Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Tonight I went with the hiking group on yet another hike up Mt Hollywood. On the way up, I realized that I’d done this same Friday night hike this weekend last year. And that weekend turned out to be quite fun and memorable.

We took a rather steep route up, which was actually great fun. When we got to the top, we all pulled out wine and food, and we had a little party.

On the way down, I chatted with a woman in the group, and I told her my story about living in Texas, and how I decided that I don’t hate Texas any more.

It was a nice way to end the week..

Tonight I went back to Griffith Park for yet another hike up Mt. Hollywood. I’ve found that this is a very good thing to do when I need to forget my troubles and just generally forget that the rest of the world exists. It’s sort of my emotional equivalent of joining the French Foreign Legion.

So here are some random images from our 24-hour vacation to Ventura.

We brought our bikes, so we could go riding on Sunday morning.

On the way out to dinner, we saw seagulls walking around near the park, looking for food. We don’t see many seagulls inland in Pasadena.

We had dinner at a restaurant with a martini bar, so we started off with caramel-apple martinis, which was novel.

After the ride on Sunday, I took a walk while Susan showered. I saw utility boxes painted and turned into art. I also visited the Albinger Archaeological Museum and saw the excavated foundations of the original mission church.

Before heading home, we had lunch at the marina, and got a souvenir picture with a tile mural of a sea otter.

It was another nice, albeit short vacation.

Edit: (4/7/2009) And this trip has turned out to be the swan song of our relationship. It all collapsed for reasons I’m not going to go into. It’s sad, but it will be all right in the end.

I signed up for the Los Angeles Climb California stair climb. This is a timed run up the stairs of the AON Center in downtown Los Angeles. This is the second-tallest building in L.A. I’d have preferred to do the Library Tower, which is taller, but this one was available. Anyway, running up the stairs in a 62-story building just sounds like fun to me. I’m funny that way.

The only real reservation I have about this is that it’s a fundraiser for the American Lung Association. While that’s appropriate in that without functioning lungs doing the climb would be extraordinarily difficult, it’s one of those things where they want everyone doing it to bug everyone they know to make a donation. And I just don’t like doing that. So this is a problem.

Sheesh. All I wanted was to do something silly and stand on the roof of a really big building for a few minutes. So if you want to make a donation in my name, the page is here.

This afternoon, Susan and I took Lucinda and her friend to the California Science Center IMAX theater to see “Under the Sea 3-D”. We’ve been fans of the 3-D IMAX movies since going to see “Sea Monsters” last year.

When we got there, Lucinda had to try lifting the truck at the lever demonstration exhibit in the parking lot. Today was the first time that she was big enough to be able to lift it.

The movie was good, although it was a bit odd, since it was narrated by Jim Carrey. I guess he’s trying to stretch his dramatic range a bit.

After the movie, we went into the museum. Lucinda and her friend wanted to try the rock climbing wall. Apparently, it’s harder than it looks, since they only made it about halfway up. We looked around the museum a bit more before they closed. Then we headed home, after the obligatory stop in the gift shop.

It was a nice afternoon, and marks the first time that Susan and I have taken Lucinda somewhere together.

Pictures are in her photo album.

Tonight was a little live-theater adventure. Susan and I went to Hollywood to see “Divorce! The Musical“. Since I’m part-way through this rather grim process, I’m ready to laugh about it. So I figured that this would be an appropriate outing.

The mood of the show covered the range from unspeakably sad to hilariously funny, which is no mean feat. The story is about Penny and Rich, married four years and getting divorced. There are therapists, lawyers, and dirty tricks on both sides. It’s all very true-to-life. It illustrated the emotional roller-coaster ride with songs like “Lawyer Letters”, “Winners and Losers”, and “There Were Good Things”. There are snippets of a few of the songs on the show’s web site. At the end, Penny and Rich sign their final agreement, which leads in to the very poignant final song, “Pennies and Riches”.

It was a very good show. Both heartrending and hilarious. It’s quite rare to find those two in the same place.

Given all that’s going on in my life right now, could this new show be any more timely? A card came in the mail the other day for “Divorce! The Musical“.

On the web site, they say:

There’s a great saying: tragedy plus time equals comedy. If you’ve ever been divorced, then you know this is true.

DIVORCE! depicts a journey many of us have shared– a journey through sadness, bitterness, irony and above all, that miraculous ability we all have to heal, forgive and move on.

And the Playbill article linked from the site says:

According to production notes, “Set in present-day Los Angeles, Divorce! The Musical takes us on Penny and Rich’s journey, as their fairy-tale marriage unravels. Denial, deception, and raw outrage collide with greedy lawyers, dramatically inclined family members, mountains of paperwork and out-to-lunch therapists. Divorce! The Musical reminds us that laughing in the face of tragedy can sometimes be the best way to move on.”

Musical numbers include “Till Death Do Us Part,” “I’m Living In My Parents’ Basement And My Friends Forgot My Name” and “Half.”

This sounds like a hoot. Even though my divorce process is nowhere near finished, I’m ready to laugh about it.

Tonight, Susan and I went on the Museum of Neon Art’s Holiday Lights tour. Being that it’s December, and the tour was after dark, it was cold by L.A. standards. We dressed warmly and brought along a couple of blankets, since the whole tour is conducted from the upper deck of a double-decker sightseeing bus.

It was a tremendously entertaining tour, but sadly, it didn’t transfer into photographs well. To take good photos at night, the camera has to be on a rock-solid platform to hold it steady enough. And the upper deck of the bus just wasn’t a steady enough platform. So if you want to see the lights, you’ll just have to take the tour. But it was certainly Great Fun.

This evening, Susan and I were supposed to go out to her friend’s boat in Marina del Rey to watch the light show there, but she decided against it, since it was going to be cold and possibly raining when we got there. So instead, we had a little adventure in the city.

We went to the IMAX theater in Exposition Park to see “Wild Ocean 3D: Africa Meets the Sea”. We saw the “Sea Monsters – 3D” movie last spring, and it was great fun, so this new one was on our list. As always, the photography was impressive and sometimes vertigo-inducing. There were lots of good 3D effects of fish and dolphins and such swimming out of the screen. Good fun.

On the way home, we stopped off in Chinatown for dinner. We had a 1/2 Peking Duck, along with some Chinese broccoli and some soup. That was nice. We also walked around Chinatown for a bit to see the neon signs. We will probably be seeing them again next week on the Museum on Neon Art’s Neon Cruise.

Afterward, we went home, opened a bottle of wine, and watched Julia Sweeney’s “Letting Go of God“. It was a nice evening.

Last night, I went to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Griffith Park Light Festival. I went with Juju, since we’d had originally planned on going on the Museum of Neon Art Neon Cruise, but it was canceled due to not having enough people sign up to rent the bus.

The first week of the festival is car-free, which is nice. We parked at the zoo, and just walked down and back and looked at the lights. The lights were almost all LED-based now, which is part of the DWP trying to ‘go green’ by reducing power consumption.

After that, we headed back to Silverlake and had dinner at Gingergrass, which was quite nice.

It was a nice evening out. And yes, it was a fun time.