Saturday in our Saucers

It's a good morning so far in the hamsterdom. We started with a bounce out of bed at 8 a.m. for 2-for-1 Garden Buffet breakfast buffet at South Point. Yes, I've gone grumpy with their dinner buffet (see Wednesday), but their breakfast buffet is fine at regular price and Quite The Deal with a two-fer. (About $6.50 total, plus a $2 tip.)

The only reason we have this other buffet coupon (plus the two others in the drawer) is because, well, Mike's fearless about touching the mailroom paper trash bin. Yes, he dumpster dives. If we get a "resident" coupon in the mail, he immediately walks the step and a half to this discard pile and picks up a few more. See, you don't even have to gamble to eat in this town.

This is also how we each got $10 in free slot play today. South Point is kind of neat in that you don't have to put any money in to activate your comped slot play (unlike Station Casinos), but on the other hand, you also don't get told when your slot play has run out (unlike Station Casinos). Mike chose to count his spins, but since we were on nine-line penny slots ("Flip Flop"!), I didn't want to keep count to 110. Instead, I counted my winnings, which ended up being $4. Mike won $6, so breakfast was free as was the gas to get there.

Next we went to an estate sale in a senior community with the most manicured mobile homes you've ever seen. Everything was extremely overpriced, even with today being half-off, and seeing a nice antique photo in an oval frame for sale is still bugging me. Did this person have no family? (Mike was just bothered that we were in this dead senior citizen's home, where their clothes still hung in the closet, and their cans of food were displayed on the counter, presumably for sale.) If it's still going tomorrow and the prices get softer, I may get that photo. $10 was just too rich for me - I'd rather pay that to save a hamster (q.v. below).

This glass was nice:

This looks retro; alas, it was two feet away from a recently used (but not flushed) toilet that people were simply walking past from one bathroom doorway to another:

This I think I liked, but I couldn't think of any purpose for it:

You can see just a tiny part of all the wood craft stuff at this house. In fact, there was all kinds of craft stuff, including several huge boxes of nothing but craft books and instructions, the kind that people buy for $10 at Michael's. However, they weren't marked, and I just didn't feel like going through them then having to ask, then probably being told they were $5 each, given the markup on almost everything else.

After not buying anything (and arguing with Mike over whether a cute old Remington was worth $4 or $10 to us, but certainly not $30 in its current state - mind you, as my father's business for a long time involved selling and servicing typewriters, I stand in a strange state between high standards of repair and suckerdom for nostalgia), we went to the library to pick up a couple of books that'd come in for me.

Mike doesn't like the Spring Valley branch (it's no Green Valley or Sahara West, true), but he wanted to read Richard Dawkins and see what the fuss is about. (So, as I type this, he's in the bedroom yelling out thoughts and questions as he reads. "Who's Oral Roberts?" "Who's Gore Vidal?" The answers are, of course, "oh, this whackjob" and "oh, that writer-guy.") Me, I got the following:

• Middlesex
• Woe is I (wanted for a long time, and the wonderful Grammarphobia blog has been the final nudge)
• Eats, Shoots and Leaves (so people will stop telling me to read it and perhaps so I can become one of those people who goes around telling everyone to read it)
• The Reincarnationist (I saw an ad somewhere)
• No Uncertain Terms (Even though I've really come to hate Safire, thanks to the more thoughtful, better researched, and less egotistic writing at LanguageHat and LanguageLog)

A little meandering took us to PETCO, where I was temporarily dazzled by this,  but we wanted to give them another "motion" option as one of their wheels has been acting up.

When I saw this, I was sold. I remember five years ago when people were talking on Usenet about how much their hamsters liked running in the "flying saucer," but such saucers were hard to find. Indeed, today is the first time I saw one in person. Of course, our hamhams must be kitted out. Swipe goes the buy-some-love card. (I think the official logo reads "VISA.")

Now I wanted to check in with the SPCA, but Mike was tired, split-sleeper as he is. However, I'm the bossy shrew in this relationship, and the only one legally permitted to drive in Nevada, so we started moseying in that general direction, with the deal being that we'd hit some yard sales instead, if we saw any. Driving on Hacienda toward the Luxor was fun, though.

Unfortunately, we didn't see anything worth slowing down for, and so we pulled into the very busy SPCA lot and headed toward critter country...

... and came out without a single hamster, isn't that amazing? Actually, there was (and perhaps still is) a danger that we'd get this older platinum (argente?), but for today we were content to find a Milkbone for him, as he had nothing to gnaw. The SPCA is rather low on hams at the moment, but if you're after gerbils, they have plenty. I don't know what will happen with that ham. We can't save them all, right? And we should be glad they have food, water, and a wheel - which is all that many hamsters ever get. But we do have room in both home and heart, so I don't know... We've reached a point again where any new animals have to be weighed against sacrificing future travel and relocation opportunities, and I don't know how much longer we want to keep postponing the idea of long periods of summer gallivanting.

(Sometimes, when Bonnet is rolling in the sand and looking up at me like he's the happiest creature on earth, I wonder why I can't just read more travel-based fiction or something.)

When I started writing this post, I knew was going to include a mention of how much I hate the buzzphrase "best practices." (Except now I can't remember what the context was.) The first time I heard this expression was in a pedagogy class, and I kept looking for an acronym to explain the lack of article before "best." Since then, I've decided that no one ever says this unless they're just making noise with their mouth to hold up their end of the conversation.

Speaking of travel, Arthur Frommer (the man himself) has a rather good blog going at http://www.frommers.com/blog/. This is how I found out that the new Virgin America airline is offering $88 r/t between Las Vegas and San Francisco. Oh, the indecision! On the one hand, that's a great deal. On the other hand, I've been to San Francisco. Wouldn't it be better to save the money for a trip to see something new? On the third hand, Mike has never been to San Franscisco. On the fourth hand, Mike isn't burning to go, other than to get some Boudin Bakery lobster bread and see Alcatraz. On the fifth hand, we'd spend the whole time at Fisherman's Wharf, then I'd feel like I had to apologize for that. On the sixth hand, isn't it annoying when people extend the "on the (extra) hand" expression too far?

Now we're back home, and Mike seems to have fallen asleep, as have the girls. Mike finally found a way to fix their old wheel after we bought the saucer, of course, but I still think it's cool and worth having. The girls? They seem to find it unnecessarily toe-tangling. Here is Pepper, unimpressed:

Maybe what they're saying is, "that saucer's for the new hammie - duh!"?

Comments

[Reese]

a little nudge toward SFO:
www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/exhib_detail.asp?id=264

The show opened today & runs through December, I think.

[Heather in PA]

I loved Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. You must read it. Hee hee!