That’s right, it’s Talk Like a Pirate Day. Generators are abound:

Look for a Pirate-Speak post later in the day. Arrrgggg, it’s driving me nuts!

In Austin sitting on your ass looking for a really long indoor soccer game (and some beers) to pass the time with? Come check out 24 hours of indoor, for Katrina relief. I can’t promise the most entertaining game ever (when I stopped by at 7pm the score was 105-114) but I can promise cheap pitchers of cheap beer and probably a lot of shit talking. I’m actually on my way out there right now to join in the soccer fun for a few hours.

So my neighbor won the “lawn of the month” award from the neighborhood association this month. For those of you keeping score, not the guy with the asian stripper but the old guy with too much phlegm. Now I have no intentions of ever winning the “lawn of the month” award. I would like to have a respectable looking lawn, but I’m not willing to put in Hank Hill hours to ensure its perfection. Either way though, I do feel a bit self-conscious about my lawn because it has dead patches all over. I don’t want to be Hank Hill, but I also don’t want to be the trashy neighbor from the ‘burbs either. So I decided to water my lawn for once. It’s really amazing how much grass will grow over a couple days if you just water you lawn once. Nature is cool. I’m a great homeowner, everyone wants to be my neighbor.

In another “how clumsy could I be?” moment, Saturday morning in San Jose, I manage to smash my elbow into a full glass of wine sitting on the nightstand. I spilled wine all over the nightstand and broken glass all over the carpet. It hurt. It looked like this:

That’s right. Hungover as hell and in a good amount of pain I made sure to have Kat take pictures of it so I could relive the pain. As if that’s not gross enough, I had to have her cut off the flap of skin that was barely hanging on with some fingernail clippers. I don’t care who you are, that’s love people.

So I wrote a ton of blog posts on my flight back from San Jose, but after reading them, decided they were much too boring to bother posting (worse than my crown plaza review). So I thought I’d just go with the highlights.

On Saturday night (9/3/05), Kat and I went to SanFran to have dinner and go to da club. I was apparently dressed in my “drug dealer” clothes – a black long sleeve button up shirt and a pair of khaki pants. I can think of three instances over the past couple years that people have seen me wearing this particular shirt when people have either outright asked me for pot or made some comment about me looking like a drug dealer. At the club in SanFran, Kat and I were standing by the bar when a guy walks up and says “Do you have any pot?” Obviously caught off guard by the question, before I could respond the guy went on the defensive and said, “If you don’t that’s cool. Don’t worry about it.” Worry about it? What do I have to worry about? Should I be worried that he called me on my drug dealer persona and I didn’t deliver? I’m not really sure.

I remember the first time this happened, I was at a party and as I’m sitting on the couch wearing the same thing when someone comes up and says “hey, you look like a guy who has some pot.” I’m not really sure how I gave off that impression. I didn’t reek of patchouli. I wasn’t wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt. I made very few references to Cheech Marin. But alas, still look like someone who carries pot on him at parties.

Now I just need to find a way to make this look work out for me. Surely there’s somewhere I can benefit from looking like a drug dealer. Suggestions?

When I booked my trip to San Jose this time around I was crazy excited about the hotel I was getting. The Crown Plaza, downtown San Jose – walking distance from restaurants, bars, and clubs. In addition to its location, the amenities were looking good to: light rail station nearby, easy access to major highways, fitness center, high-speed internet (not wireless). Of course, things had to go horribly wrong.

What I hated

• No airport shuttle: The hotel is three miles from the airpor, but no shuttle. So cab it is: 3 miles = $15. Alright, fine. But what do I see when I get to the hotel: not one, but two courtesy vans. One of them is unloading a flight crew that has obviously just come from the airport. I guess the courtesy van is just for airport personnel. I feel special already.
• Internet service: service is $10/day. Now I recognize that not all hotels have internet service, but I think you need to make a distinction when you’re going to charge for something on your website. Much like they explicitly stated that parking is $12/day (also bullshit where I come from, but I understand that it is common practice elsewhere), they should have had some mention that I was going to get raped on internet service.
• No local information: I went to the front desk to get some information about the light rail (which has a station across the street); they, of course, didn’t have any. Instead, they direct me to walk over to the convention center, where there will surely be more information.
• Parking – the worst thing ever: In the garage, you get a ticket when you enter the parking lot. Every time you want to leave the parking lot, you have to take your ticket in to the front desk and have them stamp it, then when you give the ticket to the parking attendant and tell the parking attendant your room number. This is almost too stupid for words. But let’s go through the logic for shits and giggles. They have a parking garage in downtown San Jose, which is available for public parking ($12/day is a ridiculously high rate in San Jose, btw). In order to keep regular people from just saying that they are staying at the hotel, you force them to go inside get a stamp from the front desk, which is not exactly a fool-proof method, because no verification is done by the hotel desk staff to make sure you’re actually staying at the hotel. Then you go back to your car, give your ticket to the attendant, who looks for the stamp, asks you what your room number is, and then writes it down on the ticket. There’s no way you’d lie about your room number, right? As annoying as it was to get my ticket stamped every time I went in and out, I guess I shouldn’t complain too much because I got three free days of parking because they didn’t have me on file as having used the parking lot on three of my five day stay. (Take the good with the bad).

There were some good things about the hotel that I should mention.

What I liked

• Free HBO: Came in handy when wasting away hungover mornings/afternoons/evenings.
• The bed: It was awesome. I need a new bed. And it must be king size.
• Location: The downtown location was awesome. It’s nice when you don’t have to worry about driving home from the club. As you can imagine, I took full advantage of that amenity.

In the end, as much as I hate the Crown Plaza, the location made it all work out in the end. I’m still never staying at that fucking place again.

Check it out.