Animals (2)

We went to the Hollywood Safari Park which, despite it's name, is nowhere near California - it's in Germany. (There is a Hollywood connection, but I never fully grasped it.) It's a safari park, with animals, and then a bit of a theme park.

The whole place is a little like it's been trapped in a time warp, with almost nothing done to it for 20 years. There are some white tigers, with a sign that proudly announces (in English and German, which is how I know) that they hope to have produced offspring by 1989. The sign talks about only two white tigers, but we saw more, so maybe the offspring were produced (maybe we saw the offspring? I'm not sure how long tigers live).

The monkeys were in a large enclosure, with a train that went around it. The monkeys jumped on the train and the passengers could feed them popcorn through the bars of the cage.



Here's Alex on an electric boat. You put in 50 cents, and the motor started, and then when the motor stopped, you hoped the boat was somewhere near the edge, so you could retrieve your offspring. If it wasn't, you threw coins at the boat until your child manages to catch on and put it into the slot, and then the process repeats.
There was a petting zoo with goats, which you could feed popcorn to. The shop that sold the popcorn that was next to the goats was shut, so no one had popcorn. We had popcorn (from the monkeys) so the goats were very excited.

Here's a camel. And the back of Dan's head.

S had bought corduroy jackets for the boys with patches on the elbows (so they looked like teachers). She was determined to get a photo of them together in a car ride. They were determined not to. A compromise (of sorts) was reached by Dan sticking his foot in the air, in an attempt to spoil the photo.

Animals (1)

The

Germans (and all continentals, as far as I can tell) have a different attitude towards conkers. When I see conkers lying on the ground, I can barely resist the urge to scoop them all up and take them home. (Actually, I don't resist the urge, but I usually only pick up a couple). People from other countries don't seem to realise what prized possessions they are, and ignore them - one sees huge piles of them on the ground, in the middle of cities. We visited an animal park type of place (a bit like a zoo) in Bielefeld. Outside was a trailer and two large containers, full of conkers. I started to fill my pockets (as you would), imagining that they had picked these up and place them here so that people would take them away. But I had it the wrong way around. You were supposed to give them the conkers you have collected, and they feed them to their pigs.

Shocking.

We arrived (coincidentally) at feeding time for the bear. (It used to be bears, but one of them is no more). Opa always brings the boys to look at the bear(s) and they usually have no interest, and wander away, leaving Opa disappointed. Most commonly they see something boring and commonplace and get much more excited about that than about the bear in the distance ("Leaf!" or "Cow!").

This time it was feeding time. The bear was was given a selection of fruit and vegetables (or fruits and vegetables, as it always says here), and two dead pigeons. To make things more exciting for the bear, the foodstuffs are hidden around the enclosure. The bear found a carrot first, but moments before it ate the carrots, it smelled (I'm guessing) the pigeons, spat out the carrots, and extracted the pigeons from the cranny they had been placed in.

The bear made fairly short work of the pigeons - it chose to pull or bite bits from the pigeons, rather than chew it up and swallow them whole, but the ease with which it pulled the wings off before eating them made me even less anxious to meet a bear that didn't have an electric fence separating me from it.

The boys have become enthusiastic about taking photos with my camera. This means we get a lot of duff photos, and the odd reasonable one. It also removes any burden I might have felt to document our lives. Here's a couple of the more successful ones.

First, a bear with two pigeons in its mouth:

A deer. Aim: Good. Angle: Poor.

Back from Germany

We arrived back from Germany last night, where we'd been for two weeks. I tried to blog from their, but the computer crashed and it demoralized me, so I didn't. Photos, and some blogs later.

Ollie the Octopus

The day after Alex brought Tommy the Turtle home (for being such a good listener), Daniel brought Ollie the Octopus home, also as a reward for being a good listener. A coincidence? Or something more sinister? You decide.

The day after that school was closed, so Ollie the Octopus got to go out for the day. Where do you take an octopus when you have to go out for the day? To the aquarium, to see his octopussy friends, of course. There weren't actually any octopuses at the aquarium, but there were lots of other sea creatures for Ollie to look at.

Tommy the Turtle

Alex was 'such a good listener' (didn't shout quite as much as all the other children) that he was given Tommy the Turtle to bring home. Tommy comes home with the child, and there is a journal, where the adventures of Tommy are described. When Tommy was at our house, he went in a pretend swimming pool, he got a little frightened and hid under the table, and he looked at Daniel's machine. [Daniel's machine needs a blog entry all on its own, which I'll get around to doing sometime.]

What not to say

S bought some new shoes. She said that they looked Californian, so they would fit in.

I said they looked like porn star shoes.

That was the wrong thing to say, it seems.

Cheating the System

The boy's school is "Natural Science Magnet", which means two things. First (and most obviously) it specialises in natural sciences. It has more qualified teachers than most schools, most have master's degrees, and it's supposed to be better at teaching natural sciences (as opposed to artificial ones). But this also means that it doesn't have a catchment area - this means that anyone within the city of Los Angeles (or strictly, within the LA Unified School District) can apply to have their child enter, with an equal chance of getting in - it's done by lottery.

The boys are currently in kindergarten, which doesn't follow those rules, for kindergarten you have to live in the area. So there is no guarantee of a place next year, in grade 1.

However, the lottery is not quite random, because they say that they tweak the results to ensure that there is an appropriate range of groups and backgrounds - they don't say what they mean by background (one imagines race and class), and this might mean that there is flexibility in the description. In which case it's possible to cheat.

Outside each classroom, and sent home with the children on the first day, is a'wishlist' - things that the teacher would like for the classroom. These range from the mundane (pack of crayons, white photocopying paper of the kind you can steal from work if you were so minded), to the less mundane (what's the opposite of mundane?) - a teaching easel for 100 dollars, an equipment cart for 160 dollars, a subscription to a book thing for 125 dollars. For many of these, the gave an order number and a description, but nothing else (so it said 'teaching easel - pj342, or something like that).

Bearing in mind that first impressions count, I scratched the most expensive item in each classroom off the list, and ran home to hit Google. Typing in the description and order number gives one web page, which I guessed was the place to order it from.

I should make it clear that if this was you attempting to cheat the system by increasing the chances of getting your kids in to a better school by throwing money at it (money that other parents, whose children are just as deserving as a place in that school as ours, and may even be more so), I would disapprove. I would even vote for laws that made it illegal. But they're not your offspring, they're ours, and it's not illegal, so it's OK.

First day of school

The boys went to school, for the first time. School starts here at 8:20, so it's lucky that we live 2 minutes from the school. We were a bit worried about getting there on time (well, more worried because Alex likes to arrive at places first - he's not good at joining a group of children) so we arrived at about 5 to 8, and chatted with other parents.

We were let into the playground at about 8, and Daniel played on the climbing frame, while Alex just looked a little nervous.

The boys are in different classrooms, so S took Dan, and I took Alex (on the grounds that Alex was more likely to be sad). Alex was a bit sad, but his fingers were soon pried from my hands, and he was dragged into the classroom. I think more of the problem with Alex is that he didn't want to be somewhere different from Daniel - he's much more of a follower.

S wanted me to stay at home, in case there was a crisis that had to be dealt with. Actually, she would have liked us both to stay at home, in case each boy had a crisis simultaneously. I tried to explain to S that they had people at the school who had qualifications in dealing with children in crisis, which is way more than we had, but she didn't care. She couldn't stay at home anyway, she had a meeting to go to, and I didn't.

Anyway, the day passed, and surprisingly there were no crises.

We went to pick the boys up together, and give them their Schultute. The children were released one by one to their parents (or whoever came to pick them up) while the parents waited outside the gate. They were so weary they could hardly walk - I had to carry Dan all the way home (except for the stairs, I made him walk up them) because his tummy hurt. (When he got home he did 'so many poohs that you couldn't count them all' which might have been related.)

Oh, we should have some photos, I suppose.

Here's S, outside the school with the Schultutes. ('School cones' - full of school type equipment [which is ignored] and sweets [which are consumed]).

Here is the school, with the classrooms. Dan's is on the left, and Alex's is on the right.
Outside the school.
Walking out of the gate for the first time.
Alex, inspecting the contents of his Schultute.
Daniel, looking a little dazed. The hat says 'Happy 1st day of school'.

Anti-Psychiatry Museum

I met Katrina through Facebook, which was a little weird. She was Facebook friends with two of my facebook friends. One (Erin) of whom lives in LA, and she met at a wedding. The other (Patrick) lives in London, and she went to college with. She decided I was her Kevin Bacon.


So we went (not just the two of us, it wasn't like a date) to the Anti-Psychiatry Museum, because that's what you should do with people you meet on Facebook. It's called "Psychiatry: An Industry of Death". It's about all the bad things that psychiatrists do, and how they have a plan to, errrmmm, well the museum was a bit vague on what the actual plan was, but it was very clear that psychiatrists had a plan.

Bits of it were interesting. Lots of it was true. Mental hospitals in 1800 were very unpleasant. Some psychiatrists were nazis. Lobotomies were a bad thing. Too many children are on Ritalin. But how this all linked together into a masterplan was a little vague. One of the last exhibits was a copy of every issue of the DSM (1, 2, 3, 3R, 4 and 4TR) which I thought was quite cool. But that probably wasn't the point. (I'm not sure what the point was though).

You had a receiver thing, and headphones to hear the text accompanying a whole lot of videos. But you only had one receiver, per two headphones.

Karen and Karensander

The boys have been saying for a while that they wanted a hamster. We said that if they were very good on their first day at school, they could have a rat each. (Not a hamster, because hamsters are dull).

We asked them what they were going to call their rats. Alex said "Karen" and Dan said "My friend rat".

So, the boys were good (actually, we bought the rats while they were at school), and rats arrived. They were so worn out after their day at school that they didn't notice that the rat cage had rats in it for about an hour. When they saw them, they decided who was having which rat, and what their names were to be. Alex said "Karen", and I said that Karen was a girl's name, and the rats were boys. So Alex decided his rat would be called Karensander. And Daniel said "Karen" and wouldn't change his mind.

Here's their abode. It's a Bel Air 5 storey Rat Mansion.

And here's a picture of Karensander. Karen wasn't feeling very photogenic.


Alex sometimes gets confused, and calls them hamsters.

Average Weather

The weird thing about the weather here is that there isn't much of it. The average is 'pleasantly warm', and +/- 2.7 SDs of the mean is 'Warm enough that it could be a bit cooler' or 'I might consider putting a light jacket on soon'. The wind is virtually always a moderate breeze, coming from the West. (When it comes from the East, the planes take off in the opposite direction from the airport, I've seen that once.) Sometimes it gets as strong as 'strong breeze' and occasionally it's 'Very light breeze'.

I've been rained on once when riding to work, and once it's been windy (it was the talk of the locker rooms on that day). Today was the hottest day for two years, and it reached 30 degrees, for about 10 minutes, S claimed.

So yesterday, the boys were watching the TV, and I was pottering about. Suddenly, there was shouting from the living room - this usually means that something has gone wrong with the TV, like someone has sat on the remote control. This time, the screen had gone blank, and there was a spoken message and text scrolling across the screen with a commentary that said (something like): "Warning, there will be heavy rain, thunderstorms and flash floods in Los Angeles County, in the North Eastern Region. Do not drive through water. Most people who drown in floods are in their cars." It then came again, and said basically the same thing, but also said "Tornado warning in Lancaster and Palmdale. 5:00 pm to 5:19pm"

Given our lack of interesting weather, I thought this was very, very exciting. So I looked hopefully out of the window: the weather was just a bit warmer than pleasant, the breeze was slight, and coming from the west.

I checked the web, on things like the LA Times but there wasn't anything there. I found the same information repeated on the National Weather Service web page. But the weather just stayed slightly warmer than pleasantly warm.

The price of luxury

In October, it's Oma's birthday so it seems we are both morally and legally obliged to take the twins to her birthday party so that they can knock people's drinks over for a half hour, shout that they want to go home, cause a general tantrum and be dragged away after an hour.

In my extensive searches on the interweb, I've found that Air India fly from LAX to Frankfurt, and they charge about $200 less per ticket than anyone else. That's £400 total savings, in old money.

The reviews I've found aren't really all that mixed. It's crap. Well, the food is good (if you like vegetarian food, and curry - so two thumbs up there) but everything else is a bit grim.

It's about 24 hours of total flying time - which makes £16 per hour. I can't decide between statement A:

• Flying is really grim anyway. It's only going to be relatively a tiny bit grimmer.

And statement B:

• Flying is really grim anyway. It's worth paying to make it less grim.

Coincidental Reunions

When I was in London, I chatted with my uncle. He said that he thought that L, my cousin, might live somewhere in Los Angeles, but he would speak with his brother (that's my other uncle) and find out.

And, indeed she does. Let's have a bit of background. My father's brother, which would be my Uncle David moved to Canada, ooh, a long time ago, and had three children (they would be my cousins). I have only ever (in my memory) met one of these three cousins, at that was (I think) in about 1975 (or maybe 1976), when she was in England at our grandparents house. Other than that, I knew pretty much nothing about them - we're not the best of extended families at keeping in touch.

Anyway, it turns out that not only does she live in Los Angeles, but she lives about 8 miles away (less, if you didn't have to drive around the airport), and used to live closer than that - she would buy lunch from our local Indian restaurant.

I mentioned this to someone at work, and they explained that it wasn't really a coincidence, after all, LA is a big place, and it's very common for people to move here (very few people are from around here), especially people from other countries, and I have a number of cousins, and started to do calculations on my whiteboard.

Today she, and her 18 month old offspring (who is, according to my mother, D and A's second cousin - but I've never understood that) came to visit, and she turned out to be not unpleasant at all. We gossiped about various family mysteries - I had hoped she might have answers to questions that have been family hearsay and gossip for as long as I can remember, but she knew even less than I did.

We had lunch, and then she was going to have to leave to go to a barbecue, but it started to rain (!) so she stayed a bit longer and generally hung out. A and D were extremely grumpy - partly because they were a bit tired, but also I think because they were not used to having a younger child around, who garnered more attention than they did. (When their cousin came to visit, there was the opposite effect - she got grumpy because they were younger and got more attention).

Earthquake!

Well, more like earthquake .

There was an earthquake here the other day. It happened at about 1am, and woke me up, although I didn't realise it was an earthquake, until someone asked me the next day if I had noticed the earthquake. It scored 4.5 on the Richter scale, as opposed to the recent earthquake in Peru, which was an 8. (And remember, kids, that the Richter scale is logarithmic, so 4.5 to 8 isn't twice as high, it's about 3000 times higher. Its epicentre was the Simi Valley, which is a bit of a way from us (and also where the Ronald Reagan presidential library is based. Coincidence? I think not.)

Apparently a plate somewhere fell off a shelf, and was slightly damaged.

Google Maps has streets

Google maps has added street views of bits of Los Angeles. The photos near us are on the old side - there's a hotel near us that has been (mostly) demolished since we've lived here, but it's in the pictures. I tried to find something profound and interesting near to us (our street isn't on it), but failed.

Never mind. Here are some unprofound, and uninteresting things.

Our local Trader Joe's. This is on the street, but you can't get in this side.

The bus stop where I catch the bus to CoCE. That's the bench I sit on.

CoCE - the ramp on the right is where I ride into the car park. And here's the other side.

Our local Taco Bell, mmmm... 7 layer burritos.

Santa Monica pier. The thing that looks like a warehouse was a movable museum made of shipping containers. It was there in the summer of 2006.

Children's Planting Day

One of the nice things about living in the kind of apartment complex we live in is that one never has to do any gardening at all. Everything is done for you. But one of the less nice things is that you can't do anything, even if you wanted to. But today, that changed - just a tiny bit.

One area of ground had been prepared for a children's garden. The area was divided up with paving slabs, and each child got about a 5 foot square area, to plant. The organiser was, as organisers tend to be, incredibly officious. You had to have signed up by Thursday and if you didn't, you didn't get a bit of garden (we had signed up, very early on). You could not choose plants - these were assigned, you could only choose where to plant them. We have had a shrub on the balcony that has been slowly dying since we moved here, so we planted that too (we had to ask permission first - we were a little nervous.)

Alex planting:

Alex's garden, nearly complete:


Daniel digging, in a fashion proscribed by the medical profession.

Riding South

On Sunday, the boys and I headed south along the bike path - me on the bike, them in the trailer. We started at Playa del Rey, then El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, and Torrance, and would have reached Palos Verdes, if we'd gone a bit further.

I always feel that Torrance got the raw end of the deal when they were naming these places. Playa del Rey (Beach of the King - or King's Beach), El Segundo (which just means 'The Second' and apparently is so called because it was the site of the second Standard Oil refinery on the west coast - which is still there, along with the sewage works and power station), it doesn't really matter what Manhattan, Hermosa and Redondo mean (although Manhattan is named after Manhattan in New York, Hermosa means 'beautiful' and redondo means 'willow'). Torrance was named after someone, who was, surprisingly, called Torrance. (Palos Verdes is actually an area that contains four cities, but if you really care, you can look it up on Wikipedia.)

Here's a picture of D on Manhattan Beach pier.



Anyway, we rode the 12 or so miles to Torrance, where the beach bike path (and the beach) end, and S came in the car to take the boys home, and I rode home.

We met at Redondo beach, about half way home, and went on what was called a "Glass Bottomed Boat" and "The Submarine", which was actually a boat with glass sides under the water, with a slightly grumpy guide / driver (is that what the person who steers a boat is called?) The picture below shows the 'bottom' that you could look through but "don't touch the glass 'cos it's really hard to clean."


Some people who'd hired a pedal boat incurred the driver's (?) wrath by coming too close. "Cut me some slack, I've hardly got any fish" he said. Then he phoned someone and told them about the incident (including the "cut me some slack" bit.)

He also told us (before we'd paid our money) that we'd see sealions. I imagined that this would mean watching sealions majestically gliding through the water. Not a big heap of sealions lying in the sun.


I had wanted to go on the boat that said "30 minute thrill ride", but when we got back from our glass bottomed boat trip, the superfast boat was trundling in to the dock, with one engine obviously not working, and the other one pouring out black smoke - so maybe it was better that we didn't.

Then we went to a Mexican restaurant - a Mexican restaurant which conveniently sold children's meals of pizza. It had quite an impressive view from the window.


We ordered guacamole, and to prove it was fresh, they made it at the table. They brought avocados, and a little bowl of chilies, a lime and the other stuff, and mashed it up there and then. Which I thought was partly a nice touch, but also let you personalise it with your choice of how much chili, lime, onion, etc, you wanted.

Here's a photo of the same place from the outside.

CostCo

We'd been sort of meaning to go to CostCo since we arrived here, and today, we finally managed it. First we had to battle through the line to pay our $50 to join, and then, armed with our cards, we were in.

CostCo sells absolutely everything. You can buy a tire for your car, and a loaf of bread and a TV and a sink. (I didn't actually see a kitchen sink, but I did see someone with a bathroom sink on a trolley. And you can't buy a loaf of bread, because everything comes in bulk, so you have to buy two loaves of bread).

We spent $420 (not including our $50 membership fee), which was a lot, even for us. And I'm wondering what I should now do with 1.75 litres of tequila ($26.99 + tax).

Like an American ...

I went back to England. I went to shops. I thought "These shop assistants are surly." I went to restaurants "These restaurants are expensive". I went outside "It rains a lot here."

I'm worried I've turned into an American. Already.

Emails

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Without even trying...

We heard today that S has a visa that means that she can start work at Corporation of Current Employment. It all came about rather bizarrely, S was determined not to apply for a job at CoCE, because it's where I work. Not that she objects to working in the same organisation as me, but if they were prepared to give me a job then maybe it's too contemptible a group to consider working for.

Anyway, S got offered a job without trying. She wasn't desperate for a job, she works for University of Previous Employment, and for the National Cancer Service (or something like that) in Wales, and they're both pretty flexible (which they need to be, what with having to work at the nursery every other day).

I was chatting with R one day, who was doing a systematic review - and he said that he needed someone who knew what they were doing to help with his review (that's what S does, btw). But, he said, he needed someone in Los Angeles, so he could meet them; and they needed to be able to be paid in pounds, from Britain. And where was he going to find such a person?

So S started working on that project, and (as she does) stormed in like an organisational whirlwind (if that's not too much of an oxymoron) and tried to make sure it was done right. The people at CoCE obviously liked this sort of thing (perhaps they are married to Germans?) and decided to offer her more work.

However, before they could offer her more work, they had to get her a work visa, which is the process that started a few months ago, and is very nearly complete. The piece of paper that says she can have a visa is now in the post, somewhere between a lawyer's office and CoCE. But it's not a visa - it's just a piece of paper that says that she is allowed a visa; and that piece of paper is all you need to be able to (legally) work (for CoCE) in the USA. (It's an H1-b visa, the same as mine, in case you're interested.)

Until you leave the country. When you leave the country, you need a visa to get back in again, so you need to turn that piece of paper into a work visa. The transformation process can only be done at a US embassy, by making an appointment several weeks in advance, so just how we manage to work that is going to be a mystery. (Although if we deny the existence of the piece of paper, presumable her old H4 visa still lets her in the country, even if it doesn't let her work.)

Boys vs the Roomba

We've bought a Roomba - which, if you're not up on household technology, is a robot vacuum cleaner. It's battery powered, and it doesn't suck enormously hard, but what it lacks in power it makes up for with persistence.

You put it in a room, and it vacuums it. It starts off going in an increasing spiral, until it hits something, and then it gets a bit random where it goes. But it just keeps vacuuming until it's battery runs out. Then it sits on its charger for an hour, and it's ready to go again (if it's near enough to its charger when the battery runs out, it makes its own way to it, and sits on it. Usually it's not in the same room that it started in though.)

So, we have the boys (and possibly me) constantly scattering crumbs on the floor, and the Roomba constantly (well, almost constantly) scuttling about picking them up. The boys call all vacuum cleaners Nu-Nus (from the somewhat maternal vacuum cleaner on the Teletubbies) but this does seem especially like the Nu-Nu. First, because it follows you around, cleaning up (today I chopped onions in the kitchen, and didn't worry about the little bits falling on the floor - I'll just drop the NuNu in there later), second because of it's fidgety manner. It goes forward until it hit something, and then it turns a little, to try to get around it, goes forwards again, and so on.

Because we splashed out on a slightly more expensive version, it's got a remote control, so rather than letting it wander on its own, one can steer it. D and A have a number of remote control cars (it's the law that children have a number of remote control cars, because they are so cheap. When I was their age, I would have killed for a remote control car), but they have spent more time steering the NuNu around things, than they have with all of their cars combined.

The other weird thing about it is how much one anthropomorphises it - well, maybe not anthropo, maybe zoomorphises ... maybe I should stop trying to use clever words that might not even exist ... how much one thinks of it as an animal. It misbehaves, because I set it cleaning one room, but forget to close the door, and when I come back it's gone. Like a naughty little thing that has escaped, it's away cleaning the bathroom or the bedroom instead of the hallway (it's supposed to be doing our bedroom at the moment, but I suspect it's in the living room instead).

It also gets trapped - once it gets behind the dining table, or into the bathroom, it has enormous trouble getting out again. There's quite a small target it needs to hit to get out through the door, and when it fails, it turns too far and gets in again. I feel sorry for it, and like I should rescue it.

Ex-Cat

We were away recently (S was in Germany with the boys, and I was in England, teaching), so N came in every day to feed the cat, and generally look after it. (Also G recently started working at CoCE, and so he was staying here too - but he was either travelling to places for work, working, or partying, so he wasn't going to be great in the cat department).

The cat, I should mention, was getting on in years - she'd been in our possession for 12 years, and I got her from the Cat Protection League, who thought she looked about 2 years old. However, when I'd had her for 10 years, she still looked about 2 years old. She was getting a bit too old and dim to leave the house - when she did, we'd spend the rest of the afternoon wandering around trying to find her, because she didn't know the way home. She'd had other problems too.

Anyway, all was going well, until Friday, when we got an email saying that N had found her bleeding from her stomach, had taken her to the vet, and she'd been put to sleep (as they euphemistically say [euphemise? Is that a word]).

When we got back we rang the vet for the full story, and they said "She was hit by a car." (Amongst other stuff, they also said that she had a very weak pulse and low blood pressure, couldn't move her legs and was generally unresponsive.) Which was very mysterious, as she never (she can't) get out, and if she did get out, she wouldn't be able to get home, whether she'd been hit by a car or not.

So we don't really know what happened. The only thing we can think of is that she got into some sort of tussle with a raccoon - she had taken to spending a lot of time outside on the balcony, sleeping there for most of the night, and we have seen raccoons on the balcony occasionally (and we think they've come into the flat once, to get the cat's food), but I don't think that raccoons would attack, and if they did attack, the cat would leave.

Film Review

I've gone on about the LA Weekly before, but there was a review of the new Die Hard film in it. Here's a quote from it:

"...he’s a Sisyphean figure wondering how the hell he got to here and wishing he was home with a beer in his hand. Nineteen years after doing Christmas Eve battle with money-grubbing German terrorists in a Los Angeles office tower, McClane is so far past his sell-by date that his existential exhaustion becomes more than a mere character trait; it’s his entire raison d’etre. Set over the July Fourth weekend, the proudly post-9/11 Live Free or Die Hard is festooned with references to anthrax alarms ..."

That one not quite a paragraph has about 5 words in it that have never appeared in Metro. And one that I had to look up.

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.