and now...Chicago!!!

I arrived this afternoon in Chicago for a four+ day visit to samadhiseeker (Em), to help her organize after her recent move to a new apartment right near Lincoln Park in Chicago.

However, for a number of reasons, Em, her roommate, and I, are staying in a lovely suite hotel in downtown Chicago, a couple of blocks from the Mag Mile.

Let me just illustrate briefly the reason for my extended stay (I originally planned to fly home from Chicago Midway Thursday morning) and the hotel:

Bedbugs.
In E & E's apartment.

No, they are decidedly NOT mythical creatures after all.

Goodnight all :-)

Hello Los Angeles...!

Well, It has now been several days since I arrived in the greater LA area, so perhaps it is now time for another post...

Jenny, baby Thomas, and I arrived last Saturday morning (almost exactly a week ago) around 1:45AM from Las Vegas at Curtis and Jenny's new place in Canoga Park (although the address is more commonly recognized as being part of Winnetka...no, not the one in Illinois...California!). We were exhausted so we brought in the absolute necessities and went straight to sleep. I was overjoyed at the sight of the aerobed already set up with sheets and everything in a little corner of the front living room. Sleep!!!

Next day, I wrangled baby Thomas mostly while unpacking of various sorts occurred. Playing with Thomas was such fun - babies are endlessly interesting :-)

On Sunday, Jonathan's mom happened to be in the area at Uncle Whit and Aunt Caroline's (Jonathan's father's brother and his wife), so Jenny and Curtis drove me to burbank to meet j-mom and she and I headed over to W & C's over in La Canada/Flintridge. What followed that Sunday afternoon was complete fun, as I was introduced and re-introduced to W & C's numerous children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. (As I happened to be in the area, an invitation to this family gathering was graciously extended to me, YAY!!!)

We all had lots of fun chatting, eating, and laughing. What a fine fun family!

That night I stayed at W & C's with j-mom, and the four of us had an evening of visiting, which was quite enjoyable.

Monday was back to Curtis & Jenny's, where we spent the evening with some great items from Trader Joe's while visiting in the back computer/tv room.

Tuesday morning, Curtis dropped me off at the rental car place, and I picked up my rental car (my very first time ever renting a car on my own, without Jonathan!), which proved to be completely uneventful and easy. Let's hope the drop-off proves to be as easy...

The middle/late part of Tuesday was quite interesting, as I ended up back in Pasadena for lunch with W & C, and j-mom. We had a lovely lunch at the Parkway Grill (I think that's the name) on Arroyo Pkwy in Pasadena. I highly recommend the tuna sashimi nicoise salad :-D Tas-ty! (also, house-made sorbets, yum!)

So that afternoon, I had nothing to do as Rockel was at work and Zifnab & Lanth were still on their way back from FL. So, after convincing myself that my ultimate goal for this trip didn't have to include spending every moment of every single day with people, I decided to catch a movie on my own. I went in to Old Pasadena and caught Rush Hour 3 at the Paseo Colorado. (mostly because it was the only movie showing at 3, and I didn't want to wait a whole hour until 4. Also, I hadn't seen it and wanted to...) It was a pretty good movie, with alot of fun action scenes, for sure. However, I felt that there was really only essence of plot to it. *sigh*

Next, there was still nobody at the apartment, so I walked around the Caltech campus for a couple of hours chatting with an old friend, until my phone promptly died. Of course, at that point everyone decided to call me and I couldn't get to an outlet to plug in my phone. So I sat on Zif and Lanth's front stoop until they pulled up in Funktrousers' swank prius :-)

Wednesday I headed over to Redlands to see my grandma and great-aunt and great-uncle. I stayed with my grandma until today. We had quite a nice time, and we were both in great spirits for the visit! Yesterday morning we shared a lovely visit with my great-aunt and last night we had a fantastic dinner with my uncle Dan who drove up from Huntington beach.

We went out to a Mediterranean restaurant called Caprice Cafe and shared some delicious dishes! First, one of my favorite veggies, beets - we had golden and red beets with goat cheese and micro greens, drizzled with some house made vinaigrette of some sort, also we had a roasted portabello mushroom with cheese and greens, and then a Mediterranean platter with an assortment of olives, dolmas, hummus, mous'saka, and feta cheese. Those were followed up by two small pizzas: wild mushroom, asparagus, fontina cheese and thyme & tomatoes, basil, mozzarella and squash blossoms. Yum! Finally, for a special dessert we had their version of a Napolean (a traditional French pastry) made with layers of phyllo dough layered with grand marnier cream and fresh raspberries with honey :-) mmmmmmm....

Now here I am back in Pasadena, and Zif, Lanth, Rockel, and I went out for some great sushi at Zono Sushi. Tasty!

While there, we discovered that Rockel had never tasted Pocky, nor did he even know what it was...

and that's all for now... I feel like I've written an extremely trying book.

Good Bye Las Vegas...!

Today I arrived in Vegas after a very fun birthday punctuated by plenty of phonecalls, voicemails, ecard :-), and messages :-D Thank you to all of you for thinking of me - words can't express how lifted up I felt by all of the tokens of love.

So, anyhow, Las Vegas, the city that never sleeps, and here I am at what feels like 4:30AM to me, making a post to my blog. I decided that since I will be away from jwa for two weeks, at least, I will try to blog my experiences as much as possible.

Also, this will be good for my writing skills.

Right, Vegas. I'm here with C & J and baby Thomas, and also C's dad, Jim. I had a short stopover (30 minutes) in St. Louis, and while I was there I managed to wave in the general direction of magdalenisch, and I called her to inform her I was doing so :-) We were both sad that I was only to be in her town for a mere half an hour. *sigh*

Anyway, C picked me up at the airport, where I arrived just in time for us to hit rush-hour traffic in Vegas. Ooops. I didn't want to take the 6:30AM flight from BWI, so I feel that it was a good trade-off. We headed back to C & J's apartment where we picked up J, Jim, and Thomas to go find food - which was good since I was reaching the point where I was ready to gnaw my arm off...it was around 5:30pm.

We headed out for a famous Las Vegas buffet to celebrate the last night in town. The place we went was called the Red Rock Casino, and they have quite a nice buffet, so we were there for a couple of hours eating and visiting. Thomas was on stellar behaviour and was quite happy to dance on the tables.

After dinner, we headed back for more packing and loading. J and I busily packed boxes, Jim got Thomas to go to sleep, and then he and C started loading lots of stuff into the rental truck. We got a lot accomplished, but we still have more to do tomorrow, as we all petered out before everything was packed and loaded.

Tomorrow we'll finish up and the guys will head out, followed closely by J, Thomas, and I, once we've finished a final cleaning of the apartment.

And it's off to LA!

goodreads

So, I've decided to join Goodreads and see what all the excitement is about (several people I know, who are, of course, voracious readers, have recently joined as well.) It's a fairly interesting site where you can keep track of the books that you have read in the past, books you are currently reading, as well as books you would like to read at some point.

First you sign up, and then you can start adding books. Many readers on the site post reviews of books that they've read, so you can search for a book and read any number of random reviews of that book. It's also a nice way to see what other friends are reading that you might also like to read :-) So far, I'm really enjoying the site, because I typically have many books that I want to read, and I have an incredibly hard time keeping track of them, because there are always new books being published (i.e. the list just keeps getting longer...).

Anyhow, it's a fun network for readers (you can add friends and recommend books to them as well, and receive updates when they review books that they've read), and it seems that you can even trade/give books away through the site as well.

In any case, I like being able to keep track of what I've read/am reading - so it's great for that :-)