Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Cathy volunteered to lead some art projects at Lucinda’s school. So today she went there and the kids made little turkeys out of Rice Krispies, pretzels, frosting, and so forth. Apparently, this was a big hit with the kids. The pictures show one of the ‘turkey bodies’ before decorating, and then one of the finished product.

Today, I went past the old hospital up the street from our house, and I saw piles of snow in the parking lot. This is odd, since I think it’s only snowed here once in recorded history. But they do a lot of filming there, and so I figured it probably had something to do with that. In any event, I thought we should bring Lucinda up there just to see it. The guard there said that they had been filming an episode of “Judging Amy” there, and they had had the whole parking lot covered with snow for the shoot. They tied up the palm trees and brought in their own trees to make it look right. After all, it just looks strange to see piles of snow in front of palm trees.

The power went out at our house last night around 8:00PM or so. This doesn’t happen all that often, and it’s not all that big of a deal most of the time, but when you’re a five-year-old who’s afraid of the dark, it can be a big deal. We got out all our emergency candles and flashlights, but no matter how you sliced it, it was dark. Fortunately, Pasadena Water and Power was on the ball. They got the lights back on by midnight, so Lucinda could sleep with her night light on again.

I had a day off work, and Lucinda had a day off school. So we all went to the movies. We went to the new AMC megaplex in Santa Anita Mall. We wanted to see “The Incredibles”, but it was sold out. So instead, we saw “The Polar Express”. This was described in Salon as “a creeping horror”, by the Los Angeles Times as “creepy”, and the Boston Globe as “merely a marvelous toy that has somehow become convinced it has a soul”. But Lucinda wanted to see it, so we went in.

It wasn’t bad, although I could see why people found it both creepy and overly-loud. We all wore snack-bar-napkin earplugs, and it was still too loud at times. And a lot of the movie had the feeling that it was only there to either pad out the story and make it longer, or just to show off some neat effect that they could do with the computer animation. And the computer animation was pretty good. It’s come a long way over the last few years. And it’s almost good enough for this movie. It’s good enough to render a reasonably believable human who is standing 6 or 8 feet away from the ‘camera’. It’s still not quite good enough to render a fully-believable human close-up. That was the origin of the reviewers’ creeps, and the reason The Boston Globe described the movie as “a breathtaking visual feast peopled by dead-eyed mannequins”. The close-up humans are just not good enough yet.

But none of that really matters all that much to a five-year-old. Lucinda enjoyed the movie, so in the end that’s all that really mattered to us.

Lucinda can write her first and last names now, so she got her own library card today. She was very pleased with this, and she checked out about a foot-high stack of books.

After dinner, we made a fire in the fireplace, and Lucinda toasted marshmallows.

Today we went to the Los Angeles Zoo to see the dinosaurs confined there. The exhibit of animatronic dinosaurs was pretty good. One odd thing, though. They specifically said we were not supposed to take flash pictures in the exhibit, as if the flash might startle the animatronic dinosaurs and make them stampede or something. Still, it was fun. Lucinda liked the dinosaurs.

After that, we went and walked around more of the zoo. They had some more dinosaur exhibits, as well as the regular animals. A lot of the zoo is torn up right now because they are rebuilding the Gorilla and Elephant exhibits. The sign on the Gorillas said that they are away at other zoos right now, and some of them will be coming back when the new enclosure is ready. I suppose the others are being outsourced to India or something.

Overall, it was a fun time. There are some more pictures in Lucinda’s photo album.

Lucinda came along today to vote. It was a very relaxed experience. Not too many people were there when we went. Our polling place is at Eaton Canyon Regional Park, so after voting we looked at the nature displays in the visitor center and then took a walk on the “Fire Ecology” nature trail.

We took Lucinda to the Halloween Carnival at her school this evening. They had little games and trick-or-treating for the kids. There were several hundred kids and their parents there. It was chaos. But Lucinda had enjoyed it.

Today is our 16th anniversary, or our 10th if you’re a geek. So we went out for a nice dinner at Traxx. This is the nice art deco restaurant in Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. We rode the Metro Gold Line to get there, which made it a bit more of an adventure, as well as avoiding the legendary Friday evening Los Angeles traffic. As always, it was very nice. The service was good, and the presentation was flawless. And Lucinda is already an old hand at this sort of thing. She knows how to behave in restaurants, and she enjoyed the dinner and especially enjoyed the dessert. So overall, it was a nice outing.

Lucinda and I went outside to see if we could see the lunar eclipse this evening. It’s been raining off and on all day, so it’s pretty cloudy. But a gap opened up in the clouds, and we were able to see the moon. The eclipse was about 80% total. I got out the telescope and we looked at the moon for about 10 minutes before the clouds moved back in and covered it up.