I went to Las Vegas this week for a get-together of posters from the TiVo Community forum, but managed to get away for a trip to Hoover Dam.

Accidentally, it turned out I had shown up during two weeks of construction work on the elevators in the new visitors' center, so for the first time since 1995, they were taking the general public down to see the generators through the elevators that run through the dam itself. Because the older elevators are smaller, there was a 45-minute wait to get in, but it was perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime event, or maybe a once-every-nine-years event, depending on how often they need to work on those elevators.

And the passageways inside the dam reminded me of certain pedestrian tunnels in the subways in Chicago, but with terrazzo floors and incandescent lights.

Later, I had another happy accident when I filled up a very special Chevron station in Las Vegas. Apparently, in order to protect their Standard trademark in the states where they're allowed to use it, they have one station per state that's branded "Standard"...in fact, I don't think this station said "Chevron" anywhere on it, except maybe on the stickers on the pumps showing pictures of all the credit cards they accepted. (It's on Tropicana Avenue at Industrial Road, just west of Interstate 15, in case anyone's curious.)