16-May-2005 Uncategorized

mini-soda

Last week I got to work from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I flew into the Minneapolis / St. Paul Airport and drove straight to the Hotel Sofitel. I was supposed to fly in the night before, but I got booted off the preferrable 7 PM Tuesday night flight in lieu of the icky 6 AM Wednesday morning flight. I flew Northwest Airlines, or as I like to call them, Help Us Not Go Bankrupt Airlines. I sat next to a really pretty girl, but she was mainly interested in sleeping and being unconscious and breathing dramatically as she dreamt of doing aerobic exercises. Urgh! I tried to distract myself by concentrating on my book Microserfs. I usually only read when I’m on planes, but I couldn’t focus and decided to give up and sleep through the trip. I was still jumpy from Hertz totally whaling on my bill when I turned in my rental car early. Never turn in a car early without warning them. Trust me on this. My travel agent person gave me bad advice about it so I had to beg and plead not be charged $900 for having a rental car for 10 days. Crikey. I still don’t know what the outcome of that is. Anyway, I got to the hotel and showered and left for work. I found the corporate office fairly quickly and was super-busy for the next three days thereafter. I had a great dinner at a place called Ike’s somewhere in downtown Minneapolis. 40’s style restaurant with fast service. My buddy (and coworker) Kevin (see his video in an early blog entry) was with me and my run of sitting next to pretty girls continued. They were yapping so much that it was impossible to slip in a witty response or aside to their conversation. There’s nothing like hijacking conversations so you can improve your hookup possibilities. Sadly, no hijacking nor hookups occurred. I went back to the hotel and played with my bidet for a few hours, then fell asleep. Good times.


I got a ticket on April 9, 2005 for an illegal left turn I made off Westheimer. I thought I had all my ducks in a row after mailing off my defensive driving goodies, but it turns out I sent them to the wrong courthouse. I’ve got warrant out for my arrest as a result which could be paid with a $200 fine. The fine for the actual offense is $175. That’s a lot of money. I was tipped off that my ducks had drowned by the Three Amigos bonding agency that called me during lunch. For $71, I could post bond and reset my court date. I like the sound of that. I plan to do that when I get back into town as this place is open 10 AM – 3PM on Saturdays and Sundays and 6 AM to midnight Monday through Friday. Hopefully my certified letter sent erroneously to the Harris County Precinct 4 courthouse will be there (it contains a cashiers check for $85 that I will be repurposing for my bonding). The moral of the story? Don’t turn left from Westheimer to Shephard.