Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today, I took Lucinda and her friend Claire out to the Los Angeles County Fair. We went out early in the day, when they were running the $1 special for tickets. It was a perfect day for the fair. It was hot, but only a normal sort of hot for Pomona. The heat wave of the last week finally broke, so we were able to enjoy the day.

The fair is known for some weird foods. And we were immediately reminded of this by the sign advertising chocolate-covered pickles. Yikes. We were not up for trying that. We did try the chocolate-covered bacon, which was decidedly weird. I kept thinking that the chocolate would have been better without the bacon. It wasn’t bad, but the bacon didn’t really add anything other than some crunch and just plain weirdness. And we also didn’t want to try the “Totally Fried Fair Special”.

We stopped by the food exhibit to see if I’d won anything with my baked goods. I hadn’t really expected to win, but I figured it would be an interesting adventure no matter what. And I did see my Black Walnut Bread on display, which was rather novel, even if it didn’t win anything.

They have a lot of concerts at the fair, and one I saw on the schedule was kind of amusing. Apparently, Creedence Clearwater Revival has been revived in some form, now 40 years later. But since the original name of the group had the word ‘Revival’ in it, what could they call it? “Creedence Clearwater Revisited“, of course.

Lucinda and Claire rode a lot of the rides, and they ran through many of the fun houses, too. We went and saw the farm animals, and they got to pet some sheep and goats. They also played a few midway games.

Through all of this, we could see the smoke plume from the Station Fire burning off in the distance. The wind was blowing the smoke away from us and up to the high desert, so the air where we were was fine. But it still looked kind of ominous.

Overall, it was a fun day.

On Saturday, I took Lucinda and her friend to the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum so they could see the butterflies on the last weekend of the exhibit. They have the butterflies there every summer from the end of May through Labor Day. This was the first time I’d taken her to see them since 2004.

When we got there, there was a tremendous crowd of people in the the park, and we realized that there was a USC football game about to start in the Coliseum next door to the museum. This made getting inside a bit of an adventure, and if I’d known about this, we might not have gone today, but we were already there, so we made do.

The butterflies are in a large outdoor cage, sort of like a small aviary. They enjoyed seeing the butterflies flying around, and also finding some caterpillars, spiders, and other insects there. One of the docents helped them to find some of the more interesting sights, including the web of the spider that inspired E. B. White to write Charlotte’s Web.

Afterward, we went inside for the “Dinosaur Encounter“, where they had an animatronic dinosaur that came out and walked around the room. It was a pretty good effect. We’ve seen robotic dinosaurs before, most recently a few weeks ago when we went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park, but this was the first time we’d seen one that actually walks around free. It was quite novel.

Finally, we spent some time looking at the gems and minerals exhibit before going home. It was a fun afternoon.

I took part of the afternoon off so that Lucinda and I could bake blueberry muffins, black walnut bread, and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies to enter in the Los Angeles County Fair. It was unbearably hot in the kitchen, but in the end, everything turned out quite nicely. Then we made the trip out to the Fairplex to deliver everything. The guard gave us directions, and we drove through the fairgrounds to the hall where the food exhibit will be held. They put little tags on everything I brought, and now we’re done. Apparently, they don’t announce the results. You have to go to the fair to find out. But we’re looking forward to going to the fair anyway. After all, what’s not to like about a place where you can get chocolate-covered bacon?

It’s been almost a year and a half since Cathy moved out, and the space where the couch used to be has been empty the whole time. Today, it was miserably hot here in Pasadena, and Lucinda and I were looking for something to do indoors. So we decided to go look for a couch.

We went to IKEA and had a look there. In the end, we both liked one that’s really a sort of futon-like couch that can double as a bed, but not a very good one. More for occasional use only. But that’s all right. We don’t want it for the bed. We just liked how it looked and felt as a couch. So we go that and some pillows and a coffee table.

On a whim, we went through the lighting section, and I got a pair of small under-cabinet kitchen lights. I’d had the idea of putting some lights like that on top of the new cabinets in the dining room. This would be so that we could have some soft indirect lighting in there for times when we don’t want the harsh overhead light on, but where candles are just not enough. So I made a wooden housing for them, complete with a switch box on the end to control the two lights independently. And the second picture shows what it looks like. It’s a nice effect.

I’d set a goal of having a new couch by the end of 2009, so I guess I can cross that one off my list now.

On Thursday, I took a vacation day to take Lucinda and her friend Claire to Disneyland. I’d promised her I’d take her one more time before school starts. It was very hot, which made for a sweaty day, but it also kept a lot of other people away. So the lines were very short.

The highlight of the day had to be when Claire and I convinced Lucinda to try Gadget’s Go Coaster in Toon Town. The last two times we were there, I rode it with Claire while Lucinda sat on a rock and watched us. She was pretty apprehensive about it, but at the end of the run, before the train even stopped, she said, “That was so much fun! Let’s do it again!” So we ended up riding it three times in a row.

We were there from 11:00AM until nearly 7:00PM. Then we went for the obligatory dinner at the Jazz Kitchen in Downtown Disney before heading home. I like to make a point of ending our days there, since the pictures from there have provided me a good measure of my progress in surviving the sturm und drang of the ongoing divorce process.

And yes, it was a very fun day.

On Sunday afternoon, Lucinda asked if we could go on another bike ride. So I took her on another local sightseeing ride. This time to see the Bunny Museum. It’s only about a mile or so from our house, although it’s all uphill to get there. So I took her there by a roundabout route that broke the climbing up into small chunks. The we stopped to admire the giant topiary rabbit in the front yard, and all the other bunnies around the yard. Then we rode home, which was all downhill.

This past weekend I took Lucinda down to San Diego. The plan was to visit Grandpa, and also to go to the Wild Animal Park. We went down on Sunday afternoon. When we got there, we picked up Grandpa and headed down to La Jolla Cove. I’d seen the seals there the last time I was in San Diego, and I knew Lucinda would like seeing them, too.

When we got there, there we no seals. There were people on the beach, and the seals were all out in the water. They were just sort of bobbing in the waves and waiting for the people to leave. Whenever one would make a move to come up on the beach, a bunch of people with cameras would run over toward it. And of course, the seal would get scared off. Rule #1 of wildlife photography is: You get better pictures when you don’t scare the animal away.

After the seals, we headed down to Balboa Park for dinner at Prado. As always, it was great, even if my friend Laura isn’t the manager there any more.

Since we hadn’t really seen the seals, I promised Lucinda that we could go back there in the morning. And we did. They were all snoozing on the beach. Lucinda enjoyed seeing them, and I got some good seal photos. As always, my camera rocks.

After seeing the seals, we had breakfast and headed up to the Wild Animal Park. We went on the tram ride around to see the African animals. Then we went and saw some of the other exhibits. We signed up for the ‘Photo Safari’ tour in the afternoon. This is the one where you ride in a stake-bed truck out into the Africa exhibit, and you can hand-feed a giraffe. I knew that Lucinda would like this. And it was fun. We all got to feed the giraffe, and also get licked by the big giraffe tongue. After that, we saw some more exhibits and the bird show before heading home. It was a nice weekend.

More photos are here.

I bought Lucinda a new bike last Monday, and she’s been excited to go riding. So we’ve gone on a few short rides in the evening, and today, I took her on a small sightseeing ride. She asked to go somewhere without hills, and not too far away. So we rode down to see the weird castle-house I found in Pasadena some time ago.

It was a nice day for riding, and we even stopped off on the way home and got a new lamp for the house at a yard sale.

Last month, I went to see Cirque Berzerk. I liked it a lot, and I told Lucinda about it. And after hearing about it, she wanted to see it. Since the show had been extended into August, we had a chance, and we went tonight.

She thought that the crowd was pretty amusing. A lot like the crowds she’s seen when she went to tattoo conventions with me. And the show was great fun. She said that her favorite was the trampoline act, but that she liked all the acrobatics. It was a fun little evening, even if it did make for kind of a late night for us.

On Saturday afternoon, I took Lucinda and her friend to see “G-Force” at the El Capitan in Hollywood. We’ve been seeing previews for this movie for a while, and they were pretty excited to see it. The tickets for the El Capitan were a bit more than at the regular theater, but they included a visit to the “G-Force Experience” attraction across the street. This made it more than worth the extra price for the tickets. The movie was very entertaining, even if I just couldn’t shake the idea that Agent Darwin looked just like a slightly furrier John McCain.

The “G-Force Experience” included life-sized games for the kids to play, set dressings from the movie, an obstacle course for the kids (and parents) to run through, and a show. It was great fun, and we had a very nice afternoon there.