Cravings

Good lord Sunday was a long night at the casino. It started out ok, but sometime around 11:00, it just died, and I went almost three straight hours without dealing a single card. Yep, I just sat there on my dead games watching TV in the bar, waiting for players to show up.

The worst thing about having a dead game, to me, is that the cocktail waitress--who you may recall, I'm quite fond of--doesn't stop by if there are no players at the table. And if I'm out at the end of the pit, and there are no players at the tables next to me, either, she doesn't have a reason to walk all the way down there to the end, much less wander by. So then it really sucks to be on a dead game.

It's bad enough that I'm not making any money, but then if my favorite lady isn't coming around either, it's a double whammy of suckitude. Now, if it's kinda slow for her, too, she'll wander down and chat for a minute or two before she goes and tries to hustle up some drink orders, but if she's got drinks to deliver, or sees new players sit down at other tables, then she's all about the mission at hand and I sit there alone with my thoughts the whole time.

However, I get bored sitting there late at night, and do whatever I can to keep myself entertained. And since it's the worst kept secret in the casino that I've got a huge crush on the waitress in my section, some of my friends do what they can to help a brotha out. Some of the floor people are pretty cool, and I've enlisted their help. When I've gone too long without my favorite gal coming by, I have pit boss grab a couple of empty bottles and dirty glasses off of the live games in our section and bring them over to my table.

So the next time the Future Mrs makes her rounds, she sees the empties at my table and has to come down and get them. Mission accomplished! Heh. I managed to pull that trick successfully three times the other night, which made the otherwise boring evening so much more enjoyable... Of course, she knows what I'm up to, and humors me.

The other bad thing about sitting there doing nothing but watching TV and acting like a pet in need of adoption whenever players walk by, is that I see the same commercials over and over again all night long. Lately, it's been the Jack in the Box ad for their new BBQ Sirloin Burger that has gotten the most airplay, and it's done the trick--I was craving a hamburger when I finally got out of the casino last night.

My plan was to come home, change clothes, empty my beyond-full change bucket, head down to the grocery store and hit the Coinstar machine, and then use that voucher to buy a bunch of hamburger fixin's and any other random groceries that caught my fancy, and I'd make a big damn burger for lunch today.

But when I got home, Falcon Rob was celebrating the end of a three-day weekend by working his way through of a case of Corona, and asked if I'd like to join him. So all my plans suddenly went out the window as we stayed up drinking beer and watching a week's worth of Jeopardy episodes. Of course, we still couldn't escape the Jack in the Box commercials, so eventually I suggested that we go get some burgers.

His heroic two-word response? Let's Roll!

So around 4:00 am this morning, we were sitting in the drive-thru at the Jack in the Box over on Horizon Ridge and Stephanie, right next to a huge neon sign that said "24 Hour Drive Thru", but yet the voice on the other side of the intercom insisted that they were closed. I started to pull away, but Rob, having consumed waaaay more beer that I had, thought it would be a good idea to go back and argue about the fact that they were closed but the sign said they were always open.

I told him that if he was going to be standing in the drive thru in the middle of the night, waving his arms around and arguing with a speaker box, he's likely to end up on the next episode of COPS, so we moved on. I was kind of bummed, because I was *really* craving a burger. We had no idea where to go, and we drove around for a bit, finally realizing that Vegas may be a 24-hour city, but Henderson sure ain't. Heading back west, towards civilization, I suddenly remembered that there was another Jack in the Box over on Eastern and Horizon Ridge, so we trekked over there.

They too had a prominent neon sign touting the perpetual openness of their drive-thru facilities, but we were skeptical at first. But as soon as we pulled up, a disembodied voice with a slightly foreign accent asked if she could take our order. By then, hunger had pushed common sense out the window, and we had one of those orders that only makes sense to drunks and long-suffering fast food employees. You know, where the pictures on the menu board look so good that you end up ordering more stuff than you can possibly eat... Yep, that was us, ordering twenty bucks worth of fast food at four in the morning.

A few minutes later, the gal at the window shoved our Hefty bag full of grub out the little square opening, and I handed it off to Rob. He held it up and said It feels heavy enough for me to believe that everything's in there, so we gave her the benefit of the doubt and just drove home. We sat up for another hour or so munchin' on our burgers (not bad, by the way, but now I'm no longer craving a hamburger, so my ziploc freezer bag full of change is still sitting on the counter where I left it), watching TV, and telling stories from work.

I waved the white flag of surrender sometime later, throwing out most of my fries and unable to even finish my drink. By then the sun was coming up, so I headed off to bed, luckily falling asleep before it got to be too bright out. I woke up around 11:30 in my sleeping bag, with a funky taste in my mouth, wondering what the hell happened to the sheets on my bed. Oh yeah, they're still in the dryer...

I stumbled out to the living room, and seeing the empty Corona bottles on the end table, the sad realization struck me that the Future Mrs wasn't around and certainly wasn't gonna come by and pick them up this time.

That's ok. Tonight is the slowest night of my workweek, so I'll get a little taste of something I really crave--a few hours worth of flirting followed by two days of freedom.

Mikey