Tallahassee Travelogue, Part II of II

Saturday morning (following a late awakening) was spent tooling around Tallahassee, including a visit to one of Tallahassee's 2.5 malls. We made breakfast for lunch, a balanced diet of bacon, maple sausages, hash browns, and scrambled eggs, and then played one more game of trading wheat for sheep. After this, we decided to take Chompy for a walk around Lake Ella, since it was right across the street and not three miles away like the Tallahassee Dog Park.

Chompy is looking very fit these days, and no longer has the sloppy flab look she had long ago. Apparently she's been working out regularly with John Basedow in his Fitness Made Simple exercise program. Who knew it also worked on dogs? We walked her across the street to the duck lavatory that is Lake Ella, but she decided that she didn't want to walk that day and tried to pull backwards out of her collar and leash. After a couple more weak attempts, we took her back home and played a little practice poker instead.

Around 4 in the afternoon, Mike had to leave for one of his steel drum gigs where their group probably pretended to be Jamaican while playing Margaritaville for the nine millionth time while taking advantage of any open bars. Kathy and I hit the movie theatre to watch whatever happened to be playing, since it was still matinee time. Flight Plan was a very good suspense-y movie, if you're willing to suspend your disbelief of the plot (this should be a given for this type of movie though). It does a good job of slowly building up the tension and reminds me a fair bit of Panic Room, also starring Jodie Foster in a similar role. Besides one very unfortunate special effect involving a character blowing up in slow motion which looks like a high school project in "Introduction to Photoshop" class which mars the ending, I would recommend seeing it.

There are several movies that I'd like to see which are out or coming soon, but none that really need to be seen in the theatre, so I'll probably just end up renting them. I still haven't seen Wedding Crashers or 40 Year Old Virgin, but apparently everyone else in the world already has. I'd also like to see Corpse Bride (which I misspelled as Corpse Bridge the first two times I typed it) but I have issues with paying full price to see a movie that's barely 80 minutes long (this is the same reason I never watched Open Water, that shark movie that was supposed to be quite good).

After the movie, we ate dinner at Rotisserie Grill, a subsidiary of Boston Market which serves the same food. In fact, it's exactly like Boston Market except that they bring the food to your table after you order it. I'm not sure what the point of the different name is, unless they were trying to look a little higher class (hard to do when you're on a decaying Florida road between a Circle K and a pawn shop. Kathy says that the spinach is higher quality than the spinach at Boston Market, but seriously, who cares about the spinach when there's rotisserie chicken? Vegetables are only meant to add colour to the ensemble of your plate because you aren't actually supposed to eat them. Kim sees eye to eye with me on this -- if only we could convince the rest of the world to stop their misguided vegetable eating and swap it with a side of bacon (or two).

From dinner, we went back to Mike and Chompy's house where they were having a Southern edition of Poker Night™ for my benefit. I got to meet some of the new music theory/composition folks that came to FSU the year after I left, like Chris and Marty, but my role as token Korean composer for whom English is a first language remains unfilled. Based on a complex calculation of the cost of living in Florida, buy-in was set at $5, forcing me to pawn off a pair of diamond shoes to get in. Otherwise, it was much the same as up north, except that people were actually good at the game. We split into two tables of four and five respectively, and I came in third at my table. By the time the tables merged with the final four players, it was nearing 2 AM, which is about four hours past my old-man sleeping deadline. I napped on the AIDS-futon with Chompy while Marty (who lives in apartment 222) cleaned out the remaining poker pockets.

My flight home left at 11:20 on Sunday. I ate some ethnic food in the Atlanta airport while waiting for my connecting flight, and paid an exorbitant $8 at Popeyes for bite-size chicken pieces that probably came off a Cornish Game Hen. I then boarded my 1:39 flight and sat on the ground for about an hour. There were problems with the auxiliary power engine which the captain promised us "was only used on the ground to power the air conditioners", so they forced the full plane of passengers to sit in the sweltering cabin while they fixed this. I suspected it was something a bit more menacing than this, because why spend an hour fixing something that we'd only need while grounded? And we wouldn't have needed the ground-based air conditioning at all had we not been grounded.

Despite these troubles, I returned to Dulles in one piece around 4 PM and got home to a couple of fat spoiled cats who got the royal treatment while I was away. A few days on the cat treadmill with free weights should perk them back up again.

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