Stan’s Obligatory Blog

School doesn’t start again until Monday, so I took Lucinda and her friend Maddy to Disneyland today. It was a nice day, and we had a good time. It wasn’t too crowded, although it wasn’t as empty as it was when we were there back in September. Still, we got to ride California Screamin’ eight times. And we even saw the ‘hidden Mickey’ on it.

We spent the whole day there, and we had a nice time. To finish off, we had our now-traditional dinner at the Jazz Kitchen in Downtown Disney.

It was good fun.

Addendum: The rest of the pictures from the day are here.

Since nobody else showed up for the club bike ride last Sunday, we did the same route today. The only change I made was to adjust the route slightly so that we’d have a traffic light to cross 3rd St in Los Angeles.

It was cold and slightly threatening today, but otherwise it was a good day for riding.

We did the route, stopping at Angelus Rosedale Cemetery to pay respects to Dooley Wilson. Then we rode through Koreatown and Hancock Park to our snack stop at Noah’s Bagels in Larchmont Village.

On the way back, we felt a few raindrops, and we briefly considered bailing out and taking the train home, but the weather held, and we made it back without getting wet. And, as if on cue, just as I pulled up to my house, the sky opened up and the rain began. It was perfect timing.

42 miles.
cycling

New Year’s Day is a day when it’s best to stay home. My house is right by the end of the Rose Parade route, so it’s basically impossible to go anywhere. So we took a walk to see a bit of the parade, and also to see the floats close-up when it was over.

The day started with the B-2 flying over, which is amusing in its own peculiar way. After all, under normal circumstances, seeing one of those planes flying by would mean that Something Very Bad was about to happen.

One of my most favorite things about the parade itself is seeing floats being towed over the finish line after breaking down. Dunno why, but that’s always amusing.

There was a float this year dedicated to Ronald Reagan. And I got a chuckle from the portrait of him on the end that totally looked like Leonid Brezhnev.

And the city of Burbank float had little floral F-117s and an SR-71 Blackbird on it. More airplane fun for all the airplane geeks.