Stuff-March 14, 2014

The past two days we have had to be normal people and not tourists. It took three attempts at a pharmacy to get a prescription filled. They had run out of that medication. Then when they finally got it filled, the price was wrong, so time was needed on the phone with insurance. Need I say more? Insurance companies are a quick way to total frustration and insanity. I think that is behind us so maybe we can move forward from here.

I did forget to share a couple of interesting things on this blog. When we were on the Strip there was a group of guys walking together and obviously having fun. They had on identical black t-shirts. One had "groom" on the back. Another had "best man" and the other five had "wing man" on the back. We thought that was clever. This is a wild city for a bachelor party.

Nellis AFB is having an operation called Red Flag. That means over 2200 fighter pilots have been here for special training. Almost half of those are from foreign countries. They fly mainly at night and I can tell you since we are only 3 miles south of Nellis, they can sure make a lot of noise. They are leaving this weekend. Then Nellis has to cut 400 airmen from the base due to budget cuts. Some will actually be forced out of the service if they do not take early retirement. They can probably all find jobs here.

The three days of the NASCAR race brought 155,000 people to the "valley" as they call it here. Those people produced $165 million in non-gaming revenue. Can you imagine people spending that much money in 3 days? They only report gaming revenue once a month but I suspect they know how much money those people dropped in the casinos.

So now we have the college basketball playoffs going on here. They are playing at MGM and UNLV. We noticed the streets on the Strip were packed with people, younger people. We thought it was spring break at first but now we think it's the tournaments. That's more non-gaming money for LV. So much money flows into this place but yet we see so many destitute people begging on the streets. There are lots of extremely wealthy people here and also there are lots of people living in abject poverty. Not much in between.

We are contemplating going to a St Patrick's Day parade tomorrow. It means we will have to set an alarm and get up early. That's not exciting but I think we both want to go. I'll take pictures if we go.