Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today we all went to the Science Museum in Exposition Park to see the Risk exhibit. This is about probability and perception of risk. It was pretty interesting. It also seemed somewhat appropriate, since fires are raging in the mountains. Lucinda was a bit afraid of the bed of nails at first, but after she tried it, she liked it enough to do it six more times.

There were also some exhibits on the second floor from the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

http://www.1134.org/lucinda/photos/index.php?string=&ayear=2003&amonth=10&aday=26&byear=2003&bmonth=10&bday=26&submit=Search

After the museum, we all had dinner at El Torito before going home.

Today we had two adventures. First, we went on a short hike in Rubio Canyon. We got to see some of the remains of the old Mt. Lowe Railway. We didn’t get far enough up the trail to see the big landslide that covered the waterfalls, though.

After this, we went to Griffith Park to see the L.A. Live Steamers, but when we got there, the sign said that they were closed today. So we went next door to Travel Town to see the trains there. Lucinda had fun climbing on the trains.

After all this, we had lunch at Chevy’s in Glendale.

I noticed that we are getting another surge of activity on the dead dot-com page. This time it’s coming from a Spanish site at www.putalocura.com.

We went to the Pasadena History museum today to see “Next Stop – Pasadena – From Red to Gold”. This presented the history of rail transportation in Pasadena. It was pretty interesting seeing the old photos and artifacts.

Then we went to see “The Weather Underground”. This is a documentary about the Weathermen and their attempts at overthrowing the U.S. government from about 1969 to 1980. Now they are pretty much all settled middle-class folks, so it was interesting seeing them now and how they were then.

Today was the Inkslingers Ball. This is the big event of the tattoo social scene. It was a fun time.

Lucinda had a sleep-over at Aunt Maggi’s, and so we went out to a party on Saturday night. On Sunday, we hiked up Echo Mountain before heading down to pick up Lucinda.

Today we went to San Pedro to ride the San Pedro Trolley. This is a 1.5 mile section restoration of the old Pacific Electric line along the waterfront. They have two cars that are new replicas of the old Red Cars, and one actual restored old car. We rode on Car 501, which is one of the replicas, and along the way, we passed Car 1058, which is the restored original Red Car.

We rode the trolley from to the end of the line and visited the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium. This is a nice, small aquarium that is focused on exhibiting local Pacific marine life.

Lucinda went to a wedding with Aunt Maggi this evening, so we had a night out. We had dinner at El Torito, and then went to an art opening at Ojala in Echo Park. The show was “In Los Angeles Something is Always Burning” with artwork and poetry about the L.A. ‘disaster lifestyle’. It was pretty amusing. We bought a print of a photo that wasn’t part of the show, but was a nice stylized photo of the towers of Downtown L.A. framed by the ever-present palm trees.

We had a long weekend, so here’s what we did:

Sunday we took a trip to Orange County so that Lucinda could visit with Grandma and Grandpa Tarantino.

While they played with Lucinda, we went to Caspers Wilderness Park and did some hiking. We walked up the West Ridge Trail, making a big loop around the west side of the park. It was kind of hot, but still a pleasant hike. Even though the hills there are not all that big, the amount of up and down in the trail made it pretty hard overall.

We took Lucinda to the Natural History Museum Saturday. We saw the butterflies, and then we spent the rest of the afternoon in the Discovery Center. Lucinda likes playing in there, since they have a lot of things to touch and see, as well as live-animal demonstrations. They also have the Insect Zoo, which she finds interesting.

Today we rode the Metro Gold Line. It was a pleasant ride into downtown, and then we took the Red Line subway to Hollywood. Below are a few pictures from the ride.