The runaway big kids! Part 1

We did it! After a long semester and a term of lots of work and school that took us away from each other (namely what Karen has been editing: http://www.jer3miah.com/ --if you have not yet seen it you should check it out) we took our finals and ran. We bought new windshield wipers (Karen finally convincing her stingy husband that they left the window blurry) which Jared spent an eternity in the wal-mart parking lot trying to change out. Little did he know that the part on the car was just a hook. That's easy...yeah right!

We also bought oil and a couple of brake lights. You think changing the windshield wipers is hard, try changing the oil in the rain right on top of an ant hill. Oh, and make sure they bite. Finding a dry spot in the parking lot, we parked the car up on the curb. We figured while waiting for the laundry to dry, we would take advantage of our time and learn how to dance with ants down our pants. Jared is under the car, gets the busted, smoothed-edged bolt off (don't ask how) and lets the oil drain without a single drip on himself. He puts the newly bought bolt in and begins to tighten it. In the middle of doing so he feels a tickle on his arm. This tickle turns to a sharp pain, causing Jared to throw down the socket wrench and jump up screaming. As he brushes off his arms and pulls up the sleeve to see what it was, Karen looks on with this "freaked out" look. She immediately asks if he had burnt himself. The instant reply is "no", and after seeing the bumps on his arm he assumes he was bitten by some insect.

After calming down and getting ready to finish the job, the same sharp pain begins to shoot from his lower back, right about the belt line. Karen pulls up Jared's shirt to find more than a million ants crawling all over Jared's back. She excitingly says to Jared "Take off your garments", to which the reply is, "I am not going to just stand here butt naked." She only meant the top garment, and for the next five minutes Jared began to understand the phrase "ants in his pants." Needless to say, after getting back under the car without a shirt on, Jared found out it was going to be painful to finish the job.

Not to make this story too long, but we did all this while the clothes were turning in a dryer that blew cold air. Yes, they were about as dry as our rained-clothes. Karen said it was all worth it when we found that we could get a large Hawaiian pizza and another medium pepperoni for only $9.00.

Now that the car was ready for a road trip, we decided to see what all the excitement was about down in Vegas (or it was the closest place with a really cheap hotel rate, take your pick). Let's just say Thursday, when we arrived, we received a shock never before experienced. The cars and billboard signs around us were extremely inappropriate. Nevertheless, we wanted to make the best of it. So that night, we took a stroll down the strip. We found many lights, a couple of awesome singers,

and a fun fountain show outside of the Bellagio.

We entered one of the casinos to see why everyone wasted their money, and walked out immediately still preferring arcades. We also encountered a moving statue!

It was very depressing to see what people succumb to only to make a little money, but we don't need to dwell on that right now.

The next day we had one of the funnest days ever. We indulged ourselves by going to the circus circus adventuredome. This indoor amusement park is definitely meant for kids, but hey, that's what we are. They charge $7 per ride or you can buy a wristbands that allows you the whole day of fun. We opted for the wristbands, and walked out feeling that they were worth it. The rides consisted of a roller coaster, a water boat that splashes you, and a few other smaller rides that leave you dizzy and scared of heights. There was also laser tag and mini golfing. Everything was worth it except the mini golfing. Too expensive for nothing really. We rode each of these rides (some more than once) and took advantage of the laser tag.

Between some of these rides, we spent some considerable time at the arcade, that was stretched throughout the park. Most of the time we walk out of arcades with silly little dinky toys that really are good for nothing, but this time we walked out with an MP3/FM stereo that has a usb port. It also has the capability of playing MP3 and audio CDs. How? That's the fun part.

There were two games that tended to work to our advantage. This game is called (at least for us) the ball drop. Basically it drops a bouncy ball down onto a moving, circular platform that has holes in it of values like 1,3,25, 100, and many values between. It also has a slot for the jackpot, although this one and the 100 slot are only as big as the ball itself, so it is almost impossible to get it in these slot. They had two of these, and both of them worked in our favor. The first one gave us sometimes ten times the value of the slot. There was one that valued 10 tickets, but gave us a hundred. This is convenient because it is really easy to get it into that slot, but gives us the value of the impossible slot.

Karen had a terrible streak going. Jared timed it out perfectly to get 10 almost every time, but Karen kept getting only one ticket. This happened about 5 times in a row, until she decided to push the button that dropped the ball without even looking. She achieved the impossible by having the ball bounce around and finally ending up in the jackpot slot. This was now worth over five hundred tickets. This is similar to one time when she just stuck a coin in a machine (again, not looking) and ended up getting the jackpot of about 300 tickets. She's good, and the reason we get all our tickets.

The second machine gave us the fair value for out tickets, but had a different kind of ball that would sometimes slip from the top and drop without having to put in a coin. This was convenient because sometimes for putting in one coin it would give us three balls instead of one. It also had a flaky wire that would occasionally gives us free credits. We would put in a coin and play the turn, and afterwards the game would go from zero to one credit. This sometimes would happen two or three times in a row, giving us 4 turns for one coin. Not only did it give us freebies, but it has a slot that says "2 free turns" and seemed to attract the ball, especially when we were down to four coins. Our last four coins lasted at least 15 turns.

We finally ran out of coins and went to have our tickets counted. Everything up there was silly and worth nothing, except for the 3000 ticket stereo that was in the shape of a slug bug. There was also a 4000 ticket stereo that played MP3 and audio cds. The tickets came out to be 2,809. We decided to keep going for the 3000, and told the lady we would be right back. Due to not having any cash, we had to scrounge around for coins. Karen, being as lucky as she is, found 6 coins in one machine's change return. We then had to choose: the extra tickets machine, or the extra turns machine. We started with the extra tickets machine (since we only needed two hundred, we figured we would hit the ten spot twice and be done). Unfortunately, the ten spot only gave us ten tickets that time. So, we went to the second machine, and ended being glad that we did. Having only five coins left, we were trying to be very careful about getting the most turns possible. After two coins, the machine started to announce that we had somehow gotten the ball in the jackpot, which was worth 300 tickets. We were stoked, and figured we would play the last three coins just for fun.

After playing two coins, and waiting a little bit, the tickets were still coming out. As much as we tried to stop them, they kept coming out and wouldn't stop. All in all, the lady at the counter came over and stopped the tickets, because we told her it was broken. When we gave her the tickets to have them counted, the total came out to be (including our 2809) 4064. We ended up getting over 1200 tickets from the six FREE coins we found. SWEET, AWESOME, RAD!! It worked out well.

Because the ticket lady's first language is not English, our communication with her was limited. When we tried to tell her the game gave us extra tickets, she thought we were trying to tell her that it didn't give us all the tickets we deserved. She wanted to give us 500 more tickets. After a few attempts of explaining and she still not understanding, we told her we were fine with the tickets that she had counted and quickly asked for the MP3 stereo. Feeling like we robbed the arcade, we walked out quickly and briskly to our car. (OK, we won it fair and square, but it was fun).