LA is enormous

Obama slept here.  That's what they told Karen when she was checking in at the RSA conference here in LA.  

It's been about a decade since we've gone anywhere by ourselves for more than a night.  It's been a great trip so far, and this is the first time Karen's been to Cali, other than an overnight at LAX many years ago.  

We rented a car and headed north up the PCH.  Stopped in Ventura for lunch, bought some strawberries and oranges in Oxnard at a roadside stand.  I began my quest for the perfect fish taco in Ventura, where, while not perfect, it was outstanding.  Tried to get back to west LA via Mulholland Drive, but were turned around at the top as a big yellow gate after a few miles on the unimproved road told us we weren't going any further.  Beautiful views, though.

Spent yesterday at the Getty and driving around LA (Hollywood, the Sunset Strip, etc) and hit Long Beach to meet my cousin and her boyfriend.  Dinner and drinks at Shoreline Drive, catching up with family news--always a great time with great people.

So now I've got a free day as Karen presents her paper and sits on the panel.   Now I'll continue where we left off, explore a bunch of places that I've always wanted to see but are off the beaten path.  The thing I most love about cities is not the cultural landmarks as much as the way the city's grid (or lack thereof) is affected by the topography and demographics.  And fish taco stands.

Chronic Tacos here I come.

Getting back to regular

It's been a weird winter, and my significant level of inactivity, coupled with the turbulence that determines whether or not we will all be gainfully employed in the near future has created a Twilight Zone effect not felt since...I'm not quite sure.

Since 2003, I "got regular" again by getting back on my bike consistently, shedding close to 40 lbs (I really let go and ventured into tub of goo-hood for about a decade), and letting those endorphins course their way through. Since I'm "all or nothing" in my approach to living, the intensities of riding, training, and sometimes racing burned brightly for a few years and fizzled out in the late fall of last year. I haven't ridden much at all since late November, not even on this hampster wheel machine or that one.

One wonders why these things happen, but it's pretty easy to see how this motivation waned. A kitchen renovation, busy Christmas season, a bathroom renovation, crappy weather, and oh yeah the current global financial situation which is threatening many a livelihood like the sword of Damocles tends to put an exercise and lifestyle activity on the backburner. Certainly the opposite would have a beneficial effect, but it's an inertia that I haven't been able to (wanted to?) overcome lately.

To put it in perspective, a recent issue of Bicycling mag reviewed the latest Eddy, a real beauty that was all tricked out with Campy Super Record and and and. After getting through all the flowery bike review language (which can easily, with few changes, be substituted with restaurant review prose and no one would be the wiser), the price of the machine is revealed. A staggering $12,500. I don't often guffaw loudly, but this was an exception. I love me my bikes, especially my own Eddy, but not 12.5K worth. I could buy a small team's worth for that price. Not gonna happen.

Anywho, I'm getting the itch to ride again, and it's no coincidence that the days are getting warmer and the sun is staying out longer, especially after daylight savings kicks in this weekend. So maybe I can actually reverse the trend of muscular atrophy and pear-shapedness and get back out on the road with my friends, comrades, and countrymen. Spring is right around the corner.

Like a ton of bricks

It isn't supposed to be this way.  Parents should not attend the funerals of their children.  That's not fair.

I was sitting at home tonight, nursing a nasty head and chest cold which began on Thursday.  Standard Saturday afternoon TV fare, the reruns of movies we've seen, sports, and crappy reality shows.  Mindless blather to relieve the stresses of the earlier part of the day and the latter part of yesterday.

We had attended the viewing (ashes in an urn), funeral, and wake of a close friend who died last week.   The outpouring of support and compassion has been amazing, and will surely help the family get through these tough times.   During Mary's battle with cancer I lived in blissful, hopeful ignorance and hope that all would be well in the end, just as I had when my mother, sister in-law, and aunt fought and defeated cancer a few years ago.

Instead,  her time was severely limited when the diagnosis was made.  So limited that we all thought today's events would have already taken place last summer.  I knew this in the back of my mind but refused to accept it, so when she made heroic advances at recovery over the summer and fall months I figured that she was beating this thing once and for all and everything would be back to normal once again.  So when Mary's health declined once again after the New Year, it became clear to us that she had battled for and won an extension of her life so that she could prepare her family for the next journey.  Even when I heard that Mary passed away last Friday I felt sadness but relief that she could rest in peace, finally.

The community gatherings to celebrate her life were appropriately sad and bracing.  The grieving was open and raw, but music was a big part of the service to celebrate her memory.  So tonight I picked up my guitar and tried to emulate my friend Mike's rendition of Harvest Moon that he played at the funeral service, and suddenly the flood gates opened.  I had been holding it in for many months, knowing that the inevitable day would soon be upon us, and it all came out, uncontrollably cathartic.

The only good thing about having a bad cold is when you spend an hour bawling, your face doesn't look any different.

Bass trio

We were watching This is Spinal Tap this weekend after hanging out with the cousins.  My cousin's husband, who, like me, has seen this flick umpteen times, noticed something that I had never noticed.

Everyone knows the "This one goes to eleven" line--it's entered our consciousness and is a part of pop culture.  And the umlaut over the "n" in Spinal Tap is also obviously funny.  But the thing that slayed me when we saw this again was during "Big Bottom" we noticed that Derek Smalls had a double bass.  A four stringer and a...four stringer.  When the camera panned over to Nigel Tufnel, he had a bass guitar too.  And David St. Hubbins rounded out the trio with another bass.

Guess you had to be there.

Cortlandt Street Station

We spent the weekend in NYC, visiting with my cousins who live in Brooklyn. We spent the time being with my cousins, seeing friends (one of whom I haven't seen in 16 years), and spending an entire day walking around Midtown, the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. We started the journey with a trip to Ellis Island to see what our great grandparents and grandparents went through to get here about a hundred years ago.

It was all a great time, full of memories that stem from the fullness of the weekend and the inevitable frictions of hanging out with family. In our zeal to accommodate everyone's plans we found ourselves stepping on each others' toes in ways that became comical. Mix in some overtly deferential communication styles amongst all of us who are hard-headed and convinced that our way is the right way. Layer that on top of my cousins' opinions of where the best pizza to be had can be found or how to get somewhere (which way is fastest? or cheapest?). The funniest moments (though frustrating at the time) could have come straight out of an I Love Lucy episode, involving a car service car and a bus (and its surly driver), with movements that could not have been choregraphed better. Describing it here won't do it justice--it will live on in memories.

One other unintended detour, however, gave me a bit of closure on something that has been on my mind since September of 2001. I have a macabre obsession with the events of the 11th, starting with Why and How and going back to Why again. I've always wanted to see the site with my own eyes, knowing that pictures and TV images don't demonstrate the peripheral scope that being there provides. Since I design buildings for a living, understanding how buildings react to outside forces (or in this case, how they fail), is an endless source of fascination. How people react to buildings under stress is similarly fascinating, since building codes are written and revised as a direct result of tragic events. I was hoping to see "Ground Zero" to understand the physical magnitude once and for all.

I called an old friend from architecture school, who told me to get on the R Train from Park Slope and get off at Court Street, where I would visit and catch up on 16 years of time gone by. The train rolled past Court Street without stopping, and before I knew it I was on the Manhattan Bridge. I got off on Canal Street in downtown Manhattan, jumped across and waited for the R to come the other way to get back to my intended destination. Sunday evening train schedules and routes get weird due to repairs, etc. I was along for the ride.

As we rolled (slowly) back to Brooklyn, we went through a station that looked like it was under construction, when in fact it was deserted, dusty, and spooky. This was the Cortlandt Street Station, the closest one to the Twin Towers, with what looks like the dust and debris from that day still resting on the tiles and rails. Riding through it, listening to the aching screach of the train's wheels on the tracks raised the hair on the back of my neck, since above me approximately 3000 people died in the span of an hour when two buildings failed based on forces that they were not intended to withstand.  It's actually not closed due to the collapse--now it's closed because of the construction of the new WTC, but the effect remains the same for an outsider like me.

I got to see Ground Zero, finally, but not from where we are used to seeing it. It's no longer so important that I see it again. But this:

the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk...was awesome.

Friday the 13th

It was not the best day of days.

The dwindling economy is finally taking a toll on our office.  We're cutting back in ways that we don't want to, but have to.  The hard decisions are upon us, and it's not fun.  But we'll get through it.

This is all is dwarfed by a far larger sadness, the news that we have been preparing for about a dear friend, a mother, a wife, who succumbed to a battle against cancer tonight.  Her husband and three kids will be supported by all of us in their new journey without her.  They are strong people, a strong family.  They will get through this.

Rest in peace, Mary.

Closing dinner

Our client  (on one of our jobs) treated all of us (who worked on the project) to a "closing dinner" at OYA downtown.  Very nice.  Good feelings all around, drinks were flowing, the food was great (though sparse as is typical in haute cuisine), and we cemented some relationships.

This is an intense, hard charging group of people.  Type A personalities all around.  Many feathers ruffled during many meetings as the project took shape and we marked our respective territories.  Animated and sometimes angry conversations about process and product, telephone conferences with bad connections, crossed e-mails, unyielding government agencies, and high levels of stress.  Not to mention an extremely slow cashflow (not unlike molasses in January).

Recognizing these difficulties that enabled the project to proceed to construction made tonight's dinner that much more enjoyable.  Things can get done when you work together and work toward a common goal which will ultimately benefit a large number of people.  It's not always smooth, but if it was, everyone would be doing it.