funnystrange.com

Lina went to the vet this afternoon. They said she's limping because of her knee, and gave me Rimadyl to give her for the pain. I didn't get to talk to the doctor, but the paper said we should check back in a week and see if she's still having problems. The lady at the counter made noises about Lina maybe having arthritis and needing to take Rimadyl forever, but I really don't think that's it. Rob says she was out for a long time one afternoon, rambling around in the woodsy outer reaches of the back yard, and when she came back in she was limping. He said it's gotten better since that first day, when she was hopping to avoid putting any weight on that leg. It really sounds to me like an injury. Well anyway, I'm glad it's not related to the surgery. Best of all, the Rimadyl was a free sample. That stuff is expensive, or so I've heard.

We had dinner tonight at a new barbecue place in Chapel Hill, simply called the Barbecue Joint. They had some frou-frou items on the menu, like banana caramel torte instead of the traditional banana pudding. But the barbecue was excellent so I'll overlook it. It came with these spectacular fresh pickles. I don't even like pickles, but these were great. I also ordered green beans, which had tons of garlic and bacon on them.

Back to the trip report. Sunday dinner was the only dud meal. It was late and we were both to tired to walk over to another casino and sit down to a fancy meal, so we just went down to a cheeseburger place in the "Desert Passage" shopping mall in the Aladdin. The sign outside the restaurant had a rotating cheeseburger with a fez on it, which intrigued us, but it failed miserably to live up to expectations. There was nothing terribly wrong with the food; it was just mediocre, overpriced cheeseburgers. And i don't know about Georg, but I was way too tired to enjoy it even if it had been worth enjoying. Anyway, if that was our worst food experience then we did pretty well.

One thing I should mention here, before I forget, is that the Aladdin had really crummy cable TV -- all Vegas casinos seem to have bad cable, I guess because they want to encourage you to get out of the room and gamble -- but the one interesting thing was a Chinese channel. My Mandarin is so far gone, I couldn't understand but a few short phrases here and there. But I still had fun watching a news program, and a historical melodrama that seemed to be a soap opera with a lot of martial arts. They also had ads for some kind of freaky game show, or maybe talk show, with a lot of yelling and pictures of everyone's faces on Lego people. But we never caught that show, just the ads.

OK. Monday morning we both woke up early, because of jet lag, and walked around the big casinos. One of my favorite pastimes in Vegas is to look in the windows of designer boutiques like Armani, Chanel, Prada, etc., and read the menus of high end restaurants like Lutèce or Le Cirque. I don't have the nerve to go into the clothing stores since I have no intention of buying, but it's fun to window-shop. Especially since the designer stores seem to at least partially change their window displays every day.

Georg and I had great fun snarking on the various designer clothes on display. For instance, we decided that the women's shops were almost all going for one of two looks: either groupie slut (as Georg put it) or "I'd like to thank the Academy." Menswear often veered towards bling-bling (i.e. fur coats and basketball jerseys). Even Armani had a fur jacket in the window! Actually that jacket might have been for women, I can't remember. We also noted that DKNY is going totally new wave (they had a jacket in the window that looked like they stole it from Debbie Harry in 1981) and Betsy Johnson's clothes still look like she found them in the bargain bin of a thrift shop somewhere and marked them up 5,000%.

The worst clothing we saw anywhere was in a lingerie shop window. It was a completely backless nightgown (just a few strings to hold it up) made of fabric printed with images from the Kama Sutra. But get this, all the genitals had been airbrushed out! Why the heck would anyone buy a Kama Sutra nightie with all the naughty bits removed? What on earth is the point?

I didn't take many photos in the shopping malls, but I did get this one at the Venetian that proves mod is alive and well this fall. As if we didn't already know that. All I can say is, I had this idea way back in the spring, before I saw designer labels doing mod. I really did!

I also took this photo of (allegedly) the world's largest Hawaiian shirt, for my friend Marc who loves Hawaiian shirts.The little boy who appears to be peeing on the ground or something was a bonus. He was really jumping up and down.

Bellagio had really nice Christmas decorations up last December, and for fall they had done up their conservatory in a gorgeous autumnal display. Those glassy arches over the path are fountains of water. I forget the technical term, but there was a sign explaining that all the molecules of the water are aligned so that it flows perfectly smoothy, no spatter at all. That bed with the arches over it is normally full of flowers, but they had built a brick path down the length of it.

Around the sides of the conservatory were more beds full of autumn flowers, pumpkins and corn. This bed had big droplets of water -- maybe the size of a tablespoon -- blooping straight up about three feet, then falling back down. I tried to get a picture of it but with so much greenery, it was really hard to see the water in the photo. On the other side was this bundle of some kind of grass, standing a pool of misty water. My photo is a litle blurry unfortunately.

The main event, so to speak, in the conservatory was the "ol' mill" complete with functioning water wheel. Surrounding the mill were lots of these incredible glass leaves hanging from the ceiling. They had also scattered the leaves throughout the shopping mall part of the casino.

This time I remembered how I'm always disappointed to have photos of scenery but not of us. So I took a couple of shots of Georg on that walkway down the middle flower bed. I also made him take one of me but it didn't turn out that well, I don't think. We took tons of photos of each other in front of the ol' mill (yes, it was labeled "The Ol' Mill," complete with apostraphe, on the little sign) but the light was all wrong and they were totally washed out. We should have gone back in the afternoon and tried again.

My last photo of the conservatory is pretty unremarkable except that I think this is the staircase Julia Roberts walks down in her first scene in Ocean's Eleven. If I recall correctly, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt are waiting at the bottom of the stairs, and she walks past them, but you get the impression they're in some totally different place like the lobby, not the conservatory. Unfortunately we just cancelled HBO so I won't have 20 opportunities a week to watch the movie and check that scene. Guess I could rent it.

Jeez, I'm only up to about 9:30 am on Monday! Our next stop is a museum exhibit of objects from Chatsworth, the ancestral home of the Duke of Devonshire. Which will take a bit of time to write up so I'm going to start a new entry.