Stan’s Obligatory Blog

This evening, I took Lucinda to the Carpenter Performing Arts Center at Cal State Long Beach to see Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. My cousin Irene bought us tickets so that Lucinda and I could have a night out together. We saw them two years ago at Caltech, and it was a fun time.

The show was a lot of fun. As always, the ‘dying swan’ was hilarious. I still think we’d enjoy it even more if we knew more about ’serious ballet’, but it’s still fun.

This afternoon, I took Lucinda and her friend for a little adventure in Hollywood.

First, we went to West Hollywood, where we went to M+B to see the Alison Jackson: Confidential photo show. This was a fairly small exhibit, but it was very amusing. I bought the book so we can see the rest of her photos.

After that, we went to the park in West Hollywood. The girls played there for a bit before we headed back to Hollywood to visit High Voltage Tattoo. This is the shop in “L.A. Ink“, which Lucinda and I have been enjoying recently. When we were first watching it, there was a scene of a person walking out he front door, and I recognized the JONS market across the street. And I realized that the shop was right around the corner from our old condo in Hollywood. So I’d promised Lucinda that I’d take her there to visit. We gawked for a bit and I bought Lucinda a shirt. And then we went home. It was a fun little afternoon adventure.

Today is New Year’s Day, which means the Rose Parade here in Pasadena.

And my two most favorite things to see at the parade are:

• The look on the face of the kid who just marched 5 miles carrying a Sousaphone;
• Seeing a broken-down float getting towed away.

And what’s up with that ‘chin strap across the nose’ thing?

Anyway, my day was complete very early on. After that, we headed back home to see the horses. Along the way, we saw the band kids all sitting and chowing down on In-N-Out burgers. For some reason, I find that amusing, too.

We went to the parking lot where they had most of the horse trailers. Lucinda and her friend got to pet and feed carrots to the horses. While they were doing that, I watched a guy practice rope tricks, and I also got to see Miss California Rodeo.

When we went back home, we were treated to the always-surreal sight of horses grazing on suburban lawns, and people riding past our house.

It was a fun day.

For the day after Thanksgiving, we headed down to see Grandpa in San Diego. The plan was to go visit, take him to lunch at Prado, and then go see the Midway aircraft carrier museum.

The lunch at Prado was nice. We also got to see our friend Laura there. She manages the place, and it appears that she never leaves there. I guess that’s just how it is to manage a big restaurant. But the food was good, and the presentation was first-rate.

The Midway was interesting. Its active days spanned from the end of World War II through the Vietnam War. They had a lot of the older airplanes on display on the hangar deck. They also had several flight simulators on the hangar deck, and they were selling rides in them. Maybe next time we’ll have to try them.

Up on the flight deck they had newer airplanes on display. The A4 reminded me of the time when I was working in San Diego and one of them crashed down the street from my office. We heard it go by and could tell by the sound that something was wrong. We all ran to the windows in time to see the plume of smoke and the pilot drifting down on his parachute. It still amazes me that he was able to aim the plane for the parking lot between two office buildings before he ejected.

There were also exhibits about taking off and landing on the carrier. They had retired pilots giving talks to explain how the process worked. It was pretty interesting, and it’s really amazing that they are able to make it look (relatively) easy.

Overall, it was a fun day.

I also got a new sign for the Animal Crossings Gallery.

On Friday night, we went out to Santa Monica to the opening reception for “Plays Well With Others”, which is a collaborative art show with Sharon Kagan, Leslie Yagar, and Lana Shuttleworth. Lana was the artist who did the “Cone Migration” show that we saw recently.

This new show is a single large piece in the gallery. It’s a poppy field suspended from the ceiling, with poppies made from dyed coffee filters, pieces of traffic cones, and crocheted yarn. And we got to meet the artists, which was a fun time. I’d been looking forward to meeting Lana, since I participated in the Cone Migration. And in the photo, be sure to check out her purse made from traffic cones.

It was a fun evening.

This afternoon, Lucinda and I went down to Carson to see the last day’s races at the Elite National Championships at the ADT Center velodrome. We went this last year, and we liked it enough to go back this time, even though nobody we know was racing this time.

We got there just as they were starting. For some reason, we had to go through metal detectors at the door. I’m not sure what they were trying to prevent there.

The events we saw were the team sprint, keirin, team pursuit, and the Madison. They were all fun to watch, although the Madison is the best of the bunch. It has lots of action, and it lasts long enough that you won’t miss the whole thing if you go to the bathroom.

There were a few crashes in the Madison, including one that made a little gouge in the wood surface of the track. They ‘repaired’ this by putting some tape over it.

I also found it amusing that there were at least two riders competing there whose fathers were champions back in the ’70s when I raced.

The final event was an exhibition race. They have a track racing program for kids, and they had a short kids race at the end of the day. Lucinda wanted to try track racing, but when she tried getting on the bike they had there, it was just a bit too big for her. So she needs to grow about another inch or two before she can do it.

We got to see some good racing, and I got to tell a bunch of old ‘war stories’. Overall, it was a fun afternoon.

Our afternoon art adventure was a trip out to Culver City to Bandini Art to see the “Cone Migration” show. This show is all art made from traffic cones. Lana Shuttleworth placed cones all over Los Angeles and let them get beat up by traffic. Then she collected them and made art out of them. It’s an interesting idea, and the art she made was very nice.

It’s also an interactive art in a way. They had a pile of cones in front of the gallery, and visitors are encouraged to take one and ‘release it’ somewhere. So of course, we had to do this. I thought it would make for an interesting piece of performance art to take the cone along on a bike ride and place it somewhere. When we were leaving, we picked out a cone to take along.

Since we were out on the West Side, I wanted to go see the Museum of Jurassic Technology. This is sort of an art project museum on Venice Blvd. It’s kind of like entering the world of “Eraserhead“, which I thought was amusing, but Cathy found somewhat disturbing. It’s filled with lots of strange things, including an entire room devoted to memorializing the dogs of the Soviet Space program. They had large oil portraits of the dogs, including a special shrine for Laika with a little candle and a quote from Tsiolkovsky.

We all enjoyed the cone exhibit. And I liked the Jurassic Technology. It was all very deeply weird, but I like stuff like that.

Tuesday was the last day of our trip, and I had one more thing on my list to see. Since I had to be in New Jersey, I couldn’t miss the chance to visit Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst and pay respects to Joey Ramone. I’ve been a big Ramones fan for almost 30 years, so it was a necessary stop.

Chelsea* directed us to the cemetery. Then I stopped in the office to get the exact directions. The woman working there was very helpful, and she said that Joey Ramone was probably the most famous and most-requested person buried there. She told me to go to the northernmost road through the Jewish section of the cemetery. Then look for the two pillars marked “New York Social Club”. Joey is buried three rows back in that section, right next to his mother.

After that, we went down to Liberty State Park in Jersey City. Since we’d missed the Statue of Liberty on Monday, I found out that we could just make it there if we made the 12:45 boat out to the island. So we got on the boat and rode out to the statue. We didn’t have time to stop off at Ellis Island, since we had to make our flight home at 6:00. But Lucinda got to see the statue close-up, which was the whole point.

When we got back to shore, we headed over to the airport. We got there early to check in our rental car, since we’d been told we’d have to fill out an accident report. The guy who checked us in looked at the car and just said something like, “it looks fine to me” and we were done.

So we had plenty of time to have lunch while we were waiting. Then we got on the plane for the trip home. Newark is apparently notorious for delays around that time of day, and today was no exception. We left the gate about 30 minutes late, and we actually took off 90 minutes late. There was a huge backlog of planes that apparently were all scheduled to take off at 6:00.

Once we got in the air, the trip home was just fine. When we were going over New Mexico and Arizona, there were some big electrical storms below us, and it was interesting to watch the lightning from above. I tried taking pictures of it, but it was hard to do it justice.

Overall, it was a pretty fun trip.

* The GPS navigator unit offered a choice of several different voices. But Lucinda didn’t like the ‘American English’ one, since when it said ‘left’, it always sounded like ‘bleft’. So we switched it to ‘British English’, which sounded much more cultured and mannered. And that was when Lucinda decided to call it ‘Chelsea’.

Monday was our day for sightseeing New York City. We rode the train in and met Cathy’s cousin Michelle and her family at Penn Station. Then we all rode the F train up to 63rd St and Lexingon, and then walked over to Central Park.

When we got to the park, Lucinda wanted to climb the big outcrops of Manhattan Schist there.

Since we had only limited time, I wanted to go to the model boat pond to show Lucinda the statue of Alice in Wonderland there. I used to like climbing on that when I was a kid, so I thought she might like it, too. Lucinda figured this out. When we were going there, when I told her about the statue and how I liked to climb on it, she said, “So you want me to climb it so you can take a picture, right?” Our child is very perceptive.

After seeing the pond, Lucinda and Christina wanted to go to one of the playgrounds for a while. Then we walked back to Lexington Ave and got on the #6 train downtown to Grand Central. Then we took the shuttle train over to Times Square and then the #1 down to South Ferry. That’s the station that is built on a sharp curve, so there are little hydraulically-activated metal platforms that move out to meet the train doors.

When we got up to Battery Park, we found that we were too late for the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. So we just walked around the park a bit. We saw a wild turkey there. Apparently, there is a population of wild turkeys living in Manhattan now. We thought that this was kind of strange, but after seeing the bear in New Jersey, we were ready to believe just about anything. Since turkeys are not good fliers, the speculation is that they walked in over one of the bridges, which is a funny mental image.

The final stop for the day was the East Village to visit with my old friend Thaddeus. I’ve known him for about 35 years now, ever since my mother was his high-school guidance counselor. And somehow, we’ve kept in touch all these years. This was the first time I’ve seen him in many years, so we got to meet his wife and daughter for the first time. We all went out to dinner at a little Latin American restaurant across the street from their house. I was amazed at how the neighborhood along Houston St has changed over the years. I always remember it as being a place where there were groups of homeless huddled for warmth around flaming trash cans. Now it’s really quite nice there.

So, aside from missing the Statue of Liberty, we had a nice day.

Finally, I have a photo from the pond in Central Park. It’s my latest Canon commercial. Have I mentioned recently that my camera rocks?

Did you know that there are wild bears in New Jersey? I didn’t. We were going out to visit my old high school friend Steve on Friday afternoon. He and his family live in the far suburbs of Sussex County. We were going down a semi-rural road when Cathy said, “I just saw a bear.” I didn’t believe her, since seeing a bear in New Jersey seemed about as likely as seeing Bigfoot or Elvis. But she insisted that it was really a bear. So we went back to look. And there it was, just ambling across someone’s front lawn. I grabbed the camera and got a quick photo before it strolled off into the woods.

When we got to Steve’s house, his wife Kris told us that the bears are common knowledge around there. But they are not particularly abundant. She said that she’s seen them on just a few occasions in the 16 years they have been living there. So we were lucky to have seen it. With the bear we saw last year at Lake Tahoe, we’ve now seen a wild bear while on vacation for two years in a row.

We had a nice time visiting, and Lucinda had fun playing with their kids. Pictures are in our photo album.