More Craziness From VEGAS, BABY!

 

I seem to be incapable of saying the name of this place as anything except its nickname, in all caps, followed by the English word for a small infant, also in all caps, followed by an exclamation point. What is it about this place that drives me to such paroxysms of shoutiness?

Well, maybe it's the price of the ONE BANANA (whoops, there I go again) that was my breakfast. Seriously, Las Vegas? I realize it's not Tuesday, when bananas are 19 cents a pound in Small Town, but one hundred and thirty five pennies for ONE BANANA? (Ask anyone from Small Town how much bananas cost on Tuesdays and they'll know it's 19 cents per pound.)

I spent my first day of my Sin City vacation exactly as I had hoped, watching a completely creepy and wonderful series on Netflix (thank you, Boy#1, for opening my eyes to Damages) and knitting four inches onto the afghan I hope to have done by Christmas. It was wonderful, except for the 90 minutes I spent on Apple Care support after I updated my iPhone and it no longer made or received calls, but thank you, Apple Care, all good now!

Then Husband got out of his tax seminar and we were off to experience the wild and crazy VEGAS, BABY nightlife.

As it turns out, we are super-terrible at being wild and crazy.

We sat down at the penny slots with our $26 worth of coins and proceeded to lose $2. We looked at each other, bug-eyed. It was not going the way we had scripted, which was that we were going to put in six nickels and win several thousand dollars. So we managed to make ourselves play $3 worth at the quarter slots, and won enough to get back our initial investment throwing-away-of-money, so we cashed out. As we walked back across the bridge Husband dropped our roll dimes into the basket sitting beside a young man flanked by two little girls whose sign said they needed money for rent. I know, I know, panhandlers often are just scamming tenderhearts and drive back to their houses in the suburbs in BMWs. But whether those three young people were or were not con artists, they certainly needed our dimes more than the casino did, so we felt like winners.

So, having escaped the one-armed grip of the slot machines, we walked down to the Mirage and watch the "volcano eruption" that happens every hour on the hour, where hundreds of tourists gather to watch the spectacle on the tiny screens of the cell phones they are holding between their actual eyes and the spectacles. Really, people? You think you will get such spectacular footage of this that you must STORE IT ON YOUR PHONE rather than in your memory? Huh.

And finally, we enjoyed the lights and Christmas trees and reminders of the season, because nothing gives homage to this sacred time of the year like a statue of Ceasar draped in tinsel.

But that's VEGAS, BABY!