Spending the night in Pullman, WA

Tomorrow, I have what I'm hoping will be my last followup appointment with the orthopaedic surgeon in Colfax for my shoulder... although my PT thought I'd probably need another 4-6 weeks of therapy (and I suspect he's right -- I've got a lot more range than I've had in a really long time, but still almost no strength). And since the weather has been, well, pretty wet and kinda windy across most of the state lately, we decided to head across the mountains this afternoon, rather than trying to do it tomorrow morning with the clock ticking down to my appointment time. I'm actually a bit more worried about the trip back tomorrow, since the mountains are supposed to be getting pretty slammed.

BTW, if you ever find yourself anywhere near Pullman, I can definitely recommend a great restaurant: The Fireside Grille. It's where we had an early dinner the day before my surgery back in September... and we went back tonight partly because the food was so good and partly because we're staying at a hotel just down the street. Mmm.... just as good as we remembered. Our waiter looked strangely familiar, but I couldn't figure out if it was because I'd seen him before or because he resembled someone else I knew... and then I saw his name tag, which listed his hometown as Kirkland, WA (which is where I live) and it clicked into place. He'd been our waiter back in September! Very weird! (Or maybe not so weird, it just surprised me that we'd only been there twice, months apart, and gotten the same guy each time.)

Our hotel room has a widescreen television, which was another surprise. I'm not sure if any of the channels are actually in HD, but they've got it set strictly to widescreen, which means that some channels are displaying strrrrrettttcccchhhhed across the screen.

In other news, I'm plowing right through the Discworld novels... I just started in on Mort (Book 4) earlier today. Not too bad a pace, considering I read the first two books aloud to Rackham on our last roadtrip (I could have sworn I'd read them before, and there were scenes I remembered clearly, but I had absolutely no clue what happened overall in those books). I started reading Equal Rites aloud to Rackham while we were on the road earlier today, even though I just finished the book last week, which really makes for a pretty quick turnover on rereading... but they're just so much fun and the text is absolutely meant to be spoken. I'm rather pleased that even though I'd read very few of the Discworld series, I did a pretty decent job of acquiring the books. I'm only missing a handful of them. *makes note to self to get a Discworld icon*

In other news, it became obvious recently that neither Rackham nor I have had any need to multiply or divide fractions in a really long time. It was one of those random things that come up in conversations from time to time, and I thought I remembered the trick to fraction division, but neither of us thought we were doing it right (we were in the car at the time, with no paper and pencil handy). I was chatting about it later with rahirah and she mentioned the same trick I thought was supposed to work, but I still couldn't quite get my brain around it... until I gave up and grabbed pen and paper. And realized that for some bizarro reason, I'd gotten some things reversed and was tryin to divide the wrong thing into the wrong thing. D'oh. I do feel better knowing that Rackham was doing the same exact thing.