Mountain View, CA On $200 A Day

This past weekend, I learned how to spread a mere $200 or so throughout an entire day in Mountain View, CA. No travel brochure or guide could have possibly helped me in this feat. My skills at budgeting funds come naturally. It's a gift, I suppose.

So how did I manage a full day on just two bills? You see, the secret is to buy just one $20 I Love Vagina t-shirt and then you have the rest to spend on hideously overpriced beer and food. To be honest, I can't be sure how much I spent, but I had a wallet full of greenbacks on Saturday morning and come "free continental breakfast" time on Sunday, I had 15 one dollar bills.

Ozzfest, I'm glad you come around only once a year, but I'm glad you come around.

More tales to tell later over on the other blog. In the meantime, I look forward now to the trip back to Bethesda for the surgery date. The family member going under the knife will have most of the immediate family back there for support. All indications are positive for the procedure, so in some way, in spite of the heavy nature of the visit, I'm actually looking forward to the travel. I'll be seeing relatives I don't see enough of due to the 3,000 miles between us, I'll be spitting distance from the nation's capital with some time to explore, and I might even catch an Orioles game. Actually, I'm also looking forward to the flights. I love air travel. All jokes aside about air travel being a bus in the sky with waitresses, I still get a little giddy looking out of a 12 inch window seeing things that humans might not have been designed to see from that vantage point. And, that initial feeling we all get at liftoff can't be found anywhere else. Speed and flight = joy.


At the risk of sounding like, or more likely worse than, a hack stand-up comic on the Boise to Dayton circuit, there are some things that I'm not looking forward to. I can already feel the pain in my knees from trying sit comfortably for hours at a time in a space designed by some twisted soul who probably would be better suited at coming up with ways to get suspects to talk in a police station. Trust me, after 4 hours in those torture seats, I'm ready to spill anything you want to hear. Oh, and watching a censored version of the latest crapfest from Hollywood with headphones that barely compete sonically with toy stethoscopes makes me thank goodness for my MP3 player. While the other passengers smile weakly at the 2 decent jokes in the whole movie, I'll be rocking out with the Rollins Band, preparing for the July 28th show up at the Warfield.

I'll also have my nose in a book, most likely trying to finish the heartbreaking Ghost Rider: Tales From The Healing Road by Neil Peart. I've had this book for a while now, but I put it down about half way through. It's pretty heavy stuff, dealing with Peart's loss of his daughter and wife in a span of 10 months. The book details his decision to hit the road on his motorcycle to find some meaning to his life. His writing is honest and eloquent, collecting styles such as journal entries, letters to friends from the road, and thoughts written post-ride. I put it down for some lighter reading, or so I thought when I plowed through Helene Stapinski's Baby Plays Around , the story of a freelance journalist joining a rock band. I flipped through it at a book outlet and thought it looked pretty good. But alas, the writer gets personal and dives into subjects such as loyalty and infidelity. The passages dealing with the struggling relationship with her husband were heart wrenching and I always breathed easier when the story turned back to the music, the clubs, and the band. Anyway, I'm going to give Ghost Rider another shot, but with the point of my trip being a serious surgery that will most likely get emotional from time to time, I'd better pack a Mojo magazine as well for a good distraction.

I'll be taking my laptop as well, so I might even post from the road. At the very least, I'll have yet another distraction back at the hotel. Having access to my email has become yet another convenience that I'm sure I won't remember living without, much like cellphones and answering machines.

Thanks for stopping by........

Tony