Oscars!
Ah, feels so weird after working the Oscars 4 years in a row, now watching it from home! Overall, I felt the show was rather boring. I liked Jon Stewart better on his last Oscars hosting duty. This time he just wasn’t so good… dunno if it was due to the writers strike or what.
So, out of the top categories I only saw “No Country for Old Men” and “Juno”. Still on my list is “There Will be Blood”, “Atonement”, and “Michael Clayton” (yea this year I’m interested in seeing them all). I liked “No Country for Old Men” because it’s excellent film making, acting and directing. But the story line just throws me. I liked it until the end. I’m not sure what I was supposed to get out of it. I got the theme - hunter becomes hunted. The hero is not quite moral but we still root for him… but I’m not sure what else I was supposed to get out of it that made it an excellent film… if someone got more out of it, please tell me what I’m missing!
I loved Juno! I saw it once and already want to see it again and I will because Josh fell asleep during it 
I heard a lot of people loved “There Will be Blood” even those that didn’t like “No Country for Old Men”… so I’m very interested in seeing that next.
Now Playing: Dead Confederate - The Rat
This is a new one…
The insurance company “First American Title” up here in Valencia has a few lights out…
Snow capped mountains
All the rain and cold weather here in LA has created a beautiful back drop of snowy mountains here in Valencia! This is the view out the window by my desk at work. It feels a bit like Colorado!
Back from Mexico and my house is safe!
I’ll expand more on the Mexico trip next entry… but on Tuesday I received word from the Passenger Services Desk that my neighborhood in LA was evacuated due to fires in the area. A message from my boss… It put a damper on the vacation a bit but we were still able to enjoy ourselves a bit. We were tuned into CNN in our room watching any footage possible to see if we could find anything about our house.
The fires were just across the wash from us about half a mile East. Josh’s parents were watching our house and dogs and were advised to evacuate and waited it out and then the evacuation was called off.
Here are some photos from our neighborhood area:
I’m partially happy I wasn’t home because I heard the sky was as dark as night at 2 in the afternoon and it was so smokey, you could barely breath and it burnt everyone’s throats. But I sort of wish I was there just in case to pack my bags and be ready!
now playing: “won ton tomatoooooo is stuck in my head!”
Detour Festival recap
I forgot to post a recap so here goes…
Went down to LA from Valencia via freeway to Universal City then took the subway downtown. Way cheaper, way easier and way faster
Shout Out Louds = Fantastic! The crowd didn’t move much.. but it’s a festival with several bands so this is typical… the die hards are at the shows where the band is the single the main attraction.
Lead singer of Shout Out Louds has a striking resemblance to…
Jason Schwarzman! Could it be his long lost Swedish twin brother?!
I never saw or heard JUSTICE before and they were pretty good. Sarah and I noted we never saw so many guys dancing before. Waaaay more guys in the crowd than girls and they were dedicated to their moves. wow.
According to Amritz… Daft Punk’s manager is a DJ and he was there doing a set. We stopped by that it looked like they were having a blast. There were 4-5 DJ’s doing their thing on one table.
Bloc Party was good, but not as good as Coachella… they seemed to have more energy at Coachella. It was way hotter at Coachella and nice and cool at Detour so I don’t get it either It was their last tour date in America maybe that was it.
Here’s the Shout Out Louds (the video quality sucks when it gets YouTubified so I’ll try to post it in my photo gallery at a much more reasonable quality):
now playing: that you tube video above
Buffalo Wing Festival
This weekend is the Buffalo Wing Festival in Buffalo! I was thinking we should have some sort of homage to it here in LA.. maybe Sunday when Ruben & Neeka come by?
Full Lunar Eclipse!
Josh and I heard on the news about the full lunar eclipse last night and there hasn’t been one since 2004. It sounded cool, but waking up at 2:58 AM to see it… not so cool. So we just went to bed and waited for the morning to watch it on the news. But then somehow Josh woke up at 2:56 AM! He woke me up and we saw it and I tried to get a photo of it. It looked awesome. Sort of glowing red like and dark enough that you can get the sky and photo subject matter looking correct. Photographers will tell you, you can’t get a good shot of the moon and your subject matter (if it’s not the moon!), you will get one or the other and you must do some photoshop magic to get them both
Of course the photo doesn’t do it justice… but I thought it was kind of cool. 20 second shutter with my f1.4 Sigma lens
now playing: Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Down Boy
Jetskiing!!
Went jetskiing with our new friends this past weekend Ryan and Teresa. Ryan has a Kawasaki stand up jetski. It was the first time out for the War Chariot tube! It’s sooo awesome. Way cooler than our past tubes.. it’s very difficult to flip it, but we managed to flip it 3 times
When we were hanging out beachside we saw 2 boats smack into each other (sides grazed each other). One boat was just idling and another came flying by at like 50mph at least.. and bounced off it. I dunno how you hit a boat that’s standing still.. but they managed to. Didn’t look like too much damage though. Probably dents and cosmetic mostly.
Then we saw a patrol boat clearing out the cove next to us and they said helicopters will be landing to get water. Then we smelled fire and saw smoke behind us and then the ash came down. We got all excited to watch the helicopter come to get water and after like 10 minutes it was like 5 helicopters.. constantly getting water from the lake. We decide to go tubing and then got this photo and realized the fire is at Pyramid lake in the brush behind us!!
We went tubing for a bit more and then went back to our camp area and they were evacuating because the fire was getting close. We moved to a small beach area with an awesome shelter and then we started wakeboarding and wakeskating. I still didn’t manage an up for a good amount of time on the wake skate but Teresa was awesome on the wakeboard even with the choppy helicopter waters.
More photos in the photo gallery … link on right!
don imus… everyone else is commenting on it…
So Don Imus said some horrible racist comment on his show calling the basketball team from Rutgers “nappy haired hos”. First of all who is Imus to comment on nappy hair.. let’s see what died under that cowboy hat of yours…
And I don’t see a lot of commentary about his on air apology. I so wish I could find the transcript somewhere. It went a lot further than the 2 sentences everyone is quoting. His apology was WAY more offensive than his 3 word comment that he was apologizing for. He pulled the “black people like me” thing. Saying his camp has lots of black children at it and he “lets” them sleep in his house with his wife and him and “even eats with them”. omg really? you eat with them?? they don’t have their own slave quarters in your home? wtf. this guy is so transparently racist! his on air apology was highly entertaining. the best part is that Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and the rest of the people demanding his resignation didn’t even catch these much more offensive comments. They’re so focused on ‘Burn the witch! Burn the witch!’ It’s a Monty Python skit in the making.
Reminds me of that recent South Park episode - the nagger. Rev. Jesse Jackson made an apperance 
