Old pictures

This is my happy thing for today, old photographs out of one of my mom's albums. Newspaper photos tend not to scan too well, but I think you can get the idea!



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Vegas, baby (again)

Rob brought home a crumpled piece of newspaper last night containing the news that Tilman Fertitta, who owns about half of Galveston as well as the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas, is giving anybody who lives in Galveston County (and can prove it) two free nights in Vegas. Rob pointed out that we do have a credit on Southwest from the trip to Ohio in October that we didn't take.... so what the heck, we're going to Las Vegas again next month. MLK weekend, to be exact. (I never thought that Rob would like Las Vegas as much as he did. People surprise you sometimes, no matter how well you know them.) I suspect that Fertitta's motives are not 100% charitable, since he's trying to get gambling legalized in Galveston and this can't really hurt his chances, but still. Free room, hey.

We could have gone next week (assuming we could get reservations) but I didn't think it would have worked out like it did last year - last year Christmas was on Tuesday, and so we left for the airport to head to LV after lunch on Christmas Day, stayed three days and got the heck out on Friday before (a) the big crowds got there and (b) the prices went up for the weekend and New Year's. This year, with Christmas on Thursday, I didn't see how that was going to work as well. First you have a holiday weekend, which would be, what, the 26th-28th, and then presumably by the 30th, if not before, you start getting people coming in for New Year's Eve. (And NYE was also the only day blacked out on the free-room deal.) I didn't go and research this but I just couldn't see a big gap in there like there was last year. AND Rob is off next week but has to work some days the week after (I think it's Monday, Tuesday and Friday, but I forget, now that I don't have the calendar sitting on my desk to look at all the time). He does have a three-day weekend for MLK so that was why we picked that. And the airfare was only $30 more than what we had already paid. I also got a rental car, the first time I've done that in LV. I hope I don't regret it - but I never stayed downtown before, either, and I didn't want to choose between depending on taxis and being stuck downtown. I haven't even been downtown in years, but my memory of it is that it's a pretty small area. I'm inclined to think we're going to want to make at least one jaunt over to the Strip.



Random holiday-related stuff:

I love that Tor is sponsoring a Traditional Jewish Christmas (consisting of a Chinese buffet and Monty Python movies). Sounds like a blast to me.

Scalzi's guide to spotting fake Santas

The Guild's version of A Night Before Christmas (last year's Guild Christmas special is on that page too)

Oh, a small thing, but some of us are picky about stuff like this: if anybody is looking for the perfect red fingernail polish for seasonal purposes, I think I'm wearing it: OPI "An Affair in Red Square". I think I bought it last year but presumably it's still around. "Russian Red" might be a pretty good description of it - it's sort of a deep metallic red, just a hair darker than fire-engine red. I really like it a lot so I thought I'd share.