weekend report...
weekend report…
I went to Salt Lake City this weekend for a number of things.. Got an initiation that I’m pretty excited about since it was by invitation. Supposedly this may have some effect (positive, I hope) in my ability to take away people’s pains.
We drove in Thursday night/Friday morning directly to Amity and Chad’s house, and all four of us (me, , and ) crashed in the basement. This was the first time that Michelle and I have gone with someone else. This meant that we didn’t have to get our own rental car, and we got to ride there in the back seat. Very nice way to go, slept a bit on the way home, but was awake the whole way there.
Friday was pretty chill, the 4 of us hung out at Amity’s house. We were visited by Dave Hermann and had lunch. There were some last minute “Affairs of State” for the folks who were performing the initiations, which was cause for some consternation and gnashing of teeth. These kept us from spending much time with michelle’s family (they all came over, and we had to leave just as everyone arrived.. grr)
We ended up going to a “private club” called O’Shuck’s downtown SLC. For those who aren’t familiar, Utah has some pretty odd laws about the sales and consumption of alcohol. You can buy only beer at a “bar”, and it is 3.2% beer. If you want something stronger like wine or distilled spirits, mixed drinks, etc, you can get them at a restaurant, but if you aren’t planning on eating, just drinking and socializing, you must go to a private club. These require you to be a member. Becoming a member involves paying a fee, either annual or “temporary”. As it turned out, I was designated as the person who would hyold the membership for our party since I wasn’t involved in the “Affairs of State”. They took down my full name and gave me a card. I wanted to declare “hear ye, hear ye, Robert Charles Anzlovar is a temporary member of this bar”…
After the “AoS” meeting was done, we went back to the house, but everyone had already left. When all have kids, curfews get a bit early. When we stay at Amity’s, we sleep on an air mattress on the floor in the basement. I’m not that jazzed about air mattresses in general because they almost never hold their air for a whole night and I end up with my butt on the floor. This time was no exception, although if both of us were on the mattress, we were suspended just slightly above the floor.
Saturday was another full day: hung out with the grandkids in the morning, had a brunch with a bunch of the folks in SLC and Ogden, then to the place where we were doing the inits, the home of one of the people who were receiving the initiation. There was a certain point at which we were sequestered, then later shooed out of the house because of other things that were happening. Can’t say much about what happened there, but it was a good experience and I have some new things to consider, but isn’t that what it’s all about?
There was a gnostic mass put on by the Horus folks, and then after that was a trip to the Downtown Hookah Bar. By the time we got there it was a bit late, but we got to hang out with some other brethren who hadn’t been at the brunch. When we were there, Michelle stated that she would like to get a hookah, so i suspect there’ll be a fun toy purchase in our future.
One funny moment there was when two folks who had iPhones started geekin’ out on their toys. Feeling a little bit of iPhone envy, I pulled out my toy, a palm treo, and asked “can you do a natal horoscope on yours?” and gathered their birth information. It’s interesting to me, as I have been collecting this information from friends and family, there are a lot of folks I know who have a lot of planets in one sign. Is that unusual?
Sunday morning was more hanging wiht the kids, followed by a lunch at a place called the Red Iguana, a Mexican restaurant of some renown. Way too much food later, we started heading out to the airport to get one of our number on his flight home. Had some unnecessary excitement as he had dropped his wallet at the restaurant, but this was fortunately discovered before we were too far from the restaurant.
One of the highlights of the weekend for me was learning about google’s text message interface. This allows you to get simple answers by way of sending a text message to 466453 (spell google on the letters associated with normal phone buttons) with things like “local thai restaurant near slc”, “weather slc”. If you want to get started, you could just text that address with “help” or “topics” to get some pointers. It was because of my playing with this that I had the phone number for the red iguana in my phone already when we discovered that the wallet was missing.
Another fun bit of the weekend just just being around a bunch of people all playing with their phones a lot. I’d never really tried to do anything in Wyoming, assuming it to be a wasteland of no signal. It turns out that there is enough signal for a lot of things, if only for a few miles.. no signal, then full signal for a few minutes, then no signal. Surprisingly enough, many times there was no usable signal at the gas stations.