Stan’s Obligatory Blog

The U.S. Bank Tower stair climb is coming up on Friday. And I’m still short of my fund-raising goal. So if you think this is an amusing thing, please stop by their site and make a donation to the YMCA. If not enough people donate, they’ll take a pound of flesh from me. And while that would make me lighter, I rather doubt that that will improve my time climbing the stairs. (OK, they won’t really do that. But they’ll charge my credit card for the difference.)

Today, I took Lucinda and her friend Claire out to the Los Angeles County Fair. We went out early in the day, when they were running the $1 special for tickets. It was a perfect day for the fair. It was hot, but only a normal sort of hot for Pomona. The heat wave of the last week finally broke, so we were able to enjoy the day.

The fair is known for some weird foods. And we were immediately reminded of this by the sign advertising chocolate-covered pickles. Yikes. We were not up for trying that. We did try the chocolate-covered bacon, which was decidedly weird. I kept thinking that the chocolate would have been better without the bacon. It wasn’t bad, but the bacon didn’t really add anything other than some crunch and just plain weirdness. And we also didn’t want to try the “Totally Fried Fair Special”.

We stopped by the food exhibit to see if I’d won anything with my baked goods. I hadn’t really expected to win, but I figured it would be an interesting adventure no matter what. And I did see my Black Walnut Bread on display, which was rather novel, even if it didn’t win anything.

They have a lot of concerts at the fair, and one I saw on the schedule was kind of amusing. Apparently, Creedence Clearwater Revival has been revived in some form, now 40 years later. But since the original name of the group had the word ‘Revival’ in it, what could they call it? “Creedence Clearwater Revisited“, of course.

Lucinda and Claire rode a lot of the rides, and they ran through many of the fun houses, too. We went and saw the farm animals, and they got to pet some sheep and goats. They also played a few midway games.

Through all of this, we could see the smoke plume from the Station Fire burning off in the distance. The wind was blowing the smoke away from us and up to the high desert, so the air where we were was fine. But it still looked kind of ominous.

Overall, it was a fun day.

On Saturday, I took Lucinda and her friend to the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum so they could see the butterflies on the last weekend of the exhibit. They have the butterflies there every summer from the end of May through Labor Day. This was the first time I’d taken her to see them since 2004.

When we got there, there was a tremendous crowd of people in the the park, and we realized that there was a USC football game about to start in the Coliseum next door to the museum. This made getting inside a bit of an adventure, and if I’d known about this, we might not have gone today, but we were already there, so we made do.

The butterflies are in a large outdoor cage, sort of like a small aviary. They enjoyed seeing the butterflies flying around, and also finding some caterpillars, spiders, and other insects there. One of the docents helped them to find some of the more interesting sights, including the web of the spider that inspired E. B. White to write Charlotte’s Web.

Afterward, we went inside for the “Dinosaur Encounter“, where they had an animatronic dinosaur that came out and walked around the room. It was a pretty good effect. We’ve seen robotic dinosaurs before, most recently a few weeks ago when we went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park, but this was the first time we’d seen one that actually walks around free. It was quite novel.

Finally, we spent some time looking at the gems and minerals exhibit before going home. It was a fun afternoon.

I registered for the Los Angeles U.S. Bank Tower stair climb today. It’s on Friday, September 25th, and I’m hoping to make a decent showing there. When I did the AON tower stair climb back in April, I came in 24th out of 327 runners, and I’m hoping to improve on that this time. Given that my time for the 62-story AON tower was 12:50, I’m hoping to make the 73 stories of the U.S. Bank Tower in just a bit under 15 minutes. Based on the 2006 results I found online, this would put me at about 30th among the men and about 35th overall. Hey, I’m goal-oriented.

As with the other stair climb, it’s a fundraiser for charity, and I have to solicit donations to make my fundraising goal. In this case, the donations go the Ketchum Downtown YMCA, which I think is a good cause. I used to go training classes there back in the ’80s when I was an aerobics instructor. So this is my way of asking all my friends to consider making a small online donation.

I will be taking my camera along again, and I’m going to get some pictures from the roof of the building, and also probably an ‘action shot’ or two on the way up. Just so you can see how hard I’m running to get a good time.

And as always, there’s a LOLcat for every occasion:

On Thursday, I took a vacation day to take Lucinda and her friend Claire to Disneyland. I’d promised her I’d take her one more time before school starts. It was very hot, which made for a sweaty day, but it also kept a lot of other people away. So the lines were very short.

The highlight of the day had to be when Claire and I convinced Lucinda to try Gadget’s Go Coaster in Toon Town. The last two times we were there, I rode it with Claire while Lucinda sat on a rock and watched us. She was pretty apprehensive about it, but at the end of the run, before the train even stopped, she said, “That was so much fun! Let’s do it again!” So we ended up riding it three times in a row.

We were there from 11:00AM until nearly 7:00PM. Then we went for the obligatory dinner at the Jazz Kitchen in Downtown Disney before heading home. I like to make a point of ending our days there, since the pictures from there have provided me a good measure of my progress in surviving the sturm und drang of the ongoing divorce process.

And yes, it was a very fun day.

Today’s bike ride was another little sightseeing ride. This time, the destination was The Donut Hole in La Puente. This is a prime example of programmatic architecture, which in this case is a building shaped like the product sold there.

The actual route out there was pretty straightforward and flat. This was a minor variation on a route we did last summer.

When we got to The Donut Hole, we each took a souvenir photo in front of the big donut, and then a group shot, with the camera balanced on a rock.

The snack stop was at Panera in West Covina, and the route home went over Santa Fe Dam and up the bike path. Then home across Monrovia and Arcadia. It was a fun ride. The route itself wasn’t all that exciting, but the Donut Hole made it amusing.

45 miles.
cycling

Saturday afternoon, I went over to Hollywood for the big Tattoo Hollywood convention put on by BMEzine. I figured that because it was BME, it would be a good convention. And I also figured that a lot of people I know would be there.

When I walked in the door, I immediately saw The Lizardman. We’d never met in person before, I’ve known him from rec.arts.bodyart back in the days when he was a grad student, and before he embarked on his show business career.

I had a fun time schmoozing around and taking pictures. I met up with several other people who I’ve known online for years but never met in meatspace before. Late in the afternoon, Leslie came by, fresh off the plane from being out of town for the last few days. So I got to introduce her around, and she even has instant cachet in the tattoo scene, since she worked on the Modern Primitives book back in the ’80s.

It was a very fun afternoon and evening. Pictures are in the usual place.

This past weekend I took Lucinda down to San Diego. The plan was to visit Grandpa, and also to go to the Wild Animal Park. We went down on Sunday afternoon. When we got there, we picked up Grandpa and headed down to La Jolla Cove. I’d seen the seals there the last time I was in San Diego, and I knew Lucinda would like seeing them, too.

When we got there, there we no seals. There were people on the beach, and the seals were all out in the water. They were just sort of bobbing in the waves and waiting for the people to leave. Whenever one would make a move to come up on the beach, a bunch of people with cameras would run over toward it. And of course, the seal would get scared off. Rule #1 of wildlife photography is: You get better pictures when you don’t scare the animal away.

After the seals, we headed down to Balboa Park for dinner at Prado. As always, it was great, even if my friend Laura isn’t the manager there any more.

Since we hadn’t really seen the seals, I promised Lucinda that we could go back there in the morning. And we did. They were all snoozing on the beach. Lucinda enjoyed seeing them, and I got some good seal photos. As always, my camera rocks.

After seeing the seals, we had breakfast and headed up to the Wild Animal Park. We went on the tram ride around to see the African animals. Then we went and saw some of the other exhibits. We signed up for the ‘Photo Safari’ tour in the afternoon. This is the one where you ride in a stake-bed truck out into the Africa exhibit, and you can hand-feed a giraffe. I knew that Lucinda would like this. And it was fun. We all got to feed the giraffe, and also get licked by the big giraffe tongue. After that, we saw some more exhibits and the bird show before heading home. It was a nice weekend.

More photos are here.

A week or so ago, my girlfriend was telling me about her friends who live in Shadow Hills. That’s the horse neighborhood off Sunland Blvd in the northeast San Fernando Valley. She said that their neighbors have an emu and a llama named Lorenzo living in their front yard. So of course I had to find out where so we could do a sightseeing ride up there. It turned out that it was only about a three-block detour off the “No Tuna for Me” route that we do. So this was today’s bike ride.

It was a perfect day for riding. We started off across Pasadena and Eagle Rock, and then across Glendale into Burbank. We took Glenoaks Blvd up to Sun Valley and turned on Peoria St, just before the big dump. And then we headed into horse country. We wound around in there a bit before we ended up in front of the llama house.

There was a sheep, a goat, an emu, and then Lorenzo the Llama. They were all friendly and curious, and they came up to the fence to check us out. So we all got souvenir pictures with them. It was a good piece of weird Los Angeles sightseeing.

The route back went through Tujunga and Montrose. Then we stopped at Goldstein’s for a bagel before heading home.

It was a nice ride.

44 miles.
cycling

This morning, I built a new box planter for my back yard. I had some basil plants started in pots on the window sill, and I wanted a place to put them outside. So I built a little planter with some spare wood I had in the garage. Lucinda helped me fill it and plant everything.