For those who may not remember the date (and since President Obama has decided that this day should be "downplayed" this year), I thought I'd link to the main site for this day ( Read more... )

I haven't done a post about this in a while; not because people in L.A. have stopped getting personalized license plates, but because I keep forgetting to write them down. So there's a lot you've missed, sorry. But to continue:

On a silvery-blue expensive sporty car of some kind:

SILMRILI'm sure Mr. Tolkien is rolling over in his grave, but I ( Read more... )

City building codes are utter crap. No one in the country can build their own stuff any more--you have to be rich enough to pay contractors or live in squalor.

Absolutely idiotic.

(Especially when you're a tenant in a big old house and suddenly everything is presumed to be a safety hazard. *spits on official "laws"*

I woke up this morning around 5am to the sound of rain, and it rained off and on all morning. Now, though? It's windy, with sunshine on the palm trees, blue skies, and piles of fluffy clouds being driven along.

It's been 5 years since I moved to Los Angeles.

5 years ago this time, I was driving through California on a very hot day, with the air conditioner running and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the CD player. I'd started at about 4:30 a.m. Because of fires in southern Oregon and northern California, I couldn't see the sun as it rose; ( Read more... )

I will not be commenting on politics in my journal. I do not care that this is the most interesting presidential race in the past decades (it is), nor do I particularly want to know who you're going to vote for or who you think I should vote for (I'm certainly not telling you when I decide--online communities have a bad track record of stomping on ( Read more... )

So I was in the shower when the house started shaking. It actually got pretty bad (2nd story of an old house, too, so I could really feel it). Fortunately it stopped after a minute, but I just found the quake listed at one of the online seismic sites:

5.8 on the Richter scale. Not big, but moderately large. And the rest of the San Fernando ( Read more... )

And very jet-lagged. :-)

I haven't time right now to make a lovely long post about how pretty Edinburgh is, or how lovely it was to see whitemartyr after 2 years apart, or to freak out quietly about having to go back to my job on Tuesday ( Read more... )

Mind you, it obviously doesn't compare to the storms and tornadoes that Georgia and the Carolinas have been dealing with this past weekend. (Darn it, I can't find a web page that'll give me the wind speed--I almost got up and turned on the Weather Channel at 5am to check ( Read more... )

Okay, so last week (Thursday, I think) I was pulling out of my driveway on the way to work. I noticed 3 large, unmarked white vans parked across the street and wondered what they were there for. A quick look revealed a Criminal Minds sticker discreetly placed in the rear window each ( Read more... )