Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Best Crap Ever!

Got back from Vegas on Monday, and had a general run of good luck, bookended by a little bad.

To start off, a couple of days before leaving, a pipe froze and burst in our basement. Soon after landing, I was on the phone with Kathy and found out it would cost $650. I hadn’t set foot in the casino, and I was already in the hole.

Next, I managed to steal someone’s luggage. I pulled the wrong suitcase – pretty much identical to mine – off the back of the shuttle bus, not noticing until I went to unpack it. My first thought was “someone stole my sports jacket!” but then I realized what was going on.

I called up the shuttle service, and they were trying to track it down, when I got a call in my hotel room from the woman who tracked me down. Seems she had taken MY suitcase, and started calling the hotels she’d stopped at previously to track me down. She got me on the first try. Two quick cab rides later, I had my bag in my room. But I’d missed my only chance to see Mac King. Que Sera…

I hooked up with my coworkers and had some nice meals on various people’s expense accounts. And we played craps. Lots of craps. And man, there I kept getting lucky. The first night I pretty much broke even, then left to play some cheap blackjack, only to get clobbered by the dealer. After that, though, I kept on leaving better off than I started. By the end of the weekend, I was $750 up, and pickled in gin. Some of the money stayed in Vegas, in the pockets of cabbies and the purses of showgirls. But I still brought home $500 (after a miserable flight), which in less than 24 hours was in the hands of a plumber. But we’ve got the new pipes I’ve always dreamed of … or at least, that I’ve dreamed of since we lost heat in the bedroom.

There’s more to my Vegas trip than this little overview, and I should be getting to it soon. But I wanted to get this quick post out there, in case any of you were wondering if I’d lost my shirt.

Answer? Doesn’t matter, as long as the heat’s on.

Rob

4 comments:

Andrew said...

I was a little worried when I read the title of the post. I thought you might be about to relate a particularly transcendental bathroom experience....

You know, this story plays out a lot like a half-hour sit-com. You hop a plane to Vegas leaving Kathy home to deal with the crisis. There's a little sub-plot with the bag mix-up. And of course, there's the neat wrap-up where you win the money to pay off the plumber

Rob S. said...

Great -- just what we need, another tubby-guy-hot-wife sitcom. Isn't King of Queens enough?

Dave said...

Rob, you'll always be my king of the queens.

Jeri said...

Sitcom--heck, we could make a feature out of it. Let's see, the nice lady turns out to be a launderer for the Russian Mafiyah and the switched suitcase is full of drug money. They start chasing you, and you have to steal a car made by a manufacturer that needs commercial exposure, let's say an Audi TT roadster, from the hotel valet. There's a spectacular car chase in downtown Vegas, a la "Go." You dead-end in an alley but escape with the help of a kindly homeless man you gave five bucks to in Act One (note to self: insert kindly homeless man into Act One).

Then you have to disguise yourself, so you dress in drag until the spunky young female FBI agent can find you. You accidentally meet in the bar, and there's a whole reverse-"Twelfth Night" attraction thing going on before she realizes you're not only a man, but the man she must save to, uh, to save her career, because she's a bit of a renegade and the stiffs at the Bureau have given her one last chance to prove she can play by the rules and still get the bad guys.

I see it as a Matthew Perry/J-Lo double swan song vehicle.

Congrats on the win. I guess the Stones were right when they said "If you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need."