Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Lucinda’s preschool held a graduation ceremony for all the kids who are going to be going to kindergarten in the fall. It was very cute. Pictures are in her photo album.

I built a new gate for our driveway this weekend. Here we are posing with it at the end of the day.

We had dinner at “Renaissance” tonight. This is the restaurant at the Scientology Celebrity Center in Hollywood.

They don’t have a sign outside, so we just sort of wandered in and asked. There were lots of very friendly people in their faux-naval uniforms wandering about. One of them showed us the way to the restaurant. Inside, the place was nearly empty. I guess they don’t get a lot of people coming in off the street. The service was very pleasant and attentive. They didn’t try to get us to take a personality test or anything like that.

Outside the restaurant in the hotel hallway they had lots of displays about how wonderful Scientology is. And they had L.Ron Hubbard’s study preserved there, with a little velvet rope across the doorway.

The food was all right. Not bad, but not great. We’ve had better, but it was still a unique experience.

After this, we went to the Renberg Theater at the Gay and Lesbian Center in Hollywood to see Varla Jean Merman‘s new show, “Under a Big Top”. As always, La Merm was hilariously great. We also bought her DVD video collection, and she signed it for us. We’ve seen her three times now, and she’s always great.

Lucinda won an award in a Mothers’ Day art contest sponsored by the 99 Ranch Market. She got a little trophy and a $20 gift certificate.

Lucinda won an award from the 99 Ranch Market. Afterward, we went shopping there for a bit. We were wondering what ‘feminality’ is.

Our dog Buddy is kind of weird. He likes to jump up on things like a cat.

There was a movie crew filming near our house today. This happens a lot down near Caltech, but not not that often near our house.

Lucinda and Aunt Maggi colored Easter eggs on Wednesday. Then on Friday, Buddy got hold of the eggs and ate all of them. All that was left was scraps of shell on the floor.

Got a Canon PowerShot A70 camera. Built gphoto2 because it said the camera was supported. Didn’t work. Had to rebuild the devel/libusb and devel/gettext ports and rebuild gphoto2. Of course, this broke some other things, so I ended up rebuilding all of XFree86-4 from source. Now everything is good. Here are the commands to get a listing of the files on the camera and to download them:

gphoto2 --camera "Canon PowerShot A70" --port usb: -L
gphoto2 --camera "Canon PowerShot A70" --port usb: --get-all-files

We went to see “Mayor of the Sunset Strip” today. It was really good. Got to see Rodney everywhere in Hollywood. Lots of fun.