viva las vegas!

before i begin telling my vegas story, i want to congratulate lane and tina on the birth of the wee tomato. he's so cute!

...okay, so now on to vegas. we were leaving on wednesday to drive to chicago. i thought we were leaving at, oh, 3ish after everyone got out of class. by the time we actually left it was closer to 4:45--guess who was holding everyone up. yeah, the one guy. i had planned on stopping in iowa city, because i had failed to pick up slide sheets on my previous two visits and i needed to send in my application to the salt institute. of course, by the time we got there, the post office was closed, so i had to carry the thing around with me until i could find one. i was a little more than annoyed by that.

we got to birkel's a little after 10, and we hung out at her place. it was a lot of fun, but i think i got a little tipsy. i did drink those three beers pretty fast, i guess. we got some hilarious quotes for the anthem wall too. "i've never seen a toilet do that before!", and so on. we sort of slept for a few hours, but were at the L around 4am. i didn't think things like that ran that late. or early. we checked in at the airport, sat around, and then boarded and flew on to las vegas. it's so warm there! it was so nice. it was also really cool because we flew over zion, and i love the landscape. it's even cooler from above, and it's amazing how something so big looks so small. (i'm always amazed by that.)

so anyway, our taxi driver was really nice and gave us some tips on places to eat and things. but we got to our hotel, the tropicana, and we couldn't check in until 2. so we had about four hours to kill. we checked our baggage and decided that our smelly selves would head on over to the alexis, where the conference was, and also get some lunch. we took a really long way around the mgm grand, and also turned left when we should have turned right. meanwhile, i was wearing laura's clogs with socks that had no elastic, and therefore had some really fun blisters that i tried to avoid the rest of the trip, gaining even more blisters and shinsplints. it was a good way to start the trip, i might say.

well, after we found the alexis, we kept on walkign trying to find this place with $1.99 burgers. we didn't see it, but stopped somewhere else that had hamburgers, hamburger mary's, instead. it was alright, but they wouldn't let me get a kid's meal. just because i'm over the age of ten does not mean i want to eat ten pounds of meat on my burger, folks. seriously.

anyway, we stopped in the alexis to look around the place, and they convinced me to ask about mailing my application. i had been carrying it around, i wouldn't even check it on the plane--i would not let the thing out of my sight. it was ridiculous, really. so i mailed it finally and we hung out for awhile before heading back to the tropicana.

it was so sweet to be able to shower and put on clean clothes.

we had to walk back to the alexis, because there was a keynote speaker, followed by pizza. the speaker i really don't remember other than he talked about war, and it was not a very good speech. i couldn't really stay awake, so i don't know any details about it. the pizza wasn't really any good either. we went back to our hotel room, because we were trying to find the other group who was flying in later. i think we stopped at a souvenir shop, and looked around some other places before we got back to the hotel. i think that was the night of the pointless "thesis party" in our room, were derek and katie kind of sort of worked on their papers, but really most people just drank and we all hung out before passing out. it was really a very long day.

and now i have to go get ready for work. i will finish my fun story later!