I guess we picked a good long weekend to be in Tucson instead of here — we missed the winds, rain, thunder, power outages, and general havoc. Instead, we had temperatures in the 60s and low 70s, gentle rain one evening, and way too much food.

We also had a steady stream of messages from our house sitter telling us what we were missing, including photos of our late TV antenna. We’re supposed to have DirecTV come out next week and install a new dish; I was going to try very hard to get them to bring out a receiver with OTA capability (and still might) but it’ll need a new antenna, too. This one is beyond repair.

The high point of our touristing in Tucson was the afternoon we spent at the Pima County Air and Space Museum — we were lucky enough to get onto a Boneyard tour as soon as we arrived, and afterwards, wandered around the museum proper for several hours. Photos are on Flickr.

But most of the time was spent with Diane’s relatives, talking and enjoying their company.

Restaurants worth mentioning:

• El Charro Cafe (on Broadway) — as always, tasty authentic Mexican food
• The Good Egg — as always, good, filling, reasonably-priced breakfasts in a pleasant environment
• Viro’s Italian Bakery — an Italian deli with decent food, decent gelato, and very reasonable prices
• New Delhi Palace Cuisine India — they make a good Chicken Tikka, and their “Karhai” (wokked) vegetables were a nice change compared to normal Indian restaurant fare

But despite the good food and company, it’s good to be home again!

Joel Spolsky recently wrote

I’m sad to say that the Congress Plaza Hotel where we did the event at this morning does not qualify as anyone’s palace. The usual nice words you might use to describe such a hotel would be “threadbare” or “shabby.” Other words (“maccabre,” “Barton Fink,” and “scuzzy”) come to mind. This was entirely my fault; I set a target budget for hotels in each city and didn’t do the research to make sure the hotels would be entirely nice.

I remember the Congress Plaza Hotel as the “host” hotel for The Second International World-Wide Web Conference on Mosaic and the Web back in 1994. It was tired and grubby then, and I assumed it had been chosen to accommodate student budgets. They offered conference attendees the chance to have an RJ-11 jack installed in their rooms at the trivial price of $75 — my boss kicked in for the “upgrade”, and I’ll bet he had to pay for every phone call, too. I was lucky — the hotel was filled by the time I made my reservation and I had to stay at a Hyatt a few blocks away.

I guess there’s a niche for shabby hotels, and it’s good to know that it’s being filled by true experts in the field.