Monthly Archives: June 2021

It Wasn’t My Idea, I Swear . . .

When I asked Jan where she wanted to eat this afternoon while we were out and about with our errands, she looked at me with a big smile and said, ‘Twin Peaks…again.”

I know we just ate there day before yesterday, but who am I to argue with my better half when she wants to eat there again. And since we both had exactly the same thing we had on Tuesday, no new food photos for today.

A while back I talked about the Peacock TV app and how it wasn’t available on the Amazon Fire TV and Fire Stick devices due to contract negotiation problems between Amazon and NBC. Of course you could do like what I did and ‘sideload’ it to be able to use it, but was kind of involved and a PITA.

But now it seems that Amazon and NBC have gotten over their little tiff and made up, so  now the Peacock app is available in native mode on the Fire Stick. So after deleting my sideloaded version I downloaded the new one with no problems, though I did have to set it up and log back in again. Easy Pezy.

While we were on our recent trip I ordered these two metal flamingos for Jan’s Flamboyance.

New Facebook Flamingos

When I ordered them I was happy to see that the all-metal birds were made in the U.S.A. and shipped from California, unlike most of the things sold on Facebook ads. Plus the ad said that would ship within 3 to 5 days.

They lied.

It was a little over two weeks before the birds were shipped, and according to the tracking info, they were shipped via China Post from Fushan, China.

So it will be interesting to see if they are really metal, and as big as they said they were. Especially since the original ad has disappeared from FB, even from my order page, and has been replaced with a completely different one from the same company.

I’ll let you know what shows up.

Run Far. Run Fast. 

Windows 11 is coming soon to (and probably crashing on) a computer near you.

Windows 11 Screen

A recent leak revealed the new look and feel, and a probable release date of Fall 2021.

Maybe.

So get ready for a bunch of stuff that no longer works right, or no longer works at all.


Thought For The Day:


Ignorance can be educated and crazy can be medicated.
But there’s no cure for stupid.

 

The Second Worse?

Catching up with our recent trip.

June 8, 2021

At the end of our first day, and after a great meal at the nearby Sonny’s BBQ, we checked into our La Quinta hotel just down the road. But things quickly went downhill.

Our first clue was that when I ask what time the free breakfast was, I was told that it was from 6am to 9am, and that it was just coffee. Nothing else.

Just coffee.

I don’t know what this is, but it’s not a luggage cart.

La Quinta Brandon Luggage Cart

This is a luggage cart.

Luggage Cart

We finally ended up pretty much just carrying our luggage into the room since everything just kept falling off the ‘cart’.

And as we were doing that we encountered the First Floor Vending Area.

La Quinta Brandon First Floor Vending Area

And the Second Floor Vending Area.

La Quinta Brandon Second Floor Vending Area

As well as the Second Floor Guest Laundry Area.

La Quinta Brandon Guest Laundry 1

La Quinta Brandon Guest Laundry 2

Now, in La Quinta’s defense, the room itself was very nice.

Well, mostly.

It was very cold. In fact, this cold.

La Quinta Brandon Thermometer

So I went over to the thermostat on the wall to turn it up. But this is what I found.

La Quinta Brandon Thermostat

Dead as a doornail. So I decided to try to turn it up at the AC unit itself. But as soon as I touched the control panel, this happened.

La Quinta Brandon AC

The entire front panel just fell off.

Looked like someone had tried the same thing I had in mind. And the control panel on the AC was dead too. So I tried to just unplug it.

But that didn’t work either, since the power plug was buried in the wall behind the unit. So we just bundled up all night.

Yeah, I know we could have probably gotten a new room, but we were tired and just didn’t want to fool with it.

And to top things off, later in the evening Jan said the TV remote had stopped working. And this was why.

La Quinta Brandon Remote

The tape holding the batteries in had come off. It’s the little things, I guess.

Not what we’ve come to expect from La Quinta hotels. And though as I said, the room itself was nice, overall it would have to rate as the second worse hotel we’ve ever stayed in.

But I will have to say it’s a distant second, since the worse one, a Best Western in Pensacola, FL, had actual bullet holes in the wall, a pile of trash just swept into the corner, and the roll of toilet paper just sitting in the hole in the wall where the toilet paper roll holder should have been.

Good times!

The next morning, sans the ‘free hot breakfast’, we made a quick stop right across the street for Chicken Biscuits at Chick-fil-A before we got back on the Interstate heading for Vandalia, IL about 550 miles north.

We had planned our detour around Memphis to avoid the I-40 bridge closure and the resulting 3-5 hour backup across the I-55 bridge. But for a while it looked like even getting to Memphis, much less getting around it was kind of doubtful.

Though it was fairly sunny when we left Jackson, MS, about halfway to Memphis, the bottom dropped out. One of the those ‘the road just disappears’ bottom-droppers. So I did my usual, which was to find the brightest-lit semi trailer I could find and then keep them just in view, while hoping that they could see the road better than I could.

What really amazed me in all this was how many IDIOTS drive along in a rainstorm like this without any headlights. And with a light colored vehicle they just disappear in the storm. But after a harrowing hour or so we were finally in the clear. And though our planned detour route had a few more zigs and zags than we had figured, we arrived in Sikeston, MO for our lunch stop about 1:30.

We’ve eaten at the Lambert’s Throwed Rolls here a couple of times, so since we were passing through again, we couldn’t passed it up this time either. And it was just as delicious as always.

Jan got the Fried Chicken Dinner while I got a Veggie Plate. Then we divided it all up, and along with the pass-arounds, we were stuffed by the time we were back on the road. And with only a few more rain showers we got to Vandalia and Jan’s sister Debbie’s about 5:30pm.

Looking forward to the next days with all the family.

I mentioned that Jan brought home a new addition to her flamingo flamboyance that she got in Gulf Shores.

Tallulah's Treasures Flamingo

Good to see he’s among friends.


Thought For The Day:


“When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.” ― Thomas Jefferson