Stan’s Obligatory Blog

I just found out that the paper about My Pet Project has been published in Seisomological Research Letters:

The USGS Earthquake Notification Service (ENS): Customizable Notifications of Earthquakes around the Globe

I’ve had co-authorship on papers before, but this is the first time a whole paper has been published about something that I invented. Yay.

Cooking is still one of my favorite ways of dealing with stress. That and bike riding. And drinking beer. And I’ve been doing a lot of all three lately.

Tonight, I made a new batch of home-made pita bread and a some tzatziki sauce. The lula kebab meat came from the Armenian market up on Washington Blvd. And I got a recipe for Persian rice.

Now, what to make for dessert…

There was an egret perched by one of the little ponds at Disneyland. Everything there is artificial, so it’s kind of a shock to see an actual wild animal there. But I guess there’s good eatin’ in the pond.

So this is my latest Canon commercial.

Today we were supposed to go to the snow with Shannon, Mars, and Rose. I made a pan of brownies and a batch of blueberry muffins to take along. Then Shannon called and said that she didn’t think we should go because it was going to rain. So Cathy suggested Disneyland, and I agreed to take Lucinda and her friend.

Normally, if I had a choice between a day at Disneyland and a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, I’ll take the stick. But today my choice was between a day at Disneyland and a day at home. So I chose Disneyland.

And it turned out to be all right. We had a nice time. We rode a total of eight rides, which I think is pretty good. And we got to go on Star Tours. That ride is pretty old now, but it’s still good.

At the end, we walked over to Downtown Disney and had dinner before going home. Overall, it was a good day, although I think I looked a bit haunted in the picture on the Dumbo ride.

Tonight, I made The Swallow’s Pork and Tomatillo Stew. That’s what’s in the picture. I also made Shredded Pork Enchiladas. And two loaves of Olive Bread. Cooking is a nice relaxing activity for me. So it’s just the thing in these Trying Times.

Today’s bike ride was our Larchmont Village route. The idea was to see the headless Statue of Liberty that I’d heard Paramount had near their front gate on Melrose Ave. This was supposed to be promoting their new movie, “Cloverfield“.

It was chilly when we set out. We rode down through Eagle Rock and across the L.A. River. Then on down Silver Lake Blvd. There was no sign of the work to drain the reservoir that we’ve been hearing about lately.

When we got to Larchmont, we stopped at Noah’s Bagels. There was a little promotion for “Cloverfield” written in chalk on the sidewalk there. I guess that’s what you get when a mega-corporation attempts viral marketing. I thought it was funny that there was some person who was paid to go around writing stuff on the sidewalks in chalk.

Leaving Larchmont, we rode down Melrose past Paramount. But there was no sign of Lady Liberty. So either they’d taken it down, or it was in some place that was less than obvious.

When we got back to Pasadena, I remembered that today was the Doo Dah Parade. So several of us stopped off to have a look. We saw lots of people handing out campaign materials for Dennis Kucinich. It would be interesting to study why he so appeals to people with the anarchist spirit of the Doo Dah Parade. We also saw the Angel City Derby Girls and the Midnight Ridazz. I developed an immediate crush on all the Derby Girls. They’re just so darn cute. And one of the Midnite Ridazz was also my favorite. I love heavily tattooed girls with nose rings. As a final treat, we saw that the Grand Marshal for the Parade was Reverend Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping.

Pictures of the parade are here: http://www.1134.org/gallery/index.php/stan/random/doodah2008

38 miles
cycling

This afternoon, I took Lucinda and her friend for a little adventure in Hollywood.

First, we went to West Hollywood, where we went to M+B to see the Alison Jackson: Confidential photo show. This was a fairly small exhibit, but it was very amusing. I bought the book so we can see the rest of her photos.

After that, we went to the park in West Hollywood. The girls played there for a bit before we headed back to Hollywood to visit High Voltage Tattoo. This is the shop in “L.A. Ink“, which Lucinda and I have been enjoying recently. When we were first watching it, there was a scene of a person walking out he front door, and I recognized the JONS market across the street. And I realized that the shop was right around the corner from our old condo in Hollywood. So I’d promised Lucinda that I’d take her there to visit. We gawked for a bit and I bought Lucinda a shirt. And then we went home. It was a fun little afternoon adventure.

Today’s ride was out to San Dimas to The Bagelry. It turned out to be a harrowing experience.

We met at Victory Park in Pasadena. While we were waiting to leave, a woman drove into the parking lot and told us that a bike rider had been hit by a car around the corner. So several people rode over to see what happened. It turned out to be YK (I have no idea he spells his name, but that’s what we know him as.) who had been on his way up to meet us. So a bunch of us waited around to see that the paramedics took him off to the hospital and to take care of his bike. They said that they didn’t think he had broken anything too badly, but it was still a very unsettling experience.

In the meantime, the rest of the group had headed off on the ride. So the rest of us started out with about half an intention to catch them. But then Ben got a flat. I stayed back to help him fix it while the rest went on. I was so unsettled that I completely forgot to take a picture for the Flat Tire Gallery.

When we got Ben’s bike back on the road, we were quite far behind. He got in behind me and we made a serious attempt to catch up. We averaged a bit over 20mph all the way out to San Dimas, where we caught up with Sandy and Silvio. The rest of the riders were already there. But we were only about a minute or so behind them by then, so if we’d had another five miles or so, we would have caught them. Along the way was where I saw the very worn penny embedded in the pavement.

While we were sitting there, I noticed that Sandy had a fork in his backpack. I thought this was pretty funny, since nobody carries a spare fork around normally. So I took a picture of it.

We all set out together for the trip home. Then we went down Gladstone St, which is the street with the 1% downhill grade, so we always end up going very fast. This split the group in two. At the end, we rode through the Santa Fe Dam Nature Center and back up the bike path to Duarte. From there, we just took the straight route home. Then we caught up with the other part of our group. They had fallen behind on Gladstone, but then they took a shorter route, so they’d ended up ahead of us. Then we took the quiet residential route back through Arcadia and back to the park.

Aside from the unpleasantness at the start, it actually turned out to be a fairly nice ride.

46 miles.
cycling

For reasons I’m not going to talk about here, I’ve been getting a strong nesting instinct lately. So I’ve been cooking a lot. I made home-made pita bread a few days ago. I tried out a new brownie recipe last night. And tonight I made chicken with goat cheese and sun-dried tomato sauce.

At least I’m eating well.

Since it rained last weekend, we did last week’s planned ride today. The route was out to Glendora and back, with a stop at a bakery there.

It was chilly when we met at the park, but promising to warm up nicely. For some reason, we had a very small group today. Only six of us. But that doesn’t stop us. The ride must go on.

The route went pretty much straight east out to Glendora, and the only funny thing I saw along the way was the house with the topiary teddy bears and animals in the front yard. That was worth a picture.

When we got to the bakery, I got an eclair. Silvio got some apricot pastry thing that looked for all the world like sunny-side-up eggs. While we were sitting there, we called Gene to see how he was doing, since he’s not able to lead the rides with his broken leg.

The route back was nice. We tried a little different version to avoid the part of Foothill Blvd across the San Gabriel River, since it’s got really bad pavement. We took a little detour up through Azusa to Sierra Madre Blvd, and then got on the bike path to cross the river.

And then we headed straight back across Monrovia and Arcadia to home. It was a nice ride.

40 miles.
cycling