My heart beats for California, Vol I

I opted to break this into volumes instead of one huge post. See Vol II and Vol III.

So, California. It was a blast, as expected. My flight was at 8:55 AM on Friday, and since I had just worked at FedEx till about 3 AM (and had not really packed yet, heh) I just stayed up because I knew it would be hard to just get a couple hours sleep and drag myself out of bed for the flight. I figured I'd sleep on the flight, and sleep I did.

I got my rental car on hotwire.com for a pretty good rate, and since I selected “economy” I was figuring I'd get a little 2-door, 4-cylinder car, but I got a nice roomy 4-door, 6-cylinder Chevy Malibu Maxx. This made for fun driving in LA since it had those cool options like “get up” and “go”, not to mention “cd player”.

I was told that LA has the busiest traffic corridor in.. the world? Certainly in America at least. I didn't mind it much at all, though, it was actually kind of fun, perhaps it's just the different scenery.. palm trees, mountains, curves - all while driving on a 4 or 5 lane freeway. I drove to my friend Ryan's place in Hollywood, where I was staying for the weekend. It was pretty cool to get off the highway, make a turn, and see the Hollywood sign at the top of the hill. It was still a few miles away, I'm sure, but looked pretty close. Closer than I had ever been, for sure. I found Ryan's place without too much difficulty and buzzed him. It was funny, he kind of forgot it was Friday that I was coming, not that he wasn't prepared for me, he just has been crazy-busy lately with planning the Tandem Arts launch party (which was last night actually, hopefully it went well).

I caught up on a couple more hours of sleep, then headed back out into traffic to go visit Brian and Rachel. Rush hour in LA... yessss! (Again, I actually did not mind it. It wasn't parking-lot-traffic bad.) We ended up just hanging out at their place. Rachel cooked a really good dinner (raspberry chicken) and we played a derivation of Scrabble while catching up on old times and ... new times? They weren't too familiar with Homestar Runner, so I showed them some of the better Strong Bad emails, including keed's booook of course. They had this pewter picture frame on their table that didn't have a picture yet, so we decided to fix that. I suggested they put a picture of their computer in it because... you know, it'd be funny? [If you're lost, think 'puter = computer ... ?]

Yes, the three of us have similar senses of humor, so there were many instances of corny jokes like that...

Rachel: (from the kitchen) “how does chicken sound?”

gRegor: *pause* “cluck-cluck”

R: *pause* “ok-ay. and what's your reaction when you think about the idea of eating dead chicken for dinner?”

g: *pause* “mmmm”

And the evening and morning was the Friday.

Are you gonna live your life,

   standing in the back looking around?