The Steps to Walking

Our baby boy was 9 months old when he first pulled himself up to a standing position.

Standing with that other baby in the mirror

Considering how good he was at crawling, and how quickly he took to standing, we figured it wouldn't be long until he was walking.

Four months later he is still not walking.

There's nothing wrong with him-- this isn't that kind of post.  He's doing the normal things that babies do, and they all have different timetables.  He happens to be an excellent crawler. He crawls faster than other kids walk.  He crawls so fast that his little rump wiggles like a dog's tail.

In fact, I suspect that his delay in walking has to do with how well he crawls.  He has no incentive to walk because he gets around so well on all fours, and once he reaches his destination, he can pull himself up to any surface.  He gets into plenty of trouble, thankyouverymuch. 

Crawl & destroy!

This long period of almost walking has given me a lot of time to consider the myriad stages between crawling, standing, and walking.  It's not something I ever would have thought about if he'd started walking earlier.  

At around 11 months is when I started to ponder the steps that lead up to walking.  He could walk if we held his arms up and sort of pulled him forward like a puppet on a string (and with exactly that much finesse and grace.)  But he didn't show any interest in walking on his own without support. And I couldn't quite see how he would turn any of his current skills into walking.  It's like there was a missing link between crawling and walking and I couldn't imagine what it looked like.  I asked other parents about it, and they didn't remember: "They just sort of do it."

What do a baby's first steps look like? It wasn't something I could picture.

Now that I've become obsessed with this issue, I've started noticing a lot of the intermediate steps, and so I can sort of imagine how he gets from crawling to walking.  Here are the steps as they've played out with my little munchkin:

June 27 (9mos, 12days): Can pull himself up to a standing position when leaning against objects.

Standing in the car seat.  We're horrible parents.

July 15 (10mos): Stands up in the crib to greet me in the morning.

Good morning, Daddy!

Aug 15 (11mos): As I sing him the "Put One Foot in Front of the Other" song, he "cruises" along the couch, walking while holding on to the sides. 

Aug 25 (11mos, 10days):  He's getting better at assisted walking, where I hold onto his hands and he stumbles forward awkwardly like a zombie puppet on a string.  He thinks this is hilarious, but he has no interest in doing it on his own.   

Sept 3 (11mos, 19days): He can half-walk, half-crawl up the stairs.

Stairmaster!

Sept 4 (11mos, 20days):  From my notes: "Walking update: He’s not. Not even close. I keep trying to get him to stand on his own, but although he’s great at standing while holding on to something, when I try to let him go of my hands, he immediately falls down."

Sept 8(11mos, 24days): He’s cruising a lot more now.  He can go almost all the way around the coffee table.

Sept 14(11mos, 30days):  Standing!  For the first time he stood unassisted for a good three seconds, shattering his previous record.  In ensuing days I can usually get him to stand for a few seconds before he falls on his butt—in front of other people even!

Look, Ma!  No hands!

Sept 17(12mos, 2days):  Made about 3-4 laps around the coffee table.

Around the table in 30 seconds

Sept 18 (12mos, 3days): One year checkup at pediatrician.  She asks if he walks pushing things, like laundry baskets, and I say, "Yes, that's exactly what he does!  He pushes the laundry basket all over the room."  This satisfies her, as she says the mechanics are fine, he just doesn't have the confidence to walk on his own yet.

He's been using laundry baskets as a walker since he was 11 months.

Sept 27 (12mos, 12days):  Now every time I put him down, I do it on his feet, and he usually stands for a few seconds.

Oct 2 (12mos, 17days):  The weather has turned cold, and for the first time in 6 months, he's wearing socks with shoes.  It seems he’s taken a “step back” (pun intended) on his walking progress.  He doesn’t like the shoes, or standing in them, and so often refuses to try.  And when he does stand, it’s not for as long as before.

He prefers to stand in bare feet

Oct 5 (12mos, 20days):  Once I was holding him standing near the fridge and he took a half step on his own toward it. A few times now when I’ve held his arms, he’s initiated walking on his own.  He didn’t need me to manipulate his arms at all.  I can sometimes get him to start walking if I sing, "Put one foot in front of the other..."

Oct 7 (12mos, 22days): Tonight he pulled himself up to the tub, and then stood up on his own with no help from me. I was in the bathroom at the time, and wondered if I was going to experience his first steps while sitting on the toilet.

Oct 14 (12mos, 30days): First steps!  My baby took two steps without any support as I held a bag of pasta out in front of him. The power of carbs!

Oct 22 (13mos, 7days): Although he took his first two steps over a week ago, I have not been able to replicate the feat.  (Not for lack of trying, though.)  As of this writing, he still seems to be uninterested in walking, or lacks the confidence to take steps on his own.  When I stand him up and coax him toward me, he stands for a while considering his options, and then drops down and crawls to me.

I imagine the next big step, besides walking, is the ability to stand up from a sitting position without the aid of some horizontal or vertical surface.  But I don't know if that will come before or after walking. 

I don't really have a good conclusion to the this post, so here's another picture of him standing:

Note his hand holding onto the table for support

Fatherhood

So, it happened.  On September 15, 2014, at 1:17pm CST, I became a father to a beautiful baby boy.  I hate to be such a cliche, but the moment I first held my son in my arms was transformative in a way I can't describe.

Welcome to the world, heir to my vast empire.

But I'm not here to gush about that stuff.  In the short amount of time I have free while my son is taking a post-lunch nap, I want to jot down a list I've been compiling over the past six weeks.  It's a bunch of things I've learned since I became a father.

Being a father is both harder and easier than I thought it would be.  I've been pleasantly surprised at how easy and natural caring for an infant comes to me, and how much I've bonded with my little progeny.  It turns out I actually love my son, and really like being a father.  (I know that each phase of child-rearing will bring new challenges, so I'm not so cocky as to predict how I'll feel about it in 6 months, or 2 years, or 16 years.)  But there are also challenges I didn't expect, like not having the time to pee.

A sample of what fatherhood has taught me so far:

• Babies get the hiccoughs A LOT, but they don’t seem to bother them. My boy never cries and hiccoughs at the same time. [Scratch that: I have since experienced him not only crying while hiccoughing, but also eating while hiccoughing. He’s a more versatile hiccougher than I thought.] 
• As the father of an infant, I routinely forget to eat breakfast. 
• I can function on 5-6 hours of broken sleep. The body adjusts. When I do finally get 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep, I wake up too tired and cranky, as if my body can’t handle all that sleep at one time.
• Being an infant is the last time your parents will revel in your burping. “Well-burped, sir!”
• The only difference between a bib and a cape is 180 degrees. 
• Infant boys get erections. I had no idea.  And when you see that little baby boner, it's a warning that projectile pee or poop is coming, so take cover!  
• A baby’s fingernails are soft and thin and pliable, like an onion skin. This makes them really hard to cut with nail clippers.
• When I try to burp him, I burp more than he does.
• You will beg for the time to fold laundry. One evening I tried for three hours and never touched one piece of clothing. I had to wait until he was asleep, then I stayed up late (till 11pm) to finish it.
• New infant weight loss plan: eat as much as you want during the day, get a little less exercise than normal, and get up every three hours in the middle of the night (stay up for about an hour.) After a few weeks of this, I was down to a lower weight than I'd been in 3 years.  Alas, this plan stopped working once we started alternating night feedings, and Baby started sleeping 4-5 hours at a time.  Now that I'm getting about 8 hours of sleep a night, my weight has drifted back up.
• Infant poop doesn't smell like real poop, but it does have a smell.  Once you start giving them formula, even a little, it starts to smell like Velveeta.
• A sound-asleep baby can sense if you 1.) turn on the phone, 2.) watch TV, 3.) leave the room, or 4.) whisper to someone. They require 100% attention on them, and they can tell if your mind wanders.  "I sense you're taking oxygen for yourself, so I will cry now."    
• One of the creepiest things ever is to look down the barrel of a pacifier as a child sucks on it. 

  

  When that little circle pulsates, it's creepy in a way I can't explain

• Going to the bathroom or blowing your nose become way more complicated when you’re holding a fussy baby.You may think, Oh, I'll just put him down for two minutes.  Well, how well can you pee when there's a screaming baby right outside the door?  Talk about pressure! 
• The first time he slept for six hours straight, 10pm – 4am, I was worried that he wasn’t crying loudly enough. Is he sick? 
• Infant formula powder is very sticky when he get it on your hands. Is it made of sugar?
• Daddy’s little furnace: sometimes when I hold him it’s like holding a bag of hot coals. When he cries, his little red head emits so much heat you can almost see the wavy lines coming off of it. 
• Infants grunt like weightlifters, and move their arms and legs around as if they’re straining against invisible bonds. 
• And just like weightlifters, they are surprisingly strong. Trying to hold his arms down in order to swaddle him takes quite a bit of muscle. 
• Among the 50 different faces my son makes, a good 20% of them make him look like he’s trying to puzzle something out. (My brother once said that infants look “presidential.” I think it’s the furrowed brow.) 

Taken over 5 minutes, these are some of the 42 faces of my baby. 

     

A Tribute to Mr. Kittenman

It's been five years since I wrote about adopting Jinxy, my boy cat.  My life was way different then-- I even had a different blog! You can read the story of how I found Jinxy on that old blog:

http://tim-alone.blogspot.com/2009/05/best-in-pound.html

Jinxy's pubicity shot from the shelter. 

The official name I gave him was Roger Jinxy Methodius d'Claude Onioncat.  Since then he's gone by Jinxy, Jinxboodle, Jinxman, Kittenman, Boodleman, Jinxy von Boodle, Captain Swishytail, Jinxtopher (Jinxtofur), Mr. Boo, and Jinxtopher Boodle.
   
When I first got him, I took a lot of pictures.  He's got a beautiful big bushy tail and thick black fur that he leaves everywhere.  It's hard to get a picture of his tail, which he swishes around as he walks, because it's always moving.

My first picture of the Jinxman.

He and Hermione, my other cat, got to know each other pretty quickly.  They played together:

ate together, 

laid around together,

and fought together.  (For the first time in her life, Hermione had another cat who would chase her around the house. Ah, the hunter becomes the hunted.)  

Jinxy had a weird way of laying his front paws out in front of him when he lounged.  I'd never seen a cat do that before.   

When I bought my first house, my sister decorated the (pink-tiled) bathroom in a black and white pattern.  I didn't realize til afterward how well Jinxy matched it.

One day I caught Jinxy and Hermione sharing a chair:

To this day I still don't know which one of them was there first, and which was one joined the other.

Jinxy is a cat, so of course he loves to perch on all kinds of things:

On top of laundry

On a secretary desk

On the dresser

"Helping" me pack

On my printer

When he grooms, he leaves huge clumps of his thick black fur all over the place: 

I could knit myself a new cat out of that

Last year, when Katherine and I moved in together, there was a third feline in the house:

Dicey did not get along with my two cats.  We always felt like three cats were too many, but we could never conceive of getting rid of any of them.

+++++

About that same time, we had some issues with pee.  Someone, and we didn't know who, was peeing where they weren't supposed to.  I don't know if you've ever smelled cat pee outside of a litter box, but it is rank.  It's like having a skunk in your house.  Even after the smell is gone, the sensory memory of it stays with you for hours, sometimes days.

Most of the pee incidents happened in the back bedroom, on top of Katherine's old bed.  We removed the thick comforter, which helped for a little while.  Then someone peed on the thin blanket.  We removed that.  They peed on the sheets.

We took Jinxy to the vet for his annual check up.  We mentioned the peeing.  We had no proof it was him, but he was the only boy, and they are usually the spayers.  The vet suggested a few things which we tried.  We put a litter box in the back bedroom.  We bought a cat pheromone dispenser.  We kept changing around the bedding.  The peeing would stop for about a month, but just when we thought it was safe, it would happen again.  I started a spreadsheet to see if I could spot a pattern. 

Over the course of a year, there were only about a dozen peeing incidents.  It wasn't horrible, and we could live with it.  But it was annoying not being able to use our back bedroom.  We thought about using it for a nursery, but you can't put a baby in a room where cats pee all over.

The situation took a dramatic turn a few weeks ago.  As we set up the front bedroom to be the nursery, we filled it up with baby accessories.  Katherine told me that she smelled cat pee in the room.  I went in there and inspected everything: the rug, the crib, the pile of baby clothes.  What I found was that the brand-new, never-been-used infant car seat was wet.  When I took it apart, there was a puddle of yellow piss that had soaked through the fabric to the plastic bottom.

This was no longer something we could patiently tolerate.  This was in a different room, on the baby's turf.  For the first time I considered that it was time to 1.) figure out who the phantom pee-er was, and 2.) consider finding a new home for him/her. 

+++++

You know how this ends, right?  Using a simple experiment where we separated the cats, we discovered that Jinxy was the pee-er.  We caught him red-bladdered on top of the bed, a pee stain beneath him.  It was time to make some hard decisions.

But it gets worse than that.  After contacting two shelters and talking to the vet, it turns out that the chances of finding a new home for a 9-year-old cat with peeing issues are very, very low.  (One shelter wouldn't even take him.  They had a two-year waiting list!)  So then I was faced with a difficult decision:  put him up for adoption, with the chance that he could spend the last few months (or years) of his life in a cage, or just have him put down myself.         

I'm going with the latter decision, along with all the guilt and shame that goes along with it.  We have an appointment this afternoon. 

On the baby front, our doctors recommended that we induce labor next week.  So that means that within one week we have an appointment to kill our cat and birth our baby.  Talk about emotional roller coasters. 

+++++

Jinxy's been in my life for over five years now, and considering I got him when he was four, he's spent over half his life with me. 

I just realized this week that although I've taken dozens of pictures of my little kittenman, I have none of the two of us together.  So Katherine got out her expensive fancy camera and took our portrait:

Gene Pool

There's an old joke about different definitions of heaven and hell:

Heaven Is Where:

The French are the chefs
The Italians are the lovers
The British are the police
The Germans are the mechanics
And the Swiss make everything run on time

Hell is Where:

The British are the chefs
The Swiss are the lovers
The French are the mechanics
The Italians make everything run on time
And the Germans are the police

I was reminded of this joke recently when I thought about what traits and characteristics I would like our baby to inherit from Katherine and me.  There's a very good way to mix our genes, and there's a very bad way.

Do we want our kid to have white boxes or black ones?

I hope our spawn has:

• Katherine's temperament 
• my immune system
• her work ethic
• my appreciation for leisure
• her quick thinking
• my sense of humor (because despite what Katherine thinks, I am hilarious)
• her musical ability
• my sports ability
• her organizational skillz
• my dishwashing skillz
• her patience
• my enthusiasm
• her initiative 
• my morning person-ness (I don't want more people at the breakfast table who won't talk to me)
• her math ability
• my writing ability

There are also things that I hope our baby inherits from both of us:  intelligence, analytical thinking, independence, a sense of fairness, our nerdy love of spreadsheets.

Our little nerdling?

And then there are traits that we both share that it would be nice if the kid could mutate away from:  short, pale, paddle-like feet, our inability to dance, our (sometimes) social awkwardness.

+++++

Of course you can't customize your baby.  You get what you get, and you love it as best you can.  As I said in my last post, I have no idea how I'm going to take to parenting.  But it would be a challenge for me if our child had a wildly different personality than me.  What if s/he grows up to be shallow, stupid, materialistic, or cruel?  What if our kid grows into a Republican? 
   

Random Thoughts on Impending Parenthood

This package was waiting on the porch when I came home from work:

Snugride Classic Connect 30:  Only the best for my spawn

Shit just got real up in here.

I was really looking forward to having a weekend this week.  For the first time in two months, I'm not traveling or working.  And what did we spend most of the weekend doing?  Setting up the nursery, moving furniture around, cleaning things out, putting together the crib.   

+++++

I thought that once all our summer travels were over (we've visited five different states since Memorial Day), I'd have some time to chill out before the baby comes.  But after this "free" weekend,  I look ahead to the next week:

1. Tomorrow we're finally having our new sewer line put in.  This means we had to clear out a section of our basement so they could jackhammer up our floor.  It also means that for an entire day I won't have access to my computer or TV, or indoor plumbing.  How am I going to get anything done?  HOW DO PEOPLE LIVE LIKE THIS?
2. Tuesday morning we have a routine appointment with our regular OB/GYN to check on the progress of Cletus Fetus.
3. Thursday morning we're meeting for the first time with our new pediatrician. 
4. Thursday evening we have the first of our two-session class, Caring for Newborns.  
5. All day Saturday and half the day on Sunday we signed up for a childbirth class at the hospital.  (Goodbye, Weekend.  I hardly knew you.) 

If you're counting, that's four separate baby appointments this week.  It's not even here yet, and this baby is already taking up all of my time.  I was hoping to cram in more leisure time before it got here, since I know that once it comes my life will be over.


+++++

We're taking classes, re-arranging our house, visiting daycares, and thinking about things like cloth diapers, but the truth is there's no good way to prepare yourself mentally for a baby.  I know that it will be a lot of work.  An unrelenting, incessant amount of work.  Like, way more work than I've ever had to do in my easy life.  I know I will never get any sleep again.  I know that I will never have any free time again.  I will never get any privacy again.

I hear that it can also be fulfilling and rewarding, but the truth is I have no idea how I will take to parenting-- if I will like it, find it redeeming, or be any good at it.  It's a huge block box, sitting right on the calendar, dominating my future.

Am I eager to meet the new human who comes out of my wife's hoo-haw?  Sure.  I'm ready to meet the challenge.  And to feel the love.  But I don't have any delusions about it being all baby breath and pixies.    
     

+++++

From all the posts on FB on Father's Day, I understand there are a lot of people who respect, admire, and adore their father.

I wonder what that's like. 

Not to get all Dr. Phil here, but I do not have a very good relationship with my father.  I don't have much respect for him.

So it makes me wonder what my future kid, now due in less than two months, is going to think of me.  It's a fascinating and frightening proposition that there will be someone out in the world whose image of "Dad"-- what they think of when they hear that word-- will be me.

"What did you learn in school today?"

Librarians in Vegas

How does a librarian in Las Vegas cross the road?

You go through 14 casinos, 28 shops, 56,234 flashing lights, out into the 105-degree heat, walk half a mile to the nearest foot-bridge, wait 15 minutes for all the people in front of you to cross the bridge, avoid the guys on every corner thrusting hooker trading cards  in your face (I swear I'm not making that up), then repeat the process as you walk back to the spot directly across the road from where you started.

"It's just across the street."

++++++

My frustrations with Vegas started before I left the tarmac in Chicago, where our plane was grounded for an hour and half because of "paperwork issues," according to the pilot.  I'd never heard that excuse before.  As we sat in a hot, crowded, stuffy, un-moving plane and the pilot announced every 15 minutes or so that we'd be cleared to go in about 10-15 minutes, it set the tone for the whole weekend.  


Actually, let me back up three months.  Perhaps this trip was doomed soon after the moment, three months earlier, when I booked my tickets to the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference '14 in Las Vegas.  I wouldn't have even considered going, but my old ALA-roommate friend Dallas was going and had a room to offer, I hadn't been to ALA in five years, and I'd never been to Vegas.  I thought this would be a good opportunity to see old friends and visit a place I'd never been to.  And maybe get some "professional development."

Anyway, two days after I booked my flight, Dallas took a bad spill on some ice in the parking lot at work (another victim of this year's shit-tastic winter), broke his leg/hip, had emergency surgery with four new "forever pins" in his hip, and was laid up for the next three months.  He was hoping he'd be healed enough to go to Vegas, but had to bail a week before we were to leave.

That was probably a good decision for Dallas, but a bad one for me.

++++

Just outside Vegas is the world's largest pothole. 

It turned out that a friend of mine from work, Tom, was not only only my flight, but staying in the same hotel as me.   That was one ray of (hot, blinding) sunshine for my Vegas trip.  Once we arrived in Vegas-- two hours late-- Tom and I were able to share a shuttle to our hotel.

Because of how our hotel (The Flamingo) was laid out, the shuttle stop was about a quarter mile from the entrance.  We walked in the hot, 105-degree Vegas sun with our luggage into the building, and although we were relieved to be in the cool air conditioning, we were immediately hit with other violations to our other senses.  Cigarette smoke, flashing lights, souvenir shops, lingerie.  It was like walking into a shopping mall on steroids. We walked down a long crowded hallway for what seemed like forever, and Tom said, "Tim, what have we done?"

"Has anyone seen a hotel lobby around here?" I said to no one in particular.

When we finally found the hotel part of the casino, there was a line at the check in.  It was roped off into parallel queues, like at Disneyland, with rows of waiting people.  The line to check in at the hotel was longer than the TSA security line had been at O'Hare!  WTF??

About that time I checked FB and read what a friend of mine just posted:

"I've been trying to keep an open mind but I think vegas is the most horrible place I've ever been and I hate it and I hate ala for making me come here and I can't believe people like to come here."

It was a theme I would hear from every librarian I talked to in Vegas.

++++

Because of our plane delay in getting to Vegas, and then the wait in line to check in, by the time I finally got to my room it was too late to go to any of the ALA events that day.  But a new problem presented itself.

My phone battery was dying.  After spending all day traveling, I was down to about 25% power.  I was planning to go out that night, and I knew I'd need power to contact people and meet up with them.  Plus I wanted to call my wife.  But the network connection in my room sucked ass, and it drained power just having the phone on (as it constantly searched for a connection.)  And when I tried to turn on the wi-fi in my room, they wanted to charge me $13.99 a day for service.  Screw that.  I've never been in a hotel before that CHARGED for wifi, and I'd be damned if the Flamingo was going to profit off of that.    

So I had to turn off my phone and charge it up.  I couldn't leave, I couldn't surf the web, I couldn't catch up on email, and I couldn't even check the conference app to plan my day.  I was held hostage in my room by a useless phone.

So I watched crappy TV for an hour and a half.

The view outside my hotel room was not bad.

+++++

When I was finally charged up enough to leave the hotel, I encountered the second most frustrating thing about Vegas: finding shit.

I usually have an excellent sense of direction. But I got lost in Vegas more times than I can count. On the first night in Vegas, I had dinner plans with an old friend, but first I wanted to go to the convention center and check in at ALA.  I looked at a map in the hotel "lobby" and thought I had oriented myself correctly.  But when I left the hotel, I had no idea where to find the shuttle bus stop to the convention center.  I made an entire circle around this huge, ginormous building, walking for 50 minutes in the hot sun.  Finally  I went back into the hotel and asked the bellhop, who did a lot of pointing and explaining, but couldn't show me a map.

A "map" of the hotel.  And no, it doesn't get any clearer if you make it bigger.

I did eventually find the bus, and took it to the convention center, a monstrosity of a building that resembles an airport without any planes.  After further administrative headaches to register for the conference and get my badge (with a lanyard!), I was ready to party.  Sort of.

After dinner with my friend, I decided to walk the 1.9 miles along the famous Las Vegas Strip back to my hotel.  When we exited the building after dinner, it felt like walking into a blast furnace.  For a second I thought that there was a bus blowing exhaust in our face, or we were right in front of an external air conditioning unit blowing hot air.  Nope.  This was just an evening breeze in Vegas, where it's 101 degrees out.

I was trying to meet up with some other friends of mine, so I walked 2.5 miles, beyond my hotel, to find them.  I kept trying to use the map app on my phone, but guess what?  My mobile connections on the street in Vegas also suck ass, so my map app kept spinning and spinning, loading in vain.  After pushing through throngs of people along the strip, when I got to the place my friends had been, they were gone.  So I walked back home to my hotel: hot, sweaty, tired, alone, and ready to end an overall shitty travel day.

That was my first day in Vegas.

++++

Saturday, Day Two of Vegas ALA, started at 5:22 am, when I woke up and could not get back to sleep.  This would be my first day of the convention:  let's class up this place, librarians!

I was able to "connect" to the convention center's wifi, but I then spent most of the next two days waiting as my phone told me: "Obtaining IP address..." The wifi was spotty and unreliable, and although I kept having brilliant insights and snarky observations to make, I couldn't post them on Facebook.  It was torture!   I couldn't even use the convention planning app while I was in the building where the convention was happening. 

I attended some sessions, one titled "Boba Fett at the Circ Desk: Leadership Lessons from the Empire Strikes Back" (I swear I'm not making that up) and in the afternoon returned to my hotel for a quick nap and to call my wife.  I was in contact with some old library school friends about meeting for drinks the next night, but figuring out a meeting place was difficult.  We couldn't just say, "Let's meet at Bally's" because Bally's is about the size and shape of the Death Star.  We couldn't even say "At the big entrance to Bally's off Flamingo Ave" because there are, like, four of them.  So I actually had to take a walk across the street (see above: librarian crossing street in Vegas) to scope it out and suggest a meeting place.  Then I had to go outside on the street because I couldn't send any messages from inside the fortress of any casino. 

One bright spot on Saturday was that we went to dinner at Bobby Flay's restaurant in Caesar's palace and had an excellent meal.

Bobby Flay's Scallops: a high point of my weekend 

+++++

Sunday, Day Three, was both the worst and best day of the convention.  It started out crappy and got worse. The morning session I wanted to attend was in the Paris hotel, which has a huge replica of the Eiffel tower growing out of it.

The Eiffel Tower along the Strip at night

Once inside "Paris," it took me forever to find the entrance to the meeting rooms.  On my way I tried to stop for breakfast, but all the cafes and food shops had lines out the door.  Two things you should know about me, which might explain why I hated Vegas, is that I hate crowds and I'm not a patient person.  Especially when my blood sugar is low.  So I went to a little convenience kiosk and bought the crappiest breakfast ever:  a bottle of orange juice, a small bag of snack mix, and a Hostess cupcake.  I paid $9.40, and afterwards I felt the opposite of nourished. 

I went to my session and then was excited to take the Las Vegas monorail to the convention center.  (Monorail!!)  But I wanted to pick up some lunch before I went, so I stopped at the food court in the casino.  Bad idea.  I got a fancy cheese and bacon hot dog with fries and a drink.  I took it to the convention center in the monorail, which turned out to be a disappointment.  At the convention center I sat on the floor, while my useless phone told me "Obtaining IP address..." and ate my crappy food alone.  The food didn't taste good, was bad for me, and afterwards my stomach felt bad.

After two awful meals in a row, I got lost trying to find my afternoon session.  Finally I just said, "Fuck it," and decided to play hooky.  I made my way to the exhibit hall in order to get my SWAG on.  I scored a bunch of free pens and fought off one aggressive salesperson who was determined not let me leave his booth without buying a $399 cell phone charger.  (It was down to $99 by the time I walked away.)

When I returned to my hotel in the afternoon, I stepped off the air-conditioned bus into the afternoon sun and could literally feel the heat bubble up in the veins in my hands.  Is my blood actually boiling? I thought.

Actual weather report on my hotel TV

 ++++

Sunday got a whole lot better late afternoon when I met with some of my old friends from library school.  We had drinks, bitched about Vegas, and went to our library school reunion at Bally's Skyview room, which did indeed have a kick-ass view.  I loaded up on hor d'oeuvres, mingled with a lot of old acquaintances, and even hobnobbed with the mayor of the city where my library school was.  (Seriously, we had like a 10-minute conversation.) 

After that a friend and I walked along the Strip, saw the fountain show at the Bellagio, and then had some ice cream inside. 

Famous dancing fountain show

My friend went back to her hotel, but I was not done with Vegas yet.  It was my last night in town and I didn't want to leave without seeing some of the famous buildings I'd heard so much about.  I wanted to see the faux NYC skyline at New York New York.  (And feed my skyline/skyscraper obsession.) 

From my perspective, here's the best thing about Vegas:  there are some pretty amazing buildings here. I can't imagine the architectural effort that can create an enormous structure that looks like a skyline from the outside, but inside is a cavernous casino. Where else can you see the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, Magic Kingdom, a Roman palace, gigantic elabotate fountains, and funky modern skyscrapers all along the same street?

I went inside New York New York, and it was incredible.  What on the outside looks like a row of smaller buildings in front of a huge mini skyline is actually one huge building, with possibly the most incongruent walls in the world.  (Although I did not know that the Jefferson Memorial was in New York, right next to the Statue of Liberty.) 

One could argue that it's cheesey and tacky to have all these replicas of famous landmarks in one place, but I have to admit the replicas are damn impressive approximations.  If you walk into the Paris hotel, the grid-like base for the Eiffel tower goes through the walls, as if the tower is growing out of the building.  That's pretty fucking cool.   And these are interspersed with just the garden-variety cool skyscrapers.   

Cool leaning cartoonish buildings along the strip.

The Strip from the airport.

+++++

There was some further travel drama in getting home, but I'm tired of writing this post and you're tired of reading it, so I'll end here.