Stuff

As you’ll see in these here new photos Sally, Martin and I have rebuilt the porch in grand fashion. It’s surprisingly sturdy considering the last parts took place after a fine lamb dinner with Chianti, Cab Sauv and Zinfandel all round. There’s also pictures from Downey’s fantastically-named “Wilderness Park”. Santa Cruz it ain’t.

Also, hola Arturo, acabo de ver tu mensaje en mi blog. Bienvenido a mi mundo electronico y te deseo el mejor en el trabajo. Espero que las cosas alli se arreglen pronto y que no te desesperes. Pienso en Uds. alli mucho. Cuidate mucho- un abrazo, gwyn

Here are the photos to accompany yesterday’s entry. And today Sally, Martin and I have been demolishing the porch and building a new one from scratch. Off to the computer swap meet tomorrow AM for bargains aplenty, USB drives, anyone? Dinner and another movie this evening with young Sita and all the usual L.A. fun. Stay well, do good work and keep in touch…

The bunnies got their new hutch yesterday, we only had to go to Petsmart but ended up passing through Old Navy, Staples, Trader Joe’s, All American & Starbucks along the way… basically I got malled in LA again, hey ho, we made amends today by going to a genuine (open since 1937- California prehistory) Farmers Market and feasting on Greek fancy food then on to La Brea tar pits where many a dinosaur met its end. I was expecting it to be more like in Sin City so was a little disappointed, but there was lots to see and it was nicely laid out and all.

After all the cultural fun, we headed for Venice Beach, Santa Monica, various pubs, to see Mr & Mrs Smith (AVOID… 2 lulus, tops) then, at Sita’s request, Hooters for a meal. Photos were taken and will doubtless follow soon. We’re fine tuning our travel plans and budgetary possibilies for this summer, the Massachusetts part is looking a little shaky right now… more on that as we thrash it all out though. Time for bed methinks…

Here’s a gallery of photos in and around the house in da ‘hood.

Thanks to a combination of fantastic friends, in-laws and compliant pets we made it to L.A. in one piece. We spent today reorganising the garage to hold not only Martin & Sally’s heirlooms but 2 bunnies and all our crap too. Looks like more trips to the dump are in our close future. Sally’s been cleaning, cooking and orchestrating good times all round. Martin had me taking pictures of the house to show to one of his ham radio buddies, it’ll take a while to upload them on dial-up… (the first casualty of moving is DSL)… but we’ll get there as long as no one rings us during the process. I’ve been in L.A. 24 hours nearly and we’ve I’ve managed not to go to any malls or chain stores. We’ve got to go shopping for luxury, EZ-Clean rabbit hutches tomorrow. We might have to go to a multiplex too to enjoy air conditioning and Mr.& Mrs. Smith or Batman Begins or maybe Bewitched which is opening soon I think. We watched Finding Neverland t’other day which Sally recommends. Not my cup of tea, really, but it hit the spot.

We stopped at the giant artichoke in Castroville yesterday and had fine local cuisine for brekky/dinner, the rest of the journey I got by on coke and Snickers mind, then arrived after 7 hours or so in one piece with a tired little doggy and 2 traumatised conejitos in tow.

Righty that’s it for now. Might have some more photos up soon. Byeee

Thanks to a combination of fantastic friends, in-laws and compliant pets we made it to L.A. in one piece. We spent today reorganising the garage to hold not only Martin & Sally’s heirlooms but 2 bunnies and all our crap too. Looks like more trips to the dump are in our close future. Sally’s been cleaning, cooking and orchestrating good times all round. Martin had me taking pictures of the house to show to one of his ham radio buddies, it’ll take a while to upload them on dial-up… (the first casualty of moving is DSL)… but we’ll get there as long as no one rings us during the process. I’ve been in L.A. 24 hours nearly and we’ve I’ve managed not to go to any malls or chain stores. We’ve got to go shopping for luxury, EZ-Clean rabbit hutches tomorrow. We might have to go to a multiplex too to enjoy air conditioning and Mr.& Mrs. Smith or Batman Begins or maybe Bewitched which is opening soon I think. We watched Finding Neverland t’other day which Sally recommends. Not my cup of tea, really, but it hit the spot.

We stopped at the giant artichoke in Castroville yesterday and had fine local cuisine for brekky/dinner, the rest of the journey I got by on coke and Snickers mind, then arrived after 7 hours or so in one piece with a tired little doggy and 2 traumatised conejitos in tow.

Righty that’s it for now. Might have some more photos up soon. Byeee

News and pix soon from a very smooth transition from Santa Cruz to Downey via the Artichoke Centre of the World. Thanks to everyone involved.

Lovely, lovely night round Sudarat’s house. Photos for your delight and delectation here.

Last few bargains

Atticus’s wound was going down nicely… too nicely. It healed up, stopped oozing and started swelling again and a trip to the vets was in order this morning. $150 bucks later and the drain’s back in, the 15 inch collar’s on and, oh, he has tapeworm (don’t worry, Liz, it’s a one-off pill treatment, wil clear up in no time, promise, and we’re thinking of getting him Doggy health insurance for the next year…) (please don’t change you mind…). He needs constant care and attention and I’ve got a million things to do… Honest.

I’ve been backing up DVDs before our trip… I was testing the copy of Spaced and happened upon the episode where Daisy gets a dog while Mike and Tim are out paintballing. The episode ends with Tim saying something along the lines of “I’ve never been this happy, I literally have no responsibilities at all, and everything has been sorted out”, then the camera zooms back to the scottie dog that’s just been adopted… with the attendant horror film effects.

I think I mentioned what a grand job we did of getting rid of our belongings, but there’s still lots to do. Coupled with waiting/working on stuff for GoJoven and Triangle Speakers we’ve been a tad busy of late. Luckily I have my trusty new laptop to slice through webwork with. It’s got this lovely xbrite technology screen so I’ve been browsing through old photos and they look like they’re on a lightbox. It rocks.

In other news I found out this morning (thanks Suw and Liz) that there was a general tsunami warning active for an hour last night after a 7.2 earthquake off of Northern California. We were barbecuing shrimp and steak, drinking sierra nevada and working our way through Joss Whedon’s (superlative deleted) Firefly series. I think the first thing I’d grab would have been… I’ll have a think about that one… My instincts want to say the beautifully barbecued shrimp, but let’s not be hasty here…

Via Amy’s blog I found Pat Duffy’s campaign page. I shall link to it repeatedly to try and boost her pageranking. A nicer politician, you’ll not find. And she came to Taunton after coming up with the plan at 1am in The Spoke… PAT DUFFY 2005! or 2006 or, you get the idea. Have a picture of Pat with a painted cow in Atlanta at the American Sociomological Association Conference…

And it’s great. It’s 10 to 1 in the morning and I should be sleeping, but I’m too busy installing programs, migrating files etc on me gorgeous new laptop. That’s the easy part, the tricky bit’s filling in the mail-in rebates… I was trying to export my Bookmarks from Firefox and found that Firefox, God bless its cotton code, will create a webpage of them: here you go: This is how I spend my days…
See you soon- gwyn

Last night I had my first clam & garlic pizza from Pizza My Heart. It’s disturbingly like chicken pizza that washed up on shore and sat in the sun. And speaking of sun, I’m all pink from sitting out in my front garden yardsaling all day haggling with strangers over 25 cent crap. It was fun all round…
We sold a ton of stuff;
operated a special bargains-for-monolingual-Spanish-speakers policy;
Atticus is kennel-less (10 bucks- ker ching);
we can’t seat more than 4 people in the house at a time;
can wash, but not dry, clothes;
can’t cut the lawn;
have a smaller library;
have fewer plants to water;
and we’re about $750 better off than last week. That will change once I get to Fry’s electronics though. Mwa ha ha ha, as they say…

& Tanya, if you’re reading, your plants have been soaking up the H2O nicely. Happy LAX

We bought it yesterday from CostCo and after one cursory listen can make the shocking revelation that if you like Coldplay, you’ll like this album. It’s more varied than previous efforts and has more electronica bubbling in the background. There’s more prominent guitars, more confident delivery and they don’t have Gwyneth singing back-up vocals, so they’re doing something right.
I was none too pleased when Radiohead stopped doing campfire sing-alongs about plastic watering cans and self-loathing and hit the ‘noodle’ button on their synthesisers instead for 3 albums. So fair play to Chris and his mates for keeping to what works (and people obviously like) with minimal changes.
Jayziz, I’m getting old…

It should in fact have been called the Mystery of the Trullian in UC Davis. I was on the ever-marvellous flickr.com and saw he’d posted a photo of a chair just like the one I was selling so I pounced on the chance to comment. He wrote back, his name’s Chris Lewis. He’s from Trull, he went to Richard Huish 6th form college (as did I), he’s at Bristol Uni but is on his year abroad thing and has an American girlfriend. He chose UC Davis over UC Santa Cruz because Davis had a better website (D’oh!) and the Taunton photos he posted originally were part of a web design assignment at Uni. He rates Taunton over Sacramento for entertainment (Agreed). He also owned the same (OfficeMax) chair as me, but only got $20 when he sold his as opposed to my $25, but the cost of living is different in SC… he now owes me 1 x Milk Chocolate McVities HobNob and our paths may cross in the Wetherspoons pub in East Reach… It’s a funny old interweb

Sita’s (and thus technically ‘our’) little doggy’s been poorly for the last few days. Sita noticed a golfball-sized lump on the side of his neck. He’s such a furry little bugger it was hard to see it. So we took him to the vets and they immediately shaved the lump and put him under to sort it all out. He did alright in the operation, but they’re not sure what it was so we’re waiting on the results of the biopsy. Hopefully it’s some kind of cyst that will go away with meds. The hollow lump’s still there but they put a tube in so the last of the fluids can drain out. It looks revolting, like a bone’s sticking out or something and the fluid’s none too pleasant neither. They’ll be taking the tube out on tomorrow afternoon and in the meantime he has to have lots of hot compresses and antibiotics (wrapped in gourmet ham). He’s also got to wear one of those nirvana video style lamp shade things which he carries off with a certain quiet dignity. Bless him. Pains me to say it but I might end up missing little Asparagus when we leave…

Tanya had us round last night and cooked fancy vegetarian fare plucked straight from the organic farmers market. T’was lovely. We played a bit of Scategories until it got too heated (it may be worth paying someone to independantly referree these games) and then moved on to Scrabble (where the rules are more easy to arbitrate). I had a bit of dizziness (I’m coming off some meds myself and the booze probably didn’t help) and we abandoned that and went home.

Today’s been productive too. Walked the space dog. Did more translation/web work on the Triangle Speakers website. Went to Brasil for breakfast (the restaurant, natch) and for this evening, maybe a film. I’d like to start reviewing stuff again for the site, the last one I did was Mala Educacion back in Feb and I’m slacking off. Now I have acres of free time ahead it’s going to be fun all the way. I’m probably going to buy a fancy laptop any day now and start work on a website for my freelancing in Mexico stuff too.

Eeh well, back to the warm compresses and bumpy doggy. More soon, as per usual…

All our furniture now has price tags on it and things are flying of the shelves like shelves. While I was packing things up I came across this Spanish children’s book “Yo, el perezoso”. I bought it in the Skyview flea market a few years back. It translates roughly as “I, Sloth” and I’ve scanned it in for posterity. Have a read of it here.