Tag: Las Vegas

Last weekend we went to Las Vegas for the first time in several years. (For those following along at home, due to the frail condition of our two cats Newton and Blackjack, we didn’t go away on vacation for several years. Both of them have since passed away, so we’ve been travelling again.)

Something about this trip didn’t feel quite right to me from the time we booked it. This isn’t foreshadowing, nothing bad happened on the trip; it just felt slightly off, like I couldn’t quite figure out why we were going. Vegas can be a bit of an odd trip for us, trying to figure out what we want to spend time doing, especially since we’ve seen most of the spectacle before several times. But walking around aimlessly is tiring and kind of pointless.

What we did do was book tickets to go see Cirque du Soleil’s “O”, which we saw the first time we went to Vegas about ten years ago. (We had wanted to see their new show, Zarkana, but it was dark during January.) We flew in Saturday afternoon and went to the show in the evening. It’s quite a spectacle, of course; it seemed like they’d changed it up a bit (in particular the closing piece was different from what I remembered).

We stayed at the MGM Grand, where we’ve stayed several times before. We liked them partly because they had a branch of Fat Tuesday in them, but also because they had a killer poker room, a large room with a variety of games. Sadly, their great room is no more, the space largely unused, and the remaining poker tables shoved into an alcove to one side of the casino. And they only seem to have 1/2 no-limit games anymore. Disappointing. Also, the room where they used to bring in lions from a nearby preserve has been remodeled into a night club. And it turns out that Fat Tuesday now has something like eight locations on the strip, so we could find daiquiris all kinds of places.

Anyway, I went to the site All Vegas Poker to check out rooms, and it seems that the collapse of on-line poker has hit poker rooms on the strip hard, with many of the downsizing or closing.

I struggle to have the courage to play no-limit poker; all my poker playing friends seem to play no-limit when they come to Vegas, and that’s what we play in our nickel-dime home games, at which I hold my own (and our home games are tough). But I feel more comfortable playing limit when I play for real money, so we went to the Flamingo, which still has a 2/4 game and I’ve enjoyed playing at before. It was a good choice: We visited several other poker rooms over the weekend and they were pretty consistently quiet, while the Flamingo’s room was active during the day and busy at night. I talked to several people I played with during the trip and they said the Flamingo was one of the better rooms on the strip for finding a game at all hours.

While I play poker Debbi usually goes to play a mix of pai-gow poker and video poker. I often feel guilty for separating from her for hours at a time to play poker, but she seems okay with it. This trip I tried to embrace her giving me the time to sit at the table for a lengthy session.

Well, the first couple of days it didn’t work out so well. Sunday in particular I spent the afternoon being dreadfully card-dead. Honestly the best I can say from the session was that I didn’t lose much more than I was going to lose, and I actually made some pretty good folds when I did have good (but losing) hands. Monday afternoon was more of the same, except I had the sense to order some coffee with Bailey’s to warm things up (or “add some variance to my game” as I joked).

Monday night my luck finally changed and I was able to recoup most of my losses from the rest of the trip, winning some big hands and losing a few through bad luck. Overall I was pretty happy with how I played, which I guess means I need to figure out what the next step is to become a better player.

Monday night we also went to our usual dinner at Bally’s Steakhouse (Bally’s – another casino which has shoved its poker room into a corner of the casino). I was pleased to see they haven’t changed much – if anything they’ve improved a bit with the addition of a mixed drink menu (their Old Fashioned was well worth the price). Afterwards we went to the top of the Eiffel Tower replica at Paris, which was a bit over-priced but fun anyway. I got a couple of good pictures of the strip from up there, too:

We had a quiet morning Tuesday before flying out. It was, overall, a fun trip, but it felt slightly dreamlike at times. I’m not sure if I wasn’t quite mentally into it, or if the place has changed just enough in five years that I was thrown off. I do want to go back, though, and perhaps we’ll figure things out ahead of time a little better, now that we’re familiar with what’s changed.

We’re back from our latest vacation to Las Vegas. It was a fun trip, as always – except for the losing part, that is.

We flew in on Saturday as usual, and this time got a room in the west wing of the MGM Grand, where we tend to stay these days. The west wing is quiet and we had a room right next to its elevator, which was convenient since we usually have a hike from our room to get to it. The west wing’s elevator also drops you out near the poker room, which was convenient for me. And the room itself has more gadgets in it than the normal rooms (a television in the bathroom mirror, a touch-to-activate lamp, and so forth), so we spent a while playing once we arrived.

Then we puttered around for the afternoon before going to see Lance Burton at the Monte Carlo. Burton is a classic magician – he opens his act by running down a short genealogy of magicians dating back to the 1800s, with himself as the current heir to the throne. His illusions rely heavily on making things disappear and reappear, the most spectacular form of illusion, I guess. He even has a couple of tricks which made me think of The Prestige to the point that I wondered whether he has a twin brother.

One of the most surprising things about Burton’s show is the gap between his promotional material and the show itself. The posters and images I’ve seen of him are split between him as a debonair high society man from the early 20th century, and a more modern “tall dark stranger” in black clothing (especially the 2009 image all over the Monte Carlo). In the show, though, he seems quite different from what I’d expected from the images, though not at all displeasing: The biggest surprise is that he still has a fairly strong hint of a Kentucky accent, not the “standard American” midwest accent most performers have (nor even a southern country accent). Another difference is that he’s all smiles all the time, not at all mysterious in his demeanor (plus he currently has his hair cut short, very different from in the photos). His act itself is actually rather jokey, and the dramatic flair (such as the masked stranger who appears from time to time) seems too goofy to take seriously. There’s also a lot more skin in the show (in the form of seven scantily-clad women) than I’d expected from a show which seems targeted at families. Overall quite different then I’d been expecting.

But the show is basically a lot of fun: I have some vague understandings of how sleight-of-hand works (I’m far from being an expert, but I’m not entirely clueless), but some of his illusions are truly impressive. We were able to get second-row seats so we got a good view of everything, and I don’t have a first idea how many of his tricks work. And that’s not a bad thing. So if you enjoy magic shows, you ought to enjoy seeing Burton.

Sunday morning we had brunch at the Café Bellagio, and then went to check out the new property on the strip: City Center, a 5-hotel project which reportedly cost in the vicinity of $11 billion (with a ‘B’) dollars to build. We walked through some pieces of it, but mostly went and gambled at the Aria, the only hotel of the five which has a casino, including a poker room. The thing is certainly a step forward in elegance and extravagance in Vegas hotels, but – it’s still a Vegas hotel, and making a bigger, posher one is just no longer impressive in and of itself.

Sunday was also the day of the NFL championship games. While we were at the Aria, the Jets/Colts game was on, and it was amusing to hear the cheers from the bar nearby while playing poker: Jets fans were much louder (and therefore probably more numerous) than Colts fans, and their TVs were showing the game a few seconds earlier than ours were, so we could tell when a big play happened based on how loud the cheers were. Since I always root against New York sports teams, I was happy to see the Jets lose. Despite being a Patriots fan, I don’t have any problems rooting for the Colts; the teams have been big rivals in this decade, but it’s hard to root against Peyton Manning, who I think is clearly the best quarterback of his generation.

Later in the afternoon we gambled at the Flamingo, during which time the Saints/Vikings game was on. At one point I took a bathroom break and passed a bar with 5 people sitting at it, all wearing Vikings jerseys. Vikings fans seemed to greatly outnumber Saints fans, and there were plenty of Packers fans wearing their Favre jerseys, too. I was rooting a little more for the Saints, since I went to college in New Orleans, but seeing Favre get to another Super Bowl would have been fine, too. But it wasn’t to be for Favre, as the Vikings turned the ball over 5 times – including Favre’s last-minute interception throw in the 4th quarter – and the Saints won it in overtime. The teams did hit the over on the total score of 53.5, though, and the Super Bowl had an over/under of 56.5 when we left Vegas, so it may be an exciting game.

We finished the evening with our annual meal at Bally’s Steakhouse, which was delicious as always. The after-dinner coffee with kahlua and grand marnier was excellent, too!

Our weekend at the gambling tables was not quite as much fun, though. We’ve almost entirely moved away from slot machines and video poker, to games which have less of a house edge, or in my case, no house edge, at the poker tables. Debbi mostly plays Pai Gow Poker, where the house still has an edge, but you can play for a long time and often break even. Our first day we played some Pai Gow together and Debbi won what I lost, and I lost a little more at those tables over the weekend. But at the poker tables themselves, I had a really rough weekend.

The first game I played was 2/4 limit at the MGM, which was a tight-passive game where I basically bleeded off chips over two hours. The next game, 3/6 limit at the Aria on Sunday, was a loose-aggressive game where I did not get very many good cards and lost over a full buy-in. Finally at the Flamingo on Sunday, the 2/4 limit game was good to me and I was able to recoup some of my losses. But Monday I finally tried the 1/2 no-limit game at the Flamingo, and got stacked twice, mostly I think through bad luck, but it overwhelmed my good luck. I finished the weekend with a break-even session of 2/4 back at the MGM.

A few memorable hands:

• In limit at the Flamingo, I got a “big blind special”, flopping a flush with J5h and getting paid off. I later flopped the nut flush with AKh and got paid there, too.
• The first hand in which I got stacked in NL: I had about $110 in the small blind. After a few limpers, I raised to $10 with pocket Queens. The big blind reraised to $20. The limpers folded, and I raised to $50. The big blind called. So there’s about $105 in the pot, and I have about $60 left. The flop is AA6, and I go all-in. The big blind calls and shows Kings. The final board is AA6-6-A, so even if a queen had come, the 3 aces would have counterfeited my full house. The big blind was a guy from Russia who didn’t speak English (his English seemed limited to “I don’t speak English”), but he crushed the table, going on a tremendous run and winning about $500 in a little over an hour. In a later hand, I managed to get out from under his turned nut flush (which he showed) when I folded my pocket Tens on a Jack-high board.
• The other hand had me on the button with about $75 in my stack. After 4 limpers, I raised to $12 with pocket Aces. The small blind called, and the big blind and limpers folded (pot $34). The flop is KQ9r, and the small blind bets $10. I go all-in for my last $63, and she calls. She shows K9 for two pair. I hit my 5-outer on the turn, a Queen, and she rivers her 4-outer, a King, and I lose. Yes, she was sitting in the same seat as the guy who stacked me the first time.

It’s not clear that I could have gotten away from either of the big hands, although on reflection I should have played the first hand more carefully, since AK and AQ were within his range (even though I hadn’t been at the table long enough to get a read on anyone) and obviously crush me on an AA7 board. Then again, with him having Kings, AK, AQ and AA were within my range so I arguably had some fold equity. I dunno.

All told this was I think my worst showing at the tables in Vegas I’ve ever had, which was pretty demoralizing since I thought I’d been getting better over the last couple of years. But other than one encouraging session, it was almost entirely disappointing. Just bad luck, or so I have some serious work to do to improve my game to take on even the low-stakes tables? I’m not sure.

We flew out Tuesday afternoon. It was still a fun trip, but the losing part did color it unfavorably to some degree. I’m sure we’ll go back next year (if anything, because Debbi wants to go see Garth Brooks), but it might take most of that time to work back my enthusiasm for the trip. At least for the gambling part.

We’re back from a long weekend in Las Vegas. While we didn’t get the snow that the city got last month, it was surprisingly chilly all week, with lows below 40. We don’t often have to wear jackets when we go to Vegas, but this time…

Saturday night we went to see Le Rêve, the show at the upscale Wynn hotel. It’s not actually a Cirque du Soleil show, but it was created by a former Cirque choreographer. Apparently it wasn’t a big hit when it debuted, and has undergone quite a few changes since, but overall it’s quite good. For those who have been to Vegas, it’s a water-based show like “O”, but has many of the feats of strength and agility of Mystere. The music is somewhere in between, with several songs with English lyrics. The story – such as it is – doesn’t make a lot of sense, but as a framework for the sights and sounds it works well enough. Overall I still think Ka is the strongest show of this sort in Vegas, and it actually does have a story that makes sense! But Le Rêve is worth seeing, and I could see going back to see it, too.

We bookended our trip with our usual outing to the steakhouse at Bally’s, which was excellent as always. We never regret going there. If anything, we only regret being too full to eat everything on the menu.

Chinese New Year fell on Monday, so many hotels had decorations up for the event, such as the Venetian:

(click for larger image)

…and, as always, the Bellagio conservatory:

We didn’t try many new restaurants this time; the only new one was BLT Burger at the Mirage, which was quite good. The Mirage is reconfiguring things since Siegfried and Roy are no longer there, and BLT replaced the white tiger habitat, which is too bad, but that’s the way it goes I guess. Otherwise we hit our usual haunts, which were good as usual, save that we had really bad service at the Studio Cafe at the MGM: Slow service, and Debbi’s eggs benedict were cooked wrong and we sent it back. We were very grumpy about this, especially because we’ve always liked them in the past, but now we’re not sure we’ll go back. We probably will eventually, once we get over this experience.

Debbi played a bunch of Pai Gow poker and I joined her for much of it. We had a few interesting hands, as every so often you have several choices of directions to go and one is clearly better than another. The most interesting was a hand Debbi had where she had both a straight and a flush, but playing the straight gave her a pair in the low hand, which was better overall. I played two hands at once for a little while, on the theory that it would lower my variance, which seems like a good idea in games played against the house.

We had some really nice dealers, especially one woman at the MGM. We also watched the other players, who can be fascinating: A lot of high rollers play pai gow, and bet $100 and up on each hand, which is a good way to win or lose really quickly. That’s an order of magnitude higher than we feel comfortable with, but it’s interesting to see. Some of them are perfectly friendly and others seem to want to just play their game and not be bothered.

I also played some poker, mixing in limit games with some 1-2 no limit. I was pretty lucky all around, and had a few memorable hands:

• Picked up Aces in the big blind. Before the action came to me there was a raise, two calls, and a reraise. I reraised, the first raiser and callers folded, and the other player reraised me all in. I called. Someone asked, “Who has Aces and who has Kings?” A King came on the board, which worried me, but he had Queens, and I won the pot (and his whole stack, since I had him covered). I wonder what he thought when the other played wondered who had Aces and who had Kings?
• A young woman sat down at the table and gave the impression of knowing the basics of the game, but none of the nuance. A few hands later I hit my set of 8s on the flop, and rivered a full house, and put her all in, winning her stack. The other players ragged on me for dampening the mood at the table (many of them were flirting with her). She re-bought and started winning many hands, including a huge one just after I left the table.
• In my last session I got stacked myself: The under-the-gun player called the blind, the next player called, and I raised with Ace-Jack. UTG reraised and everyone else folded. UTG was an aggressive player who had won many pots at the table (which had just been formed when I joined) without showing down any hands, so I thought there was a good chance he had a worse Ace or even King-Queen or something like that. But he had Ace-King, and I didn’t catch a Jack and got stacked. Bummer. I did consider folding rather than going all-in, but it seemed like a borderline situation, where I could go either way.

Limit poker went well too, although the hands were less memorable.

We also always enjoy seeing the lion habitat at the MGM:

One thing we noticed was how quiet things were the whole time. It even started in San Jose airport when we got there on Saturday, and there were maybe a couple dozen people in Terminal A when we got through security. Las Vegas was relatively quiet, too; Debbi says one dealer said the whole city is like that, but that the MGM Grand’s casino is doing better than most. The recession is hitting Vegas pretty hard.

On the other hand, we did have to wait to get seated at a couple of restaurants, and the poker rooms seemed as busy as usual when I played. So it’s not completely dead.

All-in-all, another pleasant getaway. Going back to work was a bit of a shock!

So as I said, Debbi and I went to Las Vegas for a long weekend. We left Saturday afternoon and got to Las Vegas without a hitch.

No, the hitches only started after we landed.

First, the shuttle bus we took (Showtime) had a very grumpy driver, who took forever to load all the passengers, and took forever to get us to our hotel. It took us an hour after getting our bags to get to our hotel. Not cool. We stayed at the Excalibur, which is not the flashiest hotel, but its rates are cheap. Unfortunately, for the third consecutive time they didn’t have a king-sized bed that Debbi had requested, so we ended up with two queens instead. This isn’t a horrible thing, but it does make you feel like they’re pulling a fast one on you.

And on top of that, I realized after we were nicely ensconced in our hotel room that I’d left one of my poker books on the plane. Argh.

Fortunately, things mostly got better from here on out. Starting with dinner. I did some research on restaurants on the Strip (for instance, at Vegas.com) and found some places we hadn’t been, at least not there. So Friday night we went to Il Fornaio at New York New York, which was quite tasty.

The Hoover Dam

The main reason we made this trip a 4-night stay was to visit the Hoover Dam. We took this tour, which was actually quite good: A chatty bus driver who provided perspective on the trip and some funny commentary (often using the word “dam”, of course), a 2-hour stay at the Dam, lunch at the buffet of a nearby Casino, and a trip to the Ethel M chocolate factory and cactus garden. All things considered, the lunch and Ethel M stops are probably not essential, so if you decide to go you might want to skip the Deluxe tour, but it wasn’t bad.

The Dam, however, was cool. The thing is really huge, and the tour takes you down into the Dam to see the turbines, and further down to see one of the huge metal spillways built into the canyon walls. There’s also a lot of fascinating historical info on the Dam, which was built during the Great Depression and was a cutting-edge engineering feat then, and would probably still be a pretty impressive effort even today.

The Hoover Dam
(click on an image to view it full size)

The views from the Dam are stunning: Lake Mead on one side, the continuation of the Colorado River on the other, the walls of the Black Canyon, and the highway running right over the top of the Dam. Meanwhile, a new superhighway is being built to run over the Canyon a few hundred feet downriver from the Dam, to help with traffic and to provide some redundancy in case the Dam ever comes to harm (natural or otherwise) and has to have its roadway closed.

The Dam Turbines

Plus, each side of the Dam are in different time zones, which means you can walk across into another time zone. And beyond that, I added a new state – Arizona – to the list of those I’ve visited.

The Hoover Dam: A very cool visit. I recommend it.

In the evening we made our usual trip to the Bally’s steak house. It’s really quite good, as I’m sure I’ve said before, and well worth the price. Casual dress is fine, and the wait staff treats everyone promptly and well. Someday we may try another steak house in Vegas, but we’re in no rush; we like this one.

Penn & Teller

Monday I played in my first-ever poker tournament (about which more later), and then had lunch at the Rainforest Cafe in the MGM Grand (mainly because I wanted the chicken-fried steak). Then in mid-afternoon we headed over to the Rio in order to see Penn & Teller.

Now, I should mention this up front: The Rio is not on the strip, and is in fact about a half-hour walk from the nearest point on the strip, through an area which – while not dangerous – is in fact extremely boring (you walk over a freeway, for instance). I highly recommend not doing this walk, and instead catching the Rio shuttle from one of several strip hotels (such as Bally’s, which is also on the Las Vegas Monorail). Unless you really need the exercise, which – after eating a chicken-fried steak – I arguably did.

The Rio as Seen From Our Walk Over

The Rio is also the home of the World Series of Poker, so I was curious to play in their poker room. However, it turned out to be rather small, and the whole time they were there they only had 2-3 games going, so I never did. Oh, well!

Penn & Teller themselves were quite cool. Although the show was on the short side (about 75 minutes), the hour before the show features Penn on bass and Mike Jones on piano. I liked Jones’ style a lot, and may need to pick up some of his work on CD.

Now, I’ve seen Penn & Teller on TV a couple of times, including their turn on Babylon 5, but that’s only a few appearances, so their act was basically new to me. I think what I enjoyed most were Penn’s feats of dexterity, by which I mean juggling, as well as his witty banter throughout the show (it wouldn’t be the same show without it). I found the magic tricks to be uneven: I enjoyed the tricks where they revealed how they did it, although it mostly seems to rely on sleight-of-hand, much the way that Richard Feynman described lockpicking as mainly using some heuristics that work in many common cases, but not all. I was also intrigued by Penn’s demonstration of psychic scams such as cold reading, hot reading, and a third whose name I can’t remember. I was disappointed that he didn’t discuss how these tricks worked (which made me wonder whether they actually did employ a very sophisticated mechanism for using plants in the audience, despite the pains they took to show that they weren’t), but at least I can read up on them on-line.

(If anyone knows their act and can remember the third method Penn used, please let me know so I can read up on it!)

Honestly, even knowing how they do it, it’s still pretty impressive.

My biggest disappointment was their closing trick, the “magic bullet” trick, which despite the large build-up just isn’t a real impressive trick, I thought, mainly because bullets are so small that there’s not a real big “wow!” moment.

Despite that, it was a cool show, and I’d go see them again, since I guess they change up their act on a regular basis.

Gambling

Most of the rest of our trip was spent gambling.

Now, I get ribbed a bit by some of my cow-orkers about this: In general, you have a negative expectation when gambling. But the whole point of gambling is to win money, yet overall you can expect to lose money. So am I just paying a math tax, or what?

Well, some of both. I don’t find slot machines very compelling, since there’s no skill at all involved. While the bright lights can be entertaining, I don’t want to spend a lot of money on them. So these days I only play the penny slots, where my losses can be minimized. I’ll also play some video poker, where you can win money. And then I play “real” poker, because I figure with some practice I will eventually actually be better than most of the poker players in Vegas (who tend to be tourists), and I can actually win money. Plus, in poker there is skill involved, so it’s a real game, and therefore interesting to me, because I like games.

But I also enjoy gambling because I get to spend time with Debbi while we’re in Vegas. In fact, I tend to repeatedly confirm with her that it’s okay that I play poker, because since she doesn’t play, that means we’ll be doing separate things while I play. But she doesn’t mind. So we do some things together, and other times I play poker. So it works out.

Sometimes we just go watch the Bellagio Fountains

Anyway, our first night there I played some poker for a couple of hours and went up to cash in my chips. The woman behind the desk said, “So that’s… six hundred and ten dollars.”

“Uh,” I said, “those are ones.”

She smacked her head and gave me my one hundred and two dollars, and thanked me for being honest. “So many people around here just try to get anything they can, even if they have to lie about it,” she said. Well, while an extra $500 isn’t nothing, it’s not going to change my life, either, so I figured why not be honest about it? (As people have pointed out to me since, the $500 probably means a lot more to her than it does to me.)

Debbi points to this bit of honesty as the moment of good karma which explains my good luck for the rest of the trip, to wit:

I won $220 playing penny slots!

I mean, geez, have you ever heard of anyone winning this much at penny slots?

When playing a slot machine, I usually look for one with several “controls” to make the game slightly more interesting, even though I know it doesn’t make a lick of difference in whether you actually win. At the Rio, I noticed a new (to me), Mardi Gras-themed slot called Carnival of Mystery, so I played that. After figuring out how it worked, I started making some $1.25 bets on it, and soon found myself regularly winning $10 or $20 every few spins, and was soon up over $60 from my original $20. This seemed deeply peculiar, and though I would usually cash out with that amount of profit, I kept playing. And eventually got up over $150. Then the machine finally went cold (another concept which makes no mathematical sense since the machine presumably uses a true pseudorandom computer algorithm to perform the spins) and I cashed out at $100.

This was the silliest thing I saw at the Rio
Part of the Masquerade Show in the Sky

Then, the next day at Bally’s, I found another of the same machines, put in my $20 and played for a bit. I got down to $5 and figured the end was nigh.

And then on one spin I won $144.00.

Since the machine pays out in credits, I had to do the math multiple times just to convince myself that I’d really won $144.00 and not $14.40. But no, I really did. After a few more small wins, I cashed out at $150.

I had some more wins on an old standby, Hexbreaker, and ended up about +$220.00 on the penny slots for the trip. Which is really just amazing. It paid for (basically) my losses at the poker tables and our Penn & Teller tickets. I’ll say it again: Geez!

Like I said, it’s not life-changing money, but it doesn’t hurt, and I came by it honestly, so I have no regrets about it at all.

My poker exploits were less impressive. I stuck to low-limit games an lost about $80 during the weekend. Plus the entry fee for the tournament, since I did well, but not well enough to cash. I’m going to write a separate entry for all the geeky poker goodness of the trip. I had a good time and learned some stuff, but I’m still not a winning poker player.

Lion Cubs at the MGM Grand

Going Home

We ate a lot of good food on the trip. Besides what I mentioned above, we also had lunch at the Cafe Bellagio (which turns out to border the hotel’s conservatory, not its famous outside pool as I’d thought) and at Kahunaville at Treasure Island. While Kahunaville had good food, it was its mixed drinks that really stood out: I got a White Chocotini, which consisted of white chocolate liqueur, Bailey’s Irish Creme, and vodka, in a martini glass lined with a veneer of chocolate syrup. Wow. Debbi got a Rum Runner, an extremely tasty fruity drink. They were really, really good.

View from our table at Cafe Bellagio

But finally on Wednesday it was time to go home. Actually, I was feeling like the trip was a day longer than it needed to be, and coming home was not such a bad thing. We certainly had a good time, but next time we’ll probably stick to just 3 nights in Vegas.

Getting through security at the Vegas airport took forever, but we finally made it back home, and were greeted by happy kitties on our arrival. Coming home was marred a bit by dropping my stone turtle which I use as card protector when playing poker, and breaking two extremities. I might be able to glue it back together, but I was really angry, since it’s a really nice little carving that I picked up at WisCon last year. Grrr. Thinking about it still makes me upset, but I have no one but myself to blame.

But, we’re home now, and we’re one big happy (mostly furry) family again. It was a good trip, but it’s good to be home.