Monday in Los Angeles

We had a wonderful evening Sunday night with Doreen's friend Michael, his partner Jeff, and their son Patrick. They live up in the hills towards the north of town, in a spectacular home.

Monday morning, we got up again and had breakfast at the hotel.
 

Then we decided that we were going to rent a tandem bicycle and ride over to the Intellegentsia Coffee Shop in Venice Beach. They are quite famous (though their HQ is in Chicago) and I wanted to try their espresso.

So we wandered on over to the bike rental place, where I made an idiot of myself, and almost broke my nose.

We picked out a tandem, and I since I am pretty tall, I wanted to see how bad it would be to ride it. I tried to get on it like I do my regular bike. I put my left foot on the left pedal, get the bike gliding, and the swing my right  leg over the saddle. The first time I tried, my foot hit the back handlebar.

At that point, both Doreen and the rental guy said, "Stop, you can't do it that way"

But of course, I knew better. I just had to swing my leg higher. I tried again, and the next thing I knew, the concrete bike path was rapidly coming at my face. There was nothing I could do to stop it, so I broke my fall with my nose. It crunched.

It also bled, both inside and out. And I stubbed my toe, skinned both knees, and got road rash on my right hand.

It was painful, but I learned a valuable lesson. When Doreen tells me to do something, I have to do it immediately and without question.

Eventually, we did rent TWO bikes (easier) and made it up to Intelligentsia. The coffee was good, but I think mine is better. At least it tasted better with the residual taste of blood running down my throat.

We then drove to LAX
 

and flew home.
 

It was a nice trip:
   

except for the tandem.

Los Angeles, Day Two Morning

We woke up the next morning late (for us, and for our time zone). It was easily 8:00 AM before we got down to breakfast.

The hotel looks like this from the beach:

From Los Angeles

The breakfast room is off to the right.

We had a busy day Sunday, and we got started right away.

The La Brea Tar Pits was our first stop. I have been reading about this since I was a kid. It was sort of odd to see in person:

From Los Angeles

There really is tar (asphalt, really, though my ChemE family members would have to say what the difference is) oozing out of the ground. Yipes!

From Los Angeles

They had a life size Giant Sloth. Doreen took my picture with the sloth. I am the one on the left:

From Los Angeles

The Tar Pits are right next to LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

You might recall a year or so ago this big rock made news, as it was moved from Riverside to the museum:

From Los Angeles

From Los Angeles

From Los Angeles

From Los Angeles

It is called "Levitated Mass" and the artist is Michael Heizer

From Los Angeles

It was something to see.

Flying into Los Angeles

We spent last weekend, MLK weekend, in Los Angeles. Doreen had wanted to see a show of early medieval art and manuscripts (lots of Giotto) at the J. Paul Getty museum. So that was our excuse.


We flew over on a United Boeing 757. An old 757. But, it got us there just as quickly as a new 787 would have, with a lower potential for bursting into flame over Death Valley. Interestingly enough, this is probably our last flight as "Global Services" invitation only frequent flyers. As far as I know, it is the highest level on United - though there just may be a super-duper secret level that I am unaware of. They let you get on the plane first, but that is about it. Oh, well. The rest of this year I go back to a 1K (100,000 mile) level.

We found LA quite easy to navigate. Now, that does not mean that we did not see traffic. But Doreen
 
was a great navigator, and we got where we were going in every case.

The show at the museum (above) was pretty good. I am no medievalist, but Doreen (who is) seemed to enjoy it. The museum itself was probably worth the trip, just to see how over the top it is. There are hundreds of thousands of square feet of galleries, and the grounds are also amazing.

They don't charge you to get into the museum, but you have to pay $15 for parking. (15 minutes or 15 hours, it is still $15) Then you take a tram up to the museum. If you ever need to kill some time in LA, take The 405 up to the Getty. It is worth it. (and why do they say "THE" 405? we don't say The 610 here in Houston.)

 
After the museum we ran into a little traffic as we were getting back to our hotel (view from the bar, above) in Santa Monica. It is a cool building (see next post) and it used to be an old folks home. Beachfront was not valued in 1926 the way it is today (when you fly out of LAX if your flight path is right, you can see an oil refinery and a sewage treatment plant right on the beach. Oh boy!

We had dinner that night (our fanciest dinner) at Fig, quite a nice place.

We started off with Stuffed Honey Dates (stuffed with blue cheese and walnuts). We followed that with their Chicken Liver Parfait, a chopped salad, and finally the meat loaf.

We had a bottle of a nice Oregon Pinto Noir, and then walked home.

We walked past the Santa Monica Pier, which is the end of Route 66. We liked that (not the beginning?) but thought that few people younger than us would even know what Route 66 was.

Then we went to bed.

Los Angeles Sunday Afternoon

From the Tar Pits, we went to pick up Doreen's friend Tim Naftali. Tim was, until recently, the Director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

I grew up politically under Nixon. I am not now, nor was I then, a Nixon fan (or Nixonian, as Tim calls them)

I will not dwell on the trials and tribulations of Tim's work at the museum (I am sure that there will be a memoir in there somewhere) but show some photos.

The museum was nice. Here is Tim and Doreen in front of the entrance.


Nixon wanted to show his interaction with international leaders, so they had theses life-size sculptures made, and put them all in a room. I will try and do this from memory: Zhou Enlai, Mao, Brezhnev, Kruschev, Sadat, Golda Meir, Churchill, de Gaulle, Adenauer, and Kijūrō Shidehara



They had a good sized moon rock:


and this, which is the most poignant:

Every Presidential library is allowed to re-create one room from the White House. Every other President chose the Oval Office. Nixon chose the Lincoln Study. He spent a lot of time here. Alone. During his re-election, he was getting updates on the election from his son-in-law while sitting in this room, alone.


Tim is responsible for all the Watergate exhibits. They are tremendously detailed, and you can listen to any of the tapes you want. Tim also interviewed many of the people who are still alive who were involved.

Nobody can come away from this very fair exhibit and believe that Nixon was innocent.

 

But, I am not a crook.

A Mast Year

This has been a "mast" year for acorns in Houston.

This means we get a real lot of them:


This is a shot of our back alley. It is almost covered with acorns, and it has been blown clear every week for the past month.

The local naturalist say that it is because of our drought last year. The oaks respond by producing many more nuts than they usually do. I understand that pecans are responding the same way.

Oh, and I took a new job. Executive Chairman of TerraSpark Geosciences.

Wish me luck.
 

On the road

Doreen and I will be in Paris for a while.
I should be posting (sporatically) here.
We'll be back soon!

Cooking Moroccan Food

The other night we had Paul over for dinner. It was great seeing him here in town.

Paul is making much better use of his sabbatical than I am, having been to a retreat in the cascades, taking a class at Oxford, and celebrating the 50th anniversary of his little childhood church.

But we did cook a spicy shrimp tagine.

So I had to wear my fez.

Photo link: http://bit.ly/P6cikG -- via http://bit.ly/picasa_tool

Brazos Bend

Doreen and I drove down to Brazos Bend state park today.

We saw a garter snake. We also saw a couple of alligators, lots of lizards, a turtle, and many birds.

It was warm, but that didn't really bother us.

There was a lot of water this year

There is an alligator in there if you look real closely.

You can see him in an unedited video. I will try to edit it down to something more reasonable.

or here:



Then we drove to Alvin to eat Bar B Que at Joe's. It was OK.

It is always fun.

The COH delivers

Last week Thursday I noticed that there was a leak in the water main leading up to our water meter. It was just a small leak, but we all know what happens to small leaks in the street.

So I 311'd the problem. (I tried to do it online, but it was not possible. They need to get someone from Google to help them with usability) I called and my line was picked up in under a minute. It took no more than 2 minutes to report the problem, and then I signed off.

I was not particularly optimistic about when the problem would be resolve, but was very pleased to see  the City of Houston water guy in the street Friday morning when I was coming home from a meeting. (Yes, a work meeting. It is mostly pro bono at this point, but I hope that will change at some point)

The streets were wet, so the leak was hard to spot. I showed the guy where the leak was, and he flagged it.

The next day (Saturday!) when we came home from Waffles with Waltraud, our street was blocked off (inconvenient) and the main was being repaired!

IT took a couple of waterless hours, but the pipe was fixed.

The street is still a mess, but I hope that will be resolved, too.

So, it is a win for the City of Houston!

Family in town

My brother Mark and his wife Becky were in Texas this past week. They came down to pick up the fez that I brought back from Morocco.

Well, his new grandson and his pregnant daughter may have had something to do with that as well.

We had good, though short visit.

They are already back home in Wisconsin.

(This post is mainly a test of my new hardware)

On Sabbatical

On June 29th, 2012, I sold the company that I was working for - Object Reservoir - to Landmark Graphics, a subsidiary of Halliburton. This was the conclusion of about 18 months worth of work.

This gave me the opportunity to take a sabbatical.

Now, my sabbatical is not a goal oriented sabbatical like some of our good friends engage in. I admire the author of that blog, and read his updates, shall we say, religiously.

My time off is spent in more prosaic ways.

I have planted a garden, and have harvested some beautiful radishes:

I have cooked a lot of seafood, mostly on Fridays, including a lot of soft shell crab:

That takes a lot of butter and oil:

   

but you end up with a beautiful meal:





Since I am not longer driving to work, I am spending a lot more time with Blaze.

This shows what she feels about this:
 

I was also able to drive up to Austin one a whim and see my newest nephew, Oliver:
 

I also grew a beard:
 
but I shaved it off.

I also got a new coffee machine. A Quickmill Achille 0996 spring driven lever operated espresso machine. I will probably write more about this later.
 

The first several weeks have been busy. Very busy.

But I am trying to find a way around that.

More later.

More testing

I am trying to see how well this tablet will work once we start traveling.

There is always a trade off of with verses capability.

I want the performance on a laptop, with the with and flexibility of a tablet.

Maybe I should have bought a netbook

New toy

I just got a Samsung Galax tab. This is just a test to see how well the Swype works on this machine.