SoCal - A place of wonderment & beauty

Dare I say - SoCal is a pretty dang cool place? Ok, so I'm highly biased from a visitor's perspective, but I sure had a helluva lot o' fun while I was there. Even though I did come down with a fever while I was there. Even though I did come down with a sore throat while I was there. My friend Scott was the ultimate tour guide - and I thank him for being the gracious host and showing me things that I feel honored & privileged to see. For a photolog of the trip, keep reading...

Day 1:
The Grove - a very nice, fancy shopping center where I'm told all the locals hang out to get away from the touristy crowd in Hollywood. Of course the only store that really called to me was the apple store, which was the first one I had seen and been. I took some delight in emailing my family & close friends from inside the "look-ma-everything-is-translucent" store. The Grove is also home to the original Farmer's Market.




La Brea Tarpits - I followed my stint of local-ogling with a jaunt through the La Brea Tarpits, both of which were only a ten minute walk from my friend's apartment. What's interesting with the tarpits is that new seeps keep occurring from time to time, and they either have to dump crap on it to soak it up, or they build these caged off areas which are big huge eyesores. In the second photo below, you can see a bubble of methane gas which has reached the surface.




USC campus & USC fencing club - I came, I gave a couple of fencing lessons, and I kicked some fencing butt. Glad to see that my kick-ass mad fencing skillz haven't atrophied too badly during my nearly ten year hiatus from fencing. Looking into picking the sport back up here in LR.

Day 2:
Museum of Radio & Television - a brief tour of where my friend works. Since it is located in Beverly Hills, that called for a walk down Rodeo Drive. Note the famous gift bag from Tiffany & Co. That was to score some major brownie points with Jen. ;)


Hollywood Bowl - since buying tickets on ticketmaster.com was going to cost us almost twice as much as the tickets themselves, we decided to pick up the tickets in person at the box office. On tap for that evening: Nickel Creek and the LA Philharmonic - what a treat!
In-and-Out Burger - What's a trip to LA without a visit to an In-and-Out Burger? I had to see what the rave was (esp. in the ArsTechnica community) with the Double Double Animal Style. All I can say is - YUM YUM.
Santa Monica Pier - To kill some time before our concert, we headed to the beach & the famous Santa Monica pier. After wasting some zombies in House of the Dead at the arcade, we did some beachwalking and some more local-ogling.


Mann's Chinese Theater & the Walk of Stars - my brief foray into TouristTrapLand landed me at Hollywood & Highland - for a few brief moments before heading off to the Hollywood Bowl for the concert. Plus it never hurts to boost the good 'ol self-esteem ogling the freakazoids dressed up with no place to go in front of the theater. Yep. I may be a computer geek and LoTR nerd, but at least I'm not *them*. Heh.








The concert totally rocked - with Nickel Creek playing the last few songs accompanied by the LA 'freaking' Philharmonic. Plus I think my friend enjoyed their music, having not heard them before. Always a plus.

Day 3: (not feeling well so we tried to see more "indoorsy" sites
Walt Disney Concert Hall








Los Angeles Public Library
The Bradbury Building - built at the turn of the 20th century on what they envisioned a building in the year 2000 would look like.

Day 4: (still sick - rested all morning but in the afternoon felt well enough to go see...)
Arclight Cinema Dome - saw Hero playing here which was just about the epitome of a movie-going experience. Amazing movie. Amazing theater.
Amoeba Music - since it was across the street from the Arclight, we just HAD to go there. Heh. Very very hip music store. Gotta be there to appreciate it.
Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis-Brown house - definitely the highlight of my trip. It was guys night out at the FLW house, or as they call it, "poker night." But they don't play poker. This night was dedicated to D&D & BBQ. Mmmm. A geek's dream paradise. Playing D&D & eating meat in a historical landmark. What could beat that? Lots of photos from this part of my trip. Plus the view was incredible.

Day 5:
Abalone Cove Shoreline Park - tide pool sightseeing










Wayfarers Chapel - designed by Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Day 6:
One last hurrah in Beverly Hills & the Page Museum at the La Brea tarpits before I had to leave to go home the following day. All-in-all, a very fun, memory-filled trip - spent in the company of one of my bestest friends.

What's he saying?

int main ( )
{
int day, chl_progeny
double month;

day = 0;
month = 0.0;
chl_progeny = 2;

do
{
day++;
month = day / 30;
} while (month != 9.0);

chl_progeny++;

cout

Another fun day...

We spent a good part of the afternoon on Monday at the National Zoo in Washington DC. We got to see lions, tigers, and bears (oh my!). Not to mention the illustrious panda bears that get so much hype and attention. :) However, my favorite exhibit at the zoo must have been the web spinner spiders that they have living out in the open (sort of) in the invertebrate house. We got to witness first hand a spider attacking, paralyzing, and eating a live cricket. Yum. Heh.

Still enjoying my vacation immensely, however today is one of those agenda-packed days. Jen & I are going to try & hit the Whole Foods Market this morning, then we're considering taking the kids downtown to see some of the Museums, and then tonight we're going to Baltimore to eat dinner & see Phantom of the Opera (which my dad got us tickets for as an early birthday present).

We leave tomorrow to head back home - definitely NOT looking forward to the long drive ahead of us.

So far so good...

8 days and counting...

That's how long I've been on vacation. And what a vacation it's been. For a change, I haven't been running around like a chicken with my head cut off to see all the sites and listen to the sounds that I had planned for. For a change, I haven't had a set daily agenda that needed to be met on a day by day basis.

I've been able to go to bed when I want, get up when I want, nap when I want - mostly tuned around the Olympics for the past couple of days. Table tennis at 5am? That meant going to bed early and waking up early. U.S. women's softball at 2am? That meant struggling for 10 min to figure out how to program my parents' VCR.

And visiting with my sister & my newborn nephew has been majorly fun. Man, what a cutie pie. He's almost as cute as Braden was at his age, but not quite. ;) He sure seems to be a mild-mannered, colicky-free baby for now. *knock on wood*

I've also been able to put work out of my mind, at least for a couple of hours at a time. Yep, this is the vacation that I needed. One in which I can say after I get back home that I actually HAD a vacation - and not that I need a vacation from my vacation.

The high point of my vacation thus far?

Receiving this from my in-laws as an early b-day present! Probably the best birthday present I've ever received! I posted on the Ascend users forum that I felt like the kid in America's Funniest Videos that screamed at the top of his lungs for minutes on end when he received his dream present. Heh. Nowhere in my wildest dreams did I expect to get anything like that from my in-laws. I expected a CD or a book from Amazon, not a high quality home theater speaker. Wow. My in-laws are the best.

Small change

[Suggested writing topic from A Writer's Book of Days]

As I lay there on the hard, unyielding pavement, hundreds and thousands of footsteps rushed by me, seemingly oblivious of my presence. It did not matter if these feet were connected to giant trunks with a cotton-like bark, slender willowy columns of porcelain, or unsightly hair-covered supports - they were all equally prejudiced toward me.

I am helpless and immobile - the only way I am able to move is if someone accidentally kicks me in my side, enough to roll me over and over until I come to a stop, staring up again hoping some kind soul will stop and rescue me.

After an indeterminable amount of time, my prayers are answered. I feel some soft fingers grasp me around my midsection and lift me up. The fingers are coated with some sticky, dark substance that fouls my shiny skin, but I no longer care. I gaze back into wonderous eyes, as a giggle emerges from childish lips.

"Look what I found, dada!" she exclaims, "my very own quarter!"

Nothing can beat the instanteous change of feeling worthless one second, and then priceless the next. I am truly loved and wanted once again.

Un Aperitif

Narrative urges - they come and go as unpredictably as the spawning of twisters on a muggy, summer eve. One moment, the blood rushing through my fingers as they fly across the keyboard can barely keep up with the ideas cascading out of my mind, but the next instant, a blank wall staring back at me with deafening silence.

Lately I've been sensing a pulsating beat, emanating from somewhere within my being. Words and phrases, cooking under a gentle boil, simmering in wait, occassionally rising to the surface where they pop and spew their creative juices onto my canvas primed for alphanumeric characters.

Not yet, but soon. I promise.

Useless Mutant Ability #1554

UMA: #1554 - Ability to discern make/model of vehicles within 0.2 milliseconds of seeing them.

I must say that I can probably pick out the make/model of nearly any vehicle on the road simply by glancing at them. Is this a guy thing? It's not like I frequently spend my free time loitering in car lots. It's not like I sit down with a pile of car magazines and stare intently at every car listed to memorize them. It's not even remotely close that I have a list of cars that I don't recognize right off the bat that I need to improve my memory on. I just find myself driving around and noticing that I can pretty much instantly tell you what any car is that you see. Yes, my powers of vehicle recognition are keen.

And the scary thing is that I sometimes play a game where I try to name every car that I see. Yes, Cliff has truly gone off the deep end when he's reciting makes/models of cars to himself.

That's why when Jen told me one of the ladies from church bought a new SUV but couldn't tell me anything about it that I was truly astounded. "What make is it?" I interrogated her. That way if she said "Chevy", it could have been a Suburban, or a Tahoe, or a Trailblazer. If she said "Ford," it could have been an Explorer, Expedition, or Excursion. Perhaps one of those would jog her memory hard enough to recall what her friend had told her. But she couldn't tell me one detail or even what color it was. Whereas if I saw a friend's new vehicle, even if for a brief instant, or was told about it, I could tell you exactly what it was from that point forward.

Is this seemingly innate useless ability to know stuff about "cars" a guy thing? Or am I just a freak of nature - a mutant, if you will?