it's warm today although it looks stormy. one corner of the sky is ominously gray while the other couldn't be bluer. there's sunshine but it's only half bright. rare days for santa barbara.
i made site visits this morning to two projects under construction. this is the one instance when i wish it hadn't rained. my car couldn't negotiate the cobbly road so i had to park it half a mile away. then i had to slip and slide up a muddy dirt road then across a swampy ripped up landscape to get to the house. all the while i was terrified i would fall and make a scene in front of the construction workers. there were pool size puddles inside the house!
look at my shoes.
career hazard
in other news, my boss actually asked me how i like my pc so far. i complained that it now takes an autocad file over a minute to save. it used to take three seconds max. he suggest that i get additional ram (which was why he asked me about my pc in the first place). i immediately ordered a 256mb stick directly from emachines. i bought it before his moment of clarity wore off.
despite it being super tuesday today, i'm not voting. well, for some reason i was taken off registration. they stopped sending me voting information for three years now. jg thought he saw my name on the roster when he voted last year. how come they didn't send me any litarature? my colleague joked that i had been taken off the list because i voted for gore.
i ran around all weekend with my f401 tied to my neck and/or attached to my fingers. i took pictures of anything and everything, experimenting with file sizes and zooming. i couldn't have asked for better weather for whoring photos.
for years i've been writing julia about a neighborhood cat that resembles her schmoo, the princess of all cats. last sunday i happened to have my f401 at hand when i bumped into the look-alike.
in stealth mode (blurry from unsteady zoomming)
sexy catwalk, note those radar ears
posing for the camera
stop following me, woman!
for years i'd see her almost every morning just sitting at the top of the drive way. she'd let me come real close but would move when i tried to touch her. now i only see her every once in a while, when she comes down the common yard, licking her lips and looking at the mallards.
you know, now that i've watched her at length, she doesn't really look all that much like schmoo. her hair isn't as dark and her face is way too pointy. she may even be a he. in that case, schmoo would kick his ass for trying to look like her.
there is another cat in the neighborhood whom i haven't seen for a while. she's short haired, slender, and black. she's the most sinuous cat ever. but she wouldn't let me come near. i wonder where she went.
brace yourself for another image laden blog entry.
i woke up with a headache the size of george bush's idocy. it was because i spent all day yesterday driving the infamous los angeles freeways. i guess it was traumatic except i didn't know it. i was too busy being stuck in traffic.
5 mph and braking
it was hot and smoggy. i sweated so much that eveytime i took a swig of water, i could taste the salt that washed off my lips. when i wasn't swearing, i took pictures.
veggie mirage
miraculously, i got lost only once. it took almost 15 miles of driving before i got back on track. in case you are wondering why i subjected myself to this torture, i had to go to disneyland. for those of you unfamiliar with disneyland, it's located in hell.
come in, mothership, ten four
may be my headache was from listening to christian radio for the entire stretch of highway 126 (west of the 5) because that's all the radio there is in the bible strip of the central coast. a freak named nancy moss was preaching repeatedly, "the word of the lord shall not be reviled. a woman shall be submissive to her husband." too bad she had a southern drawl. i could have been successfully brainwashed if she had spoken normally.
look at her. nancy leigh de moss. man, not hard to imagine her with fangs and horns. evil doer!
obey ye husband!
once i hit the 101, the temperatures dropped by 25 fahrenheits. out of the smog and into the fog.
pacific coast highway at 75 mph
my favorite cypress on the 101 near montecito
speaking of 101, harold and i ventured to the 101 deli for lunch. nothing exciting happen. here's a montage to make loading this page even slower.
usps trucks make me happy
leave if you can
gangsta
my left foot
vespas make me happy too
mobile lunch
peach chevrolet
avocado pinto
my other foot
how about a picture of a nice sunset to make his monstrous blog bearable?
this new category will guarantee more regular blog entries because i waste a lot of money on junk. today, i'll introduce you to the how and what of my thrift store finds.
i have a sedentary office job. if i didn't have to go to the bathroom, i could be sitting for four hours at a time. in order to make ourselves less like slugs and more like humans, my colleagues and i go for walks about once a day. we go twice on crappy days when we have to talk to architects.
my walking buddies are rk and am. all three of us walk mondays and tuesdays.
rk + am
wednesday through friday, it's just am and me and we almost always walk to the thrift store three blocks from our office.
saint vincent depaul
it's a very well organized thrift shop. it's the only one i know that has a yarn and needles section. i love browsing through their bookshelves. i buy on average a book a week. so far this week, i got this one for $4:
duncan on picasso
last week, i got a book whose author i'm unfamiliar with. i bought it mostly for the weathered orange binding. that it's a collection of short stories is also good.
judge this book by its cover
if you own volume one and if it has a pretty cover, i'd try to buy it from you. also, last week, i bought two sets of cup and saucer. these are something i normally wouldn't buy. i'm not sure why they caught my eye. i really like that they couldn't be any simpler in design.
cup, no saucer
they're pure white, not cream as these images show. but this is why i bought them:
green bee logo
i'm giving one set to my old college roommate missy. i can't remember why but i seem to remember that she collects bee things. it has something to do with her middle name, dee. hm. makes no sense, does it? what does dee have to do with bee? gee.
am and i haven't made our pilgrimage today. are you wondering what i'll find? i know you are. well, stay tuned!
last night i went home in the twilight. as usual i drove down the drive way and parked in front of the garage. i went inside for a quick snack and went back out to check mail. our condos' mail box is at the top of the drive way.
so i walked up the drive way at my usual pace, looking at the stars, feeling the brisk air, and smelling the jasmine bush, just minding my own business like i do everyday. and then i noticed this giant thing on the asphalt moving toward me. it was about two feet in front of me so i did a sideway skip and hopped back away from it. you know, the kind of movement you'd make when something had jumped at you from behind the bushes. i even gasped. totally startled!
this is what was coming at me!
ack!
it took me a few seconds to come to and to see that it was a giant gargantuan snail! it was at least 12 inches in diameter!
all right, it was just 2 inches. but still, that's inordinately big for a garden snail! his body was about 5 inches in length. man, he was hauling ass! so fast that i could see him moving in the dark. he left a two foot trail on the asphalt. he kept right on sliming down the drive way. cars, snails, crazy girls, no difference.
i went ahead to get the mail. i sort of chuckled when i realized i must have looked ridiculous being scared by a snail. hahahahaha. i was rather glad no one was around. it was too dark for anyone to see me, anyway.
on my way back, i bent over to take a closer look at the monster but was careful to keep my distance in case it decided to reach up and feel me with one of his extended eyes. then, i went running back to the house to get my f401!
i ran back and there he was, still merrily moving along. and there i was, in the middle of the drive way, hunching over real close to the ground, making flashes go off every three seconds. i'm sure the neighbors were all peeking through their blinds wondering "wtf is she up to today?"
toot too doo
the funny part was: i was standing to the right of his path taking pictures and flashing repeatedly. and the snail got either very disoriented or pissed; he made a sharp right turn straight at the camera! this is when i took the macro shot shown in the first image.
"gotta take cover from this crazy woman."
i could tell he was in distress because his spotty trail became a continuous blobs of slime. just as fast as he was coming at me, he made a u turn. a regular speed racer!
"i'm outa here."
i scrammed right before a car approached the drive way. i hope the snail didn't get the tire. it would have been a slimefest with that baseball size mollusk!
i just saw a movie in a real theater. it's been a while since i've done that. why, i think it was lotr return of the king. that was, oh, back in november?
i have two colleagues who live in san luis obispo. they work two days in office and three at home. monday nights they spend in sb usually camping and partying. this week, they wanted to do some mountain climbing. they asked me to join them and i thought, why not? three married people displaced from their spouses should stick together.
we saw touching the void. i forget if movie titles are all caps or bolded or what. since i just learned html for underline, i'm using it. i had heard the main character interviewed on npr months ago but i didn't know that they made a movie from his book. it's more or less a documentary with actors playing out the story line. for some reason i remembered that there were three climbers and one died. turns out there was only two. the third character was a non-climber who kept camp. the movie was just one despondent and hopeless scene to another. i mean, we all knew they survived to tell about it but, man, it was heart breaking.
the playas: joe simpson and simon yates.
can't believe you cut my cord, mate
so there we were, three of all eleven movie goers in the entire theater. it reminded me of the indie theater in san luis osbispo. plaza de oro is like the palm of santa barbara. smut shoved a full bottle of rum down his pants and snuck it in. they tried to get me a soda so they could spike mine up but i knew better. so they each got half a bottle. through out the first half of the movie, smut kept mumbling "dig a cave dig a cave," which was exactly what i was thinking. had those fuckers dug a snow cave and sat through the blizzard, they wouldn't have gotten in half the trouble. well, they wouldn't have books and movies about them either. but, being who we are, we just have to be logical about spilled milk.
hand+smut (note bottle of rum in cup holder)
for the second half of the movie, smut kept trying to verbalize joe's thoughts.
hm, i'm still on the mountain?
or
oh, fuck, i'm still in peru!
etc.
meanwhile i kept sighing aloud each time something else went wrong. it's a good thing no one sat near us. we were being way obnoxious especially with the two clowns all liquored up. i guess i tolerated it because i know smut. he gets all worked up about potentially dangerous situations. he was a ball of nerves when we hiked to the top of half dome. granted we weren't climbing alpine style through cravasses and over glaciers. but, trust me, it was just as harrowing to hike a 17 mile roundtrip in 12 hours. 7 am to 7 pm. 8,200 feet of total change in elevation. and a man died on our trail right in front of us!
so, go out and see this movie tonight if you can. it's worth 100% of $8. or listen to cordless joe's interview on freshair. it's about the extraordinary survival of two brave foos.
much to my dismay, this is what i found this morning, on the opposite side of the driveway and down slope from where i first saw him. look at that dried up slime bath. i told you he was huge.
crime scene
i think he got clipped after i saw him. either a tire or someone's foot must have flicked him down the drive way.
good news, everybody! there are things left in this world that you can enjoy for a buck!
the last hole
on my way to work this morning i stopped by eller's licking my chops thinking about sugar donuts. i left with two sugar, two chocolate covered, and a dozen of these snail size holes. i ate eleven before i got to my office, which is but a mile away.
donut holes, yet another perfect example for an oxymoron.
i just read a bay area resident's blog about nervi's saint mary's cathedral. can you put as many possessives in one sentence? she dedicated her entire blog to dissing the building. adding insult to injury, she reports that the locals see boob silhouettes on the roof. man, how much drug does one have to do in order to see a breast in that image? i respect her opinion but gee, there really is no need for that sort of perpetuation of disrespect. absolutely no love for the genius.
i have a sore spot for regular joes bashing extraordinary structures. diss frank gehry. back off the geniuses.
on to better things. last week on our walk to lunch, rk and i found a local neighborhood gem. i've driven past it oh, everyday for over two years now, and have never seen it. proof that walking is good in more ways than one. anyway, at first glance it looked like a gallery of some sort. there are massive sculptures in the enclosed parking lot. there was a truck in the way that day so i couldn't photograph it. name and address at entrance:
r2, 720 haley
there was no one in sight so rk and i proceeded with trepidation. i kept saying "hello... hello..." as we walked into the alley.
to our right:
lion at the gate
a lettered wall
to our left:
a dynamic water fountain
a giant rusty anchor
and all along the alley:
antique signs
large scale sculptures
more letters
the owner, a woman, came out to greet us, explaining that her husband is the man responsible for the "junk." we learned that r2 stands for residential on the second floor, that parts that make up variations of r2 is still being collected for the ongoing installation, and that the latest trend at r2 involves glass eyeballs.
r2 alley
these pictures are poor and few because it was an overcast day and i didn't take pictures during the owner's narrative. apparently, there have been people coming as far as japan to see the alley. so, swing on by the next time you're in santa barbara. bring your camera.
