Colorado Puddles

Some days, it just doesn’t pay to get outa bed, even when you slept at a Holiday Inn last night.  But when check out time is noon, you have to.

It started with the coffee.  Holiday Inn Express serves that “smart” roast stuff, which makes it dangerous to start with;  because they serve it in styrofoam cups that can’t withstand the force of ten butterfly sneezes.  I simply tried to pry the lid off, and it headed for the carpet.  The instant it hit the floor, the entire bottom of the cup popped out like the lid of a Popeye spinach can;  all twelve ounces worth spent a nano-second on top of the thirsty fibers before disappearing into them.

Actually, I lied;  it didn’t start with the coffee, it started with the hand lotion that found its way into my laptop bag.  The lid wasn’t closed tight, and gravity was helped by a gradual altitude change, and two or three ounces worth found its way onto the power cord thingy, which now has a great vanilla scent, just like I do.

Colorado is currently experiencing one of those rare, but not unheard of, lush green springs fed by regular and copious rainfall.  But it’s still surprising to look out the window and see hills that are so incredibly green and verdant they put Scotland’s to shame. And it’s even more surprising to see puddles— puddles!  You know, little watermelon-sized pools of rain water that have no other place to hang out.  Awesome.

But back to the coffee carpet.  I grabbed one of them there “smart” towels and started blotting up the smart roast, which turned it a really dumb, dirty color;  a color I imagined the maid would not want to touch with your ten foot pole. Tossing a few items out of the way and onto the bed to get at more errant coffee spots on the tee vee stand, a couple of which were bottles of water, one of which was, of course open, and began belching huge mouthfuls of h2o onto the bed covers.  At this point we had to stop the festivities for a good tear-producing laugh, caught up as we were, in a weawee wet WTF! moment…

You know those little mini-fridges that are in hotel rooms now?  the ones than emit a high frequency whine all night that resonates with your my tinnitis and causes alien robots to commit seppuku?  Well I unplug those little droids as soon we set the bags down.  Even though my partner in comedy knows this, she nonetheless put the dinner leftovers, resting comfortably in their little styrofoam containers in there anyway, convinced it’s going to slow down the multiplication of untold billions of bacteria by a few dozen. When I opened the fridge, it triggered a mini-avalanche of frosty ice to drop off the freezer coils and— yes, slide out on the coffee stain.

By now we weren’t a damned bit surprised by this, but when we got out the styrofoam dinner boxes, both of which had little puddles on the top and were loaded with water from the melting freezer which, yeah, went all over the floor.

So the morning started with puddles in the parking lot, followed quickly by a puddle of coffee on the moca brown with cardinal red zig-zags colored carpet, followed by a not-so-smart attempt to make a water bed, followed by puddles on, and in, our doggie bags.

Needless to say, we got the hell out of there.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, a car just in front of us turned out and spilled another styrofoam cup full smart joe that had been left on the roof of the car.  And just for grins, tears started falling outa the sky.  I love this freakin’ planet.