Preparing for Vegas – Thoughts from April 6, 2024

Patti and I drive out tomorrow to Las Vegas. She wants to leave the house at 11:00 am. You may consider that barely in the morning, but it’s what time I woke up this morning. I set the clock for 9:00 am so I can do some of my morning stuff. Yes, two hours is not enough to do my regular morning routine. I would have to get up at 8:00 am if I did my normal routine. We are doing this because Patti wants to go to a buffet before we get to Vegas, and she doesn’t want them to give away our room. As far as I can remember, they’ve never given away our room, but I guess the possibility is always there.

Patti is still working on cutting down on her smoking. She’s been down to two or three cigarettes a day. I don’t know how easy it’s going to be to continue smoking less and less in Vegas. It’s not as smoke filled as it used to be, but drinking seems to make Patti smoke more. My hope is she won’t use Vegas as an excuse to give up on her goal. All I can do is help her when I can. Encouragement is my only tool for helping her. The rest is up to her. I learned this in the many years I tried to get my dad to quit smoking. Smokers must decide to quit themselves. I’m not glad Patti lost part of her sight, but I’m glad it pushed her into quitting before it killed her.

We have two people coming to watch the cats while we’re gone. One is the regular friend of Patti who normally watches them, but she can’t come two of the days. Our nephew is coming over on Monday and Tuesday. He came to the house so we could tell him what to do. Most of it was me telling him what to do because I’m the one who feeds them and cleans out their litter boxes. When we showed him around, we only saw two cats. The other two hid the whole time he was there. He may find that he only sees flashes of them while he’s there. Hopefully, one of them gets brave enough to let him pet her.

This trip should be good for my Thoughts papers. In case you don’t know, you’re reading one of my Thoughts papers right now. I’ve been getting pretty good at writing on vacations. My writing may suffer if I’m too drunk to write sometimes, but those can also be my most entertaining thoughts. I know I’m going to gain weight. That’s a given. I cannot eat my normal vegan fare in the real world. Patti’s job is to help keep me under control as much as possible. The main thing she must keep me away from is sweets. If I start down the path toward Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, she must keep me from drowning in the chocolate river.