April 15, 2006

An exellent day, although no rockets were involved

Yesterday was my wife's birthday. Liz and I both took the day off and we spent the day together.

There are three things that Liz loves to do: travel, gamble and shop. Me, not so much, but since it was her day that was the plan.

After sleeping in, we headed north a couple of hours to Dover, Delaware, home of Dover Downs racetrack and slot machine casino. We made a couple of stops before gettting there to check out a craft store on the way (Liz bought a couple of small items) and an Atlantic Books Warehouse (I think that's what it was called). Liz was excited to find it, says they're not very common in our area but have excellent prices. We browsed there for quite a while and I scored a couple of computer reference books (tax deductable, yay!) for half price.

After a very nice late lunch, we pulled into the casino parking lot and found a parking spot right in front. Would that be the extent of our luck? Or just a precursor to a run of good fortune?

As a gambler, Liz plays for entertainment. She's happiest on the penny and nickel slots, because her money goes farther and she can play longer. She has a set amount she's willing to lose, and the longer it lasts, the better. Personally, in my life I've probably dropped less than fifty bucks into slot machines, maybe not that much on casino gambling of any kind. Mostly, I wander around and people watch, or stand there and watch Liz play. I enjoy that.

I saw two things worth noting. First, there is a slot machine called "Winning for Dummies", with the standard yellow and black motif and graphics. Pretty funny. Secondly, there was one small area partitioned that contained the high-value slots. In there, I watched a guy drop at least $1500 into a machine at $50.00 a pull. It took him about 20 minutes to blow through that, although when he walked away he didn't seem upset. I guess he's a gambler.

Anyway, back to Liz. She was having a good day. What I did was every time she'd get way ahead, I'd make her cash out and start with a fresh twenty while I would go to the cashier and put away her winnings for "birthday" money. I did that four times, and when we left that evening, she was up over $130.00, playing nickel slots!!!

Next stop, the mall. Liz isn't used to buying for herself, she'd rather spend her money on the kids and I, but this time I was insistant, and she bought some things she's been wanting but couldn't bring herself to spend the money on before.

Traffic behaved on the way home, and for much of the ride we were treated to an amazing light show as a line of thunderstorms was slowly rolling towards us from the Southwest. We started seeing the lightning a long long way off and for a good hour our conversation was punctuated by frequent "oooooooh, that was cool" comments.

One last thing (I won't pretend that this was at all interesting to anyone), one of our local radio stations changed formats (last week?). Big 100 is now playing music that sounds like they're picking from my personal collection, with 60's and 70's rock. The most interesting part is that they've gotten rid of all their DJ's. You get canned commercial breaks and station identification segments, but other than that, it's all music. Considering some of the annoying nitwits that're on the air in this area, that's a very good change.

Happy Birthday, my love. Here's to many many more together.

Posted by: Ted at 06:57 AM | category: Family matters
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1 Happy belated,Liz.Glad y'all had a great time.

Posted by: Russ at April 15, 2006 03:07 PM (ObxzR)

2 Happy Birthday to Liz! And congrats on the winnings. Sweeeeeeet. The most I ever won in Las Vegas was starting with $10 and leaving with a little over $60. That was on 25c video poker.

Posted by: Tuning Spork at April 15, 2006 04:38 PM (9UcWY)

3 WBIG is directly responsible for my XM purchase. Last year they quit playing oldies (somebody out there besides me must still like Elvis, right?) and they canned Johnny Dark...oops, sorry, what I meant to type was Happy birthday, Liz!

Posted by: nic at April 16, 2006 10:25 AM (l+W8Z)

4 The happiest of birthdays to that rarest of gems: the wife who can tolerate a rocket geek husband!

You're an excellent storyteller, dude...good thing the computer stuff takes all your energy or you'd be a major threat to us writer-types.

Posted by: Doug Pratt at April 16, 2006 04:13 PM (ia2zV)

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