It was also my first time seeing a show at the Nob Hill Masonic Center.
Hopefully it won't be my last for either one. Thanks to Jester for inviting me to such a fantastic show...
The venue is right across from Grace Cathedral...
The evening began with an opening set by Holy Child, which I had previously seen live when I was in San Francisco for Betty Who. They were followed by a band I had never heard of before called Saint Motel...
I really, really enjoyed their set. Saint Motel is an amazing live band. Wasn't as impressed with their studio albums, but maybe they'll grow on me.
The main act was Walk The Moon and they were fantastic...
You can get a taste of what they're like live in this video for Different Colors...
They are best known for their hit single Shut Up And Dance...
I was worried that my favorite song off their latest album was skipped, but We Are the Kids came along in the encore...
If you ever have the chance to see Walk The Moon live, it's an opportunity you absolutely should not pass up.
Back to real life.
And so today I flew to San Francisco for one night only to attend a concert with long-time blogging buddy, Jester.
Needing to kill ten hours before the big event, Jester drove us up to Marin County. Believe it or not, the only part of the region I'd ever visited was Sausalito at the bottom-most tip. Everything north of that was a mystery. A MYSTERY IN THE FOG...
Our first stop was a pumpkin patch because Jester wanted to make pie...
Pumpkin measured $12... including tax!
Further up the coast...
And finally we arrived at out destination, Point Reyes and the Point Reyes Lighthouse...
The hundreds of stairs down weren't a big deal... the thousands of stairs back up was agony for an out-of-shape bastard like me...
On the way back, Jester and I saw something odd. A kind of weird machine or something...
A stop at Olema Farm House Restaurant for mac & cheese lunch...
And then... a quick stop at Stinson Beach before heading back to the city...
Where we saw a seagull hauling off a whole crab...
A great day, and the main event hadn't even started.
Get ready to bask in the City of Roses... because a Bullet Sunday from Portland, Oregon starts... now...
• PDX! How many airports do you know that have carpeting so famous that they have a Wikipedia page devoted to it? I have no idea. But if there's a list, Portland International (PDX) would be on it (seriously, here's the Wikipedia page). For years now, you can always count on seeing people photographing themselves standing on it. Like me today...
The pattern apparently represents the intersection of PDX runway lights as seen at night or something. In any event, it's a beautiful design and everybody seems to love it. Which is why the Port of Portland decided to replace it with a new design rather than a reprint of the old design?...
It's a nice enough pattern, I guess, but I don't understand why they didn't replace the worn out carpet with the same design, which didn't really need updating. Especially given how popular it is. A very sad day for PDX fans...
Including me. The next time I fly into Portland, all remnants of the classic PDX carpeting will be gone.
• Hooking! Is it just me, or does this advertisement from Alaska Airlines' inflight magazine look like some guy just hired a very expensive hooker?
Turns out it's an ad for a casino, but wow...
Enjoy your hooker victory, sir.
• Congrats! The reason I flew to Portland today was so I could see two of my long-time blogging friends, Oh Sarah Joy and Iron Fist get married...
Congrats to Sarah and Vahid!
• To Go! And speaking of weddings... this is not a real ad for Tide To-Go Pens, but it should be because it's really clever...
The ad may be fake, but that's the real Miss Yvonne from Pee-Wee's Playhouse!
• SuBullets!
And... my flight will be taking me back home any minute now, so no more bullets for you...
My decision to skip sleeping last night was probably the best decision I could have made. A meager three hours would only have only served to put me in a coma for my three-hour-fifteen-minute commute to work. A coma from which even 5-Hour Energy would not let me escape.
As an insomniac, I never get much sleep anyways. But no sleep makes me very stabby indeed...
Driving sleep-free was the least of my worries though.
The reason I always drive to Spokane at night is because driving it in the morning results in about two-and-a-half hours of staring into this...
I-90 runs due-East directly into the rising sun. And on a day like today, it obliterates everything on the road. I really need to get me a sun-shield one day, but until then all I had was some notecards and clothespins hanging from my visor to cut down the glare as much as I could. I also had sunglasses, but they don't really help when it's this bright.
Work was a brisk 50 minutes, at which time I should have turned around and headed back home.
But there was no way I was going to come all this way without having some of the Best Pizza on Earth courtesy of David's Pizza Spokane...
Waiting 25 minutes for them to open was torture, as I was totally falling asleep after finding a spot to park. I ended up setting the alarm on my iPhone to wake me up, which was probably the smartest thing I did all day.
David's Da Vinci pizza was amazeballs as always.
Then it was time for the three-hour-fifteen-minute drive back.
Which was awful, but at least I didn't have to spend the majority of it staring at a giant ball of flames on the horizon.
I stopped to pick up some crap at Costco on the way because I'm stupid that way. Then I drove to work because I'm incredibly stupid that way. Eventually I managed to get home... at which point I passed out for two hours.
Since waking up I've been wandering around in a haze, my mind still in a state of exhaustion from serious lack of sleep.
Which is why I decided it's the perfect time to post an entry to Blogography... this time I have an actually excuse as to why my incoherent ramblings are incoherent and rambling.
This was an awful day in so many ways.
I don't even want to talk about it. Instead, here's a picture of a happy lizard I took while in Australia...
I need a vacation.
And, just like that, my L.A. adventure is over. The flights back were relatively uneventful, so I guess I don't have any complaints.
Well... I do, of course... just not about this trip. So I guess I'll just be sitting here minding my own business...
This is my cat, Red. He does this often & I'm glad I was able to video him in action.
Posted by Amy Audia Risi on Sunday, August 9, 2015
Originally I had two business meet-ups and a dinner meeting peppered throughout my trip to Los Angeles... plus a birthday party (happy 95th, grandpa!). After landing I ended up with another meeting, which meant I'd be working every day I'm in the city. This was a major bummer, so I arranged to push all my work to Monday (today!) so I could enjoy time with family and friends over the weekend.
Which was a fantastic idea.
Until I woke up this morning and realized I would be dragging my ass from one end of L.A. to the other. Which pretty much means an entire day stuck in traffic between meetings.
But there were bright spots along the way.
I had time to stop at Pink's for a Patt Morrison Baja Vegan Dog, one of my favorite things...
Amazing.
After an unexpected side-quest back to my hotel, I was off to Anaheim for one last meeting and a business dinner.
It was at my final meeting that something amazing happened.
We were discussing our impending dinner when somebody said "I'm surprised we're not going to eat at Earl of Sandwich since Dave's in town." I laughed and then broke the news that I don't eat at Earl of Sandwich anymore because they discontinued their veggie sandwich. A colleague then piped up with "Really? I just had one at Disneyland a couple weeks ago."
Uhhhh... come again?
So I look at their online menu and, sure enough, their veggie sandwich is listed. Thinking it surely has to be an outdated menu, I am nevertheless intrigued. This is my favorite sandwich on earth. For years I obsessed over Earl or Sandwich and moved heaven and earth to eat at their restaurants.
With no choice in the matter, I hop in my car and rush to Downtown Disney so I can check it out. As I walk up to the restaurant, I'm starting to hyperventilate...
Sure enough, their veggie sandwich IS back...
And it is just a glorious as it ever was.
So, even though it spoiled my dinner, a tremendous THANK YOU to Earl of Sandwich for bringing back one of my most favorite things to eat. Amazing. Delicious.
Since I was at Downtown Disney, I decided to use a Disney Dream Dollars gift card that's about to expire. I ended up getting a Disney 60th Anniversary pin and lithograph, which is pretty cool. Also cool? Now that Disney owns Star Wars, they are doing a super-sweet job of integrating their new property into the Disney parks...
BWAH HA HA HA!
The dinner meeting was short & sweet, and I was on my way back to my hotel at 7:00... arriving by 7:30... in bed at 8:00. Not a bad end to a pretty great day... especially food-wise.
Time for a very special Los Angeles bullets edition... because Bullet Sunday starts... now...
• Getty. If forced to pick my favorite place in Los Angeles, it would probably be Disneyland. Outside of Disneyland the contenders get murky and I'm not entirely sure what my next pick would be. But The Getty Center would be near the top of the list. It's a gorgeous location above L.A. that's populated with beautiful galleries that are filled with amazing art. And it's all free for the viewing (though parking is $15, if you're driving up)...
• Frog. If you look closely in the first photo above, a work called "Boy with Frog" (by Charles Ray) is near the top of the steps...
This surprised me, because a version is also at the tip of the Punta della Dogana in Venice, Italy...
Not sure what that's all about, but it was kinda cool.
• Art! As a huge Monet fan, I usually thrill to see new works... but those at The Getty are versions of a theme that I've already seen many times. Still great though...
The most popular painting at the museum is a nice irises pieces by Van Gogh...
Probably my favorite piece is one that has Baby Jesus loving GOLD, but... SUSPICIOUSLY...
And, of course, RICK JAMES, BITCH...
• Rude! Los Angeles is a weird city where lots of weird stuff happens. Like the public hanging of a Teddy Bear...
In all seriousness, WTF is wrong with people?!?
• Traffic? Something I had not seen on the most excellent navigation app, Waze, before is a traffic jam gauge. It tells you how long the current jam will last...
Interestingly enough, it was pretty darn accurate! Sweet! Modern technology at work.
• Traffic! You see the oddest things in L.A. traffic (my favorite being DOMO-KUN!), and today did not disappoint. The first thing I noticed was an abundance of handyman vans that seem to be in competition for most interesting paint job. Two I managed to photograph...
Rock n' Roll indeed... he had the heads of dozens of rock legends painted on the sides!
Truly... Stitt does happen!
Though L.A. traffic was best represented by somebody proclaiming their love of traffic...
So long leisure bullets... tomorrow it's time to get to work.
Los Angeles is a city of extremes to me. I both love and hate it, all the while acknowledging that there's nowhere on earth even remotely like it... even though I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Which means it's probably a little of both.
Every time I come back, I try to focus on the many, many positive experiences I've had here... but the soul-crushing negatives are always in the back of my head. For that reason, I can never just come to L.A. for relaxation and having fun. There's too many things haunting me to make that possible. But I do always manage to enjoy myself... assuming I don't think about the insane amount of time I spend in traffic too much.
Which would be easy if it weren't for all the time I spend in traffic.
Next year I turn fifty and, let me tell you, there's nothing like travel to make me feel like the crotchety old fart I'm becoming.
The morning started off with my being told that Seattle is experiencing weather delays and the flight in could be delayed by an hour or more. Which would be fine if this were one of my typical four hour layovers at SeaTac but, just my luck, I have a 46-minute layover this time. But, eh... what can you do? If it happens, it happens and I'll figure something else out, right?
See... I'm also mellowing in my old age,
But then I started getting irritated because people are just so damn irritating.
The actual flight to L.A. was fine. I was completely absorbed by watching Mad Max: Fury Road again because... well... ZOMG WHAT AN AMAZING FILM... and didn't pay much attention to anything going on around me.
After landing it was another story.
There I was getting my suitcase down from the overhead when I get bumped into by a small boy. He's irritated and squirmy because he has to go to the bathroom. I let the mother know that they will probably let him use the bathrooms if she wants, because we're at the back of the plane and it may take a while for people ahead of us to clear out. She thanks me, but says he's already gone to the bathroom several times and he's just using it as an excuse. I then goof around with the kid for a bit to try and take his mind of things, but it doesn't last long and he's back to squirming in no time. His mother tries her best to keep him in line and everything, but the guy is a handful.
Then it happens.
Some crusty older bitch in her hipster black turtleneck sees that the mother has tattoos and crazy colored hair and piercings and instantly comes to the conclusion that this surely must be a bad mother, and SHE knows better how to raise children than the mother does. And she tells the mother this.
Which infuriates me. It's not like the mother is letting the kid go apeshit all over the place like most parents do now-a-days... she's trying her level best to keep him in line. So I cut the bitch a glance and say "Give me a break... he's a kid!" Which should have been the end of it.
But of course it wasn't.
The self-entitled parenting expert of the year keeps at it. Telling the young mother everything she's doing wrong.
I was about to say something again when all of a sudden... the mother lets her have it.
"ARE YOU HIS MOTHER? DID I ASK FOR YOUR ADVICE? WHY DON'T YOU JUST SHUT YOUR MOUTH!"
Surely that would be the end of it, right?
Nope.
The hipster Anne-Rice-Wannabe bitch proceeds to tell the mother that she had to sit in front of her and her kid the entire flight and it was horrible and maybe the mother should drive next time.
The mother loses it.
SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH! NOBODY ASKED YOU, SO JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!
And good for her. Probably wouldn't have cursed in front of the kid like that but, seriously, good for her.
As we're leaving, I feel the need to tell the mother that it's not her who should be driving... it's people who can't deal with being in public and are serious assholes about it. I hope it makes her feel better about the situation.
Sure I may like to talk about how people should be raising their kids... but never in a million years would I presume to actually tell a mother she's raising her kid wrong. Especially a mother who was trying to discipline her child and making them behave. What the fuck is that about?
And then I got to the car rental counter.
I can only guess the man causing a scene there was related to the asshole on the plane, because he sure acted like it. Apparently the car he wanted wasn't available, so he was just going off on the poor guys at the counter who were doing everything they could to placate the piece of shit. Like they have control over somebody not returning a vehicle on time or whatever. The asshole kept hammering away with "I'M A VERY GOOD CUSTOMER!" and "I'M GOING TO TAKE MY BUSINESS ELSEWHERE!" and "I'M NOT SPENDING MONEY WITH THIS COMPANY AGAIN!" and "AUF WIEDERSEHEN! GOOD BYE! GOOD RIDDANCE!" and "YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO DO BETTER THAN THAT!" and "I'M NOT WALKING ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE PARKING GARAGE! YOU NEED TO BRING THE CAR TO ME!"
As I stood over at the next counter filling out my paperwork I just couldn't take it any more and started screaming "WAH! WAH! WAAAAAAAH! THIS IS ALL ABOUT ME! PAY ATTENTION TO ME! WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT ME?! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! MEEEEEE!!!" Then I looked over at the dickhead, inviting him to take on somebody who didn't have to put up with his bullshit.
But of course it never came. Assholes like this are almost always complete cowards when they have to fight against somebody who can fight back.
The prick finally signed off with "This is supposed to be customer service? I've never been so disgusted!" Which is when I had to point out to the guy helping me that I save my disgust for things like extreme poverty and world hunger.
Look, I get it. I have blogged many times about how shitty it is to not get the car you reserved. It sucks. It's wrong. It shouldn't happen. It's upsetting. But to take it out on some poor guy who is trying their best to help you? I'm just not that big a dick.
Well, I am... but I save my big dickish behavior for those who deserve it.
Even though I would probably be better off not getting involved at all.
Except I just can't help myself, can I? I am well on my way to becoming a crotchety old fart and seriously don't give a shit anymore.
If I ever did.
And then there was traffic hell on the 405 to deal with...
Welcome to the City of Angels.
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