Daily in L.A.

... in sunny Southern California.

It was pretty cold over the holidays here in Los Angeles.  Out highs were in the mid-50's F most of the time.  That's cold for us.

This week's forecast:



I like warmer weather but I will being able to wear my beautiful cashmere sweaters.

I love, love, love the Genius feature in my iTunes.  It introduces my own music to me.

A Borders near me is going out of business.  I ran in and bought $116 worth of books in about 30 minutes.  Yikes.

A creativity book
Some about personality disorders
Some Christian books

I'm going to go browse them a little more slowly now. 

:-)

I had an awesome moment on Friday.  I was buying two high-ticket items from a home goods store.  I got in line to buy my two items and the customer in front of me walked up real close to me and said "Are you buying these two things?"  "Yes".  "Only these two?"  "Yes".  She walked away, went digging through the bag in her cart and came back with two (not one, but two!) 20% coupons for me to use!  What a blessing.  I was so happy and so humbled by her generosity and I saved a bundle of money.  Awesome.

I am taking an art class beginning next week.  It will be Mon - Thu from 12:30 - 4 for six weeks.  Full immersion.  Wheeeeee!  :-D

I walked out to my car this afternoon to drive to my parents for a New Year's Day visit.  I went to the usual spot where I park my car on the side street but it wasn't there.  I don't always remember where I park so I continued wandering around, carrying several things, many of them which are heavy, and a drink, trying to find my car.  Minor panic set in, the sort that you get when you're looking for your wallet in your purse and think for a moment that it's been stolen or left at home until you finally get a flash of it.  I walked to the street behind my street but it wasn't there either.  Then I thought "Oh, it's a holiday, I probably parked in front."  I remembered that I was on the phone when I parked my car the day before so I was not completely paying attention when I parked.  I turned the corner to the front street, silently praying that my car would be there.  It wasn't.  I walked back to my place, unloaded all my stuff and retraced all my steps.

I called my dad.  "Dad, I can't find my car.  I think it's been stolen".  He offered to drive 45 minutes to come pick me up and told me to call the police in the meantime.  He said it in a way as if he knew I was in shock and he wanted to be sure I had solid instructions I could follow.  I was thankful for his guidance.

I didn't know if I should call the insurance company first or the police.  I was feeling pretty mellow about the whole thing but very disappointed to think that my neighborhood is one in which people steal cars.  I began thinking through the process of buying a new car and was thankful that car prices are down right now.  I decided to call my insurance agency first.  They give me a claim number and told me an adjuster would call the next business day and that I could get a rental car tomorrow.  Next I called the police and said I wanted to report a stolen car.  The officer took my license plate number and said "I have good news and bad news, which do you want first?"  Yes!  They have my car!  I thought perhaps they recovered my car but it was in bad shape.  He said "Your car was not stolen.  But it was impounded."  What??!!  How can my car be impounded, I have no outstanding tickets, it has not been abandoned!  After looking up the info he told me my car was towed because I was blocking a driveway.  Ugh. 

The long and the short of it was that I was able to pick up my car from the tow yard after paying $240.  Ouch.  And to add insult to injury, my car had a $50 parking ticket on it for blocking a driveway!  Ya, thanks, I kind of figured that one out.

Lessons learned: 
1) Don't be on the phone when I park my car.
2) Call the police first before the insurance agency.

So that was the exciting part of my day.  :-)

I stayed up until 2 a.m. last night trying to get the last of my Christmas cards prepared.  I went to the post office today to send them and the mail box inside was so full that all my envelopes wouldn't go down the chute.  I grabbed the envelopes that were sticking out and took them to the outside box.  That one was full, too!  Lots of people are going to be getting Christmas cards in the next couple of days from people in my neighborhood!

Working on my Christmas letter.  I did one a couple of years ago with lots of pictures in it.  It is now a tradition.

No matter how early I start getting ready for Christmas (this year it was in October), I always seem to have last minute things to do!  But it's all really fun.  :-)

Bush having shoes thrown at him has got me thinking.

I once had to dodge a pen being thrown at me during class.  The thrower was the instructor.  It barely missed my eye.

What has been thrown at you that you've had to dodge? 

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well, let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - I read this just a few years ago, I liked it very much
6 The Bible - I'm almost done with my first read through, I'm in Hebrews now.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - Really loved this story, I cannot believe it was the author's first book.  They are making it into a movie.
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - It was kind of dumb.
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - A beautiful, beautiful book.  Also terrific is this author's 2nd book, "A 1000 Splendid Suns"
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - I only read it so I could defend Christianity better
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - I've started this a few times but haven't gotten far.
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - Blech.
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Just read it a few months ago.  I did not like it.
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - I liked it mostly but was somewhat disappointed with the "jump the shark" moment
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - I had to read this in college and watch and juxtapose "Apocalypse Now" as part of a smart-people program.  I decided I preferred to be ordinary.
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - I think I read this as a teenager along with "The Man in the Iron Mask"
98 Hamlet - Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - Yes!
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - I've seen the stage play a number of times.  Does that count?

**********
I've read 28 of the top 100 books.  That's pretty good!

There is a man at the top of the crane putting the final touches on the Cartier bow.

At the same church as yesterday's image. I guess I took most of my pictures at night. There's a certain quality of light that is attractive at night.

I think this is from the same church as yesterday's photo. But it might not be, either. I don't quite remember.

So many picture opportunities present themselves when you're in NYC at night!

Walking along, peering into the windows on the side of a church.

Saks Fifth Avenue at night

I got this from Hanna

Your Debut Album

1 - Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Random quotations: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

If you want to do this again, hit refresh to generate new quotes, because clicking the quotes link again will just give you the same quotes over and over again.

3 - Go to flickr's "explore the last seven days" http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. Feel free to crop it to a square, and make sure it won't stretch the image.

Mine

Band Name: Larkinsburg Township
Album: Few Experts are Many


Picture source:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3233/2910795624_a52d626c6d_m.jpg