June 2006 Archives

So last weekend we went to Reno with 3 other couples for a friend's birthday (and yes, I'm only just now getting around to writing about it, bite me). We had a fun road trip down there in the ultra posh minivan (you can get no better trippin' vehicle than the comfort-focused Odyssey…yay), including a truly surreal moment I feel I must share if only because it proves that truth is always, ALWAYS stranger than fiction. To wit: we were nearly there, barreling over the mountain pass (hell-lo, Donner party!) and had decided to stop at the rest stop for a pee break. As we entered the small, round, cavernous shelter that housed the bathrooms, we heard the sound of an itinerant musician plonking away on the guitar (taking advantage of the acoustics, I guess). We were actually two steps away from the bathroom door before we realized that the grubby, gray-haired old hippy musician guy was playing Nirvana's "Come As You Are". We barely made it into the bathroom before exploding into nearly hysterical belly laughs. I mean really, how did it come to this, that you'd hear Nirvana (once the epitome of edgy, and urban teen angst) in a nowhere rest stop bathroom in the mountains, being played by someone (clearly not of the grunge generation) busking for change?

Anyway, once we got to Reno we changed into fancy dress up clothes for dinner and a night of drinking, smoking and gambling (no whoring, sorry, it was a "sin lite" weekend). The guys wore suits, the girls all (except me, who clearly didn't get the memo) wore little black dresses (I wore a glitzy silver one since I figured it was an appropriate place for a little bling). The funny thing was, we were by orders of magnitude WAY more dressed up than anyone else we encountered (except perhaps the dealers and the music acts). People kept looking at us strangely, and asking us "are you here for a wedding? A funeral?" I think the staff appreciated the way we classed up the joint, though. Generally gambling (like so many vices) seems to have lost any of that gangster glamour it might once have had, and has become just another way for the unwashed masses to entertain themselves between WWF matches and monster truck rallies (not to mention AARP meetings). Ok, perhaps I exaggerate slightly for comic effect, but still--the type of sleazy you find in Reno casinos seemed mostly sad and pathetic rather than sexy and thrilling.

Despite that, though, we had a pretty great time. The guys had huge steaks and cigars (those particular vices don't do it for me, so I didn't bother). The main gambling activity of the group was craps--one of the only social gambling games you can really engage in--and by the end of the night (which was actually the beginning of the morning, as we didn't get to bed until after 4am) we wound up all being mildly successful and winning more than we lost. I mostly enjoyed the form (sharp, pointy plastic) of the dice themselves and the feel of hurling them all bouncy bouncy down a table (I *am* a D&D geek after all, of course I enjoy rolling dice), but it was also fun to bet on random impulse and have it actually work out. (For a few minutes here and there I actually felt convinced I was intuitive, but maybe that was just the rum.)

I tell you though, one of the best, if not *the* best part of the whole weekend was the next morning: even though we'd gone to bed so late, and I woke up relatively early (around 8:30am), we were relaxed and had no particular agenda or reason to get of bed. We got to lounge around in bed for the next few hours, snuggling and talking and dozing off again and waking up and doing all that nothing again. Yes, that's right: there we were in a hotbed of sin and the most decadent thing we could do was to (gasp) sleep in.

And speaking of sleeping…as always, it's time for me to go do some of that before I get up and do the workworkparentparent thing. So that's all the Reno detail you get right now. Perhaps at some point there will be pictures. Perhaps not.