Independence Day

Wednesday is the 4th of July, which is Independence Day, when Americans celebrate being freed from the shackles of rule by the Brits. It's another holiday that sneaked up on me - in the UK, you have a sense of what the holidays are, and what you are supposed to do on them (May Day, hang around in the rain, Easter, injure yourself doing DIY and go to the hospital, Christmas, eat, drink, watch TV with relatives, etc) but here I don't.

So I asked around, in the hope that the answer wouldn't involved spitting on British people, as a revenge for the tyranny that they inflicted on their colonies. (Not that the US has much sympathy with other ex-colonies, but anyway). It seems that's not what one does, which is nice. One (traditionally) goes to the beach or park, where one has a picnic (peanut butter and jelly sandwiches) or a barbecue (hot dogs and hamburgers), and then one watches the fireworks. There is usually a free fireworks display in each city, and some paid ones around the place. The nature of firework displays is that it's kind of hard to make people pay to watch them though.

Santa Monica used to have fireworks displays on the beach, but they got too crowded (something like 100,000 people would go to the beach to watch the fireworks, which is pretty impressive in a city that only has a population of 100,000). They tried having them very early in the morning, but then they just gave up.

The fireworks this year are going to be potentially particularly exciting because of the rain. Or rather the lack of rain. Since we arrived (about 9 months ago) I've seen water fall from the sky precisely once. In an area where houses are surrounded by low level brush, the houses are all close together, and made of wood, this makes for much bigger fireworks than the ones that are lit with a blue touch paper.

Repairs

The button fell off my shorts (shoddily made, I say), so I took them to be repaired on Saturday.

Today I went to pick them up. It cost $2. Or about 1 pound and 10p in old money.

That is so cheap, that even if I'd been to the shop to buy a needle, a thread, a button (of the right size) and managed to gather those, along with my shorts, in one place without losing any, I would still take them to the cleaners.

I am torn between thinking that it's so fantastically cheap that it's great. Or that it's so fantastically cheap that someone is working 14 hours a day fixing my shorts, and getting paid almost enough to be able to not eat sawdust. (They even put them on a hanger, and in a bag.)

1000

A while ago, I bought a new speedometer for my bike. Today I did my 1000th mile with it. Because S and the boys are away, I could go on a bike ride, for fun, not just to get somewhere. And that's the first time I'll have done that for a little over 5 years and two weeks (if you missed that reference, the boys are a little older than 5 years and 2 weeks old).

When I'm riding to work, I sometimes chat with other people cycling (these chats are usually short) but one thing they say is "It's really nice riding South from where you live, but you must know that". I don't know that, but I nod in agreement. (Otherwise they win). So today I decided to do that. I rode South on the bike path, until the bike path ended, and then I rode on the road. I went about 25 miles, and almost reached Long Beach, but it was time to go home, so I turned around at the Donald Trump Golf Course. The route is here, if you're interested. I took a lot of photos on the way. Enough to make you bored. Here's a selection. of pictures.

This is Dockweiler beach, near where we live - near to the beach and then maybe a mile south of us. The airport is very near, and planes take off over the beach. When there's a big one (like this) they seem to come very low. A few years ago (before we were here) some bits fell out of the engine of a plane, and landed on the beach.

This is at Redondo Beach. There were pelicans diving for fish, and I spent ages trying to get a good photo of one, so I could win a BBC Wildlife Photography prize, or something like that. I didn't quite succeed.

This was a splash that was made by a pelican. I know, you're going to have to believe me. The person in the foreground is sitting on the beach (although you can't see the beach, the pelicans weren't far out.)
This is a bit hard to tell, but it's a pelican with it's beak full of fish, and doing that sagging thing that makes pelicans more interesting than seagulls.
This is a pelican diving, and another one thinking about it.
This one is just thinking.
And now it dives. (Or did I just turn the camera sideways?)
I can't remember why I took this photo. It might have been the highest point - a sign said that was 1600 feet. I don't have a reference to know how high that actually is, but it felt very, very high, after I'd ridden up the hill.

This is Redondo Beach pier. It looks like a normal pier, sticking out into the sea and stuff, but then it turns a couple of corners and comes back. I didn't think that was, strictly, a pier. But they seem to call it that, and who am I to say they're wrong?This is the turning the corner and coming back bit.
There's my bike.
This was a sign on the pier. Why? What's he going to do? Hahaha.
A tanker, of some sort, on legs. No idea why.
This is me and my bike at the San Vicente Interpretive Center. It's the best place for seeing whales from, when they migrate. Except not in June. They finish in May, and they come back again in November.

Tanker in the distance. Although it's all beachy and nice, there's also some fairly serious industry about. It might not be a tanker, it might be a freighter.

Huh?
Oh, it's true.
That might be Manhattan Beach pier, but it might be Hermosa. I forget.
If that was Manhattan Beach pier, this is Hermosa, and vice versa.

More industry - this is Scattergood generating station - it runs on natural gas.

This is possibly the same freighter/tanker, or it might be a different one, on the way back.
That's just a view of the beach on the way home.

I went into this pizza place, at Hermosa Beach.
And I saw this guy. His name was Marcello, and if you managed to eat a whole tray of pizza (16 slices) you got your name on the wall (you're not allowed to throw up, or go to the bathroom, until you finish). Here he is, almost finished. He'd been eating it for an hour and 20 minutes, which might explain why the person sitting next to him looks a little bored, and is fiddling with her cellphone. He was dipping the last bits of crust into the water, to help them slide down a little easier. He managed to eat about 2 bits in the 10 minutes or so I was there.
This is me, at the Trump National Golf Course, which was the end of my ride (well, the half way point, it didn't end until I got home again).

Detachable Penis

One of the nice things about living here is there are lots of radio stations, playing all kinds of stuff. I usually listen to KCRW, which is an NPR station. In the morning they have 'Morning edition' which is almost like the Today Programme, in the early evening 'All things considered', which is almost like PM.

From 9 until 12 there's Morning Becomes Eclectic. I don't listen to that very often, because I'm usually at work. Which is good, because I tend to have the urge to buy CDs after listening to it (I usually can't remember what they were).

Anyway, today I wasn't listening to KCRW, I was listening to KROQ and they played "Detachable Penis", which, you'll remember, is by King Missile. When was the last time you heard anyone play 'Detachable Penis'? on the radio? Precisely.

Actually, before today I've only heard detachable penis once before today (except when I played it), and that was in someone's car, on a compilation tape that someone had made for them. And that was enough to make me buy it. (Sometimes I don't understand other people - first, it's got the title 'Detachable Penis' - which you would think would be enough to make anyone buy it. Second, it's even better when you hear it. So you would think it was a massive hit. But I don't think it was.

But today, they played it on the radio.

Thanks to the power of the internet, you two can listen to the song (and watch the video) below.




And while I'm on a King Missile sort of roll, another (excellent, you might say) song by them is 'Martin Scorsese'. (I guess this was taken from the telly, because they've removed all the times it says 'fucking' - that's why there's the odd weird pause.



Don't you just want to go and buy King Missile CDs now?

Alone

S and the boys and have gone to Germany, for 5 weeks, leaving me here (not for all 5 weeks, I'm off to England). My life has suddenly lost it's structure. For the first time in I've forgotten how long (actually, it's probably 5 years and 2 weeks) I don't have to get up in the morning at a certain time - like when someone shouts "Daddy, is it daytime?"

It's like driving around without a map lady. I'm unconstrained - I can go anywhere I want to go, but I don't know where I want to go. Some mornings, I get up a 6:30, and go straight to work - I shower, eat breakfast, drink coffee all at work. And there's no reason to go home. (I read another blog recently where someone wrote about infinite time - because of the nature of our jobs, it's never finished. If you gave us an infinite amount of time, we could use it all up.) So I can go home at 10pm, if I want to (and sometimes I do.)

I hope that's not making it sound all bad. Because, at least to start with, it's not.

Have you ever seen that email that people send around? I've just tried to find it, and I can't. It goes something like "Do you feel tired all the time? Listless? Lacking in energy? Do you feel that you are getting older, and there isn't enough time to do the things you want? Do you and your spouse spend time just talking any more? have you wondered what is wrong? The answer is: You've got children."

I thought I was just getting old or something, but sudden, I find that I don't have to fight the urge to go to bed, starting at 9pm, and usually succumbing by 10. I can stay up late. And I can still get up at the same time. I don't know how the boys manage to suck the life force from me - but I've realized that they do.

Tomorrow I'm going to go on a bike ride. Not to go somewhere, but for fun. Just to go out. I can't remember the last time I did that, but I'm prepared to bet it was slightly more than 5 years and 2 weeks ago.

Who am I?

I was walking past the swimming pool this evening, where some children were swimming (surprisingly). They shouted "Hello Alex and Danny's dad!"

That's all I am now. It's what I've become. It's like a few years ago, when women got married, and became "Mrs John Smith", or whatever.

(Bad?) Medicine

S and the boys (and Oma and Brigitte) are going on a flight to Germany, via London. (Well, strictly, the flight is to Amsterdam.) So today, I went to a travel stuff shop, which had all kinds of travel stuff. I went in, and slightly pessimistically asked for a German-US modem adapter plug. They asked if I wanted West German, or East (West) and new style or old (I'd already investigated this, and wanted new). They rummaged under the counter and said "Just the one". Which I thought was quite impressive.

So while I was there, I bought a step up voltage adapter thingy, so that our hand blender would turn with slightly more enthusiasm. On the counter they also had some travel pills "Reduce jetlag! Sleep better!" I investigated more closely, and in smaller letters it said "Homeopathic!" so I put them back.

Then we went to the pharmacy. Partly to buy more cheap toys (pharmacies have enormous quantities of cheap toys - I've bought one of pretty much everything they have for less than 2 dollars, so that every 10 minutes on the flight, S can whip out another toy that they have never seen before. At least for the first 4 hours) but mostly to see if there's anything that is non-homeopathic/non-herbal/non-illegal/ethical that we can stuff into the boys. I went to the 'consult' counter, and explained my problem. I expect a tirade about my parenting skills - something along the lines of "You expect us to sell you powerful pharmaceutical products, products which have been developed to aid sick people; you expect me to use my years of training in pharmacist school; and you want to drug your children , all to make your life a little easier?" But he didn't say that. He said "Benadryl - aisle 8, on the right."

So I looked at the Benadryl (it's an antihistamine), and it said "Warning: may cause severe drowsiness". However, the smallest bottle was 4 ounces, and you aren't allowed to take more than three ounces on a plane, so I bought the bottle, and some strips too.

When we got home, I read the rest of the warnings. The third one said "May cause excitability." Fantastic. So it's either going to knock them out, or give them ADD. And we don't know which, until we try it.

Wipers

I spoke to someone today, who had lived around here for a while, then moved away to Washington, DC, for a few years, and was now back. They said that before they moved away, they didn't realize that you had to replace windscreenshield wipers.

Toast

In Germany, they don't eat sandwiches. This might seem like a problem only when you are in Germany (what do people eat for lunch, if they don't sell sandwiches anywhere?) But it can also prove a problem when you have Germans visiting, who try to help.

The boys had a birthday party, on Friday (which I've nearly recovered from enough to write about). We wanted to make sandwiches, and B, Oma's pal (whom I am supposed to call Frau Kaiser; S thinks it's OK for me to go into her bedroom and rifle through her underwear looking for stuff I'm supposed to take to work, but not to call her by her first name) decided to help.

But (and I know this is hard to believe) she didn't know how to make sandwiches. She took each slice of bread, cut the crusts off, cut it in half, diagonally, and buttered it, and then tried to cut a slice of cheese so that it fitted. Then she put it on the plate. (Yes, that's right, she didn't put another piece on top). I think S tried to explain that sandwiches involved two piece of bread, so she then made sandwiches, but by basically the same procedure, cutting the crusts off each slice, cutting in half, and then cutting a slice of cheese so it fitted, and putting them together. I tried to explain in my rather feeble German "Erste machen, dann Schnitzen" but she just carried on. S thinks that that is because she was so shocked that I called her by her first name, she was unable to listen to anything else I said. I think it's because she didn't have any idea what I was talking about.

The German word for sliced bread is 'toast'. The German word for toast is 'toast'. This kind of makes sense - if you don't eat sandwiches, the only use for sliced bread is to make toast, but it's caused confusion before - such as when Oma writes 'toast' on the shopping list, and the only kind of toast that they sell in Sainsbury's is that hard French stuff, so I buy it, and she can't understand why there's no bread, and I can't understand why she didn't write it on the shopping list. Anyway, we all woke up late this morning (not quite recovered from the party), and so we were in a hurry. I usually get slices of bread from the freezer, leave them to defrost on the breadboard, and do other stuff while they defrost, then I make sandwiches for the boys.

So I do this, as normal. But when I turn around, Oma has toasted them. She thinks this is normal - after all, I got toast from the freezer. So, I try to explain that I didn't want the toast toasted, because even though she thinks it's toast, I think it's bread, and I'm going to make some of that weird foreign mysterious food called a sandwich. So I get more bread from the freezer, put it on the breadboard, andgo about my business. Now, with leaving time mere minutes away, I go to pack the boys' lunches. But, yes, you've guessed it, my bread is in the toaster, and is nicely toasted. I fling it into the sink (Oma gets it out again, a few bubbles won't allow her to let good toast go to waste) and get more frozen bread out of the freezer, which I make into frozen sandwiches.

If I were to go into a bit of self-psychoanalysis and introspection, the reason this offends me so is because of an incident that happened (naturally) when I was a child. I think that a number of incidents involving packed lunches have scarred me, and this is just one of them. (Another involves my yogurt breaking open, and me being upset about this, while other children look on and laugh because I pronounce if to rhyme (almost) with Bogart. My mother was Canadian, and so said yogurt this way - I've speant years fighting the urge to call it yoagurt, and trying to remember to call it yoggert. A f then we move to America, and I have to try to call it yoagurt again, so our boys aren't scorned at school for being weirdo outsiders.)

But I was going to tell you about the frozen bread. I was (I'd guess) about 13 and we were going on a caoch trip to Londom. (I think it was a own twinning thing, where lots of French/German people came to stay, and we had to do something to amuse them). So we made egg sandwiches. And we (well, mum, let's assign blame where it's due for the psychological damage this caused) thought we should freeze the sandwiches. That way, when we arrived in London, they would be cool and pleasant, not warm and disgusting. So, we arrived in London, and prepared to eat our cool yummy egg sandwiches. Except they weren't cool, they were frozen.

We left the sandwiches on the coach, thinking that when we got back for the journey home we would have cool, delicious sandwiches to eat. When we got back to the coach, the sandwiches had attracted enormous amounts of condensation, and were soggy balls of mush. And I was sad (and, obviously, damaged).

Names

Oma has come to visit, and she's brought a pal, Frau Kaiser.

This introduces one of those bizarre name problems that Germans have. S and the boys call Frau Kaiser, Frau Kaiser. I'm not sure what Oma calls her. But the question is, what does she call S? She can't call her S, because that's too informal. But she can't call her Frau H, because that's Oma. And that's too formal, when Frau K is older. And S isn't Frau H. She is Frau Dr H.

The solution is that Frau Kaiser doesn't speak to S directly, she can only address her through Oma. As in "Does your daughter want sugar?"

Frau K has yet to address me, partly because she doesn't speak much English, but mostly because (I suspect) she has no idea what to call me.

We were in a shop today (The Pinata Store, but that's another blog entry), and after I paid, the woman serving had looked at my credit card and said "Thanks Jeremy". It's like another country. Oh, hang on, it is.