Stuff and Things

• the hell on earth that has defined 2009 is continuing well into March. my latest gripe with this year involves a household surprise in the form of a leaky fridge that ruined my kitchen floor and spawned all sorts of fun mold. this has necessitated the tearing out of half the kitchen, in order to replace it, as well as several utterances of “crap covered shit fucking hell,” “fucking ass damn shit hole” and “kill me now.”
  
  this is an ongoing kitchen nightmare for me that will be documented, with photos, in a future blog post once my brain learns to process the event with real sentences that contain more than just a string of expletives. in short, it’s been a fucking nightmare and i’ve declared 2009 Year of the Suck.


• in another sign that the apocalypse is nigh, i saw Tom Cruise during lunch the other week. i don’t have a photo of this encounter so feel free to call me a liar, but i’m positive it was him walking around downtown LA. he was sans wife and child, accompanied instead by a few filmmaker-looking dudes, chewing gum and wearing the type of obnoxious sunglasses that only celebrities wear.
  
  i saw him with two coworkers while enjoying a lovely lunch outdoors at Cafe Pinot. he was hanging around the garden area near the Central Library, while we sat transfixed just 20 feet away, gawking at The Crazy like he was some exotic zoo animal while making snarky comments about his height. none of us approached him, and i resisted the urge to yell “Free Katie” despite thinking i would if i ever saw Tom Cruise. then i returned to the office with my coworkers, where we told everyone within earshot that we saw Tom Cruise at lunch. our coworkers were rightfully impressed and we became the coolest kids in the office that day.


• a photo i took in san francisco a million years ago on a lousy camera was included in the Schmap San Francisco guide! man, this photography stuff is EASY. i actually didn’t ask for my photo to be included; the editors found it on my Flickr photostream and said, “hey, can we use this? we won’t pay you, but you’ll be famous on the internets.”
  
  despite already being famous on the internets, i agreed because i’m a nice person. the photo was taken at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park and even features a cameo of Mo (at left, in black jacket) walking toward the entrance. i’m embarrassed to say we ditched the place right after i took the photo since the line was too long and admission was too pricey, but the readers of the Schmap guide will never know this as they’ll certainly be too busy admiring my fancy camerawork.


• Mo and i attended a walking tour through “historic” Highland Park, where we saw a bunch of cool craftsmen houses in the Sycamore Grove part of town. most of the houses were built in the early 20th century and made me drool with envy because they were so epic looking. it was neat tour, made neater by the fact that it was led by local historian Charles Fisher, who knows pretty much everything there is to know about the area, so much so that he wrote the definitive book on Highland Park, a book i bought for Mo when we first moved here.
  
  i learned a lot of very important things on the tour, none of which i will ever be able to recall since my memory has a way of resisting the admission of historical facts, but the tour was an awesome experience nonetheless as it allowed me to enter lots of strangers’ homes and look at the way they live, which is one of my favorite pastimes. i took some photos of the tour (in case anyone cares). i only hope that one of them will be published in a Schmap guide of Highland Park someday.