Sun Make Skin Go Owie

Commercials advertising televisions with super-duper HD, 1080pee-pee, Skywalker Sound with a sprinkle of Japanese pixie dust are funny to me. They show you these spectacular images of rainbow colored fish or rainbow colored fairies flying with rainbow colored streams of glitter trailing them or a bunch of marbles...rainbow colored, to demonstrate how great the picture should look on the TV they are trying to advertise. All it does for me is remind me how great the picture on my old TV looks. I mean come on, they're showing you a "simulated" vibrantly colored picture for their TV on YOUR TV.

Anyway, I'm out at Treasure Island for the Labor Day weekend with the fam. We've been coming out this way every year, several times a year, since we moved here to Florida some 10 years ago. We normally stay down the street at Madeira Beach but wifey found a good deal on a hotel here at Treasure. It is a nice place within walking distance of the beach called Treasure Bay Hotel and Marina.

Would I recommend it? Well, if you'd have asked me Saturday the answer would have been hell no. Our room smelled like zombie ass. Seriously. Imagine finding a dead body, that's been decomposing for a couple weeks. Got the visual? Now imagine the body farting. Can you imagine that smell? That is what our room smelled like. It smelled so bad when Jemara (11-year old daughter) said, "It smells like...sh*t." Yes, she said the actual curse word and it was the only the second time I've heard her say a bad word. The first one was "damn", but that doesn't count because she was questioning me about the word and kids can usually get away with it because of it's innocent cousin "dam". Anyway, when Jemara said it, she immediately covered her mouth in a futile attempt to catch the sound of the word in mid-air and return it back to her lips. We were all pretty shocked and I would normally immediately make her put a bar of soap in her mouth, but I figured she was out of her, normally, right mind due to the odor of the place. Kind of like how nerve gas makes you all twitchy and vomity and eye bleedy before you die, the zombie ass gas gave Jemara a slight bout of Tourettes. Even Jordan, my son and a past consumer of various bars of soap, excused his sister's brief lapse in verbal judgement and went back to breathing through his t-shirt.

The other strike against this establishment was being woken up at 1:30 in the morning by the Pinellas County Police Department as they were looking for two suspects in a theft that occurred nearby. Being woken up in the middle of the night by the police is never something one could get used to, but I didn't even fit the description of the suspects. Seriously. In fact, no one in the family fit the description. The suspects? Well, they were two white females in their young 20's driving a white Nissan Altima. They even had the name of one of the women. They were seen going into the hotel and entering one of the rooms on our side of the hotel. Apparently, someone was harboring the two fugitives (probably not knowing they were fugitives). I told the cop, with crust in my eyes and the smell of zombie ass behind me, "No white women here. The only women in this room are my wife and daughter."

Sunday morning I went straight to the front desk, chest swollen, ready to pound my fist on the reception desk and demand customer retribution. What happened was, I went to the front desk and no one was there. I peeked around the corner and there was a nice older lady in the office. Call me crazy, but how can you yell at old people? You can't. So, I talked to the lady and mentioned my complaint about the early morning cops and the foul smell (you don't say "zombie ass" to old people...you just don't). She said she wasn't the manager, but she'll tell him about it and get us a new room. We ran into her again about half an hour later and she said several other people complained about the cops because they went down most of the rooms on our side of the building looking for the thieving white women. She also moved us to a odorless room with a decent view of the inter-coastal. So it isn't too bad a place to stay...as long as you don't get room 106.

In other vacation (non-hotel) related news, we all got a fair amount of sun while chillin' on the beach for a couple days. Okay, more than a fair amount. Everyone is sunburned and I think wifey got it the worst. Her fair Asian skin just wasn't made to take too much direct sunlight. We also ate at our favorite restaurant Conch and it was kind of humbling since it'll probably be the last time, in a long time, we'll eat there together as a family because Jordan is on his way out the door to live his own life in the Air Force (I'll blog about this later). Jemara and I also shot some footage to put together another "Jemara's Not So Typical Adventure". I'll be sure to post it as soon as I've finished editing it.

Okay, time for us to get packed up, checked out and head back to Orlando. Hope your Labor Day weekend was as adventurous and fun as ours!