Shopping with Conan O'Brien

I love traveling with my kids, but a weekend away with my wife is one of my favorite things in the world. We took an opportunity a while ago to get away and see the Conan O'Brien tour in Las Vegas. Conan had recently been let go from his Tonight Show gig, and the premise of the tour was the steps he was taking to deal with being unemployed.

Great show, tons of fun, but I know what you're thinking. "Hey Steve, the show looks great and all, but have you seen how many shopping bags Lori is holding in that top picture?" Oh believe me, I noticed, but it's a small price to pay my friends. Besides, Lori has earned her black belt in outlet shopping. She may carry a lot of bags, but she doesn't spend a lot of money.

Today, with the temperature hitting -20, a foot of snow on the ground, and another six inches expected tonight, I'm wishing that I was away somewhere warm with my wife. Vegas would do just fine, even if it means spending the afternoon at an outlet mall.

This post is a part of Photo Friday at Delicious Baby and Friday Daydreamin at R We There Yet Mom. If you didn't get here from one of those sites, you should really go check them out. There's people there who don't visit every outlet mall in the area when they're on vacation. I wonder what that's like?

How I Met Your Mother

Kids, the story of how I met your mother is a long and twisted tale. It almost didn't happen, but I guess when things are right, you just can't stop them. I could probably stretch the story out to cover seven or eight seasons of a TV show filled with star actors, but because you guys have the attention span of a toddler, and I don't have to run commercials, I can condense the story down to this one post. Who needs an Emmy?

Your mother led a very different kind of life before we got together. I don't know if she ever told you this, but she was adopted. I'm not sure how it happened, since both of her real parents are still alive. She says that one day she just wandered too close to an orphanage and before she knew it, she had new legal guardians.

At the time I was still coming to grips with the fact that I might never make it as an NBA player. Sure, I had the moves and the ability to father children out of wedlock (not that I ever did...) but there was this whole "too short and out of shape" stigma that somehow got attached to me. Darn stereotypes.

Your Mom's life was pretty easy. Having rich adoptive parents let's you lead a pretty luxurious life, but when you grow up like that, you never really learn the value of money.

I decided that since my sporting career wasn't panning out, I'd look to a future in politics. Somehow, I managed to rise pretty far up in the political ranks, especially considering I'm Canadian.

Our futures were both destined for controversy though. Your Mom started running with the party crowd, but while she could handle it, the people she was associating with couldn't keep up, and your Mom got blamed for a couple of pretty famous flame-outs.

I wasn't immune to the wrath of the public either. People were pointing at me as the source of problems for one of the world's most famous golfers. Apparently "Check out the slope of the green" and "Check out the rack on the one in green" aren't the same thing.

After the dust settled, I finally met your mother. Of course, she was dating somebody else at the time, but she wasn't happy. She suspected he was cheating on her...keeping another blonde on the side. Some sort of singer...

After a fair bit of convincing (and a whole lot of begging), I managed to pry your mother away from that cowboy, and we've been inseparable ever since. We don't run in the same kind of circles that we used to anymore. We've settled down and live a nice, normal life with no more celebrity friends. Well, except for Friday night poker of course. Good old Matt...still thinks he can beat me at cards...

My Deep, Dark Vegas Secret

When you visit Las Vegas as often as I do, you eventually so some things you're not so proud of. I have my own list of sordid tales including:

• Taking free rooms from casinos then not living up to my gambling expectations
• Playing "Real or Fake" with my wife while watching the topless Jubilee show
• Convincing a drunk guy that the escort cards they hand out on the strip were numbered, and if he collected the whole set, he got a discount.

Beyond these small transgressions however, lies my deepest, darkest secret about my time spent in Vegas. It's not something I talk about often, but I've come to grips with it now, and I think it's about time that I can stand up and admit to the world...

I am a member of the Celine Dion fan club. I'm not one of those wimpy new members either, where all you have to do is submit an e-mail address to join. No, I'm one of the old school paid members from back in the days when it was $35 to become a fan. Back in the days when signing up got you real benefits, like a shiny membership card, and a subscription to every Celine mailing list ever created (Seriously, every one. There must have been 10 or 12 e-mails a day from various Celine interests. The French ones were particularly helpful.).

Of course, before you spend too much time wondering how such a prime example of manliness could end up in this type of club, the prime benefit of membership was a select group of tickets for Celine's Las Vegas shows available only to members. Lori made it clear very early in our Vegas visiting career, that she wanted to see Celine. Being the good husband that I am, I made sure that it happened and that we had very good seats for the show. I'll even go as far as to say that Celine's show impressed me. The production value was incredibly high, and once you look past some of the theatrics, the girl really can sing. The fan club section however...

Celine has some die-hard fans. I mean really deep, emotional, "Celine is singing just to me" kind of die-hard fans. Everybody around us kept shouting things to Celine, and whenever she said anything back, the entire section went nuts. At one point the guy beside me burst into tears and kept shouting "I love you Celine" over and over again. They also knew every word to every song, including the French songs. This might have been when I felt most out of place, as my French musical knowledge begins and ends with the days of the week song, and unfortunately she didn't sing that one (I did though. Lundi, Mardi, Mercredi.....).

With Celine's new show in Vegas, it seems the fan club rules have changed. There's no longer access to tickets for fan club members, so everybody has to find their own way in. That's fine with me, as I've had time to cultivate an absolutely terrible gambling record at Caesars Palace, and with that kind of record there's usually some tickets available to you somewhere. Last summer Lori and I took eight of our friends to see the new Celine show, and although our tickets weren't quite as good as our fan club visit, at least nobody sitting next to me started crying and only one member of our group sang along with the French songs (she's a French teacher, so we'll let it go). It was nice that I was able to share the benefits of my lack of success with my friends, but I'm still the only one with a shiny membership card. Of course they don't have to deal with random Celine trivia showing up in their e-mail every hour either. Anybody else want to know what Celine's new years resolutions were?

I Don't Do Dentists (Except in San Diego)

I can be a little stubborn when it comes to going to a doctor. There's pretty much got to be a ridiculous amount of pain or an overabundance of blood before the thought of "I should see a doctor about that" will cross my mind. My general medical plan is that everything will go away eventually if you just tough your way through it. This annoys my wife to no end, as she's the one who has to deal with me while I'm putting on my tough guy act. Eventually she will call and make an appointment for me with the doctor, then tell me what time I'm supposed to be there. I may be tough enough to battle through a broken ankle, but I'm not brave enough to disobey my wife if she tells me to be somewhere. The machismo line has to be drawn somewhere.

My stubbornness with doctors however, is nothing compared to my dislike for the dentist office. I stopped going to the dentist when I was 16, and I managed to make it 25 years without having to go back. Unfortunately for me, the reason for having to go back managed to derail a good portion of one of our vacations.

We had arrived in Disneyland a few days before Christmas, and almost instantly I began to have a toothache. Now just like my rock solid "ignore it" plan for dealing with medical issues, I have another flawless method for getting me through dental problems. I stop eating sweet stuff. For a few hours anyways. Normally that's enough to get the pain to go away, but on this particular occasion, it didn't do the job. I decided to go over to Walgreens and pick up some toothache medicine to help things along a little. It got me through the day, but by the next morning I was slathering the stuff on like hot fudge on a sundae (which is probably a bad analogy to use for a toothache).

Problem was, we had to change hotels that day (Yes, we were hotel hopping again). We were headed out to Huntington Beach, but by the time we got there and got settled in, I was in an enormous amount of pain. I managed to explore a little bit with the family, but eventually I set them off on their own and I went back to the room to load up on Tylenol and Anbesol. I managed to numb the pain a little to get through the day, although the temptation to amp the pain relief up with some of the Whiskey in the mini-bar was huge (That's what they use in all the old west movies right?). Somehow I made it through a very restless night, and of course, in the morning, it was time to change hotels again.

This time we were heading to San Diego, so I loaded up on Tylenol and took a few extra swigs of Anbesol before we set off. About 15 minutes into the drive it became clear to me that there was going to be a problem. See, when your tooth is killing you, you don't really feel like eating, and when you don't eat, large quantities of Tylenol and very little sleep are not a good mix. I owe a large debt of gratitude to whoever was driving their blue Toyota Tercel down California State Route 73 that day, because all I did was follow them wherever they were going, and I'm eternally grateful to them for actually going to San Diego and not stopping along the way. Sure we had followed them a few miles past our exit before anybody realized that I didn't really know where I was going, but the blue car got us into the general vicinity, which I'm sure is far better than I would have managed on my own.

By the time we got to Mission Bay, the jig was up. I asked the concierge for the nearest walk-in clinic and went off to get checked out. By the way, $175 just to see a doctor? I can see why there's such a fuss about affordable health care in the States. After checking me out, I was told that I had an infected tooth, and that I should probably cut the vacation short and go home and see my dentist (or in my case, actually find one). They gave me some anti-biotics and pain-killers to help me keep things under control, told me to lay off the Anbesol as apparently I had burned my gums all around the infected area (I probably should have stuck to the instructions on the bottle), and sent me on my way.

We decided not to bother trying to get home as the next day was Christmas Eve and no dentists were going to be open anyways. By the time we moved back up to the Anaheim area, the anti-biotics were doing their thing and I was starting to feel better. We managed to finish out our vacation, then when I got home I had to go see my first dentist in 25 years. The verdict? The infected tooth had to be pulled, and I had one other cavity. Not too bad for 25 years of neglect. Of course it still took my wife calling to make an appointment for me to get the other cavity filled. I just can't bring myself to make appointments with doctors or dentists. Ask me how long it took once we decided that we were done having children. Believe me, I wasn't calling to make that appointment.

It's a Strange Day

Have you had one of those days where everything seems just a little strange?

Where nothing seems to make sense to you, and you feel like the only thing you can do is try to find things that bring you back to a feeling of normal. Maybe have some comfort food for lunch...

Or if you're more along the lines of my wife, maybe go and see what's on sale at the local store...

Of course if it's a Monday like today, there's very little you can do but just get dressed and head to work, hoping that maybe you can blend in and the day will just pass you by...

It's going to be tough, but eventually the day will end, and you'll be able to do something nice and normal to help yourself relax.

I'm having one of those strange days. This isn't what I was intending to post today, but as I was sitting here wrestling with some problems I'm having, these pictures were popping up on my screensaver and putting a smile on my face. So I wanted to share them, because it doesn't matter how strange the world seems, it's always a little brighter if you keep your sense of humor.

Back to our normally scheduled wanderings tomorrow, assuming the world can stop spinning backwards by then.