The Time We Saw the Hummingbird

Let's notch up another sign of my latent stupidity. I took the Quad Queen to the IRS today to renew our ITINs.

We got up early, skipped the usual in-room coffee and any ideas of breakfast, and headed downtown in a Lyft. We had about an hour to play at Main Street Statio. I opted to use one of my stealth coupon techniques to get a comped breakfast at the Cal (2 over hard sausage hash browns wheat toast), and after I joined the Quad Queen to have a fun run on Slutty Times Pay. Still lost money though.

At the appointed hour, we marched under the tracks to the IRS office, which is snug as a shutdown bug closed. Yeah. It just never occurred to me that someone like the IRS would not work for no pay.

Walking back to Main Street Station, we had a chance to get up close and personal with a hummingbird that was feeding on some flowers in front of the building. What an amazing delicate creature, gifted with astounding flight capabilities. The chance to interact in some fashion with this inspiring being made the walk worthwhile, that and the sun shining down upon us, blessing us, and also passing twice the place where someone took a shit in the underpass, rendering in physical media an expression of our luck thus far on the trip.

I prefer to remember the flitting hummingbird and you should too.

We haven't played enough video poker this trip, and sought to rectumfy that. And we did, hammering the machine for hours upon hours, getting scads of scratch cards.

The staff at Main Street Station are excellent. And they give scratch cards.

It was great! We played until maybe one o'clock, and then broke for lunch. The slot club boothling set up a buffet comp for us (she said it 'boofay') after taking one peek at our losses. So $22 saved on lunch.


Main Street's buffet isn't as good as it once was, but even in some decline, we enjoyed it way more than the one at Wynn the previous night.

After lunch, we went back at the five-play nickels. Bam bam bam.

Five failed Royal attempts.

Ten failed Royal attempts.

Fifteen failed Royal attempts.

In all, QQ had ten shots at the Royal, and I had eight (one on triple-play not pictured).

We ended up with $78 in scratch cards.

The Quad Queen did finish with all her budget gone, but thanks to some last minute heroic, savvy button pressing on my part, I had the thrill of cashing out a ticket for $150 - meaning I hadn't lost all my budget, only most of it.

Damn it was fun, and we played enough where we were at the point at the end where we had played enough. As in seeing cross-eyed. Time to head back to Wynn, via swift Lyft.

At the slot club, I confirmed that my boofay passes that had a time on them of 3:14 PM really expired at 3:14 PM instead of the end of the day - and they do. They did. They are ex-passes. I also checked to see if I could earn more boofay passes for getting 500 points and thus qualifying for tomorrow's slot tournament, but she was playing coy about whether or not they would 'let them know' if that promotion was on.

The next order of business was for me to fuck up yet another shower head by twisting the handle that shifts the spray from 'firehose' to 'white hot meteor shower' and back again and completely removing it from the apparatus.

There I stood, naked, trying to fix some plumbing. Again. Flashback to Gold Coast last year...

The good news is that the lady on the phone was incredibly polite and apologetic, and the man with the "belt of many tools" was at our door within ten minutes, plenty of time for me to put back on my underwear and shirt - although I didn't bother.

He replaced the shower head, apologized for the inconvenience, and two minutes from the time he entered our room, he was jingling his way down the hall to his next plumbing emergency.

What's next?

Well, doing this blogging work and having my first drink of the day. (Zounds!) The Quad Queen had no such healthy restraint and was blowing 0.13 on the pocket breathalyzer by morning tea time.

After that, I will attempt to shower and shave, and then take on the casino here at Wynn one more time, hopefully earning enough points to get more boofays that I don't really want, and probably can't use. And/or I will win money...

Tomorrow we check out of Wynn and move downtown to the California, where the machines are more forgiving, even if the slot clubs are not.