Tag: 4th of july

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

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.

The Long Weekend

Friday: Goo Goo Dolls/ Counting Crows concert at it’s-still-Irvine-Meadows-’cause-“Verizon-Wireless-Amphitheater”-just-sounds-dumb. Nifty view of the central Orange County valley before the sun set.

Saturday. Spent the day lying on the couch with a fan running, catching up on the Babylon 5 script book commentaries. So far I’ve only read about 1/4 of one script, but the introductions are a fascinating insight into the process of making the show. Given how much was out in the open (since JMS spent several hours a night online during production), some of the stuff that wasn’t revealed back then is mighty interesting. (Example: we all thought season 4 was compressed because they weren’t sure they’d get a season 5, and wanted to get as much done as they could. It turns out that at the beginning of the season, they were told in no uncertain terms that there would not be a season 5. So getting that fifth season on TNT was a real surprise.)

Dinner at CPK, then Superman Returns Enjoyed it, but no interest in seeing it again. It already felt like deja vu since there were so many references to the first two movies with Christopher Reeve. There were some great moments, but overall it was just kind of okay.

Sunday: Finished Bad Twin. Decent book, but not exactly a major insight into the secrets of Lost. Waited several hours until checking my email, at which point I discovered I really should’ve checked earlier… so I could bring a server back online. Went down to the office, brought the server up. alenxa tagged along and we had lunch at the crepe place at the Spectrum. Happened to glance over at one of the wall alcoves, which held a vinegar bottle… labeled Temeraire. After some shopping for food for upcoming family get-togethers, went home and played Heroes V for a few hours. Fortunately I was still awake when the same server went down again at 1AM. So I drove back, brought it online, figured out a way to make sure that it would automatically start up again next time, then came home. Still trying to diagnose the cause, but whatever it is does seem to like holiday weekends…

Monday: Traditionally, the 4th of July consists of hanging around at home followed by looking for fireworks. This year, both our families wanted to get together. So on Monday we went to visit my grandparents, carpooling with my parents and my brother. My aunt and her husband brought their dogs, which meant I spent most of the afternoon in a Benadryl-induced funk, despite drinking way too much Dr. Pepper to offset it.

Tuesday: I squeezed in an hour or two of Heroes in the morning, then it was off to visit Katie’s family, with more BBQ. Dinner was relatively early, so we cleared out around 7:00 so we could make it back to Laguna Beach for the fireworks display there. They launch the fireworks off one of the bluffs, out over the ocean, and the viewing is pretty good from the beach. We caught the tail end of it a couple of years ago, while driving around looking for displays. Two years ago we got there too late and missed the entire show while we walked from the car out to the beach. (Hey, have you ever tried finding parking in Laguna Beach?) Last year I was sick, so we just walked out to where we could see the local display. This year we made it with plenty of time to spare, parking up on Forest (roughly in line with the Laguna Playhouse, and maybe a few hundred feet from the entrance to Tivoli Terrace, where we had our wedding), and snagged a spot on the beach. The wind blew the smoke in our direction, so a lot of the fireworks were half-obscured, but they lit up the smoke a lot more than I can remember seeing anywhere else. After the show, we did our semi-traditional stop at Diedrich across the street.

Today: Back to work. I’ve been stress-testing the server, trying to get it to crash under controlled circumstances so I can get some information about what’s causing the problem… and it just won’t crash!