The 1992 Sons of the Desert Convention – Las Vegas
Saturday, November 19th, 2011
For week, maybe even months, before we actually departed for the 8th International Convention of the Sons of the Desert, my friend Jon Petering kept telling me, “Buddy, I can’t wait to get on that plane.” Yes, for some odd reason one of my fellow Kroger baggers was going along with us to Las Vegas to attend the convention. It was a little odd, because he had no real interest in Laurel and Hardy, but the allure of Las Vegas and the untold pleasures he could find there was too much to resist. In the end, his favorite quote was “Buddy, there’s nothing to do here”, and he spent a lot of his time sitting in the room watching baseball. Read the rest of this entry »
In return for taking Jamie to Indianapolis for her birthday weekend, she agreed to take me to Chicago to celebrate my birthday weekend. Of course, since I’m the planner, I made the arrangements and itinerary for the trip, which would include celebrities, diners, landmarks, and movie locations – and hopefully a lot of fun for both of us. I had liked the way Jason and I had only driven part-way on Friday night the last time we had gone to Chicago just 
Jamie and I had planned five weekends in a row with some sort of out-of-town traveling. We had completed our weekends eating Indianapolis and had ventured to Columbus to celebrate Adam’s birthday. The third item on our agenda was going to take place on Saturday, September 17, which was to be a trip up to the Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio. However, Jamie had developed a bad cold that week and we decided that it would be best to just take it easy that weekend. So I ventured up to Findlay that weekend in order to spend time with her and nurse her back to health. 
After fiddling around for what seemed like an eternity waiting for and trying to find the photos that I had paid to have taken with some celebrities of the Wizard World Comic Con on Saturday, August 13, 2011, my friend Jason and I were finally ready to get moving to the next event for the evening. Jason whilst making a trip to the car to charge his phone, had discovered that it was now raining – which put a bit of a damp damper on this event – an evening at U.S. Cellular Field to watch the White Sox play the Kansas City Royals. 
I cannot recall a hotter summer in recent memory. Every single day seemed to be either at or approaching 100 degrees. Weather agencies touted this heat wave as the worst since 1999, which I can’t say that I recall. And one raucous storm put the power out in the homes of several friends and co-workers in Dayton, although I escaped this one unscathed. But the heat ensured that whatever activity I had between vacations would be relegated to the indoors, where we might find such things as air conditioning…and good food!