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.

Spreading the Doom Around

Caltrans has been resurfacing the Ramp of Doom for the last few weeks. No major accidents there, though on the opposite ramp yesterday a moron tailgated me on a curve at 50 MPH while holding a cigarette in one hand and dialing a cell phone with the other (I think she must have been steering with wrist pressure alone).

Anyway, this morning… big accident at the Walnut entrance to Jamboree. Looked like an overturned (and backwards!) gardening truck. Several fire trucks, a ton of police cars, a couple of random cars that looked okay (maybe witnesses, or people who stopped to help). The ambulance was just leaving as we arrived. The ramp was completely blocked, so plan A was to continue to Harvard… along with everyone else. Harvard isn’t built for that much traffic. So, on up to Culver, over a block, and back down to Jamboree (after a 2 mile detour).

Then, after I’d dropped alenxa off, I got on the 405… and guess what? Another accident! I couldn’t quite tell what was there, since it was on the other side of the freeway, though the fire truck was on the near side at the center divider. Looked like at least 3 cars, maybe 4.

And of course a construction crew at the classic Ramp of Doom.

It was one of those mornings…

Wicked

Finished reading Wicked. Very good. Also very different from the musical. And I don’t mean in a Les Mis or Phantom condensed-the-heck-out-of-it way. I mean in a took a few high points from the book, then connected the dots with its own story way.

At least it wasn’t on the level of, say, Starship Troopers.

Electronica

I’ve finally done it. After resisting for years, I’ve bought an iPod.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. Our music collection is on alenxa’s computer, which is old enough that its USB port is USB 1.1. This hasn’t been a problem until now, since she syncs her iPod with Firewire. Little did I know that the latest generation of iPod only supports USB. I charged it this afternoon, and started the initial sync this evening. So far it’s about 1/3 through.

At least future syncs won’t be so bad.

In other news, I’ve found myself in the middle of an online firestorm twice this week. Safari for Windows and a relaunch of the Flash comic book.

Quick bits

Finished The Bard’s Tale this weekend. [Review moved to website.]

Also watched This Film is Not Yet Rated, which alternates between an expose of just how arbitrary the ratings are, and an attempt to determine just who actually sits on the ratings board, since their identities are kept secret. I think I lost faith in the ratings system in high school, when The Joy Luck Club (which we’d read for school) came out with an R rating.

Visited alenxa’s family on Sunday for her sister’s birthday.

Finally packed up the old camera to send it in for repair so we can have two cameras at Comic Con this year. We kept trading off who had the camera last year based on who was going to which panel, and kept running into “If I’d only had the camera!” moments. There’s only so much you can do with a fuzzy, fixed-focus, zoomless VGA-resolution cell phone camera.

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

Weekend Antics

Friday: Finally watched The Legend of Zorro (the second one with Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones). Much better than I expected, even if they did play fast and loose with history. Odd moment when alenxa recognized one of the actors as Ben from Lost.

Saturday: Mostly trying to catch up on my website. (Lots of new stuff in the last couple of weeks.) Ran some errands. Dropped by the local comic store for Free Comic Book Day & picked up several books, including a BSG book which is supposed to be a prequel, but which I don’t dare read until we’ve gotten a bit farther along in watching the show. Also felt I ought to buy something, and not just grab the free stuff, so I picked up (and read) a JLA book I’d been meaning to read, Syndicate Rules. It’s a sequel to both JLA: Earth-2 (in which the Justice League meets their mirror-universe counterparts, the Crime Syndicate of Amerika) and JLA/Avengers, which I finally read a few weeks ago after picking the series up at Wizard World LA. Much better than I’d been led to expect by some of the reviews.

Sunday: Went out to see Hot Fuzz, figuring Spider-Man 3 was guaranteed to still be in theaters next week. Great fun. Keep your eyes open: Once he arrives in Sanford, no detail is wasted. I liked Shaun of the Dead better, but I think that’s largely because the genre conventions being spoofed were more straight-forward: Zombies vs. a combination cop-buddy/horror/action film.

It was amazingly clear out, since it was the first day of Santa Ana winds (though they died down by midday). I seriously considered driving up into the hills to find a nice viewpoint, but after the movie, a late lunch, and some errands, it was running late enough that we just went home.

TV Thoughts

Heroes: Excellent!

Veronica Mars: The rumors about Veronica and Piz just didn’t make sense. Then I saw the first 30 seconds of the episode, and it suddenly made perfect sense. Can you say rebound?

Lost: Locke did exactly what Ben wanted him to. The others are big on the concept of “good people.” If he’d killed his father himself, he wouldn’t have qualified to join. Getting Sawyer to do it proves that he’s resourceful and manipulative enough to get “bad people” to do the dirty work for him — just like Ben manipulated him into blowing up the sub.

So, how long did it take to pull the trigger on Locke’s dad, the con artist, being the original Sawyer? 1 year? 1½?

Also, I’m operating under the assumption that the wreckage was either planted or simulated. I never liked the “they’re all dead and in purgatory” explanation, and the show’s producers have denied it several times. If they’ve reversed course on this, I probably won’t be watching Season 4 (assuming there is one).

Weekend and Wayzgoose

Friday: rain, at last! Clouds were clear in the west just before sunset, producing a really impressive red rainbow towering in the east. Did some work on my Superman-Flash Races page, restructuring it to make it a bit more accessible to the sudden influx of visitors more familiar with Lost than the Flash.

Saturday: Went to Wayzgoose at UCI. Spent some time at the CHP booth catching up with Susan, katyakoshka & Dave, wayens and others. Missed sekl, non_seqvitvr & company, though. Wandered around the School of the Arts on the way out, getting a sense of what had changed. The last few years I’ve mostly seen it at night, on the way to or from plays. Remembered I had a camera, & took some shots of the campus, but wished I’d taken some pictures back at the CHP booth. Also wished I’d taken more pictures back in college. At the moment, I can think of one roll taken my senior year, plus stuff from trips — Ren Faire, camping, etc. But not much in the way of random pictures of friends.

Stopped at the market on the way home and ended up with pizza ingredients. alenxa made pizza, and we watched the Heroes marathon.

Incidentally, this weekend confirms that Saturday evening, if you happen to be home and have to share a laundry room with other tenants, is an excellent time to do laundry. There’s no competition.

Sunday: Mostly random stuff. Errands. Watched the first few episodes of Drive, with Nathan Fillion and some other Jossverse alumni (Tim Minnear’s a co-creator, and Amy Acker shows up from time to time). More interesting than it sounded from the description. Will probably watch the new episode tonight (fortunately, it’s on before Heroes, not during). Also spent way too much time reading Lostpedia.

Current Location: work

Off-by-one error

Since I came into work on Sunday afternoon, I’ve been feeling one day off all week. Monday felt like Tuesday, Tuesday felt like Wednesday, and Wednesday felt like Thursday.

Today I’ve evidently internalized three days’ worth of “No, it’s a day earlier than that!” because I keep thinking it’s Wednesday.

Drove out to Foothill Ranch yesterday on my lunch hour just to explore a bit and get pictures of the nearby hills where you can actually see what color they are. It’s been hazy enough that from my usual vantage points, they look faded grayish yellow-brown, instead of yellow-brown. (Though by this time of year they should look green. Yay drought.)

In other news, earlier this week I watched someone zip around a truck to pass it on the one-lane uphill cloverleaf section of the Ramp of Doom. Oddly enough, car and truck made it through unscathed.

Off to UCI tonight with alenxa to see The Lark, a play about Joan of Arc by the author of Becket.

In other other news, today’s Forgotten English phrase is “crotch-trolling.” No, it doesn’t mean what you think it does.

Current Location: work