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| Saturday, February 23, 2002 |
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Written by two American guys 
At least you can't get laid off by your own blog
| | Max is, as we used to say in the radio business, on the beach. |
Travelling at home
| | Now when I travel I always pack my Apple Airport. It's small, light and ovoid, so it fits easily among the socks and undershirts. And it knows how to dial a phone, so even if I'm at a place with no Ethernet, I can plug a phone line into the Airport and roam freely about the house with my laptop. Unfortunately I'm at a house that doesn't get better than 24 Kbps over dial-up. Bummer. |
Home again, sort of
| | Did it hit 90 in L.A. yesterday? At 8am it already felt that way when I passed through LAX, walking across the tarmac from the little prop plane to the shuttle bus. It's 34 here in Graham, N.C. Seems strange: travelling to someplace cold where you can't ski. |
| | Got into Raleigh-Durham at about 7, drove to Mom's place at Elon, formerly Elon College — the town decided to drop down to just "Elon" when Elon College became Elon University, which is kind of like a munipal airport callilng itself "International." |
| | Anyway, it was almost 9 before we went out to eat in Burlington, where about 95% of your dining choices are chain restaurants: Arby's, Bob Evans, Cracker Barrell, Pizza Hut. But there was still Hussey's Barbecue, which we hit at about 9 on the nose. "We're closed," the woman behind the counter said. I never heard that many syllables in a one-syllable word: "clee-aay-aao-zzd." She was kinda rude about it, too. I wonder if that's because she took one look at Mom, who's almost 89, and decided we'd be slow diners. |
| | So we left and went down to the first non-chain restaurant we could find — a Mexican place called La Fiesta. It seemed odd to be a Californian eating Mexican in an old Southern town, but I was hungry and it seemed the odds might favor okay food, since the Spanish population is growing faster in North Carolina than any other state. (I read this somewhere, but I'm on dial-up here, and it'll take too long to look it up). The food wasn't bad, but what really freaked me out was that every single person in the place was smoking. I think there were more smokers in that one restaurant than in the entire population of Palo Alto. |
| | The weird thing was, it gave me the same nostalgic feeling you get when the radio plays an old song you never really liked but kinda welcome hearing again. Smoking is a highly convivial activity, and most of these people were having a good time. Would they be having as good a time if they weren't allowed to smoke, as in California? I was guessing they wouldn't. |
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