Snow??!?!?

Last week was looking like this:

This week, I brought my 360 and the first hotel was nice, in a "not been remodeled since '79" kinda way. The TV, which was probably state of the hotel industry art at the time looked like this:

It's a crappy pic, but it suits. If you look closely, you can see in the bottom right corner is an FM tuner. Which did not work, of course. It's a classic Magnavox, wood grain and a high pitched whine that sounds like someone letting air out of a balloon veeeeeeery slowly. While an icepick is being slid into your ear. For thirty minutes and with accompanying fuzzy picture. Awesome. This beauty is not cable ready, and so had the required bunny-ear-spade-lug connector to enable third rate hotel cable viewing. But they did have dirty movies for $3.99. I didn't, because if I wanted to see fuzzy B-porn, I'd be surfing YouTube at Starbucks. Oh, and the remote didn't work properly- got my workout by hopping up and down to get the cable receiver to work. How did we live before remotes? I think an iffy remote is a worse curse than a completely broken one. Titty bar theory- all the excitement with none of the gratification! You keep hoping things will go your way, but you end up banging your head in futility.

Last night I was down in Salem and ended up staying in a Best Western. Better hotel chain that has some good rep, right? Wrong. I was so bored I ponied up for an RF adapter because that damn TV didn't even have RCA jacks. I am going on record that Crackdown looks like ass coming through 75 ohm tnc connectors. God I miss my TV. I gotta figure out how to cart a monitor with me. Damn POS adapter doesn't even have the optical output that I need to run my Tritton headphones. So on top of a crap picture, I get crap sound. If you haven't played 'da Crack', the sound is very important to find the orbs required to up your stats. So I hooked it up and wandered through the fuzzy landscape listening very hard for the faint sounds. I ended up just picking fights with random thugs and trying to clobber them with random objects. Take what you can get, right?

So today I completed two jobs and get into Vancouver around 8pm and found a Holiday Inn Express. Decent TV, but I'm too damn tired to drag all my gear out. I figure I'll just blog about it, and see what lessons are to be found. And it starts snowing. Big ass flakes of snow that are melting as they hit. Beautiful and freezing on the bridges and overpasses. I ain't driving the company pickup the 7 miles to the shop in the snow/ice tomorrow, I'll be right here doing paperwork. At least it has a desk and a thermostat in the wall. The company truck however, has some very real character. Character like:

• 220,000+ miles
• manual transmission
• cracked windshield
• passenger door that won't work due to botched theft attempt
• broken antenna due to frustrated car thief taking out his aggravation on the poor truck
• constantly fogging windows caused by crappy defroster/temp controller combo (got some Rain-X and fixed that!)
• broken camper shell, presumably for failed thief needing somewhere to sleep?
• leaking driver's window
• broken fuel gauge that requires keeping a manual fuel log on a sticky note over said gauge
• and the coup d'grace, white painted steel rims on a green truck with a black camper shell!

I can't bitch too much, at least the little sucker runs. Oh wait, it was a dead duck when I went to the airport parking lot to get it on Monday. Required a jump and away we went. The ground was wet so I couldn't get enough traction to push start it, if you were wondering. I just got sweaty and tired. At least I have a gas card to fuel it with. Oh wait, that stopped working yesterday!

If I haven't mentioned it, I want to thank my dear wife for the iPod she got me for Xmas. It has been a lifesaver while driving the crap out of my little green "Charactermobile".

The lesson I have learned is this: I'm working from my hotel room tomorrow and staying out of that damn truck.

I hope you are all having a great week. Hug your kids, kiss your wife, and tell your Xbox Live friends that you appreciate them for being the wierdest people your never met in person. :)

Life lesson #3: Never try and get the paper in your boxers. Those boxers you're wearing have a gaping hole in the front that will let the horse out of the barn when you bend over to pick up the Daily News. This will happen every time your elderly neighbor is taking her cockapoodle out for its morning constitutional. Take a minute to put on a robe and save yourself a sex predator rap. You'll thank me later. :)

Call this number:  781.382.3756