Wasted a good chunk of the middle of the day on message boards. Did some minimal shopping, and discovered that The District will have both a Pei Wei Asian Diner and a Peet’s. And as near as I can tell, the movie theaters opened on the 4th, because I don’t remember seeing a “Now Open” sign on Tuesday.
alenxa and I left for Laguna Beach at 6:45. We clearly drove the canyon in record time, since we were parked in a lot up on Forest and Broadway by 7:10. So we walked out to the beach, found ourselves a spot, spread out the beach towel and set in to wait.
I quickly determined that I should have stuck with shorts instead of changing into jeans, because while she sat down and started crochet, I immediately took off my shoes and headed down to the water to check out the waves and take pictures of the scenery. (I was planning to try out the fireworks mode on the camera, and figured I’d go for some establishing shots.) Naturally, I got soaked.
Watched the stars slowly appear. Planets first. Venus was fairly early, then Jupiter. Wispy clouds caught the setting sun. Watched people: the 20ish guys playing frisbee with penalty push-ups for missing a throw, who would lash each other with wet seaweed. The family burying their father in the sand. The girl who screamed that she didn’t want to get wet, though she had gone down to the water in a bikini. The woman holding a plastic bag above the waterline as she walked out into the waves to a waiting boat. The couple taking turns dunking each other into the water.
Around 8:30 the sun was down, and a single firework popped off to the west, probably heard by more people than seen, though its smoke was silhouetted against the glow of the western sky. Over the next hour the light continued to fade, people left the water, more people arrived and set up camp on the beach, or on the lawn just above. Shortly before 9:00 we started hearing vaguely eastern-sounding music, and looked around and someone was doing a procession of some sort.
Finally, at 9:00, the fireworks started. At first they were obscured by their own cloud of smoke, which made for an interesting nebula-like appearance with thin smoke reflecting light and tendrils of thicker smoke in front, blocking it. After a while a breeze came up, blowing the smoke eastward along the coast. Maybe 5 or 10 minutes in, the first fire engine drove past down PCH. No doubt someone messing around with fireworks who didn’t know what he was doing. (The number of fire trucks and ambulances that drove by last night was disheartening.) The show was over by 9:20, but we could still see the fireworks from up in the direction of Newport Beach. We waited, watching those, while the crowd dispersed.
The Diedrich Coffee we used to go to is now a Starbucks. I suppose it’s better than closing it altogether, but there’s another Starbucks about 300 feet away. It’s a bit silly. I’d called Coffee Pub earlier in the day to find out how late they were open, and they closed that afternoon. In the end, we decided to go to BJ’s across the street and split an appetizer and a pizookie. (Sadly, pizookies are crispy now, instead of chewy.)
We drove back by way of PCH to Newport Coast Drive, saw some interesting fog effects, and I managed to completely lose my bearings with all the twists and turns through the hills. Fortunately you can’t go wrong by staying on the road. Home around midnight.
Notes for next year: Shorts, flip-flops, and jackets.
Went out to see 
Thursday: Disneyland — for the first time in maybe 5 years. There are definite advantages to visiting in the off-season, during a weekday… like the 5-minute wait for Pirates of the Caribbean. Thankfully, the changes to align it with the movies were minimally invasive, and the last view of Jack Sparrow demonstrates some seriously impressive motion capture. Some other nice updates to Haunted Mansion and Jungle Cruise. The new “wildest ride in the wilderness!” recording at Big Thunder Mountain, however, is a travesty. Splash Mountain and the train were closed. They seem to be piratifying Tom Sawyer’s island. Pirates, Indy and Big Thunder kept breaking down, but we still managed to hit all three (some of them twice). It was odd to see fruit carts all over the place. It’s actually possible to eat mostly healthy food at Disneyland now. Finished off the day with dinner at the Blue Bayou.
About 15 minutes before Veronica Mars, I finished a scene and checked my word count. It was 50,145. A few days ago, when I checked the offset between OpenOffice’s word counter and NaNoWriMo’s word counter, I calculated that it would be about 144 words off at 50K. I figured, what the heck. I saved it to a text file, scrambled the letters as directed, and uploaded it.