If a guest post falls in the forest, and no one's around to read it....

At Lydia's request, a guest post.

She's out of the state again, this time with the boy in tow. I am, as I was before, home with the challenge of filling my unusually empty evenings. Lydia's quite the traveler these days. As for me, the last time I left the Valley was to go pick up the Altima, and the time before that was that time last winter when we drove down to Tucson when I had a cold, to visit some friends, and to eat at El Guero Canelo, which may have been worth the trip all by itself.

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Possibly the best Mexican food in Arizona, and that's saying something.

But I digress. The reason I've been instructed to post was my dad's weekend trip here from Anaheim to get an apartment squared away. He's moving to Tempe in January to get out of the humidity, and to put Orange County in his rear-view once and for all, and it doesn't hurt that he'll get to see more of his grandson either. I have a certain respect for all of those reasons.

If you know anything about my dad, you know that musical theater is absolutely his favorite thing on earth. All the time he lived at home, musicals and him talking about them were the soundtrack (if you will) of our lives. Most of it, for me, went in one ear and out the other. I was not a fan of 95% of that music, and I haven't lived with my dad since 1999, so I've forgotten anything I may have retained in the short term.

Well apparently it was time for a refresher course. I had just gotten home from work today, and was on the way to Cartridge World to get more printer ink, when my dad called.

"How would you like to go to a dinner theater tomorrow night?"
What's a dinner theater? I think I might know what that is. It it what it sounds like? How is it that I know what an exhaust backpressure transducer valve is, but not a dinner theater?
"What exactly is that?"

Turns out it's a place where there's a dinner buffet, and then after you eat, you watch a play right from your table. This is a new concept to me. I agreed, because I thought it might make a good story. Plus, there would be food. I'm in.

I got to my dad's hotel, and he greeted me and said,
"I hate to do this to you, but we have to go tonight instead of tomorrow. So..." - looking at my clothes- "...you're going to have to change into something a little nicer." Saturday night was sold out, apparently, and they prefer guests to attend in business-casual attire. Ok, I guess that's no big deal, so that was done and we were off.

This place was in northeast Mesa, and that coupled with the fact that the show was a musical version of the movie Some Like it Hot, led to my being (much to my lack of surprise) one of maybe half a dozen people there under 50. And most were way beyond that. I called Lydia at the intermission, and she thought that the fact that I was randomly at a dinner theater was worthy of a blog post. So there you are.

The next day found the two of us doing some necessary errands, such as going to the bank, getting spare keys made for dad's new place, and the like. Other items included a tattoo parlor in Scottsdale. I would have stayed around to watch, but it seemed like it would be rude to stand over the artist's shoulder the entire time. And in the waiting area, the only- a-hem- reading material consisted of a few copies of Rolling Stone and a bunch of porno mags. That, added to the death metal on the store hi-fi and the overall prickly atmosphere of the place, inspired some quick thinking. I conveniently remembered that the car was dirty, and the trip to and from the cheap car wash in north Tempe with the free vacuums, took up enough time that the wait was not terribly long when I got back. Then lunch, a couple more errands, a bit of a nap, and then the awesome-as-usual miso soup and sushi at the Sake Bomber were a great end to the day.

Perhaps one or two of you may (or may not) be wondering how the Altima is coming along. In a nutshell, it's going well, despite having a good-sized electrical mishap a few weeks ago. The alternator that had been in the car since it rolled off the assembly line when I was in the fourth grade, had at last shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the choir invisible. For those of you keeping track at home, that now means that all of the drivebelt accessories have been replaced over the years, except for the power steering pump. The people at Auto Zone were a little less helpful than I wish they would have been, but everything got fixed, and it can all be summed up with this one picture:

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