Labor Day Weekend Update

Friday
Allen and I decided to take advantage of the long weekend and drive to Vegas...to get some much needed laundry done! We left LA around 9ish and pulled into LV around 2.30am. Traffic wasn't too bad, but we had decided to take a different route and it turned out to be a little longer/slower than expected.

So my father has a house in LV in a little gated community - except the gate had never been enforced until now. We showed up in the middle of the night and of course the front gate is closed and locked. There's no guard or anything, just a piece of paper taped to the keypad saying, "Pick up your remote at X location Mon-Fri 9am-5pm. Call Jane Doe with any questions." Um...we were screwed. I notice there's a door to walk through and I try to give that a shot. I push some random buttons and it opens (although, i had been pulling and it turned out I needed to push, so i'm not sure if my button-mashing helped anything). I'm thinking, okay, the gate to exit is probably just pressure sensitive or has a sensor or something, so I walk over to that side and start jumping up and down, waving my hands - to no avail. Finally, we just leave the car by the gate while we move stuff inside (luckily my dad's house is fairly close to the gate), thinking we'd just deal with parking the car somewhere later. We're already out of the car and near the house when we see a few cars coming in (it is vegas after all) and we try to flag them down so they can open the gate for us, but apparently Las Vegasians aren't very trusting or friendly so no one stopped. Finally, someone was going OUT so we started running towards the gate. Allen jumped in the car while i physically held the gate open. I held one side open enough for my car to squeeze thru, but just as Allen was approaching the gate, the other side started opening too and was about to hit my car! I'm frantically motioning for him to back up and he does, just in the nick of time. Then the gate is wide open so we just drive on in. Finally!

Turns out the gates stay open from 8am to 5pm (or something like that) and we just followed a car in after the gates closed.

Saturday
Did five loads of laundry in the morning. Then, starving, we headed to the South Point hotel's buffet lunch - only cuz we know it's super cheap. (Hey, I'm not used to paying for anything in Vegas and especially hate the idea of paying for food.) The buffet was okay, not the best quality we've ever had, but for $7 each it wasn't a bad deal.

Did a little shopping at Target, took a nap and then headed to a mall on the strip just to stretch our legs for a bit. After browsing the shops, we hit up In N out for dinner (yum!) then we went bowling. I was doing pretty good at the beginning of the first game, but then things went back to normal. I broke 100 so it wasn't that bad (unlike the 45 i got one time).

Sunday
Decided to have brunch at the Silverton hotel's buffet (bellini brunch!). It was a little pricier at $16.99 per person, but well worth it. They had yummy food and homemade-tasting ice cream (not sure if it was actually homemade, but it wasn't dryers or anything).

Bummed around, did a little more laundry, and headed out to the Primm outlets before heading home. We decided to eat dinner in Primm instead of trying to find something on the road back to LA (we don't eat fast food except for In N Out). We asked around and a salesperson suggested the cafe at the Primm Valley Hotel & Casino. We gave it a shot and I got a monster-portion of spaghetti and meatballs, a dinner salad and garlic bread for...$5.95!!! It tasted decent too! Allen splurged and got the jumbo shrimp dinner for $8.95.

We finally hit the road around 9.30pm and were home in LA by 12.30-1am. :O)

Monday
Our apartment was way too hot to stay in all day so we went to Barnes & Noble to browse the books and leech air-conditioning. Flipped through this interesting book Allen spotted called PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives.

It all began with an idea Frank Warren had for a community art project. He began handing out postcards to strangers and leaving them in public places -- asking people to write down a secret they had never told anyone and mail it to him, anonymously.

The response was overwhelming. The secrets were both provocative and profound, and the cards themselves were works of art -- carefully and creatively constructed by hand. Addictively compelling, the cards reveal our deepest fears, desires, regrets, and obsessions. Frank calls them "graphic haiku," beautiful, elegant, and small in structure but powerfully emotional.

Some of the secrets are silly, like a woman who puts boogers in her husband's soup when she's mad at him (gross, I know), but some are sad secrets about self-loathing, betrayal, abuse and guilt. Check it out if you have time. You can also check out his blog, where this all started.