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Just another earthquake in Southern California. Yesterday's was the biggest I've felt since moving back here in 2005. I was at work. The building jolted, the windows creaked. People got up from their chairs, walked into the hallways, looked at each other and went "oooh, earthquake."
The big one will hit eventually. They've been talking about it for ages. I remember in 1986 everyone at school was talking about how Nostradamus predicted the big one would hit that year. I was so scared I slept on the floor of my parents' room and piled all our canned food next to me.
Where I like to go and where I like to take visiting friends and family:
- Huntington. My favorite place in LA. Skip the art exhibits and just walk around the grounds. The Desert Garden (esp the Succulent Greenhouse) is a must see. And the much anticipated Chinese Garden opens in February.
- Griffith Observatory. My second fave place.
- Norton Simon Museum
- Santa Monica Farmers Market
- Broadway in Downtown
- A movie at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery or at one of the historic theaters downtown
I haven't given much thought to earthquakes since moving to LA. I mean, it's always in the back of my mind, but I don't really worry about it. I think I worried more about terrorist attacks when I lived in NY than I do about earthquakes now. Still, The Big One is coming. Apparently, a big one hit Peru yesterday.
Are earthquakes the scariest of natural disasters? I guess it depends on where you are. If you're home, then maybe not so scary. If you're in a highrise and you can feel the building sway from side to side, then that's scary. I used to work in the tallest building in LA and was told that it was built to withstand a very powerful earthquake because it was set on rollers (whatever that means). I'm glad that I now work in a short, but new, building. I take comfort in knowing that Eagle Rock is a good 20 miles or so from the beach, so death by tsunami is highly unlikely.
There is a small town in Chilean Patagonia called Puerto Aisen that has had over 7,000 earthquakes this year. It's just been rumbling for months. None of the quakes has been as big as the one in Peru, but the locals are bracing for the big one. It's torn families apart and driven some to alcoholism.
August is here and I realized on Friday that we have not once been to the beach this summer. We're not really beach people and we don't actually live close to the beach, but still this was shocking to me. What a shame, living in LA and all. The last time we went to the beach was probably last summer.
So we put on our bathing suits, packed our 50 spf sunscreen, slipped on our flipflops and headed west. We decided to go to Venice Beach, one of the more laid back of the LA beach communities. We took five freeways to get there. The 2, the 5, the 110, the 405 and finally the 90. After circling around for street parking we bit the bullet and paid $15 to park all day.
Aaah, the Venice boardwalk. If Berkeley were on the beach, this would be it. The smell of incense and pot. A few street performers and a few more drunkards. People riding their beach cruisers. People getting their first tattoo. It's all here. I sang the theme song to Three's Company as we walked, even though I know they lived in Santa Monica.
Mr. Octopus braved the yellow green water, as I watched from dry land. It felt good to be out in the sun. Small planes flew banners advertising the movie "Hot Rod." Indian people went into the water with their clothes on. A family of French tourists struggled for a half hour to put up a tent. We met up with some old friends at the Figtree Cafe and had a three hour lunch.
We pulled up to our driveway at 6pm, groggy from being in the sun all day. But there was no rest to be had because we were meeting friends at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery for a screening of Pee Wee's Big Adventure. For anyone visiting LA in the summer, I highly recommend seeing a movie at the cemetery. They screen every Saturday, projecting the movies against the backside of the mausoleum. Bring your friends, blankets and booze and picnic as the sun goes down. If you want to take a walk, you can lay some flowers on Rudolph Valentino's grave or pay your respects to Cecil B. DeMille, Mel Blanc and Johnny Ramone.
The cool thing about going to a movie in LA is that you never know who you'll see. Take, for instance, Pee Wee himself. He walks the streets among us, but who knew he would be at the cemetery. The crowd went wild when the emcee introduced him. The crowd got on their feet, hooting and whistling, looking at each other thinking, no WAY. Pee Wee also brought out the ladies who played Dottie and Simone. The cemetery screens Pee Wee every year and the crowd had a lot of hard core Pee Wee fans. The kind of people who get up and dance Pee Wee style when the tequila dance scene comes on. You figured these people probably saw Pee Wee in the theater 20 some years ago in the theater, just like you.
I guess I've always liked cars. Or at least noticed them, recognized logos and models, stuff like that. But living in LA has made me pay even more attention. Now I notice things like rims. The other day I said to my friend "Oh there's another car in the parking lot exactly like mine, except mine has better rims." Laughable, but that's a fact. My car has better rims.
By golly I got it! That weight I've put on over the last year is because I haven't been walking as much (ahem, at all) since moving out of NYC. It's not the food or the gym or my age-- it's that sitting on my ass in my car has replaced walking and standing on those hot subway platforms. Duh!
This crystal clear moment came to me as we were walking along Smith St in Brooklyn yesterday. It was a warm and sorta muggy day in the city and the roughly 10 block walk from the Carroll St station to Atlantic Ave had me feeling tired and gross. This was really pathetic because I used to power walk down this stretch without thinking anything of it.
Now that I've figured out the problem, I need a solution. LA isn't so walkable, so maybe I need to hit the treadmill most days after work...
The fire burning in Griffith Park.
This afternoon. And into the evening.
LA is the hippest city in the world. It's official. With movie folk and beach babes on the westside, indie rockers and hipsters on the eastside, and bourgeois bohemians in between, there really is no doubt. Now with Posh and Becks coming to town, I mean, it's getting embarassing.
On top of all this, Wiki proclaims Eagle Rock as "a center of hipster culture in Los Angeles," which means that Eagle Rock is the coolest place in the entire universe.
I stopped at Yummy Cupcakes in Burbank on my lunch break today. I bought five cupcakes (not all for me!). I've had one (chocolate with vanilla frosting) and it was yummy, all right. They are $2.50 a pop, so a bit pricey. Cupcake inflation?
Maybe they'll name their next kid Eagle Rock.
I'm realizing that I love having a routine. I love knowing when and how I'm going to do things. For example, one of my favorite things in the whole world is Saturday morning. Not only because it's the weekend, but because I wake up, open the curtains in the living room, let the light shine in (pause), and then do the laundry (may favorite chore-- I love my washing machine) and water my plants (also a fave). All by 10am. I really like that.
The rest of my week isn't nearly as predictable, but I'm hoping it will be. I don't mean that I'm going to be on a schedule every day, every hour (8:05 read book, 8:25 put down book and scratch head). I'm not that weird. But having a routine to me means that things are going to happen, that I'm going to be productive. One of my resolutions is to exercise three times a week, so I'm trying to decide which days will be my work out days. I need some sort of schedule or else I'll just procrastinate.
Where can you hear Xanadu, Last Christmas and Safety Dance with the wind blowing through your hair? Where can you feel four inches taller and twenty years younger? At the Moonlight Rollerway in Glendale!!!
I felt like I was in a time warp. I laced up my rented skates, shuffled to the edge of the rink, leaned over and watched intently as people zoomed by. Eventually, I pushed myself onto the floor. The first few minutes were an exercise in getting some speed, turning without windmilling my arms and hoping that no one knocked me over.
It was seventh grade all over again. There were a handful of teenagers who looked like they'd been born on skates. They went backwards and forwards without any effort. They looked slightly bored as they skated. They knew the people who ran the rink. These kids were probably awkward and dorky outside the rink, but inside they were the coolest people.
We finally turned out heat on last night. What a difference! HVAC man said we should replace our ducts, but that it was fine to run the heater in the meantime. Now I can look forward to going home again!
What a joy it was to see an article in the NYT travel section on the best Chinese food in LA. Mr. Octopus and I read it and made a beeline for Chung King, a dive in Monterey Park that the author says "puts just about every other Sichuan restaurant in the United States that I’m familiar with to shame." Lovers of spicy food unite!
We ordered our dishes "medium" spicy and it came out spicier than what other places would consider "very, very spicy." From the article: You know how some Chinese restaurants have little chili symbols next to the hot dishes? Every dish in the entire first column of the menu here, with — literally — one exception, has a little chili symbol next to it. Fully half the dishes are blazingly hot — they must go through a coffee-sack of dried peppers daily — but tamed by the mouth-numbing sensation of floral-scented Sichuan peppercorns. This is a mind-body experience not to be missed: your body, abused with chilies, is crying “Please stop,” while your mind, entranced by the incredible flavors, keeps directing the chopsticks from plate or bowl to mouth and back again.
Hardly any of the staff speaks English, but that's ok. They're friendly (not the snarly sort, if you know what I mean). The resident English expert sized us up quickly and came by to point out the dishes that the article had recommended. We'll be back again...soon.
Weekends are so great now that I have no fear that I'll spend them at the office. On Saturday night we went to the corporate holiday party. It'd been a long time since I got dolled up. Putting on makeup is tricky business.
Makeup can be fun, if you know what you're doing. If you don't, then chanchow's rule of thumb is that less is more. Less eyeliner and certainly less eyeshadow. Don't try the smoky eye. As I was putting on the bronzer and the lipgloss I began to wonder why women wear makeup. I came up with a very crude theory. When you're a teenager, you do it to look older. In your 20s and 30s, you do it to look better. In your 40s on up you do it to look younger.
Sunday night was a different sort of fun. "Smiths Nite" at the Echo. Eastside Gen-Xers were out in full force reliving their happy memories and dancing to The Smiths and Morrissey.
There's something about California cold weather that really shocks your system. Last night it dipped down into the 40s, but it felt much colder than that (I can't imagine how freezing it must've been near the beach). Even Mr. Octopus, who grew up in Connecticut, said that it gets colder in LA than on the East Coast. While I don't agree with that, there is definitely something about the California cold that is different. Maybe it's the temperature swings. 80 degrees during the day, 40 degrees at night, which means that if you're out all day, then you're not wearing enough clothes to keep you warm after dinner.
To make matters worse, we haven't turned on the heat in our house. Not that we can't, we just haven't (we should!). We have an old house, with old ducts, and I think we want to get the heating system checked out (ducts cleaned, filter replaced) before we turn it on. As a result, our house is freezing. My fingertips actually turned numb this morning. We're calling some HVAC people come over soon. I'm looking forward to turning the heat on full blast next week.
Soon after I moved from Minnesota to California in 1986, I got a letter from my friend in Minnesota saying "I hear that a lot of famous people live in Burbank. You should go there." (Apparently, all of our favorite movie stars and bands had their fan mail directed to some P.O. box in Burbank.)
Twenty years later, I'm finally getting around to exploring Burbank and man, this place rocks. I'm not kidding. There are some 1950s era gems like Bob's Big Boy (the oldest Bob's still standing) and Papoo's on Riverside Drive. There's also the Toluca Lake district, which has some really beautiful old houses. I love old houses! Especially the fairy tale/storybook looking ones. There's an IKEA, Barnes & Noble, movie theater, among other life essentials. To top it off, there's the Burbank Bob Hope airport (he was a longtime Burbank resident and was supposedly very jealous that John Wayne had his own airport). It's one of those fantastic old fashioned, teeny weeny airports where the lines are short and the parking is cheap.
Good press on Eagle Rock. Yee haw! Makes me feel better about moving here at the tail end of the housing boom.
In fact, they've become even better now that I have a job where I don't work weekends. This morning the sun is shining. The sky is clear. The birds are chirping. Since Fridays are casual I'm trying to figure out what shirt I should wear with my jeans. We've got a full plate of plans for this weekend-- Flushed Away tonight, birthday party tomorrow, Volver on Sunday. And of course, there's eating in between. The older I get, the more I live to eat.
And back to watching TV. Project Runway. How do we feel about last night's episode. Did Jeffrey cheat? Do we feel bad for him? I'm starting to like Uli. Not sure that I want her to win, but I'm starting to like her more and more.
Marie Antoinette. I've seen two trailers for this movie and already I feel nauseated. I can't explain what it is that bothers me. 
It's not the story, because I don't know anything about it. I think it's the presentation. Overstylized. Overcool. Over-something. I like New Order, but I don't want it in a Marie Antoinette trailer. And The Strokes, too? Is it too familiar? It's like a trailer I would make if I had the money and the connections. Perhaps I'm flattering myself. I'll probably see the movie, but I'll fight it all the way.
