Saturday, August 30, 2008

Pet Problems

Last weekend the boys and I went to the Fiesta Ballona, a carnival in Culver City, with expensive rides run by grumpy people. We didn't stay long, 'cos the boys were in bad moods, but we did see the Spam Truck. I'm sure there's a joke about getting free Spam, or more Spam, or something, but I can't think of one that's not so obvious that it isn't funny.


Anyway, the boys wanted to have a go on a stall, most of which were extraordinarily expensive and probably brief. The one that wasn't was throwing ping-pong balls into glass jars, 'cos it was a dollar for 7 balls, and it's impossible to win, so we were safe. Ignoring the fact that it's impossible to win, Alex won a goldfish. Which is bad enough, 'cos we've supported the person at the fair who probably doesn't treat his goldfish as well as he might. Plus it means we've got a goldfish, but at least that meant we could leave the fair.

(We had spare ride tickets, so I tried to find an underprivileged looking child to give them to, but every child I saw who looked potentially underprivileged had a $20 free ride bracelet on. Eventually I gave them to an overprivileged looking child, who was just arriving).

So now we have a goldfish, called Cutefish by Alex, who gets naming privileges for winning it (because it's so cute, apparently). Except Daniel calls it Freddy the Fish, much to Alexs chagrin. (When I was young, we had chickens in the garden, and each child was allowed to name one. I name mine 'Zodiac', after the rusting and derelict Ford Zodiac parked at the end of the neighbour's garden, My ever loving sister's decided to call it Sadie, much to my chagrin. So maybe it's genetic).

I went to the pet shop to buy some goldfish food, where I found that goldfish are 25c each. That's about 13 pence in old money. So we somewhat overpaid for our goldfish, by a factor of about 4.

Anyway, pet trauma number two was that Karenzander the (male) rat had a lump growing on her side. So we took her to the vet, once we found a vet who had sufficient rat expertise. The vet diagnosed a case of 'lump on side' which needed to be sliced off, in an operation. So he was duly booked in to the vets, and had to be taken there at 7:15 on Friday morning, which seemed a little excessively early to me.

The logistics of the day were very complicated, Daniel had a friend around to visit, and Alex was at Ana's house, so the various children had to be taken/fetched, and then we had a vague plan to go out to the Souplantation, so we weren't quite sure how to fit all this in.

But we forgot! This is America! The vets open at 7:30 in the morning, and close at 9pm (on weekdays); 4:30 on Saturday, and 10-4 on Sunday). So we went out, and I went to collect the sick rat from the vets.

Karenzander is now back in the rat house, but we've divided into two so that he doesn't feel obliged to fight with Karen while he recuperates. We are supposed to wash the injury with a hot compress twice a day. That's going to prove an interesting challenge.

A new rat is considerably more expensive than a goldfish - I think they are about $4. So overpaying for the goldfish by a factor of 4 was nothing. It cost $39 to have the vet look at the lump, and tell us that it had a lump, and needed to be hacked out (we knew that), and $265 to actually hack out the lump.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Licking out the bowl

Sometimes I try to pass on my hopes and dreams to the boys. And often it fails. Today was one of those days.

The boys and I made chocolate brownies today (fat free!). Well, we opened a packet from Trader Joe's, stirred in some yogurt (?) and put it in the oven.

When I was little, one of life's most pleasurable pleasures was eating the remnants of cake (or whatever) mixture was left in the bowl and on any implements. It always dismayed me and my siblings if the person doing the creating was too diligent in scraping mixture into the cake tin, so today I was deliberately unconscientious. Even more unconscientious than usual.

I gave the boys spoons (I didn't even make them get their own), and they set about the bowl. Alex had one small sample from the spoon, and said it made his throat hurt. Daniel had two or three, before saying it was too salty for his tongue.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

River Inn

In Big Sur, there is a place called the River Inn, which has an inn, a cafe, several shops, a pub, and things like that. It also has the cheapest food we found in Big Sur - a vegetarian burrito for $6 (although I had guacamole in mine, for an extra $1.25, and jalapenos, for an extra 50c, but given that a sandwich anywhere else was $12, it was still cheap).




Anyway, the interesting thing about the River Inn is that they place chairs in the river, so that you can cool your feet whilst eating your (cheap) burrito.

Despite the fact that it was a river, it had pond skaters (or something like that) in it. They had to spend a lot of time skating upstream, and then they would be washed downstream again.

Here are a couple of them, ermmm, cuddling.

Monterey


When we visited Big Sur, we actually stayed in Monterey. We did that because there aren't many places to stay in Big Sur, they are expensive, and they were full anyway. So the Holiday Inn Express it was for us.

Monterey is a fairly touristy kind of place, it has an aquarium, and other things, and the main street for that sort of stuff is called Cannery Row. It's one of these places that used to be full of industrial stuff, and now has been transformed into something that attracts crowds - presumable going through a difficult period in between. I suggested that, given that lots of people went to Monterey for the sake of going to Monterey, we might go and look at it. Susanne said that we were members of the Long Beach Aquarium, and it wasn't like it was in the book anyway, and so there was little point.

One of the many lovable things about Susanne is that she assumes that if she knows something, I must know it too (or almost all of it). For example, I was supposed to know about 'the book', but obviously didn't know quite enough to know that it wasn't like the book.

I enquired further. "The Book" is called Cannery Row, and is by John Steinbeck. It describes the life of Cannery Row (which used to be called Ocean View Drive) where sardines were canned (surprise there) and pressed to make sardine oil, and the workers were largely Asian.

Why we would want to go there if it still was the place where sweating workers processed sardines into cans, I'll never know. But if they weren't there, squeezing sardines, it wasn't worth looking at, apparently.

Look! Cannery Row is on Google Books.

Pacific Coast Highway

The Pacific Coast Highway is about 200 miles of quite impressive scenery (and about 100 miles of dreariness, but we don't photograph that). Here are some pictures.

This is a mountain, and our car (45 mpg on this trip!) (That's US gallons too.)

A beach. There are lots of nice looking beaches along the PCH. One of the reasons they look nice is because there is no one on them, and there is no one on them because there is no way of getting to them. You are discouraged by big fences and signs saying "Private". Sometimes you are discouraged by signs saying "If you climb down here and get stuck, we will want a lot of money to get you out."
Water, hills.
Clouds which were blowing up the mountain from the sea. Obviously you can't see that, 'cos it's a photo.


More sea, more inaccessible coastline.


This might not have been on the PCH, but it was near.

A bridge.

Elephant Seals

We drove back from Big Sur on the Pacific Coast Highway (that's the PCH to us locals). On the way there are lots of places to stop with interesting things to look at, but when we had 300 miles to drive it had to be pretty interesting.

We drove past one parking lot with a lot of cars in it, and when we were past, we saw that the cars were there because there were elephant seals on the beach. We made a U turn, and went to look at the elephant seals - as did about 50% of the cars that headed in that direction.

The boys weren't feeling great (they had colds) and refused to get out of the car. I had to tell them that the animals had mouths a little bit like Dr Zoidberg's before they would.




David Attenborough never had the problem of children kicking the fence he was resting his camera on. (Also, I've got no sound on my computer right now, so I've no idea what that sounds like).

Madonna Inn

We went on a trip to Big Sur last week. On the way, we stayed at a place called the Madonna Inn. I thought that that might have something to do with either religion or popular music, but in fact it was founded by someone called Alex Madonna. There's a Google Map with a photo of it here.

Every room in the Madonna Inn is different, and has a theme. Several of them have rock waterfall showers (I still don't really understand what that means). We didn't know what we wanted, so we took pot luck and got the San Francisco room.

I don't know what was San Francisco about it, but it was very red.

The lightswitch was carefully covered with wallpaper, ensuring that the redness wasn't spoiled, and that you couldn't see it.


We had a red leather sofa in our room:


And an ornate metal bed (the boys had a similar metal bed).

The place was vast - it comprised several buildings. Here is Susanne, Alex and Daniel in front of one of them.


And here is another. Notice the stone chimney.


The interiors of everywhere were done out in the same sort of elaborate, opulent style. Here is the pastry shop / cafe (where we had breakfast).

Alex and Daniel's favorite thing was the urinal in the cafe. It was a copper trough, and when it flushed, the water poured over and turned a metal water wheel.


They had a postcard for every room, with a photo of the room. Not that you can really see, but here they are:



And here's Dan standing on a rock. (Notice the pink lamp post).

Computer Problems

The boys have OLPC laptops - laptops designed for children. They are, in many ways, great machines. They are fairly childproof, they don't have a hard disk, so they don't mind being dropped, they are pretty waterproof, there are no sticky out bits to break off and no holes to shove stuff into. They can't get viruses, and if they can, you can wipe the operating system and reinstall with a memory stick, and the whole process takes about 20 minutes. (Obviously, you only use Google Docs and Gmail, so there's no worries about it not saving stuff).

One tiny drawback that they have is that the mouse pad doesn't work if it's even a tiny bit wet - our children aren't bad at washing their hands, but they're not great at drying them, so this is occasionally a problem.

On Sunday we were driving in the car (coming back from Monterey, but that's another blog post). Alex was using his computer (that's another thing about OLPC computers - great battery life) in the car when suddenly, and without warning, he vomited on it, himself, the car, and anything else in the vicinity. We stopped (conveniently he did it just before a car park with bathrooms to aid in cleaning up) and started the clean up process.

We'd finished when we realized we hadn't cleaned his computer. And we couldn't see it. Then Daniel said "My mouse doesn't work on this computer, because it's wet."

Thursday, August 07, 2008

Nerdy Hotel Room Joke

404: Hotel room not found error.

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

ABCHomeStore Review

I ordered new beds for the twins from ABCHomeStore, and I've never experienced such a crappy company.

Beds are fairly big, and fairly heavy, so we couldn't really ask them to be left with a neighbor. They took about 8 days to arrive (fair enough, they had a long way to come), and they rang to make an appointment to deliver. They couldn't do a time when we were in (partly 'cos we were about to go away for a couple of days), and said that they would charge us for storage if we couldn't be in. Eventually we found a time when we could be in, and they could deliver.

They came, and there were three boxes. I thought that was curious, as had ordered four things, so I rang, and was told that it wasn't a problem because the two beds were in one box. I thought it was kind of light, for two beds, but didn't worry.

When I opened the box, lo and behold, there was one bed in there. I rang them up and asked about this. They said that I shouldn't have signed for it if it wasn't complete (I was hardly going to open the boxes first, to check everything was there, and then sign for it). They said that they sent two beds, and it wasn't their fault, and it wasn't their problem, and I should phone the delivery people. They claimed that the delivery people weighed the bed at every stage, so would know if a bed was missing; the delivery people seem to know nothing about this.

As far as the delivery people were concerned they said that they had been asked to deliver three cartons and that they had delivered three cartons, so it wasn't their problem.

As far as ABCHomeStore was concerned, I was lying, so they didn't care.

They claim on their website that "Honesty, integrity, and quality are the values that we've built our business on." Which smells like bullshit to me.

To be expected ...

From the LA Times

Christian biker gang members charged with attempted murder

Police say the charges stem from a fight last week at a Newport Beach bar, and the victims are members of the Hells Angels.
If you're going to call yourself "Hell's Angels" it's only fair to assume that Christians are going to try to kill you.

Saturday, August 02, 2008

Reunited

We saw Ana for the first time in a few weeks at a birthday party. We thought that Alex and she would have forgotten about each other (in the way that parents do with their children, although their children aren't usually 6 when that happens). However, she'd been away visiting relatives for a couple of weeks, and apparently hadn't stopped talk about Alex.

Alex was in the play structure, which was, as these things tend to be, very mazelike. They spent a little while pursuing each other, only to pass with mesh in between. Finally, they were reunited in that most romantic of places, the ball pool.

They were very pleased to be back together again.

The birthday party proper happened in a different room. Almost all the children sat on one table together where they ate pizza and cake. Alex and Ana sat on another table, mostly on their own.