Tag: holidays

Thanksgiving

Spent Thanksgiving Day with the in-laws, who were helping host a huge Thanksgiving dinner for people at their church. So instead of the 8-12 people I’m used to for holiday dinners, it was 24. Hectic, but I discovered that I’m actually good at playing Jenga. (I swear, I haven’t played the game since college, and I don’t remember being any good at it at the time.)

With the warm weather, I’d been joking that we should have a Thanksgiving barbecue. The first thing I saw when we got there: a barbecue. Okay, it was being used to cook a turkey, but still…

There was also the highest pie-to-person ratio I have seen in a long time. I think there must have been at least 10 pies, if not a dozen. Probably enough for everyone there to eat half a pie!

We stayed in on Friday, avoiding the insanity of Black Friday sales (though I did look through the 15 or so emails from various online stores whose lists I’m on), then drove up to Westwood in the evening to see Equivocation (Shakespeare gets caught up in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot).

Current Music: Some video game from someone else in the waiting room at the car service dept

The New Year

Took a half-day on Wednesday, then went home and took a nap. Went over to help my parents set up for their New Year’s Eve party, planning to come home later & watch LA Confidential, and ended up staying. Watched Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and the “auditions” for the Evil League of Evil submitted by fans. Some were good. Some were…not.

Slept in Thursday. Started out reading Greg Keyes’ The Hounds of Ash, a collection of short stories set in the same world as The Waterborn and The Blackgod. After 2 stories, decided to re-read the novels. Fortunately, we recently pulled them out of storage since alenxa was thinking of reading them. Ran some errands, ended up across from the Apple store in South Coast Plaza. We’d already discussed replacing the mostly-dead PowerBook, both wanted to replace it with another Mac, and we’d even worked out which model we were going to get, so we just went for it. Then headed over for dinner w/ my brother & his fiancee (who flew back on Friday) & my parents, where we helped work through leftovers from the party.

Friday: more reading. Made a point of walking to lunch. Laundry. Working on my Flash site after a long delay. Watched 2 episodes of “Walking with Monsters: Before the Dinosaurs” (computer-generated nature show with prehistoric animals). Nice visuals, but I was bothered by some of the things that I can’t imagine could be extrapolated from fossils — like protective coloring & behavior that’s not based on skeletal structure.

Saturday: Shopping. Finished “Walking w/ Monsters,” watched “Helvetica.” More interesting than expected, but less interesting than was led to expect from reviews.

Current Music: Vienna Teng, “Whatever You Want”

Christmas: Day 1

Somehow managed to get through last-minute Christmas shopping. I’d like to thank the following people for helping: Starbuck, Kelly, Peet, and the Bean sisters (Coffee and Lost). Read and reviewed the final issue of The Flash (the third time it’s been canceled for a relaunch in as many years) while alenxa baked cookies, and on to a “relaxing” evening yesterday of laundry, dishes, and wrapping gifts, with a break for Mickey’s Christmas Carol.

Today, went over to my parents’ for breakfast, meeting up with them and with my brother and his fiancee, who flew down Wednesday and are staying at their place. Then carpooled off to my grandparents’ house for the big family get-together. Follow-up with alenxa’s family on Saturday, originally scheduled around SIL and her boyfriend driving down from Oregon. With all the snow earlier this week, they decided it wasn’t a good idea to try the drive, so it looks like we’ll be hitting the post office sometime in the next few days.

Overnight in San Diego

My company will sometimes do its Christmas party as a destination event. It was in Las Vegas one year, and one year it was even a 3-day cruise. I think it’s a holdover from the dot-com days during which we’d always have an annual ski trip and an annual summer trip. Then it was cut down to one trip. And now it’s combined with the Christmas party.

This year it was held in San Diego, at the Omni Hotel. Since it’s relatively close, we were all on our own for transportation, so alenxa and I took it at our own pace, spending Saturday afternoon in Old Town, hitting a farmer’s market, and so forth. Unfortunately it was casino-themed, and I’m not really big on gambling (though Katie made a killing at blackjack), but the food was really good (it was the in-hotel McCormick and Schmick’s, and while I couldn’t eat the seafood, the steak was quite good, and the chocolate cake was excellent), and I think I have gained at least a rudimentary understanding of craps beyond “you roll the dice and bet on how they land.”

( K2R: Old Town, the Omni, and just how big is that space by the convention center, anyway? )

Now if I could just figure out what to do with this wireless keyboard and mouse…

Nighttime view: San Diego Hilton & Convention Center

What I Did on my Thanksgiving Vacation

My brother and his fiancée drove down from San Francisco to visit last weekend, and we ended up spending a lot of time hanging out with them at my parents’ house. And playing Munchkin. Which was fun, except for the interminable turns when someone needed to discard a bunch of cards and, because most of us were new at the game, agonized over which cards to toss.

Family gathering on Thursday at my grandparents’ house. In the old days we’d drive to my parents’ house, then pile into their minivan and carpool the rest of the way, but since my mom traded it in for a Camry, we had to split 6 people across two cars. I’d planned on driving since I knew neither Brion nor Marti was going to want to spend ~2 hours driving in holiday traffic after spending the entire previous day on the road.

Other than visiting family, I mostly stayed at home. No Black Friday sales. I did order tickets to a play (The School of Night, about the death of Christopher Marlowe), and tried to order tickets to Man of La Mancha only to discover it was in presale, and I didn’t have the code. (Subsequently signed up for Reprise’s newsletter. Next time…)

Did a lot of reading. I’m about 100 pages into George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, and decided I needed a break. I picked up Robert J. Sawyer’s Flashforward the day before ABC announced the first casting for the TV pilot. Jack Davenport — yes, Steve from Coupling and Norrington from Pirates of the Caribbean — is playing the lead , and Courtney B. Vance (Law & Order: Criminal Intent) is playing a character who is either new to the adaptation or shows up at least halfway through the book. I get the impression from earlier articles that they’re not adapting the plot so much as they’re taking the concept and using it as the basis for an ongoing series. I also reread Girl Genius from the beginning, which is much easier to do in book form than on the computer.

alenxa completed Nanowrimo over the weekend, having written 50,000 words during November, though she’s pretty sure the full novel is going to be more than twice that.

Also, on Tuesday we went out to Huntington Beach’s street fair to see Gigi Edgley, Farscape’s Chiana, do fire twirling (write-up w/ photos at K2R).

Today, I’m tired. 9 days of antihistamines plus 3 days of getting to bed late and getting up early plus a couple of weeks of not sleeping well. Okay, back to work.

Current Mood: 😴sleepy

Catching Up

1. I’ve been going through old comic books looking for Hostess ads from the late 1970s.  They had these one-page stories where a hero would run into a really lame villain, and be able to stop them by distracting them with Twinkies, or fruit pies, or cupcakes.  Some of them are total crack, and there’s a web archive with snarky commentary.  I got the idea to profile the villains that the Flash fought (even though there’s still a bunch of minor villains and supporting characters from canon to add), so I’ve been looking for pages to get higher-res scans.  I found 2 of 4.

The funny thing?  It turns out that the Omnivore’s 100 list I posted includes Hostess Fruit Pies because the author was nostalgic for those ads.

2. Dinner with MIL Saturday, after alenxa went to a cousin’s wedding shower.

3. Majorly dehydrated on Sunday, or something.  Tried to start going through the piles of boxes against the edge of our living room, but ended up spending the afternoon on the couch reading, sipping water.  Read sections from The Flash Companion and a comic book trade, Supergirl and The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Dominator War.  I’d picked it up months ago, before we moved, since it was a sequel to a story I’d liked that came out in 1989 (Invasion!) but hadn’t gotten around to reading it.  Not bad, but didn’t wow me either.  Fortunately felt better in time to…

4. Hit the Orange Street Fair on Sunday evening.  Passed on Abelskivers (sp) this time.  Was in line, but realized I just didn’t want them.  Agreed we have to explore Old Town Orange sometime when it’s not a fair and businesses are open.  I think the last time I did that was more than 10 years ago.

5. Responsible day today.  Groceries, Laundry, etc.

6. Interviewed the outgoing writer on The Flash last week!

Goals for this week:
1. Locate cable outlet.
2. Arrange for some sort of TV service.  The fall season is starting, and we’ll actually be watching stuff live and not just off of DVDs.

The Fourth

Went out to see the fireworks at Laguna Beach on Friday. I started the day reading comics, including the new House of Mystery issue — Vertigo is not making it easy for me to cut down on comics purchasing — and the first two issues of Gemini, about a super-hero who doesn’t know he’s a hero. (There’s a second personality, activated remotely by a controlling agency. And the hero personality doesn’t know about his civilian ID.) Also read some old Flash comics, originally to prepare for a couple of profiles on my website, but got distracted by Silver Age wackiness.

Ended up sleeping half the afternoon, since I haven’t been sleeping well and I’ve been trying to adjust to getting up earlier for alenxa’s new job. (Annoyingly, I discovered the next morning that a server problem came up on Friday — if I’d been my usual Internet-addicted self, I would have spotted it much earlier.)

Anyway, since Katie didn’t want to wait around for hours on the beach like we did last year, we aimed to arrive around 8:30, during twilight. Again, we made good time down the canyon and parked up at the entrance (across the street from Laguna Playhouse and Tivoli Terrace). It’s amazing how much more expensive it is to park just a few blocks closer to the beach.

We found a good spot, and this year the wind didn’t blow the smoke toward us, so the view was clear, both of the fireworks launched from the base of the cliffs and of the fireworks launched a mile or two farther up the coast. Someone was selling cheap blue lightsabers on the beach. We saw a bunch of them. Unlike the good ones, you could really see the individual bulbs/LEDs along the length of the blade.

We let tradition win out over annoyance at Starbucks, and went to the place that used to be a Diedrich Coffee. That, and I kind of needed the caffeine to get us home. On our way back to the car, we stopped at a gelato place, and I had a really good combo of cherry and chocolate.

Saturday morning I was stuck going into work, then afternoon was mostly errands. Then I let myself get caught up in a flamewar, wasting time I intended to use finishing up on that reading. Finally made the time for it on Sunday, as well as reading through the PDFs of The Flash Companion (I’ve made arrangements with the main author to post some excerpts online to promote it). Discovered that in the Contributors’ Biographies section, my website got hyphenated. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except it’s the domain name, and some domain squatter owns hyper-borea.org.

Current Location: car dealer

3 Malls, 1 Day

Finally got out to do serious Christmas shopping today. Hit a couple of individual stores at the beginning & end of the day, but the bulk of it was taken up by a 3-mall tour:

The Village (formerly known as the Mall of Orange). Not too bad. Parked quickly, though not terribly near the mall. Crowds weren’t too bad, even in the food court where alenxa and I had lunch. Full circuit, found stuff. Stopped at Jamba Juice & Coffee Bean on the way out.

Main Place. Total nightmare. Took 10 minutes to get into the parking lot because it’s behind the mall. They had cops directing traffic, but weren’t making it clear just who they were gesturing to. And then there was turning left into the parking structure at a blind curve with oncoming traffic. Much more crowded — seemed like it was also a hangout mall, in addition to people shopping. Even after doing a full circuit, neither of us found anything suitable for presents. Though we did find a good gelato place. Incidentally, there are some Nirvana songs that are just not appropriate for a store called “Simply Kids,” even if it is primarily an anime/manga store.

The Block. Much nicer. Again, easy to get into the parking lot. At least seemed less crowded. Disappointed to find that Earthbound Trading Company is gone, but managed to actually find stuff for people. Dinner at Tu Tu Tango. Sitting down was a nice change.

Aftermath. Got home, got ready to start wrapping presents for people we’re going to see tomorrow. Remembered we were out of Scotch tape. So I got back in the car & took a trip to the grocery store. They were out of regular ½” Scotch tape. Fortunately, they had 5,000 displays of 3-packs of ¾” tape scattered around the store.

Current Mood: 🙁exhausted

Music, Christmas, and Deadlines

Ended up missing my company’s Christmas party this year because we had tickets to see Tori Amos at the Grove on Saturday. Good concert, but our feet were pretty much dead by the end of the standing show. Sometime I’ll have to post the experience of trying to eat at El Torito Grill beforehand.

Meanwhile, everyone at my office hopped on a bus last Friday at noon to go out to Las Vegas. Apparently they did a murder mystery dinner for the actual party. It was a bit eerie afterward.

Still scrambling to finish a website at work. Also trying to finish some articles that I’m contributing to a book about the Flash. And Christmas shopping? Hah!

5 days before Christmas is a bad time to find out that you’re almost out of scotch tape, but I suppose it’s better than finding out at 8pm on December 24.

Current Mood: busy

Thanksgiving Weekend

Wednesday: Scrambling to finish a section of this big web project for work so that the client could test things over the weekend, and still get out early enough to pick up alenxa when her office closed at 3. Planned to leave at 2 & hit the comic store first, but got out at 2:50. So I went straight to pick her up, and we got stuck wading through pre-TG traffic and grocery store madness. (Gripe: The express lane clearly says cash only. Why do some people insist on paying with a check anyway? (Answer: because the store doesn’t want to lose that sale, so they call over a manager to take it, and thereby inconvenience all 12 people waiting for the process — which takes 10 minutes instead of 1 for some reason — instead of inconveniencing the one person who really should have been in another line in the first place. Thus do we reward people being either clueless or inconsiderate.)) Helped Katie a bit w/ baking.

Thursday: Thanksgiving lunch w/ Katie’s family. Worked out pretty well, since it meant neither of us needed to eat dinner.

Friday: Holed up in the apartment, venturing forth only to run by the pharmacy. Re-read first 3 volumes of Scott Pilgrim & read the new one. Still holding up.

Saturday: Drove out in the Tustin Foothills/Lemon Heights area to take advantage of the really clear air and see what I could see. Got to see Catalina Island from about 10 miles inland. Also between this and a similar drive early in October, I have some interesting before & after pics of some of the hills touched by the Santiago fire. It got a lot farther north than I thought. Edit: Forgot to mention, got a kick out of driving around the wealthy enclave with “Sinister Ducks” playing on the iPod. Gotta love random.

Then afternoon & evening for a secondary Thanksgiving dinner w/ my parents & brother, who’s out visiting from Florida (but moving to San Fransisco next month). Haven’t seen BSG: Razor yet. Will probably watch it tonight.

Sunday: Ran errands, went to see Beowulf in 3D. Sushi & tempura for dinner (Maki Maki has a teriyaki chicken roll, plus everyone has veggie rolls), then minor shopping.

Monday: I think we may have finished off the leftovers, except for a turkey leg.

Somewhere in all this I took a few hours to pare down my inbox from ~650 messages to ~250, mostly by filing and deleting things I’d already dealt with or didn’t need to (though I replied to a couple of things). Probably around 40 of the remaining items are to do/to read items I sent myself. At some point I’ll need to do this with my work mailbox.

Current Mood: 😴sleepy

Halloween, Nanowrimo, Pushing Daisies

Last night we got the biggest Halloween crowd we’ve had in years. Which isn’t saying much, since it was only around a dozen kids, but I think there were a couple of big groups that collided, because about 6 or 7 of them showed up at the same time. alenxa redid her Sylar Victim makeup, and scared some of the kids. (One actually asked, “Does that hurt?”) After that first round, she stayed in the back room and I handed out the candy.

Official NaNoWriMo 2007 ParticipantSince I was up late anyway last night (making sure everything on the laptop worked after upgrading to Leopard), decided to get an early start on Nanowrimo after midnight rolled around. Only jotted down 135 words (including the title & byline), but it’s a start. Then I spent too much time looking around the site for counting tools and such. Should’ve gone to bed as soon as I stopped writing. I’ll probably be blogging progress reports over at K2R this year, instead of here. Haven’t decided for sure yet. Here’s my profile.

Pushing Daisies continues to be fun. Anyone else here watching it?

Current Mood: 😴sleepy
Current Music: The End of the World, Gin Blossoms

Cool

The theme of the day, at least for me, has been trying to keep cool. I went to see Transformers (and I have some things to say about it at K²R) in part because I was curious, in part because I found a Regal movie pass I’d forgotten, but in part because movie theaters are air conditioned better than our apartment is.

Came back mid-afternoon. Rehydrated. Opened up all the windows since it had gotten to the point where it was just as hot inside as outside, and at least outside had a breeze. Thought about swimming, then thought about just sticking my head under the shower for a minute. Finally settled on swimming, for the first time in several years.

We’ve been in this apartment for something like 6 years, and until today, neither of us had ever used the pool. The last time I swam was on our 2003 trip to Hawaii with the IVC choir (with alenxa of course, and also andrea_wot and zehntaur, though I can’t recall whether either of them were on that side trip), when we stopped at a small bay on the north shore of Oahu. That was salt water, so buoyancy was another issue. (On a related note, every time I walk down the main aisles of the Spectrum, I get stopped by the “Wonders of the Dead Sea” spa people. It’s getting to the point where I want to start responding, “Yes, I have heard of the Dead Sea!” and then rattling off a bunch of facts about it. Then telling them I still don’t want their spa products. Do I look like their target audience?)

Treading water is more tiring than I remember. And I seem to have no natural buoyancy. When I lie on my back, I have to flap my arms and legs from time to time or my face starts sinking below the surface. Still, I was out there for about an hour, trying to keep out of the way of the family teaching their two kids to swim (I think it was the mother and an aunt, with the father sitting out on the deck). When I realized that my eyes were clouding up with chlorine, and my fingers were beginning to look like prunes, I climbed out and walked on unsteady legs back to the apartment, rinsed off, and collapsed for a few minutes.

It’s still warm, but it’s a manageable warmth. Evening should be more comfortable.

Current Music: Aimee Mann, Ghost World
Current Location: home

Fun with Electricity! (Also Coffee and the Bust of the Year)

Heat wave + 3-day weekend = way too much hot air trying to sneak into the server room. Extra measures are being taken to ensure that the server AC can keep things cool, but I’m probably going to spend much of the weekend worrying about getting a “Server X down” SMS.

Brownout during lunchtime. I was at the Spectrum food court. All the lights flickered off and back on, and the muzak went silent for just a second. Twice. Here at work, most of the desktop machines rebooted. (Servers, of course, are on UPS.)

Coffee Crisis! Coffee maker at work shut off this morning just a few cups in. Determined that the power outlet had gone dead. Tried plugging it into another outlet, via extension cord + power strip. Power strip started buzzing, then circuit breaker tripped. Further analysis of coffee maker’s plug identified melted, cracked plastic. The company we lease it from can’t send out a replacement ’til Tuesday.

So, only 3 cups of coffee for the entire office. No gladiatorial combat, oddly enough. Though I did joke that it must be a fiendish plot by the cafe downstairs to sell more coffee.

Bust of the Century: Yesterday afternoon, got onto the 405 and immediately got stuck in traffic. Turned out to all be rubbernecking from something going on by the side of the road, where police were searching a stopped car. Lots of them. At least 5 squad cars, from at least 2 different cities, and a sheriff’s car.

Current Location: work

Independence Day

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.

July 4, Reading, Weekend

Spent Saturday afternoon shopping for alenxa’s parents’ birthdays. Not terribly exciting, though we did go to Javier’s for lunch. We’ve never been there for dinner, because they’re always terribly crowded and they won’t take reservations for only two people. But we’ve always walked straight in for lunch. Sunday was mostly spent with the previously-mentioned relatives.

I finally got around to reading The Time Traveler’s Wife (thanks, andrea_wot!) Very much a character study: what would spontaneous, involuntary time travel do to someone, and to the people around him?

Plans for July 4: Head down to Laguna Beach before sunset & find a good spot to watch the fireworks display. They launch them off of the bluff to the north of the main beach. I think it was 3 years ago that we first tried going there, but arrived too late. We were walking down Broadway, and could hear the finale, but by the time we made it to PCH, it was too late. We spent some time at the Diedrich Coffee across the street to let the crush of cars dissipate a bit. Then the year after that I was sick, so we just walked down the street to see what we could of the local fireworks display. Last year we made it out to Laguna on time and found a spot on the beach well before the fireworks started, which was nice. Again, we stopped at Diedrich before leaving.

This year, Diedrich is gone. There’s a Starbucks about 300 feet away, but it’s just not the same. (And, of course, Starbucks is quite literally responsible for Diedrich being closed!) There’s apparently one more coffee place in walking distance — Coffee Pub on Forest, which looks pretty close to where we parked last year. Maybe we’ll give that a try.

Pirates of the Coffee Bean

Dread Pirate KatieWent out to see Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End on Friday. alenxa wore her pirate costume again (previous versions at last year’s Pirates and, in a more appropriate setting, on the deck of the H.M.S. Surprise). We got to the Irvine Spectrum around 6:15, and ended up about 30 feet from the front of the line for the 8:30 showing. We had pizza from the food court, and later chocolate chip cookies from Donna B’s.

Since some moron genius decided to chop the courtyard in front of the movie theater in half and put in more shops (have they filled the shops in the last expansion, yet?), the theater has had to get a little creative in finding room for lines. Ours started between California Pizza Kitchen and P.F. Chang’s. Being off in the corner, we only got to see the pirates in our own line.

Anyway, the movie was a lot of fun. My main objection was that it got hard to keep track of all the double-, triple-, and quadruple-crosses. Despite what the reviewer for the L.A. Times thinks, it doesn’t require intimate knowledge of the previous films. All you have to know are who the major players are, and how they stand in relation to each other. You can do that by seeing the other films once while sober.

It let out around 11:30, and we went looking for a place that was still open to get something to drink. We stopped at Coffee Bean, where we discovered all the employees were dressed up as pirates. The guy at the counter was impressed with Katie’s costume, saying she was the first serious pirate they’d had all night (I guess they all stayed closer to the theater?) and gave us our drinks for free.

The rest of the weekend

The old year passes

Friday, Dec. 22. Finishing key stuff at work before leaving on vacation. alenxa  had the day off, but was sick. Dinner with maldis , andrea-wot , and zehntaur at Koji’s (shabu-shabu). Service was surprisingly terrible, but the company was great.

Saturday, Dec. 23. Shopping, by myself. Hit the Block, Main Place, and (briefly) the Borders at South Coast. Much weirdness.

Sunday, Dec. 24. Katie was well enough that we both went shopping. Finished up at South Coast. Which actually wasn’t bad for the first few hours. We got their around 11:00-11:30, parked less than 100 feet from a mall entrance, and the crowds were light. We ran into some former classmates at Williams Sonoma (well, Katie did — I was dealing with the cashier), then went across to the former Crystal Court to hit a couple of stores. Had lunch, hits a few more stores, came back to the main section of the mall…which had gone insane in the two hours we’d been gone. Left around 4:00 and spent the evening wrapping presents while Katie baked.

Monday, Dec. 25. Christmas. Went to my parents first for lunch, then we all drove down to visit my grandparents in Temecula. Ended up getting lots of pictures of my aunt’s dogs as they explored the back yard. Dinner was late due to an inaccurate or simply misprinted recipe that indicated a cooking time for the roast about two hours shorter than necessary, but on the plus side, leaving late meant there was practically no traffic except for the mile or two leading up to the 15/91 interchange in Corona.

Tuesday, Dec. 26. Dropped Katie off at work, then spent the day on a mix of Internet, running errands, and doing laundry. After work, went down to Laguna Hills Mall so I could pick up my tux and Katie could look for some of the last-minute checklist items for maldis  and kayshabeast ‘s wedding. Had dinner at an Italian restaurant in the area called Scarantino’s.

Wednesday, Dec. 27. Drove into LA for the wedding. I’ve done this trip in ~40 minutes in good traffic, but allowed 2 hours because traffic is rarely good. Remembered a time in high school when the Literary Club went to see a matinée of Les Miserables at the Pantages. In the middle of the week. Leaving at lunchtime. On the Wednesday after Christmas. And despite allowing 2 hours, ended up at our seats literally as the opening fanfare began. Realized this didn’t bode well. As it turned out, everything was clear and fast up until we hit the 91, at which point it dropped down to stop-n-go. Arrived at the Bonaventure at 3:00, just in time for check-in, and managed to drop stuff in our room, then get back down to the lobby.  Wandered around trying to figure out which part of the lobby we were supposed to wait in, briefly met Sean, Nicola, Chris and H’Sien, ended up waiting for the second round of the “shuttle” and made it to the rehearsal around 4.  The rehearsal, dinner, and after-dinner get-together could probably fill its own post (and besides, 2/3 of the people reading this were there).

Thursday, Dec. 28.  Breakfast downstairs in the hotel.  Katie went off for the bridesmaids/groomsmaids hair+make-up session.  I hopped on the Internet to check some work-related stuff, then walked around downtown LA sightseeing.  I’ve never just spent time in the area.  It’s always been a place to go for events.  Drive in to see a play, drive out.  Drive in to visit a museum, drive out.  Got a little nervous when I realized I was walking around a major US city taking photos of buildings, but no security guards with too much time on their hands told me to stop.  Grabbed lunch at a deli, sat down and was asked for change as I was unwrapping my sandwich.  Decided to take it back to my hotel and eat it there.  Went over to the groomsmen call, and we’re again into wedding territory.  The wedding went very well, and again, I’ll jot stuff down in its own post.  Too tired to go to the post-reception party at the hotel, though.

This way to weird LA photos…

Friday, Dec. 29.  Slept in a bit.  Packed.  Went downstairs for a light breakfast, then went back to grab luggage and check out.  Stopped on the way back to have lunch with alenxa’s parents.  Got home earlier than expected, so we stopped at home to unload the car.  Katie took a nap (she’d started coming down with a cold the night before).  Went out to return the tux, then went to Katie’s cousin’s for a semi-Christmas dinner.

Saturday, Dec. 30.  Mostly errands and stuff.  Finally put away the sea of wrapping paper and ribbons left over from Sunday and Tuesday.

Sunday, Dec. 31.  More random stuff.  Watched the Claymation Christmas Special from the 1980s, which I had tracked down on DVD earlier in the year mainly to show Katie the “We Three Kings” sequence.  (The three kings are camped in the desert, singing each verse solemnly, and then the camels jump in with an upbeat version of the chorus.  After a while, the kings start glancing warily at the camels as they near the end of a verse.  The whole show has a sort of off-beat humorous tone to it.)  Picked up work on my website after several weeks’ break.  Katie baked brownies, and we went over to my parents’ annual New Year’s Eve party.  At one point, someone dragged out a tape of Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind, a 1980 parody of Close Encounters done in the form of an extended trailer.  It still holds up, and is funny enough on its own terms, even if (like me) you don’t remember much about the original film.

Monday, Jan. 1.   Lunch & coffee with wayens.  (Though, come to think of it, I’m not sure any of us had actual coffee.)  More errands (mostly stuff I forgot to get the day before). Watched a pair of Justice League episodes. Really got back to the Flash site.  Intended to go to bed early, but ended up staying up late again.

Weirdness of Xmas Shopping

Heh, forgot I’d started this post over a week ago…

Shopping, two days before Christmas.

Heard a dance mix of “The Christmas Song” (yes, the one about chestnuts roasting on an open fire).

Saw a “Sci-Fi” display in Borders that consisted entirely of incarnations of Firefly – the TV show DVDs, the Serenity DVD, and the graphic novel.

Saw a kid wearing a T-shirt proclaiming, “I’m allergic to my brother.”

Heard (on Indie 103.1, not in the mall) songs proclaiming “*bleep* no, there’s no Santa Claus!” and “Father Christmas, give us some money.”

Asked about a book at Borders. The clerk looked it up, they were out of stock, but he offered to call another store and have them hold the book for me. Five hours later, when I got to the front of the line at the other Borders, the clerk I ended up with (one of four on duty at the time) said she had been the one on the other end of the phone.