Weekend Intelligence: Beeps, Dings, Chimes and Rings

We had an awesome and adventure packed Thanksgiving weekend in El Paso. And each adventure seemed to be heralded by some sort of alerting noise - beeps, dings, chimes and rings. So, in typical weekend intelligence fashion, here are the highlights!

House and Home (and beyond!):

Beep... Beep... That's the noise that I woke up to on Wednesday morning. Apparently it had been going all night, kept Colin up and woke D up much earlier, but she didn't want to wake me up - figured it would eventually wake me up. All it ended up doing was driving her nuts for a few hours. After some hunting around and some light acrobatics, I eventually found that one of the smoke alarms had a dead battery, but as I was already late, I decided I would deal with it later. I remembered to get my badge out of the convertible just before D left for work, I was taking the Vue.

Noni's daycare closed early on Wednesday, so I had previously requested a half-day off so that I could get Clara. This would also give me enough time to clean and get started on packing the Vue. On my way to the daycare, D rings my cell phone. Apparently, the dinging of the car telling her that the headlights were still on didn't have quite the annoyance factor of the smoke alarm. The convertible was dead. Of all days to have an automobile incident, we'd have to have one when we needed to be on the road early. Someone in the lab she works in offered her a jump, but the battery was too drained for a cold, uncharged jump and it didn't work. So I got Clara, quickly cleaned up the Vue, picked up Colin, my emergency auto kit and the chinese food I had ordered ahead of time, then raced out to the ISR to jumpstart the convertible.

Begin PSA: Just incase you're unaware, if your battery is dead due to a slow drain (headlights, map light, cabin lights, etc) and the engine won't even crank over, then you're going to need to charge the battery a little bit before trying to start. Hook up the battery like you normally would, but rev the engine on the vehicle that's giving the jump. Hold the engine revved for about 2-5 mins, and keep it revved while trying to start the dead car. 90% of the time, it works everytime.

After some cold chinese and a packing frenzy, we were on the road. It was only about two hours later than I wanted. But that makes the difference between being able to cover a large chunk of highway at 80+mph and crawling along at 65mph all night long. -.- For all you non-Texans, the interstate speeds change around here at dusk. It would make too much sense to leave it all the same speed. I set the cruise to 70 after dark and just plodded along with everyone else. The kids wanted to watch a movie on the laptop, and D was having a hard time getting it set up. Go figure that the minute I take my eyes off the road, I nearly rear-end a State Trooper. He had just finished pulling over some bozo who decided he was going to pull over on the wrong side of the road, so as he was trying to merge back into traffic, I came up on him waaay too fast and got pulled over myself. A siren is kinda like a beep... >.>; I think he took one look at the chaos in the cabin and understood, 'cause he asked me where I was traveling for the holiday, let me off with a warning and told me to be safe and enjoy my weekend.

Thursday was VERY relaxing. We slept in very late and idly watched football and gamed a little. D's mom had bought a 17lb turkey for 3 people and 2 kids, so there was a TON of food. We went through the Black Friday ads and decided to enter the early morning craziness for the Polaroid 42" HDTV they were selling for under $600. The plan was to wake up at 4, get something quick to eat and bring it to the store to get in line for the TV.

That was the plan, anyway. The phone alarm dinged around 4, but we ended up taking a little longer than anticipated getting up, sitting in the drive-thru for nearly 20mins waiting for service and found over 200 people already in line for the 20 TVs they had. Do the math - it don't work. D and I just decided to stand off to the side, eat our food and watch the crazy people. That was the only deal worth being anywhere but at home at that hour, so we went home and did all of our holiday shopping online. We did end up buying a TV and nice Home Stereo System at TigerDirect. The TV was normally $1100 and the Stereo $500 - we got the whole rig for under a grand. We also picked up all the gifts for the kids and most of the family as well. Very pleased with our finds this year.

That night, we decided to go out dancing. Last time we were in El Paso, we went to Graham Central Station, but apparently there had been a rash of shootings there lately. We decided to go to the Whatever Lounge and Old Plantation after dinner and coffee instead. For those of you that actually follow the links - yes, there are lots of rainbows for a reason. Ding ding! Honestly though, I'd say it was a good 50/50 split between the straight and the LGBT crowd, but it was kinda hard to tell at times. Some might wonder why we'd chose to go there over other bar/club/lounge choices in town, and the reasons we chose that club over the others were pretty simple:

-Friendlier Atmosphere: Aside from the obvious reason why the patrons would be more friendly, there seemed to be waaaay less "he-said-she-said-baby-momma-drama" style shenanigans that you usually find at a club on a Friday night.
-Better music: Music you can actually dance to, played by an actual DJ from actual vinyl on actual turntables. Bad. Ass.
-Better drink specials: We spent the same amount of money hanging out at a lounge for an hour before the club opened as we did actually in the club all night long. And we were never want for drink.

Long night short - we had an absolute blast. D and I drank and danced to some of the best electro until 1am, and at the risk of giving this post a PG-13 rating, left just after the male strip show ended. So much fun.

The next morning, we woke up just in time to schedule a lunch with Papa (D's grandpa). He's very by the book, which has historically been at odds with our tendancy to be completely bumtastic while on vacation. But we nailed down 11-2 for catching up and eating at a local cafeteria style restaurant. He has been known to get on D's case about her weight, but lately we've been doing DDR just about every night for 15-20mins, and she's made solid progress, so we had a lot of positive things to talk about on the wellness topic. I bragged on her dedication to being more active and her weight loss so far - I think he might have actually been impressed. :D

We finished off the weekend on Sunday with a visit to D's old church for breakfast and worship before packing up the Vue and heading back on the road. We decided to push past Fort Stockton and refuel in Ozona, and were greeted with the ding of the fuel light 30 miles outside of the town. We're blessed we actually made it. Once we finally got home, the beep that started it all came back to haunt us: I completely forgot to put new batteries in the smoke detector. >.>;

In Game:

Not that we played much, but we did bring the 360 and laptop with us, so we were able to play a little bit. Most of my online time was spent doing what I rarely get to do: farm. Earlier in the past week, Keri and I found out why there are always people killing the bats in the Sanctuary of Zi'tah. Those damned things are broken! They almost always double drop beast blood, which NPC's for a little over 1k. Combine that with the fact that they are very, very squishy, spawn rapidly and there are a bajillion of the little buggers, and you have a very lucrative gil-making vehicle that is completely independent of the Auction House market.

Their only "drawback" is that they only spawn from dusk to dawn in game, so you have about 30mins to farm and 30mins of down time. Not really that bad of a deal, really. It means you can seriously do something else while actively farming. I watched Thanksgiving football, played with Clara a little bit, did some laundry, took a shower and ate Thanksgiving Day dinner, all while farming up a little over 175k over the course of the day. I used all that cash to upgrade my Light Staff to an Apollo's Staff to give my BST charm a bit more of a kick.

Speaking of BST, the other thing Keri and I did over the long weekend was put in a leveling session on BST. Back in the Toraimarai Canal, we did the slime trick again and it worked just as wonderfully as before. One of these times, we're gonna have to put in a good 3-4 hour session in there and just grind it out. The experience in there is phenomenal.

That about covers it. I'm on the road on Monday and part of Tuesday, so I might not get time to update like I want to. Gotta love working tech support after a long weekend...