random_skeins (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} random_skeins) wrote,@ 2005-07-13 17:31:00 |
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Los Angeles (or thereabouts)
I went down to LA last weekend, and originally I had decided I wasn't going to post a trip report (after all, who really cares what I did for a weekend?) but something happened there that made me change my mind.
So here's my trip report from LA. Ignore or read it as you please. ~~
Wednesday night:
I fly out of San Jose. My flight is at 8:50 and the airport is deserted. There's no one in front of me to check in at the automated kiosk. No one's in front of me in the security line. There's one person in line before me to get a pizza, and maybe 5 people total at the gate I was flying out of. It almost reminded me of the pre-9/11 days. Of course, the London bombings were about three hours away...
I end up on a dinky plane (at least it wasn't a turbo prop) with only three seats across so everyone got an aisle, window, or both, but the flight was uneventful.
I arrive in Santa Ana without any problems and go get my car from Enterprise. I had booked on Expedia and Enterprise's price was about $15/day for a midsize while Hertz and Avis both wanted $45 for a subcompact. I'd used Enterprise once in Seattle and they were fine, so I went with them. One nice thing at the Santa Ana airport is the rental cars are all on location, so I didn't have to take a shuttle. I was greeted by a very enthusiastic young agent, who proceeded to chat me up in preparation for getting me to pay for the insurance.
I later learned he had been working for 12 hours, so maybe he was just wired on caffeine rather than just being enthusiastic. He was cool and found all sorts of dents and scratches on the Saturn I never would have found myself, and circled a couple of numbers in case the car had problems and assured me that they would come deliver a new one to me if I had any problems. It turns out that was weirdly prophetic. After a couple tries it was clear I wasn't going to pay for the insurance, so he had me sign and initial things and I was off to Katy and Daryl's house where I was crashing for the night.
Wednesday night is one of our guilds' raid nights in World of Warcraft, and it had just ended. I chatted with them for awhile, then Katy had to go to sleep because she had to work. Daryl was slacking and taking the week off, so I played a bit of WoW with him. Luckily the server came down for a reset around 2:00 (the clock I was reading said it was 12:30 :-/) and I went to sleep.
Thursday
My plan was to see my high school friend Eric, who lived in LA proper. Yahoo maps listed it as 54 miles away and thought it would take a little more than an hour to get there. Yeah right. I budgeted 90-120 minutes, and as it turns out there was an accident so it took a little over 2 hours to get there.
Eric and his wife Kit recently had a son named Joe who was just shy of 3 months old. We went to Johnny Rockets for lunch, which was pretty unmemorable. Afterwards Eric and I hung out at his place watching Joe while Kit took a nap.
OK, though I'm still not a big fan of babies (though this is slightly changing -- they no longer cause me to panic and run away), Joe did have his moments. One of the tricks he learned was if Eric was reclining and held Joe up by the arms, Joe would mimic "walking" up Eric's chest. Not an easy task for a pre-three month old baby, but he took to it with a passion. I noticed though, that Joe seemed so intent on making his legs move forward, he forgot about that whole swallowing-your-saliva thing and started drooling. Hey, multitasking is *still* hard, so he'll get no disrespect from me for not having mastered leg movement and swallowing at the same time yet.
Later Joe needed his diaper changed, and Eric took me to the nursery which doubled as his top secret laboratory. In it, he had one of his inventions. I'd tell you about it, but Eric is a lawyer and he made me sign this NDA that forced me to change Joe's diapers for a year if I said anything about it. That's really a fate on par with burning in hell, so that's all I'll say about that.
Also at some point Eric reminded me of a Cranberries/Duran Duran concert we had gone to in December of 1993 which I had totally forgotten about. (More on that later.)
We got some stuff for grilling from Whole Foods, and I introduced Eric to Tejava, one of my favorite drinks. The grill had some issues, but dinner turned out fine. I knew I was going to be having dinner later with Katy, Daryl, and Suzy and Mike who were flying down, so I only had a smallish dinner (2 cheeseburgers and an ear of corn). I figured after another two hour drive back to Lake Forest I'd probably be hungry again.
Sure enough, after looking for a non-existent Benihana's which seemed to only exist in Katy's mind, we ended up at The Cheesecake Factory. Thinking I wouldn't be that hungry, I split a salad, calamari, and sundae with Suzy. I also ate a bunch of their bread and some of Mike's shrimp rejects. And I was still hungry after all that. Sigh. Well at least my metabolism still deals moderately well with all the food I eat.
Service was a bit slow so by the time we finished with that it was 11:30 and time for bed.
Friday
I slept in on Friday. Whee! We went to this random food court for lunch and I ate at some Philly Cheesesteak place which was ok but not as good as Amato's. Afterwards, Daryl, Mike, Suzy and I went to play mini golf. I crushed them all. (OK, maybe I only won by one stroke on the last hole were I got a 2 and Daryl got a 4 or 5. But it was still a crushing.) Afterwards we watched Mike hit some "medium" speed pitches that seemed kind of slow. He would have done the "fast" speed, but he's getting pretty old (he kept saying "sweet" which pretty much makes him ancient), and we didn't want him to hurt himself.
The arcade was decent. We played some DDR and "Rampage - 2000 World Tour" (why, I'm not sure). They also had the over/under handwaving Benami game I can't remember the name of. After that we went back to Katy and Daryl's house and I think Daryl made some homemade ice cream. Katy came home and informed us there was a "SigAlert" on the 22, which meant there was a bad crash there. (Normally freeways don't have "the" in their names but I'm in LA and when in Rome and all that.) So we took a bunch of surface streets to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim's home game next to Disneyland, where they were playing against the Mariners.
Because of traffic, we missed the very start of the game, but Suzy and Mike made up for it by singing the Star Spangled Banner (thankfully only once). Also, Tracy (aka Marwick) called while we were driving to the stadium. Hi Tracy! We gave him grief and made him promise to absolutely come to Las Vegas. Or at least that's my recollection of it.
The game was pretty cool. They had these Corona 20 oz'ers called Corona Bombers which I hadn't seen before. Of course they wanted $12 for them. Eh whatever, I'm on vacation. I ended up splitting that with Suzy. I also got two hot dogs (which looked like the $1 hot dogs at the Wednesday A's games except they were four times as expensive, so they must have been better) and a pretzel. Oh I also split some nacho's with Suzy too. Suzy requires nacho's at least once a year or else she gets bitchy, so I think the entire crew was pretty glad to get that taken care of.
Seattle crushed the Angels (much in the same way that I crushed at mini golf only more so) and there were fireworks after the show. They were surprisingly good. Evidently, they have fireworks for every Friday home game during the season, and it's sponsored by Wells Fargo. I imagine Wells Fargo gets their money's worth out of it, as the game we went to was sold out (attendance was 46xxx) despite the Mariner's being an awful team this year. And hey, it was cool enough I'm mentioning them too.
Also Ethan and his girlfriend showed up late (they got caught in traffic). Unfortunately, they were seated to Mike (I'll let you parse that however you want) so I didn't get a chance to talk to them much. I did see Ethan vault a railing on his way to get food though which I found amusing.
By then, the freeways had somewhat cleared up though we still were in some stop-and-go traffic for a while (to be expected in LA really). We got home and time for bed. As you can see, we are not teh party animals (tm).
Saturday
We went to Fuddruckers. I decided that while I could finish the 1lb burger (I had done that last time we were there), I would probably enjoy the 2/3lb burger more. It was fine, though I wish they had a 3/4lb burger option.
After lunch we went to Laguna Beach (the city, not the beach) where there was an Arts Festival. I found some metered parking really close to the event. After having to parallel park in San Francisco for so long, I'm not totally suck at it anymore, and luckily it was a wide spot (this becomes more relevant shortly).
The festival was fine, and fairly cheap (only $7). We just missed seeing someone doing a glass-blowing demonstration. Daryl and I watched some guy do some magic tricks, we saw lots of art none of us wanted, and Katy sort of helped make a bowl-like ceramic thing which was mostly made by one of the exhibitor's sculptors whose job it was to make you think you helped on the kiln when in reality they did 90% of the work.
After spending a couple hours there, it was time to go home, go to the store, and grill some stuff. So I got into the car, and started it up. It started... and then stalled. Weird. So I tried it again and it stalled again. Grr.
After a little experimentation, I discovered if I revved the engine right away after I started the car it wouldn't stall. If I then left off the gas, it would stall again. Great. 20 miles of potentially stop-and-go traffic with lots of lights. Ah well, it would be better than being stuck at the festival.
I started the car in neutral and immediately revved it up while keeping the brake on with my left foot. (As a note: this is a very odd sensation.) As I let up a little on the gas, the tachometer dropped to below 2000 rpms and I dropped it into gear and swung onto the road (which was marked 45 but thankfully I had some room). I went about 50 feet and there was a car in front of me, so I was forced to 1. flip the car back into neutral, 2. jam on the brakes with my left foot, and 3. jam on the accelerator with my right foot, all in the span of about 2 seconds.
Every time I came to a stop I had to repeat those steps. Luckily I did it well enough I only stalled once or twice on the drive back, but man that was a pita. On the way home I called Enterprise and eventually convinced them to come out to Lake Forest (about 25 minutes away from the airport) to replace the car. Once back at Katy and Daryl's house, I turned off the engine and started it back up. Of course the problem was gone. Oh well. I still didn't want to drive that car and risking a repeat, especially on a stop-and-go freeway.
Some people went off to the store. Jason called and said he'd be by in a while. The Enterprise guy came by and swapped cars with me. I ended up with a Pontiac Vibe. He also told me not to worry about filling up the tank, which is nice because I had just filled up the tank on the Saturn on the way to Laguna Beach.
I chopped some tomatoes as my part of helping with dinner (really you don't want me doing much else) and then chilled out. I got in some games of WSG while chatting with Daryl and Jason who were grilling. Conveniently, the computer room had a door out right next to the grill so I could see when my turn came up.
Katy later claimed dinner only cost $6 per person. I thought she was on crack, and Mike basically said the same thing. But Katy used her math skillz to double check the amount and insisted it was correct.
After dinner, we watched Buckaroo Bonzai. I'm still not sure exactly how that happened. Everyone but Mike blames Mike; Mike blames Katy. All I know is Buckaroo Bonzai is not a good movie. By then it was time for the Pictionary rematch. In the first game, Mike, Suzy, and I won the game for Northern California, defeating Katy, Daryl, and Jason.
Daryl jokingly suggested girls against boys, which Suzy and Katy accepted. I thought about giving them Mike as an honorary girl, but I figured they would dominate us if I did that, so I kept my mouth shut. We got crushed anyways.
Sunday
We went to the real Benihana's for lunch. Suzy was her typical self and ate only about half of her food. Yay free fried rice, mushrooms, and ice cream! Our chef guy wasn't inspired and gave us the standard performance. Oh well, at least the food was good. After lunch, Mike forced us to watch the Blues Brothers and then we drove off to the airport. Enterprise was pretty cool about the whole car swap thing and the turn-in process went smoothly. Our flight was delayed about 15 minutes but we arrived on time.
Oh and here's a tip: if you are a little on the pudgy side, but still want to wear really short jean shorts that pushes your fat up, don't wear a short t-shirt. And if you do wear a short t-shirt, make sure you don't raise your arms above your head. Unfortunately this girl on the bus back to parking got on late and was forced to stand and use the rails above her head to keep her balance. It was very not cute, or in the words of Suzy "a bit unflattering."
And thus my vacation down to LA was completed.
I went down to LA last weekend, and originally I had decided I wasn't going to post a trip report (after all, who really cares what I did for a weekend?) but something happened there that made me change my mind.
So here's my trip report from LA. Ignore or read it as you please. ~~
Wednesday night:
I fly out of San Jose. My flight is at 8:50 and the airport is deserted. There's no one in front of me to check in at the automated kiosk. No one's in front of me in the security line. There's one person in line before me to get a pizza, and maybe 5 people total at the gate I was flying out of. It almost reminded me of the pre-9/11 days. Of course, the London bombings were about three hours away...
I end up on a dinky plane (at least it wasn't a turbo prop) with only three seats across so everyone got an aisle, window, or both, but the flight was uneventful.
I arrive in Santa Ana without any problems and go get my car from Enterprise. I had booked on Expedia and Enterprise's price was about $15/day for a midsize while Hertz and Avis both wanted $45 for a subcompact. I'd used Enterprise once in Seattle and they were fine, so I went with them. One nice thing at the Santa Ana airport is the rental cars are all on location, so I didn't have to take a shuttle. I was greeted by a very enthusiastic young agent, who proceeded to chat me up in preparation for getting me to pay for the insurance.
I later learned he had been working for 12 hours, so maybe he was just wired on caffeine rather than just being enthusiastic. He was cool and found all sorts of dents and scratches on the Saturn I never would have found myself, and circled a couple of numbers in case the car had problems and assured me that they would come deliver a new one to me if I had any problems. It turns out that was weirdly prophetic. After a couple tries it was clear I wasn't going to pay for the insurance, so he had me sign and initial things and I was off to Katy and Daryl's house where I was crashing for the night.
Wednesday night is one of our guilds' raid nights in World of Warcraft, and it had just ended. I chatted with them for awhile, then Katy had to go to sleep because she had to work. Daryl was slacking and taking the week off, so I played a bit of WoW with him. Luckily the server came down for a reset around 2:00 (the clock I was reading said it was 12:30 :-/) and I went to sleep.
Thursday
My plan was to see my high school friend Eric, who lived in LA proper. Yahoo maps listed it as 54 miles away and thought it would take a little more than an hour to get there. Yeah right. I budgeted 90-120 minutes, and as it turns out there was an accident so it took a little over 2 hours to get there.
Eric and his wife Kit recently had a son named Joe who was just shy of 3 months old. We went to Johnny Rockets for lunch, which was pretty unmemorable. Afterwards Eric and I hung out at his place watching Joe while Kit took a nap.
OK, though I'm still not a big fan of babies (though this is slightly changing -- they no longer cause me to panic and run away), Joe did have his moments. One of the tricks he learned was if Eric was reclining and held Joe up by the arms, Joe would mimic "walking" up Eric's chest. Not an easy task for a pre-three month old baby, but he took to it with a passion. I noticed though, that Joe seemed so intent on making his legs move forward, he forgot about that whole swallowing-your-saliva thing and started drooling. Hey, multitasking is *still* hard, so he'll get no disrespect from me for not having mastered leg movement and swallowing at the same time yet.
Later Joe needed his diaper changed, and Eric took me to the nursery which doubled as his top secret laboratory. In it, he had one of his inventions. I'd tell you about it, but Eric is a lawyer and he made me sign this NDA that forced me to change Joe's diapers for a year if I said anything about it. That's really a fate on par with burning in hell, so that's all I'll say about that.
Also at some point Eric reminded me of a Cranberries/Duran Duran concert we had gone to in December of 1993 which I had totally forgotten about. (More on that later.)
We got some stuff for grilling from Whole Foods, and I introduced Eric to Tejava, one of my favorite drinks. The grill had some issues, but dinner turned out fine. I knew I was going to be having dinner later with Katy, Daryl, and Suzy and Mike who were flying down, so I only had a smallish dinner (2 cheeseburgers and an ear of corn). I figured after another two hour drive back to Lake Forest I'd probably be hungry again.
Sure enough, after looking for a non-existent Benihana's which seemed to only exist in Katy's mind, we ended up at The Cheesecake Factory. Thinking I wouldn't be that hungry, I split a salad, calamari, and sundae with Suzy. I also ate a bunch of their bread and some of Mike's shrimp rejects. And I was still hungry after all that. Sigh. Well at least my metabolism still deals moderately well with all the food I eat.
Service was a bit slow so by the time we finished with that it was 11:30 and time for bed.
Friday
I slept in on Friday. Whee! We went to this random food court for lunch and I ate at some Philly Cheesesteak place which was ok but not as good as Amato's. Afterwards, Daryl, Mike, Suzy and I went to play mini golf. I crushed them all. (OK, maybe I only won by one stroke on the last hole were I got a 2 and Daryl got a 4 or 5. But it was still a crushing.) Afterwards we watched Mike hit some "medium" speed pitches that seemed kind of slow. He would have done the "fast" speed, but he's getting pretty old (he kept saying "sweet" which pretty much makes him ancient), and we didn't want him to hurt himself.
The arcade was decent. We played some DDR and "Rampage - 2000 World Tour" (why, I'm not sure). They also had the over/under handwaving Benami game I can't remember the name of. After that we went back to Katy and Daryl's house and I think Daryl made some homemade ice cream. Katy came home and informed us there was a "SigAlert" on the 22, which meant there was a bad crash there. (Normally freeways don't have "the" in their names but I'm in LA and when in Rome and all that.) So we took a bunch of surface streets to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim's home game next to Disneyland, where they were playing against the Mariners.
Because of traffic, we missed the very start of the game, but Suzy and Mike made up for it by singing the Star Spangled Banner (thankfully only once). Also, Tracy (aka Marwick) called while we were driving to the stadium. Hi Tracy! We gave him grief and made him promise to absolutely come to Las Vegas. Or at least that's my recollection of it.
The game was pretty cool. They had these Corona 20 oz'ers called Corona Bombers which I hadn't seen before. Of course they wanted $12 for them. Eh whatever, I'm on vacation. I ended up splitting that with Suzy. I also got two hot dogs (which looked like the $1 hot dogs at the Wednesday A's games except they were four times as expensive, so they must have been better) and a pretzel. Oh I also split some nacho's with Suzy too. Suzy requires nacho's at least once a year or else she gets bitchy, so I think the entire crew was pretty glad to get that taken care of.
Seattle crushed the Angels (much in the same way that I crushed at mini golf only more so) and there were fireworks after the show. They were surprisingly good. Evidently, they have fireworks for every Friday home game during the season, and it's sponsored by Wells Fargo. I imagine Wells Fargo gets their money's worth out of it, as the game we went to was sold out (attendance was 46xxx) despite the Mariner's being an awful team this year. And hey, it was cool enough I'm mentioning them too.
Also Ethan and his girlfriend showed up late (they got caught in traffic). Unfortunately, they were seated to Mike (I'll let you parse that however you want) so I didn't get a chance to talk to them much. I did see Ethan vault a railing on his way to get food though which I found amusing.
By then, the freeways had somewhat cleared up though we still were in some stop-and-go traffic for a while (to be expected in LA really). We got home and time for bed. As you can see, we are not teh party animals (tm).
Saturday
We went to Fuddruckers. I decided that while I could finish the 1lb burger (I had done that last time we were there), I would probably enjoy the 2/3lb burger more. It was fine, though I wish they had a 3/4lb burger option.
After lunch we went to Laguna Beach (the city, not the beach) where there was an Arts Festival. I found some metered parking really close to the event. After having to parallel park in San Francisco for so long, I'm not totally suck at it anymore, and luckily it was a wide spot (this becomes more relevant shortly).
The festival was fine, and fairly cheap (only $7). We just missed seeing someone doing a glass-blowing demonstration. Daryl and I watched some guy do some magic tricks, we saw lots of art none of us wanted, and Katy sort of helped make a bowl-like ceramic thing which was mostly made by one of the exhibitor's sculptors whose job it was to make you think you helped on the kiln when in reality they did 90% of the work.
After spending a couple hours there, it was time to go home, go to the store, and grill some stuff. So I got into the car, and started it up. It started... and then stalled. Weird. So I tried it again and it stalled again. Grr.
After a little experimentation, I discovered if I revved the engine right away after I started the car it wouldn't stall. If I then left off the gas, it would stall again. Great. 20 miles of potentially stop-and-go traffic with lots of lights. Ah well, it would be better than being stuck at the festival.
I started the car in neutral and immediately revved it up while keeping the brake on with my left foot. (As a note: this is a very odd sensation.) As I let up a little on the gas, the tachometer dropped to below 2000 rpms and I dropped it into gear and swung onto the road (which was marked 45 but thankfully I had some room). I went about 50 feet and there was a car in front of me, so I was forced to 1. flip the car back into neutral, 2. jam on the brakes with my left foot, and 3. jam on the accelerator with my right foot, all in the span of about 2 seconds.
Every time I came to a stop I had to repeat those steps. Luckily I did it well enough I only stalled once or twice on the drive back, but man that was a pita. On the way home I called Enterprise and eventually convinced them to come out to Lake Forest (about 25 minutes away from the airport) to replace the car. Once back at Katy and Daryl's house, I turned off the engine and started it back up. Of course the problem was gone. Oh well. I still didn't want to drive that car and risking a repeat, especially on a stop-and-go freeway.
Some people went off to the store. Jason called and said he'd be by in a while. The Enterprise guy came by and swapped cars with me. I ended up with a Pontiac Vibe. He also told me not to worry about filling up the tank, which is nice because I had just filled up the tank on the Saturn on the way to Laguna Beach.
I chopped some tomatoes as my part of helping with dinner (really you don't want me doing much else) and then chilled out. I got in some games of WSG while chatting with Daryl and Jason who were grilling. Conveniently, the computer room had a door out right next to the grill so I could see when my turn came up.
Katy later claimed dinner only cost $6 per person. I thought she was on crack, and Mike basically said the same thing. But Katy used her math skillz to double check the amount and insisted it was correct.
After dinner, we watched Buckaroo Bonzai. I'm still not sure exactly how that happened. Everyone but Mike blames Mike; Mike blames Katy. All I know is Buckaroo Bonzai is not a good movie. By then it was time for the Pictionary rematch. In the first game, Mike, Suzy, and I won the game for Northern California, defeating Katy, Daryl, and Jason.
Daryl jokingly suggested girls against boys, which Suzy and Katy accepted. I thought about giving them Mike as an honorary girl, but I figured they would dominate us if I did that, so I kept my mouth shut. We got crushed anyways.
Sunday
We went to the real Benihana's for lunch. Suzy was her typical self and ate only about half of her food. Yay free fried rice, mushrooms, and ice cream! Our chef guy wasn't inspired and gave us the standard performance. Oh well, at least the food was good. After lunch, Mike forced us to watch the Blues Brothers and then we drove off to the airport. Enterprise was pretty cool about the whole car swap thing and the turn-in process went smoothly. Our flight was delayed about 15 minutes but we arrived on time.
Oh and here's a tip: if you are a little on the pudgy side, but still want to wear really short jean shorts that pushes your fat up, don't wear a short t-shirt. And if you do wear a short t-shirt, make sure you don't raise your arms above your head. Unfortunately this girl on the bus back to parking got on late and was forced to stand and use the rails above her head to keep her balance. It was very not cute, or in the words of Suzy "a bit unflattering."
And thus my vacation down to LA was completed.
