She didn't mean to push me, really...

I don't believe her, but that's a story for another day. If you click on the picture you will see the terror in my, uh, sunglasses.

As you can see above, we finally found the pics of the Grand Canyon, and I have built a badass computer and will begin the process of editing and uploading photos over the next few days.

Movin' along...

Surreal Life...

Richard Donner, pictured to the right on the far right with Mel Gibson, some fat guy, and Jet Li, is a customer of mine.

Richard Donner has directed and/or produced a slew of big hits, including The Omen, Superman & Superman II, the Lethal Weapon Series, and my personal favorite, The Toy starring Richard Pryor and Jackie Gleason.

It's just strange.

Burn, Baby Burn...

The wildfires have been raging for a week now, and it is absolutely scary how bad it is. The fires are both north and south of LA, and thousands of homes have been destroyed.

LA is (un)naturally hazy from the smog, but I can usually see downtown pretty clearly as I drive in in the morning, but on Friday the air was so nasty I could barely make out the skyscrapers as I drove in from Westwood, and it progressively got worse and worse.

By 11 am I could not see more than 200 feet away, and the air was thick with nastiness.

It was ashes from the fires around San Diego being carried in on the wind, and it was so bad that most of Orange County (South of LA) was shut down. The air quality was dangerous, as the ash being blown around was loaded with all the toxic stuff that had burned like paint, chemicals, drug dealers, etc.

Tens of thousands have been displaced, thousands have lost everything, and people have died.

And people will just rebuild. I don't get it. This many humans shouldn't be here anyway!

Next spring it will be mudslides, houses getting buried in tons of mud when the rains start in the spring.

And THE BIG ONE is coming any day now, right? The earthquake that ate California...

I am not trying to make light of the loss that so many people are experiencing right now, but for Christ's sake, there is NOTHING natural about 20 million people living in a completely artificial environment and not expecting bad shit to happen every now and then.

It's a desert! Stuff dies and get very dry! Very dry stuff burns! A lot! The first clue is that it is AGAINST THE LAW TO SMOKE IN ANY PUBLIC OUTDOOR RECREATION AREA IN ALL OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA BECAUSE THE WHOLE GODDAMN PLACE IS A TINDER-BOX!!!

Despite my smartass sense of ironic humor at the whole thing, we will be doing our part to help the people that are left with nothing in the aftermath. After what we went through, I can relate to what it feels like to lose most everything you own. We want to help. Besides, despite all the potential ways to lose everything you own through some sort of calamity, I really do like it here, and I think I understand why they stay. It's a great place to live, if you don't mind maybe dying. But I guess that's a risk we take everywhere, huh? Just more choices in LA LA Land.

By the by-

I really, really hope they catch the bastard(s) that are responsible for the fire(s) getting started.

FURNITURE!!!!

That's right, we have furniture! May God bless and keep IKEA safe from the Southern California wildfires....

We were going to go shopping Friday night, but for reasons that shall remain nameless we went on Saturday. We got up bright and early (7:30 am) and headed to the giant IKEA in Carson. This means we have to take what Californians call "the 405." (Don't ask me why they refer to highways as "the" whatever. They just do.) This is the freeway from hell, just so we're on the same page. We arrived, our Excel spreadsheet in hand. Click, click, click, we are writing down bin numbers and picking up self-serve items as we go along. Lunch in the bistro. Back to the showroom. Then, we are ready to pick up our furniture. This is what we bought: kitchen table, four kitchen chairs, 2 large bookshelfs, one small bookshelf, TV stand, endtable, two storage shelving units, a six-drawer dresser, a bed, an underbed box, and all the other assorted bits and pieces to put them together. The pile of cardboard boxes was really impressive. I wanted to pay for delivery - it's usually next day or the day after. Jay wanted to take it home RIGHT NOW. So he began loading the car. When I say loaded, I mean if there was an available space it had an IKEA product in it. Even tied to the roof. We had a small group of onlookers gathered to see just how much he could actually attach to our car. I had to sit in a small spot in the back, holding more items. We went 25 mph down "the 405" highway from/to hell. I wish I had pictures, because I bet Subaru had no idea how much cargo an Outback can really hold. It was terrifying. But we got home safely, got unloaded, and went to the Japanese Curry Spaghetti House for dinner (food fusions are all the rage in LA right now, and I had to try this one). On the way home, we bought the TV replacement. A flatscreen HDTV. My husband was on cloud 9. He was at Best Buy on his lunch break buying it accessories - it's so sweet when they're still in that courtship phase....

We will post pictures of the furnished apartment once we get everything assembled, put in place, and the boxes cleared away.

Celebrity Sighting

April and I were in Border's Books at Century City Saturday night, and it turned out that Tia Carrere of Wayne's World Fame, came out and sang a few songs from her latest album, which is mostly traditional Hawaiian music and was produced and co-created with Grammy winner Daniel Ho, pictured playing guitar.

It was surreal.

It was really cool. She is very attractive in person, and her voice was great. -april

Getting more settled

Slowly, things are falling into place. We now have our morning routines established, and I have figured out the bus routes for getting around town. Work is beginning for both of us, real work, with me planning projects and Jay visiting clients. We are beginning to be able to find our way around without consulting the map too much. So things are progressing nicely!

The insurance companies are still a bit of a pain. The truck will be completely paid for - that was our good news this week! Now if UHaul would call us back, maybe we could get some furniture... I'm a bit tired of sleeping on a pallet in the bedroom floor. And keeping our clothes and books boxed up is not very convenient.

We have managed to cook dinner this week and do laundry. These are our major accomplishments thus far - it feels good to be getting back to normal! We went last night to see a movie. Pretty cool that the theater was located right next to the MGM building. And can anyone else believe that I'm cold here? I am wearing sweaters and jackets everyday.... everytime I move somewhere for science, people say it's going to be warm. Well, it snowed constantly on Cape Cod, and now southern CA, while very sunny, is also very chilly. Bleh.

Quick update

We are moved into our new place. The address is:

3240 Sawtelle Blvd Apt 210
Los Angeles, CA 90066 USA

Still no final resolution from insurance companies, except truck has been called a total loss, and we have sent the list of damaged items to the other insurance company.

We are back to work, and my laptop is still down. I swear it will be back up by this weekend so I can get some pics uploaded.

More in a few days.

Oh, we bought a Subaru Outback, it's badass. I never thought that I would say that about a freakin' station wagon, but there you are.

It looks like this:

we are there

We are in LA, arriving at around 3am local time Tuesday night/Wednesday morning.

We are still in the process of sorting our broken stuff, dealing with two insurance companies, and to top it off,my laptop has, to use a New-Englander term, "shit the bed," so sorry no witty/cute/majestic picture with this post. I am using my work computer and it can't edit shit.

Who woulda thunk a 40mph impact with a tree would damage a computer hard drive? Strange.

We are moving into our new apartment on Friday, maybe buying a car over the weekend if the insurance stuff is straightened out by then, and in between we need to start replacing things that we have to have like beds and plates and chairs and tables and, well, I guess you get the picture.

Please allow me to summarize my impression of the Grand Canyon, where we spent our last night on the road:

"Oh my effing God."

April and I ran out of adjectives after about two minutes. We only spent a few hours there, but it was easily the most physically immense and overpowering natural sight I have ever seen, and I have seen a fair bit of what the U.S. has to offer. Don't get me wrong here, I have seen a number of things that were easily more "beautiful," like the sun setting over Cape Cod from Martha's Vineyard in early Autumn, all the colors in the Badlands in South Dakota late in the afternoon, and the Catskills in upstate New York in winter, but the sheer, mammoth, overwhelming power of nature and time on this scale cannot be summed up in words. Actually, not even pictures do the trick.

Yet despite the futility in the effort, I will put together some panoramic shots and post for everyone to see, just to give you the vaguest impression of the immeasurable scale of this place. Well, that's not fair. It's very measurable. It's about a half-mile to the bottom. And if you get a good running start, you can make it all the way down in about ten bounces.

More in a few days, and by the way we miss you all.

Got Wood?

Petrified Forest National Park was formed when volcanic ash buried these trees about 10,000 years back ,and the silica in the ash replaced the organic material as the wood decayed. This process took several millinea and a lack of oxygen to create the petrified wood we see today.

For those of you that have never seen petrified wood up close, it's amazing stuff. You see a tree with bark and rings and knots, and then you touch it and it's stone. It really just looks like a tree that has been fallen for a long, long time. That is, until they cut it up into pieces and polish it, then it looks like what it is- a tree that has turned to mineral!

Did you know that petrified wood has been found in every single state and Canada? See, you got wood too!

And you thought I was being dirty when you read the title...

Shame on you!

Across the Great Divide

We crossed the continental divide today, just west of Albuquerque, NM. The drive was breathtaking.

We saw a lot of this:

Tomorrow will be the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest National Park.

It will be cool.