LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

omaha

Birthday TV

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Thanks for all the birthday wishes. The hotel in Omaha was a fine establishment, but I think we’ll stay with the 2.5-star hotels in the future. We got the 3-star for $45 (that’s the highest rating on Price-Line), but had to pay extra for parking and there was no free wi-fi. Next time I think we’ll go for our standard $35 2-star hotel. If you use Price-Line for hotels, you should look at betterbidding.com. I think Brent Royuk told me about it.

I stared at TVs for a long time the first night, but didn’t buy anything. I wanted to do a little more research. The next day, we ended-up getting one from the clearance section that wasn’t there the first night. It’s a return. The reason for return? “Didn’t fit. Wrong size.” In my experience that means buyer’s remorse. It’s smaller than I thought I wanted, but once we got it home, I’m glad we didn’t get anything bigger. It’s a model that Consumer Reports recommended. To christen it we watched Slumdog Millionaire.

In with the new.

Oh, and Lauren got some birthday gambling in. She broke even, but I cost us $10.

Behold! The Day of My Birth

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Today I join Lauren in the fourth decade. We are going to celebrate my birthday by celebrating Lauren’s Other Birthday. I’ll be taking her to Omaha where we will probably do the same things we always do in Omaha.

birthday-boy

We’ll go to Nebraska Furniture Mart. This time we’ll no doubt spend a lot of time looking at the stoves. I will count the number of stoves and report back. We will go to Nobbies and look at their crap. We will go to the Casino and spend $20 among the people who don’t look like they are having any fun. We’ll go to the snooty outside mall, but I won’t know why we’re there. If we spend the night, we’ll go see a movie.

Somewhere along the way, something unexpected will happen and I will end up having more fun than Lauren. Feel free to speculate on what that might be.

Whole Foods, you are expensive.

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When we were young we’d save money by going to a grocery store and buy some bread and butter and really thin sliced ham and call it lunch. Sometimes we’d go to a park and picnic, sometimes we’d eat in the car. We’ve tried this at Whole Foods in Omaha a few times, and this does not save any money.

The cheese is $22.50 per pound.

But it is yummy in my tummy.

That's hummis on garlic bread

The Orange Juice is a dollar more than at the Wal*Marts.

It seemed cool at the time.

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After we went to see Jeff Dunham at the Qwest Center in Omaha last Sunday, we were leaving with a big mob of people. The Qwest Center is quite lovely, despite its foolish, cutesy spelling*, and they had some huge mirrored globes out front. I dragged Lloyd over to one and snapped a few photos. The lady behind us (in the white shirt, pointing) said, “That’s such a good idea!”

Yeah, lady. Turns out that it’s a good idea if you’ve always dreamed of being a Klingon.

giant-forehead

*That’s a joke. Lloyd thought I was an idiot.

Jeff Dunham live in Omaha

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Christina gave us Jeff Dunham for Christmas, and he just arrived yesterday. On the way to Omaha we stopped off at Cabella’s (world’s foremost outfitter) in honor of everyone in Lauren’s family and at Nebraska Furniture Mart (America’s largest home furnishing store) in honor of furniture.

jeff

I’d seen Jeff Dunham on the television before, and liked his stuff, but about 9 months ago Larry from choir, bless his heart, quoted Ahkmed The Dead Terrorist lines to me for, no joke, two straight hours. I thought I was going to have to kill him [Larry, if you’re reading this, I’ve changed your name so that you don’t think I wanted to kill you].

Anyway, if you’ve been to many concerts, you know that there are two kinds. There are concerts/performances where you might as well be listening to the Tape/CD/DVD – I’m looking at you, RUSH – and there are concerts/performances that are much more fun live. Dunham was a hoot in Omaha.

Brian Haner (The Guitar Guy) opened, and served as a sort of musical straight man for parts of the show. There were some local jokes thrown in, and Jeff shot some bits for Mother’s Day that will appear (so we heard) on his website today or tomorrow. The best part was when he came back for an encore with Bubba J. He said he hadn’t been using Bubba J. on this tour, but had so many requests via email that he had to bring him out. Jeff had a cheat sheet for his Bubba J. material, and that made it doubly, nay triply, funny when a goodly portion of the audience said the punch lines right along with him. He worked that right into the act too.

Thanks Christina. Thanks Paul.