Tag: photos

Irvine & Snow

Woodbridge Snow View 1

The whole Santa Ana Mountain range seems to have gotten snow yesterday. I took a detour on the way to work to take some pictures, and ended up on Barranca, where I remembered to stop and take some photos out by the lake at Woodbridge.

Eventually I made it up to a cul-de-sac up on Quail Hill where I took a panoramic photo of the whole area, but I probably won’t be able to stitch it together until evening. I’ve posted a few segments, though.

I’ve been posting the pictures, along with the ones I took of the San Gabriels on Tuesday, in a Flickr photoset.

Highlights

Windswept CoupleLast Friday (Oct 3): attended alenxa’s cousin’s wedding, held on a boat that cruised back and forth in Newport Harbor. Lots of people I’d only met once before — at our wedding.

Most of the week: fixing Katie’s computer. Drive dying. Needed to (a) verify that it was the drive, and just the drive. (b) get a new drive. (c) install it. (d) install Mac OS X on the new drive. (e) Transfer all the data. (a) and (e) took the longest.

Tuesday: Finished watching entire series of Blake’s 7. The good episodes hold up quite well after ~30 years. (The bad ones… well, they were bad to start with.)

Yesterday: Checked out the restaurants at the new "Diamond Jamboree" center at Jamboree and Alton. Decided to try Tokyo Table sometime when we weren’t wearing funny T-shirts.

Friday: Finished reading Gateway. About to start on Neil Gaiman’s latest, The Graveyard Book. (I skipped the reading in Santa Monica on Monday, but my brother and his fiancee went to the one in San Francisco last week…and were kind enough to send us the extra copy of the book!)

Utilization of College Impulses

I’ve been meaning to run by the UCI bookstore and pick up some new license plate frames (the original plan was to just move the old ones, but when we took them off, we realized they looked kind of ratty) — if possible, before the plates arrive. Around 11:30 or so I decided I’d run up on my lunch hour, then drop in at the Apple Store at Crystal Court (excuse me, South Coast Plaza) and see if they could give me any pointers on some weird stuff my iPod is doing. (The Googles, they do nothing.)

I hadn’t been in the bookstore in several years, and it was mostly familiar, with only shelves and departments rearranged, but this was my first visit to the new Student Center. It was actually kind of eerie, since what I’d seen of construction made it look like they’d razed the entire old building except over at the bookstore/Cornerstone (sadly, now a Starbucks) end of the place. And yet the landing in front of Crystal Cove, the hallway below it, and the landing above, all looked strangely familiar. (And I could swear the only thing changed about the restrooms was the auto-flush sensors and the graffiti.) It turns out they actually kept most of the building below the terrace intact, in some cases moving stairways or adding partitions, and mainly built around it.

Most eerie: In the checkout line, I heard “La Vida Loca,” which for some reason I associate with the Student Center Zot-n-Go.

While I was there, I remembered a photo I took of the old Student Center from the top floor of what was then the Humanities Office Building. (10 years ago, as it turns out.) I had enough time left on parking that I figured I’d run over and try to match the shot. On the way, I pulled up the website with my phone and looked at the original photo so that I could match as closely as possible. I’ll try to post the before and after photos tonight. Edit: I’ve posted the before and after photos at K2R.

UCI Student Center: 1997UCI Student Center: 2007

By then I figured I didn’t have enough time to deal with the iPod, so I’ll just wait until the Spectrum store is done remodeling and drop in next week.

Current Mood: 🤔nostalgic
Current Music: The World is Not Enough, Garbage
Current Location: work

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 Dread Pirate Katie

We went out to the Spectrum on Friday to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. alenxa dressed up for the occasion, in the latest variation of her pirate costume.

The Dread Pirate Katie

Still in Line

As you can see, she was far from the only pirate in line. Two groups ahead of us there were about 5 or six people in full pirate regalia, who swelled to around a dozen, some quite elaborate, by the time the line let in. Once their whole group was there, they got someone to take a group photo.

Oh, on the subject of those cosplay photos from Comic-Con… the 2004 set has gotten a lot of hits from people searching for Elizabeth Swann costume. PageRank can do funny things…

Smoke

It’s not particularly smoky or even hazy in the Irvine Spectrum area. It does, however, smell like a campfire outside. Just slightly east of north, a huge plume of smoke is rising from the hills, drifting west in a band across the entire northwestern sky.

Last night on the way home we could just barely see the silhouette of those same hills, outlined by a faint orange glow almost invisible against the glare of street lights and traffic signals.

I took some photos at lunch. I’ll try to post them tonight, along with some that alenxa took yesterday morning. Yesterday was really strange, because it started out foggy. The fog had mostly lifted by the time we left for work, but the beginnings of the smoke from the hours-old fire seemed to blend with the remnants of the fog.

Meanwhile, the LA Times has posted some impressive photos of the smoke and, closer up, the efforts to contain the fire.

Edit: Photos are up at K2R.

Tree!

Well, we’ve hit a milestone. The last few holiday seasons, there’s always been something preventing me and alenxa from putting up a Christmas tree. At long last, we’ve managed to accomplish this difficult feat.

You see, the way our furniture is arranged, we only have one spot in the apartment suitable for a tree. The broken desk that blocked it one year has long since been repaired. The boxes that blocked it another year have been unpacked. This year looked grim as well, but for once everything fell into place. Since we hosted a “Refugee Thanksgiving” for our friends, we had to clean the corner out. And the apartment management owed us a free carpet cleaning, so we waited a week before looking for a tree. And when we visited my grandparents that following weekend, they asked if we wanted a tree, since they’d been putting up a small one instead of a large one the last few years.

So we set it up last night, and went hunting for ornaments today. First it was storage, then my parents’ house (to pick up a collection I’d been making since childhood), then shopping. And so, I present to you: our first Christmas tree!

Our first Christmas tree (ambient light)

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Tori Amos – Snow Cherries From France

Retreat!

For those of you who haven’t already seen them, I’ve posted some of the more amusing pictures from last weekend’s camping trip (well, mostly from the drive to and from Joshua Tree) over on K-Squared Ramblings.

Also, I found that the location of the last retreat alenxa and I made it to, Cuyamaca State Park, was indeed wiped out by the Cedar fire last October. There’s a picture on the park website right now of “what’s left of an ancient oak” – a collapsed, hollowed-out trunk with burning coals still visible inside. Right next to our campsite, there was a fenced-off oak tree labeled as one of the oldest oaks in the state. The page also has a picture of the picnic area where we stopped for lunch on Saturday, showing a half-collapsed picnic table.

Current Mood: 🤔contemplative
Current Music: TMBG: Fingertips (in my head)