New England trip, more

[tagryn]

Last weekend we went on a road trip to New England, and I've uploaded ten photos from that to my flickr account (click on any of the above photos to go to them). We first visited my father-in-law's gravesite in Worcester MA, then the next day drove down to check out the Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods Indian casino complexes in Connecticut. Both were fun, but we liked MS a little better; Donna said that Mohegan reminded her of Vegas, while Foxwoods was closer to Laughlin. The shopping and extras (like a Chihuly sculpture) at Mohegan Sun were more impressive than that at Foxwoods, though we did like the inn we stayed at in Foxwoods, and it has the only El Pollo Loco in the Northeast.

(Interestingly, the Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot (Foxwood) tribes have the same ancestors, but became traditional enemies and were on opposite sides in the Pequot War which decimated the Pequots for generations.)

I played and won on the Star Wars - Dark Side slot machine. I quickly discovered that the strategy I worked out for winning on the original Star Wars slot doesn't work on SW-DS: the scatter doesn't come up enough to keep you alive, but more importantly the bonus game only pays out in extra spins, not tokens, so if you're playing only one or three lines, you could end up with a bonus spin that pays out nothing (as happened to me).

First photo is the last of the summer harvest, collected at the end of October before I tore up what was left of the dying vegatible garden and put it on the compost heap. Collecting it was an interesting experience, at one point I caught myself going through the most recently fallen tomatoes on the ground to see if any were still good, and thought to myself "yeah, this is probably what folks were forced to resort to during the Great Depression." This author speculates at what a modern depression would look like. I still say, until Comcast goes out of business because people can't afford their cable bills, we're not in a real depression yet.

We rented "Elizabeth: the Golden Age" out of the library. Kind of a strange movie. The first hour was enjoyable and held together relatively well, then around half-way through the writing just fell apart. Scenes started appearing which bogged down rather than advanced the plot, and it seemed like the writers decided that being a historical movie wasn't enough, so they tried to jam in a love story and a bunch of hasty war scenes into the back end. Too bad, it had real potential.

Thursday night we went to see pianist George Winston perform his "Winter" show at the Calvert Marine Museum. It was a straightforward experience, with no opening act, just George and a piano, with occasional guitar and harmonica pieces. I enjoyed it a lot, though I was tired after working all day and had some trouble staying awake during his more melodic pieces.