I spent about 3 weeks in late December / early January hanging with my family in California, meaning to get lots of knitting done, but that didn’t really happen. What did happen was lots of game playing, movie watching, eating, and exploring different parts of southern California… Here are highlights from the trip in photos (mostly taken with my phone or iPad)…
We had a couple massive game marathon days with my whole family – on one of those days we even made our own personalized version of Apples to Apples (that pile of paper scraps is our “card” stack… the poker chips were from earlier). For xmas eve dinner, we had our traditional appetizer trays (crackers, cheeses, meats for the meat eaters, veggies, etc) and I made my homemade pickles!
And then for xmas morning breakfast, I made these sticky buns! So good!
My mom and I did some wandering around different parts of Orange and LA counties, including a day spent in Long Beach, where I used to live for a couple years before Portland. My old favorite record store, Fingerprints, moved to a new neighborhood (from beach-y Belmont Shore, where we’d only ever go to go record shopping, to the downtown arts district, much closer to our old ‘hood), into an awesome space, so that was cool! California record prices, however, not so cool… I am so spoiled by Portland!
My mom and I also played lots of games, and took walks around my parents’ new neighborhood, which has great character (and parrots!)…
One excellent highlight for me was discovering that Santa Ana has flavors (colors!) of Kool-Aid that I can’t find in Portland – most importantly, mango! My local Food-4-Less used to have this one, and it was my favorite color for yarn dyeing! The golden orangey yellow shade was perfect for mixing with other colors to tone them down and make new shades. Anyway, they stopped carrying it a couple years ago and I’d never been able to track it down, until now! I bought up a ton of it, plus piña (which I’ve never had before, so I’m excited to see how it dyes!) and jamaica (which I’ve also never used, but it just looks like yet another shade of red); now when I run out, my parents can ship me more! Yay!
The other photo up there is our old Long Beach neighborhood taqueria, Holé Molé, where I got to grab a burrito on my last day, before flying out of the Long Beach airport. A huge highlight of spending time in California – food I can’t get in Portland! I got to have In-n-Out a couple times, Wahoo’s (blackened mushrooms, yummmm!), my favorite pizza in the world – Pizza Bakery (where I worked in high school)… nomnomnom!
Another highlight was hanging with my old kitties! Bobby, who will be turning 19 this year, is looking much different than she did in her younger years, but is super sweet, despite her snarly old-lady face and clumsiness. Sybil is also getting old, 13 or 14 I think, and is more aloof than Bobby, but when she feels like attention, she is a crazy purr machine and is very sweet! I have no new photos of Sybil, but a video of a silly habit she has, of cleaning her face by licking the wall then rubbing her cheek on it – weirdo! I don’t know if this embedding is working, so you can watch it on flickr here if it’s not showing up.
http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786
The third little beast living there is Muffin the dog, with whom I didn’t get along well when she was younger (my family got her after I moved away to college, so we never had a chance to bond), but now that she’s getting older and calmer (and doesn’t terrorize the cats so much), she’s not so bad… and her toothy underbite is darn charming:
And then I got to spend lots of time with my brother Paul, which was great!! He was in the middle of a move, so he was staying with our parents for a couple days, and then I helped him with the move a little, to this great old apartment building in LA. During the time we were both at the house, he introduced me to some awful television and I introduced him to some bizarre film, we went grocery shopping, where somehow this unicorn ended up in my cart, we played a bunch of Scene It? comedy edition… fun times!
And then I spent a few days here and there in LA, where all three of my brothers live (sort of… Santa Monica kind of doesn’t count as living in LA, since it takes Matt as long to drive from there to Hollywood as it does for him to drive to Orange County). I’m so glad I never had to drive, holy crap you guys! I grew up in that area, but after a few years in Portland, you couldn’t pay me to drive around in LA!
My mom and Paul and I got to take a tour of Ben’s new office in the downtown LA arts district – he works at Cornerstone Promotion, and the office totally reminds me of Entertainment 720, except it’s awesome and not a parody. (Yes, that is a DJ station set up in front of that massive Sonic Youth poster. More shots here.)
Below are the outside of his office building, which is owned by Crazy Gideon (who once came into their office trying to sell them a refrigerator), and part of the wall of ghetto blasters. Awesome! On the night of that LA day, I got to hang with my bros and I talked them into a karaoke bar, where I sang 4 Non-Blondes to a cramped and intimidating LA crowd, and none of them sang, but it was still fun… no photos of that though…
And on another LA day, my parents and Paul and I went to the LA Zoo! Fun!! So now, to finish off this rambly post, I’ll even things out with a few of my favorite zoo photos. There are many more on flickr, here here and the bottom half of here…
Pensive gorilla.
Dramatic chimp show.
Obese beast.
The cutest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. (I highly encourage you to check out more tiger kitten playing photos.)
So that was some of what I was up to during my leethal absence. Not much work got done (here’s a glimpse at the only thing I completed) but I missed my family, so I’m glad I got to spend that time with them. When I got home, Pete had a surprise for me:
Green bathroom! So that’s all about my trip… Now that I’m slowly getting back on track, you can look forward to a big tutorial post next week! Woo!
Lee Does Stuff 