Arizona entry

[valis2]

It was a work trip, honestly, so I don't have a lot to say. We drove there, as always, and it took three days, as always. This is my ninth year of working in Arizona, which is why I'm so low-key about it.

Anyway, some of the interesting things I saw, thought or heard:

• A trucker playing tennis on the side of his rig at a rest area.


• A semi hauling some gigantic grey things that looked like massive performance art.


• A woman came to the booth and looked at some of the merchandise that we had arranged attractively on a bed of rice.
  "You should use rock salt," she said to me.
  "Oh, really?" I asked.
  "Yes, it will stay white forever and not turn brown."
  "You do realize that the rice in the trays is brown rice."
  "Oh."


• Caught an episode of Buffy. It was apparently the One Episode I Needed to See. Buffy comes back from the dead, Dawn decides to kick butt, Spike is given a soul, Giles nearly dies, Willow becomes all Evil, and Xander saves the day. I've seen these topics referred to many times in the few Buffy fics that I've read, and it was weird to see nearly all of it in one episode.


• Watched an episode of Buck Rogers. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. Apparently Earth's civilization is so advanced that they can beam interstellar messages to Twiggy/Twinkie/whatever that thing's name is, but they can't tell that Twiggy is on a different ship. At one point Wilma describes Twiggy as Buck's best friend, which turned my stomach, considering that Twiggy seems to be some sort of machine designed to spew weirdly inappropriate catchphrases at an alarming rate. Also, Buck is held prisoner by a group of the most fantastically inept race of imperial-themed aliens ever. They clone Buck and send clones back to New Phoenix, Earth with a bomb inside so that when three certain people are in a room together the clone will blow up. First of all, the imperial aliens are led by a princess. She wears a sequined donut on her head and has all the failings of an Earth princess. Plus she's really enamored of Buck. She gets the clones in a room to "test" them and they fail, which I thought was bizarre, because the original Buck liked her but just couldn't do the deed, while one of the clones was hot and bothered. I don't know why she didn't just jump him and get him out of her system. Plus there was the second-in-command, Kane, who was really getting irritated by her loopy libido. So then the clones get to Earth and the one with the bomb is, of course, malfunctioning by getting simple catchphrases wrong (Twiggy, you see, had stayed with the original Buck, and couldn't supply them) and Wilma is suspicious. The three minds get together, and instead of blowing up, the clone stands there and looks creepy until Wilma shoots it and vaporizes it. I would have thought that shooting it would set off the bomb, but then we wouldn't have a continuing series, I suppose. Eventually Buck leaves his cell on the imperial ship (revealing that he could have left it at any time, which quite frankly baffled me) and chases after the other clones. He is such a "super" human that he manages to catch up to them in the same kind of ship, which makes no sense because the clones are flying at top speed. Wilma figures out which ship to destroy and Buck and Twiggy are not aboard it, unfortunately. Then they go back to New Phoenix and play Ping-Pong on a Super Ping-Pong Table of the Future, which turns out to have a tube of neon underneath so that it looks futuristic. Buck pretends to malfunction, and then Wilma thinks, oh dear, I shot the real Buck, which is so funny that everybody laughs hysterically when Buck reveals he was kidding. Ha. Ha ha ha. I can't believe I used to watch this drek. Though I did like the tight spandexy Outfits of the Future. And it was funny that the princess turned out to be just as prudish as the average late 70's/early 80's TV audience.


• A cube of solid gold weighing one ton need only measure 14.2 inches.


• The Afghani trader across from our booth came up with an amazing money-making scheme. "You find customer to buy me," he explained. "Then at night I run away. Tomorrow morning you sell me again! We split the money!" When I asked what we would do when the original buyer came back angry, he said, "Tell them No Guarantee!"


• I could not find any store selling either of the two chais I enjoy. I found Chai Egg Nog and Chai Iced Tea, but no Green tea or Red tea chai.


• I had the most delicious food at an Afghani restaurant that had just opened the month before. I ate "mantu", which is beef in a wrapper, much like a dumpling, and has a tomato sauce and ground pepper on top. It was fabulous. The restaurant looked like it had once been a Denny's.


• I was writing up a lady's purchase in a timely and polite manner. To make a long story short, she realized that I had not bagged her purchase by color, which had been done for her friend (who had specifically asked for it). "Why do I always get the worst customer service?" she said loudly. Needless to say for the next two weeks my friends made lots of jokes about it and eventually gave me an award for Worst Customer Service.


• Found some goat's milk butter in WI. Hooray!


• Listened to the new Chevelle cd. Liked it.


• Worked on the outline to tLS, and realized that I had made a monumental mistake in timing that meant the entire last portion of the outline will need to be rewritten and one plot point will have to be excised. D'oh.


• Stayed in a motel of doom at one point and remembered why we usually stick to Hampton Inns and Fairview Inns.

Home now until Friday, when I run out to do another show, and then I'll be back for most of March. Next entry will be pics from the trip.

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