Vegas Recapped

My friend from Marquette, Matt, lives in Las Vegas and got married over the weekend. Being the doldrums of winter/spring here in Seattle, it seemed like a good time to take a few extra days to enjoy the sun in the Sin City. Jessica and I went down a little early and stayed an extra day at the MGM Grand to get some extra time in the sun. It wasn't super duper warm with temps in the mid 60's but is was sunny most of the time and it felt warmer than it was. Good times were had at the wedding and there was a good amount of Marquette people in attendance so it felt like a mini reunion of sorts.

The next big trip for me will be back to Milwaukee in a few weeks to attend March Madness. Marquette is the host site so I got tickets and I'll be heading out for a long weekend there as well. It won't be in the mid 60's I'll bet but it should be a fun weekend and I can only hope Marquette isn't playing opposite the game(s) at the Bradley Center. I'm really hoping MU is a Thursday / Saturday site as opposed to Friday / Sunday.

I just finished a book called Tokyo Vice and it was a non-fiction work written by a white, Jewish, journalist about the seedier side of Japanese culture and from the perspective of someone who isn't 100% familiar with the culture. It's a solid but sad book. You find yourself rooting for the author even when you sort of the know the result that is coming. I've been reading a lot lately but I might have to look into getting Kindle as I'm going to either need to get rid of paperbacks or buy more bookshelves. Getting rid of the paperbacks from high school like The Siege of Ocean Valkyrie which is apparently so "rare" Amazon doesn't even have a picture of it. By "rare" I mean a pile of crap. Included in the pile of Crap is The Edge which I must have bought from Jenny, the bookstore lady in Lisbon when I was obsessed with Tom Clancy. Speaking of which, does he even write books anymore? The last two were plain awful and the last one came out years ago. Maybe I should do both: get rid of the crappy books and get a Kindle.

I'm trying to think of other things to write about right now but I'm falling short at the moment. I feel like I should keep more notes because I always forget the topics that sound good during the day or week.

LIKE THIS! On the way to Las Vegas we took the cheap flight option and had a connection in LA (LAX) for a few hours. The LA airport is enormous and Jessica and I just headed towards the nearest watering hole for a few a beer to kill time. When we sat down there wasn't a lot of space so we took the only open seats and ordered our drinks. After a while I noticed I was sitting next to a tall white guy with sweats pants and hoodie pulled down low over his eyes. In LA, that screams moderately famous, and since the guy was trying to be low key that made me want to catch a glimpse of his face. Once I saw him I recognized who he was but I needed to make sure and was about to ask "hey, are you who I think you are?" but around that time somebody went up and asked for an autograph and saved me from making an ass out of myself. I was sitting next to 14 time gold medal winner Michael Phelps, and in the "Stars" they're just like us category, he plays online poker and was bitching about being delayed to Philadelphia on what sounded like a redeye flight. I used the quotes "stars" because I can't think many real stars fly redeye's but maybe that's just me. He is fairy tall and seemed sort of dickish but then again if I was delayed on a cross country overnight flight I'd be complaining a lot myself. Drew, he was drinking a dark colored beer but those were the only calories I saw him intaking; he had a long way to go before he hit 10,000 calories but it was 10 at night so it's hard to say if those were calories 2000 through 2400 or 8400 through 8800.

His girlfriend seemed sort of cute at least.