Tuesday, September 26, 2006

We leave Yosemite for Napa, and then, home to LA.

September 23rd, Saturday-Well, we were both reluctant to leave Yosemite, but we had to go to a wedding reception. We lingered just a bit too long, watching the climbers on El Cap and enjoying the view in the meadows...and ended up an hour late to our lunch date! We had a very nice lunch at the Boonfly Cafe in Napa after a horrendously boring drive out of Yosemite. I filled up with food at lunch because I was pretty sure there would be nothing I could eat at the reception. (It turned out I could eat one of the hors d'oeuvres, but that was it. But they also had a buffet of sorts so I picked at that as well. Petit fours were the wedding cake, so that was out for me. I was glad to have had the creme brulee at lunch.) We stayed at a house rental with our friends, Elise, and her boyfriend Mike. The wedding reception was held at the Frazier Wine Caves and they provided a shuttle bus from the dirt parking lot to the caves. (Imagine ladies in fancy dresses and high-heeled shoes walking on soft, gritty dirt to get on the shuttlebus. I was wearing open-toed shoes with silver nail polish and after the trip in the parking lot, dirt.) The caves were nicer than I imagined and they had tables and chairs and loads, and loads of wine there. (Too bad Daryl and I don't drink. We had sparkling apple cider.) They had also booked two opera singers, a cellist, and a pianist to provide music. (The opera singers were really good, the tenor especially.) The groom met the bride at the opera and he booked the soprano that they both saw the evening they met, so it was part of their history together. The groom also proposed to the bride at the Frazier Wine Caves, which explained the venue. It was a beautiful night so we all sat outside and chatted and got caught up on everything that was going on in our friend's lives in San Francisco. it was so nice to see old friends again and to see two friends getting married.

September 24th, Sunday-The bride and groom decided to have a bbq at their house in Napa, so we all car pooled and got food at the local grocery. I can't believe they decided to have a bbq as they must have been tired from all the wedding preparations. And then we found out the wedding presents hadn't been opened yet, so the bride opened an hour's worth before we all had to quit for lunch. And she still had half a room of presents to go. And they were leaving for Europe the next day! Our friends brought games to play and it was very exciting because we had played Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico with them in San Francisco for years, and when we moved to LA we hadn't found anyone to play games with. So we were looking forward to playing games. And boy did we! We played a game of Settlers at the bbq and then when we got to the rental home, we played more Settlers, a few Puerto Ricos, and another game called Blokus, which was irritatingly addictive. By the end of the evening Elise, Mike, and I were gamed out. Daryl still wanted to play more. Wow.

September 25th, Monday-Elise, Mike, Daryl and I all went out to breakfast and then parted, they to SF and us to LA. Daryl drove the first leg of the journey and we were still both full from breakfast we didn't get any food on the way back. We just gassed up and I drove the last half back to our place. Traffic was manageable and we got home surprisingly easy. Ah, well, now our vacation is over! The kitty, though, is more than happy we're back. Now she can go back to being evil.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Vacation. Yay! Yosemite. Yay!

September 21st, Thursday-I actually drove out of Los Angeles and straight on through to Fresno. I couldn't believe I did that. Daryl was quite happy I did the drive because he was dead tired. By the time we got to Fresno, four hours later, he was fresh enough to tackle the rest of the trip to Yosemite. Oh, and driving for four hours? I felt like I was going to go crazy in the last hour, plus, by then I really had to pee and Daryl kept on telling me to go the later exits. When we got to Fresno, we stopped for food and got binoculars. I had read on the website www.yosemitefun.com that binocs are very, very useful for looking at all of the vistas and for watching the rock climbers. And boy was it ever. That was one of the best buys that we've ever shelled out money for. The clarity on that thing was fantastic. Anyway, the rest of the roads up to Yosemite were windy and annoying so I was glad Daryl was in charge because I would have crawled along those roads at a snail's pace---with a long line of angry motorists behind me. We got to the outskirts of Yosemite and stopped by the Mariposa Grove which had all of the sequoias. We walked up a short trail to see the one called the "Grizzly Giant." Note the fact that there are people at the bottom. Very, very tiny people.

It was like the Muir Woods except bigger and a whole lot drier. But they did have some really huge roots, which if you need a reference, Daryl is nearly 6 feet tall. And I couldn't get the top of the roots in the picture.

Then we hopped back into the car and drove to the tunnel entrance to the valley. Once you get past the tunnel, it's such a lovely vista that almost everyone stops to take a picture, including us. From our vantage point we could see El Capitan (left)and Half-Dome (rightish center and way back).

Then we drove past Bridalveil falls (Just a small trickle now that it was fall.) onto Curry Village to our cabin. Our cabin had two queen beds and a private bathroom and shower stall. I was relieved just to find someplace where I knew we'd be able to relax in relative comfort, since I am most definitely not an outdoor person. (The idea of sleeping in an outdoor tent cabin really starts to sound less romantic when you know the bathrooms and showers are communal and a goodly distance away. Plus, there's the threat of bears and there are sign all over the place reminding people to lock up their food and remove all food from their cars. (Way to scare the city girl, folks. I was scared of bears tearing down the cabin all night long. But I completely forgot the fact that mice were more likely to get into our food supply. Which we had in the not-so-secure paper bag from Whole Foods.) We went to get dinner at Curry Village, which I had called earlier to ask if they had any gluten-free items and they all looked at me like a freak when I asked. (Sigh.) I ate really expensive mediocre food, but at least I had pudding, which, believe me, made all the difference. I then suggested to Daryl that we go up to Glacier Point and see the stars at night. It sounded like a good idea, but what I didn't count on, was that it entailed a very long, twisty ride out of the valley and onto Glacier Point Road. It took a good hour to get there. But once we got up there it was well worth it. There are almost no outdoor lights so it's a good idea to bring flashlights with you, btw. We lighted our path up to Glacier Point with our flashlights and while we were working our way up, we saw two deer grazing by the path. So freaking cool! It was like time stopped as we looked at them looking at us. We finally reached the top and sat down to relax and look up at the stars and boy, howdy were they beautiful. I've never seen such a clear sky. We could see the cloudy edge of the Milky Way from our vantage point. There were so many stars I didn't know which ones they were. And if we looked down, we could see the valley lit up with campfires and lights. It was beyond gorgeous. And I have to say it was the highlight of the trip for me. Unfortunately, we couldn't take a picture, but I recommend going there to anyone who's thinking of visiting Yosemite. And, hardly anyone else was up there, so if you want solitude in Yosemite, that was one place for it. And then we had to go back to the road to drive back to the valley, which was another long, twisty trip--in the dark. We went to bed pretty early for us, although Daryl didn't sleep all that much because we were awoked to crinkly-paper noise and discovered mice had found our stash of food and had gotten stuck on our bag. Daryl let them go and then spread out the food on the floor to see what they picked up and they chose a lollipop, which was probably going to be the hardest thing for them to eat. Daryl did take pictures of this, which I thought was hilarious.

September 22nd, Friday-Both of us were not in the mood for an early morning hike, so we ate a very nice breakfast at the cafeteria near the Yosemite Lodge. Daryl had booked a room for us and they wouldn't let us register until after noon, so I made Daryl drive us up back to Glacier Point so that we could go on a 4 mile hike. We parked the car and began our hike to Sentinel Dome and it was a pretty nice hike. We saw some more deer on the way! Daryl got staggeringly close.

And here we are on Sentinel Dome. I believe that is El Capitan in the background.

And here is Daryl with his friend, Half Dome, to the right.

Then we took a roundabout path to get to the trail to Taft Point, which was south and west of us. It took a while but I think it was worth it. Here's Taft Point. There's a rail near the top of the picture on the left.

All in all it was a good trip and we got a nice room at the Yosemite Lodge where we showered up, (Because by the end of our hike, we were covered in dirt. All over. There was even dirt on my feet and I had socks and shoes on! Seriously, the trails were very dusty.) We had a nice dinner at the Mountain Room, the restaurant for the Lodge, where I had a steak and chocolate creme brulee. After which, we took it easy, since we were exhausted from hike. It makes me glad that I had been walking for exercise because it turns out it gave me a lot of stamina to do these hikes and I was afraid I'd be holding Daryl back. (Of course, it would have been great if I had also lost weight, too...)

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Not again, please

September 16th, Saturday-Well, after a few months of really discouraging setbacks in various aspects of my life, I have once again found myself with very little self-confidence. This time it's regarding my work situation (I don't even want to start on the health issues. The list is too long and too depressing to mention. Not terminal, mind you, just hugely irritating.) I have once again been told I am "not good enough," although in the nicest possible way, which I appreciate. In any case, despite the light and delicate slap in the face I've been given, it just threw me into a turmoil and I remembered every past instance of being looked over, not promoted, or even considered for a position I wanted. It took me not just twice as long as anyone else I knew to get the assistant job I wanted, but three times as long. I was an old lady by the time I was hired to be an assistant. Nobody has ever really wanted to hire me in the profession I chose, except for the fact that I was cheap labor. It was another experience I can put on the "here's another thing you want that you're not going to get" board in my mind. I used to think that with hard work I'd be able to accomplish any goal I took on. Well, I don't think that so much, now, since almost every goal I've had has been thwarted not just once, mind you, but multiple times. If I gave up after one setback, then I'd think I wasn't really interested, but it hasn't been just one setback, it's been a lot. It's enough to think that maybe it's not worth the heartbreak. I'm just glad I'm going on a vacation soon, because I really need something really good and nice to happen to me, if only to be reassured that sometimes God will let good things happen to me.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

My Worst Nightmare

September 1st, Friday-I'm currently taking over work for a friend of mine while he's in Bali, which is synonymous with "hard to get ahold of in an emergency." Don't get me wrong. I love editing. And I love earning money. And I'm working out of his apartment, which is normally fine. Friday it was not fine. Raw sewage came up the pipes in the bathroom. Imagine my horror when the stuff in the toilet not only wouldn't go down, but moved up. It was like my worst nightmare had come true. (I'm not kidding. I'm the most germ-phobic person I know.) I called the landlord who said he couldn't do anything since it was a holiday weekend and he had no idea who I was. (I'm his tenant's friend who's looking after his apartment!) The landlord then left a message on my friend's voicemail, which I have access to, and proceeded to tell my friend that I had "done something" to his bathroom. I then called the landlord back to tell him that raw sewage was going to overflow into an apartment he owns. Couldn't he call a plumber to fix it, regardless of who he thinks caused the problem? Well, apparently not. He had a party to attend to and it was a holiday weekend. How nice for you, I've got RAW SEWAGE coming up the pipes!I had to call a plumber from the phone book and get him to unclog the main line, which was flushed out onto the front steps of my friend's apartment and onto the sidewalk. (RAW SEWAGE, people! On the sidewalk!) The landlord refused to pay for the repair and I paid for it myself. I also threw out nearly everything on the floor in my friend's bathroom and scrubbed it down. I later found out that this is the 4th time this has happened and that this landlord has been reprimanded by the city. Keep in mind, I'm working this whole time! Trying to keep myself from telling the clients, really, I can't talk to you right now, because I have to literally deal with crap. And it didn't help at all that I wasn't doing well with the digestion that day either. I'm still leery of using the toilet there. It's betrayed me once and I don't want it to do it again. I spent a good deal of today bleaching the place. And the cleaning lady is coming by Tuesday to sanitize again. Because you can never clean too much when raw sewage is involved. AAAArgh. I still can't get the horror of it out of my mind.

Superman, Ex-Supergirlfriends, Pirates and Monsters

July 14-31-It's been so hot lately that we've been going out to see the movies, even when we're not that interested in the movies. Lack of AC will do that to you.

Here's the rundown:
SUPERMAN
I like Superman, I really do, but this movie was not exciting. The closest it came to exciting was a scene that didn't even involve Superman, but involved Lois sending a fax. Really. We both thought a good 45 minutes cut out of the movie would have helped things, because after you've seen Superman wrestle a jet to the ground, you don't really need to see him soar much after that. Yeah, we get it, he flies. Big whoop, we saw that in the first reel, show me something better. I was looking forward to seeing Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor and I think he had a ball making the movie, it just that Lex, in this movie, kinda sucked as a villian. I mean, make more real estate? That's your evil plan? Really? Why not world domination? The Presidency of the USA? (At least that's in the comics, and makes sense because Lex is supposed to be evil, power-hungry, and SMART.) I'll give you that Lex tries to kill Superman in a novel way, but he doesn't stop to check that he's well and truly dead. The character of Lois was good, she's a pain in the neck and she's pretty persistent about following up on a lead, but I'm sorry, Kate Bosworth? Why, oh why does Hollywood do this to me? She's way, way too young and she's not even a brunette! That dye job was awful. (Substitute "blond" for "brunette" in that sentence and it's exactly the same complaint I had of THE FANTASTIC FOUR. But at least Jessica Alba's hair looked good in that movie.) And she has a Pulitzer? But I guess it's the same thing as trying to believe that Jessica Alba has a PhD. It is beautifully shot, though and has some lovely photographic moments. But I can't get over various issues I had with not just messing with the comics canon, but completely introducing elements that even the creators decided not to do. They had good reasons, people. Trust me on this. It's a pretty movie, but not very exciting. At one point, Daryl even turned to me and said, "Ok, bored now." Not a good sign.

MY SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND
This was funnier than I thought and it was nice to see Anna Faris in something other than some iteration of SCARY MOVIE. It also had Eddie Izzard and Rainn Wilson, which alone makes it worth watching. (I love how the villian's lair is his house and how he keeps his secret weapon in his fridge.) Uma Thurman is very good as your typical crazy ex, but she got so tic-y and neurotic that I really couldn't see why anyone would want to date her. But then again, I'm a het girl and she's Uma Thurman. And my understanding of guys is that they'd pretty much date anyone as long as they were pretty. Which explains a lot of the ridiculous pairings I've seen in real life. Some of the best laughs are in the trailer, but the bedroom scenes were hilarious and the variety of ways Uma's character gets back at her former lover are imaginative and visually arresting. The fight scene at the end was fun, too, as was watching Uma's super-character save the world in a variety of fashionable outfits. Not a deep movie, but a fun one.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST
This movie doesn't really have a plot, per se, just a bunch of fun set pieces where Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow gets to show off his ability to cheat death in Mr. Magoo fashion. One reviewer I read called one of his favorite scenes, "The Hamster Ball of Death" and his other favorite scene, "The Hamster Wheel", which is strangely appropriate. People fence, not just on boats and on land, but on moving water wheels where the wood is rotten enough to walk through and get stuck halfway, but not rotten enough to fell three grown men jumping around on it while it was moving. That stunt alone was elegant and masterfully done, as well as being funny and I applaud the people involved in making it. They repeated a lot of the best stuff from the first movie which didn't do as well here, since we'd seen that already, but at least they made fun of Keira Knightley's character fainting to get attention. The problem now, though, is that everyone's pretty much a pirate in this one since everyone's after the same thing, Davy Jones's Locker, or really, what's in it. Bill Nighy as Davy Jones, like Geoffrey Rush's Barbossa from the first film, is the villain who makes you feel sorry for him. Even though Nighy is hidden behind an octopus head, you can still see the flinty defiance in his eyes when he says, "Life isn't fair, why should the afterlife be any different?!" and then sorrow as he recounts how he lost his heart in the first place. It's not easy to act behind a great mass of tentacles in your face and Nighy does an admirable job. Speaking of which, the special effects people, not content with creating believable moving skeletons in the first movie, went ahead and morphed human and sea creature body parts in various ways in this movie. It's not as ghoulishly fun as the skeletons in the moonlight, but the melding of man and shark, for instance, was fantastically done. There's a brief moment in the movie where a man who's been in servitude to Davy Jones so long that he's lost his body and is only a head, sticking, like a barnacle on the wall of the ship, wakes up and talks. It's sad and arresting, and for some reason, not at all surprising considering what had been going on before. The movie ends, sort of, and you get the feeling that the next movie is going to wrap it all up. POTC3 and this one should probably be watched together in order to get the full story. This movie was fun though. Can't wait til the next one.

MONSTER HOUSE
The animation here was done through motion capture and while it's better than the creepy POLAR EXPRESS, it's still not quite right. There's something wrong about the way some character's move, like when someone sits down on a bed, that motion capture gets only just so, but not completely right. But it's getting better, I suppose, I just don't know what's wrong with actual animation. It seems to me, that sufficiently talented animators do a wonderful job of capturing realistic human movement without motion capture (and had been doing so for many years) so why bother with motion capture at all? The story, on the other hand, seems right in all the ways that kids will appreciate. The kids in the movie seem like real kids, who are just trying to get by and grow up with the least amount of embarrassment and awkwardness. And it's a plus that there's no "message" that the movie is trying to convey. It's got a real story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with believeable conflict and characters. Except for the fact that there's a house that's not just haunted, but possessed. The house itself is a masterpiece of devouring horror and I love the fact that the voice behind the house is Kathleen Turner. After we saw this movie, we found out that it's also going to come out in 3-D. I think it'll be even better in 3-D because there are some moments where you could feel the danger from the house and I only saw it in 2-D. I can only imagine how startling it'll be when shown in 3-D. Unfurling rugs, broken trees, and a lurching, moving, monster house has got to be an experience in 3-D.