beach morning

eric & gary in the waves
in the waves again, further out this time...


in the past i used to always drive to the south bay to go to the beach (redondo beach/hermosa beach/manhattan beach) because it's less tourist'y, cleaner & less crowded than the closer beaches (santa monica & venice). recently i've discovered that one not need drive all the way (45 minutes) to the south bay to find a clean, not-too-crowded beach with good waves. enter marina del rey, one beach south of venice. i was pleasantly surprised to discover how much better than venice marina is & have been going there the last few times for that reason. this morning we left bright and early at 9am and our friend gary came along. the waves were awesome & we had so much fun jumping into them, looking for shells & sunning ourselves. it was awesome.

wildfire

taken from atop runyon canyon saturday morning (right in my neighborhood) the air smells like a campfire, depending on where we are in the city. we drove to glendale last night & could see the flames & smokey sky. the moon was big & red, i tried to get a pic, but couldnt capture it from the car. the photo below is from the LA Times.
a now 42,500-acre fire is burning the angeles national forrest this weekend & will continue on into next week. we hiked in this area a year and a half ago:( two firefighters have died already, 18 houses have burned & people have been injured. also, the humane society and animal shelters are functioning like noah's arc for the pets of the people who have had to evacuate. the fire is threatening mt. wilson now, which houses tv and radio transmitters for "every major station in los angeles". as of sunday night, the fire is only 5% contained.

shhh...they're sleeping

pres

tibb

the tiniest dog

i saw a man trying to sell this tiny dog on hollywood blvd for $2000. it was SO tiny, but he said it was fully grown. i wish i had gotten a better shot of his little face, very cute.

great news!

eric's grandmother, gertrudis, made it thru her surgery this morning. she had one artery that was 90% blocked including calcification & one that was 50% blocked. sounds like the doctors in florida were able to put some stints in, so she should be OK to go forward without a more risky open heart surgery.

she's eric's mom's mom & has been married to his grandfather for 65 years!

this photo was taken while eric & i were in puerto rico for their reunion/anniversary party a few years ago. everyone was dancing & singing, even the 90 yr olds!

dodgers v. cubs

my friend, lisa, from work. she's a cubs fan because she grew up in indiana, close to chicago. she's studying at second city hollywood to be a comedian, so eric & i walk over to see her perform once & a while.
vince vaughn sitting 2 sections away from us. he stopped to sign a bunch of autographs after the game, so lisa & i took the opportunity to run in for some pictures. (taken without zoom)
it was a great day for an afternoon baseball game, probably 80 degrees.
as you can see, there were a LOT of cubs fans there. camron just wore the hat because he hates ALL LA sports teams since he's from the Bay Area.

here's the story of how we got the tickets: Eric's manager, Jameel, had mentioned that he had gone to a Dodger game & sat so close he had to brush the dirt off his shirt. he mentioned that if Eric ever wanted to go he was welcome to the seats, so of course Eric said sure he would love to go sometime. then on thursday he was sitting in the office at work & Jameel asked if he wanted the seats for this weekend. Eric said we were already planning on going so of course we would love some free seats. his manager sent a quick text and then said "alright you're all set". we just showed up at the game & Eric showed his ID to the will-call cashier and she passed him an envelope with 4 $200 tickets inside! our seats were in the shade so after the 7th inning stretch we moved down to some vacant ones in the sun. it was so much fun even though it was not a very close or exciting game & the home team lost.

i was wondering...when they sing "take me out to the ballgame" at the Twins games, does the crowd yell "...root, root, root for the Tw-i-i-i-i-i-ns"? or do they just sing "root, root, root for the home team?" my memory says "home team". Maybe because Twins is only one syllable, so it doesn't really work well for the song? at the Dodgers/Cubs there was probably 30% Cubs fans, 30% Dodgers fans, 30% pretend-to-be-Dodgers fans, & 10% neutral, so when we sang it got REALLY loud as one half screamed "...for the Dodge-rs" and the other half screamed "Cub-bies". I thought that was funny/shameful. LA just has SO many transplants, they're aren't a lot of real die-hard fans of the home sports teams here. That makes it easy to jump onto the Dodger/Angel/Lakers bandwagon at any given time though. Let's be honest, there are no actual fans of the Clippers. LA is pretty spoiled into being a fair-weather city, in more ways than one.

look! i'm making a blog!

eric got me this tiny hot pink sony digital camera for my birthday so that's what these pix are coming from. it has a setting where you can press the button once and it will take a photo every second for 5 seconds (that's what these photos are.) also the new camera is super easy to carry around with me, it goes into a little case & slips right into my purse, so i always have it on me. i'm trying to take a few photos every day. i will blog them as much as i have time.

running on the beach

for the past couple days eric & i have been trying to wake up early enough to drive the 40 minutes to the beach so we could go for a run along the waterfront. yesterday we finally made it! it was a perfect day, sunny, but not overwhelmingly hot. we did about 5 miles including a really cool bridge that runs over pacific coast highway & a huge set of stairs that took us back up to montana ave where we parked. the place we started out from is actually very close to where zack pierce lives. (8 blocks from the ocean-lucky!)