traffic

Traffic is just........well it just is. Some days it's your friend, and some days it's your enemy. I am an extremely routine oriented person, so I leave the house pretty much at the same time every day, give or take 2 minutes. So generally speaking with the exception of Holidays and road construction my morning commute/traffic is the same. I know what to expect, I know what times I should be hitting certain intersections in I am going to be on time. I know what time I have to cross the rail road tracks if I don't to get stuck behind the train, and so on. Until this week. This week has been out of control. I have been arriving to work earlier than early, because the commute has just gone by so quickly. I felt like I was in the Italian Job for a while - not because I was stealing gold bricks, or because I drive a mini cooper (I don't) but because I was hitting every single light green. Green lights shave many minutes off a drive.

So today I took a risk. I left the house five minutes later than normal, seeing as I had been getting to work ten minutes earlier than normal all week I thought it was safe. Little did I know I would be following the worlds slowest driver. I know you probably think I am exaggerating, that they were probably just driving a few miles under the speed limit and I was just stressed about being late. But no. Really he was super slow. So slow that - he got pulled over!

I have always heard that you can get a ticket for driving too slow, but until today I had never seen it happen. The car in front of me was going about 12 miles an hour in a 40, and slowly the cars behind me started to pile up. We had a string of at least 10 cars going for a while, and of course the car behind me was a cop. So he pulled out into the middle lane to get next the Mr. Turtle, and over the loudspeaker told him to pull over. So what does Mr. Turtle do? Oh well he stopped, put his car in park and put his hands in the air - as if he was being held at gun point, ultimately messing up the traffic even more. The police man had to then instruct the driver to turn his car back on and pull into the next parking lot. It took a minute or two, but he was able to follow those instructions, ironically at a much quicker pace than he had been driving. It was probably one of the funniest things I have seen while driving, totally worth the ten minutes I was late to work.

spring clean

All this warm weather as of late has tricked me into thinking it is spring. For many months now I have been pondering a big new purchase. I spent time doing product research, reading reviews, and comparing prices. Way back in November I even scoured the black Friday adds, but decided at that point I was just not quite ready to take the plunge. 

But today, today was the day. A little more research, and the agreement of Angela that I was making a good decision and we were off. Armed with the gift card our land lords so kindly gave each of us for Christmas, I was finally ready to bring home this baby:

Yes I really am THAT excited to get a new vacuum. Our old one, was just not doing the trick any more. It was questionable weather or not it would actually pick up any dirt, sometimes it spit out some fun suprises and other times it would just make your hands ache from having to hold the button in place for the power to work. But then again it was free to us, and had served us well for four or so years, so you can understand the sentimental attachment we had to it "our first vacuum."

Here she is in all her glory. Very simple assembly, a couple of snaps and one screw later she was ready for her maiden voyage.

It was a glorious feeling, pushing that baby along, knowing it was actually picking up all of the hair and dirt in the carpet. Bliss! When I was all finished with the trip around our house, I was sickened by the amount of dirt that was picked up. The canister was completely full. Clearly our old sickly vacuum was worse off than we had thought, I had used it within the last week - and still a full canister of dirt.

Now I sit here staring at the lines on our carpet, grinning like a fool, because I know for once it is clean, and this makes me very happy :)

a week later....

Look what I stumbled upon just now. Ok well that is not true, since I can't really stumble upon digital photos. Really I just remembered that I started this post last week and never got farther than uploading a few pictures. 

So here you have it a continuation of our adventures all across LA with Megan.

When we hit up Griffith Park, we packed a nice picnic to eat on the trails by the observatory. Which is really quite the place for people watching. Lots of different languages, and lots of different dress, everything from workerouters, to shredded jeans, to heels and dresses.

A hike to the sign was a must. Which I of course was not dressed appropriately for. My legs were sore for days, they were not too happy with me for wearing boots, and not the hiking kind. We got to take a photo for an interesting couple. We made lots of theories about them, I think the final one we settled on was that they met online, and this was their first time meeting in person. And with that we decided that you should not go to such a secluded place with people you don't know.

While at the Grove we got to stop in at The American Girl store. SO MUCH FUN!!!! *Fun fact two years ago when Angela and I went to Chicago to visit Megan I REALLY wanted to go to The American Girls store on Michigan Ave, but as luck would have it it was not opening for another couple of weeks. So how fun/cool/neato was it that when we finally did go it was still with Megan? Well I thought it was cool. 

So growing up before I was old enough to appreciate Nancy Drew I was all about American Girls. I read all the books (that existed at that point.....there are so many new girls!) and begged for a doll every Christmas. One time Lindsey and I even dressed up like Kirsten and have a play date with my friend Malerie, who was dressed as Samantha, she had the real deal costume - I was jealous. I never actually got one of the dolls, but it was still SO fun too see them all in the store, which is really almost more like a museum. This is me with one of the Molly displays. Her books were my favorite. Meet Molly, and Molly Saves The Day, I mean really how could you not like a girl who swims through a lake with a can of worms in her shirt, just to win at a game of capture the flag? 

After our day in LA we hit up Pasadena and Monrovia. Our first stop was The Father of the Bride House. We walked a few blocks, and all picked out our future homes.  Megan and I will be neighbors, but Angela, well she didn't want to live next to us, she felt the need to separate herself from us by a few blocks.

And finally city hall. Random? yes it was. While we were driving we spotted the top of the building from blocks away and decided that we just had to go over and figure out what it was. You can't see it in this photo, but I do believe the largest cross walk in the United States is right here in front of the Pasadena City Hall. SO LONG....with no walk sign. This could be dangerous folks.

To sum it up we had lots of fun with Megan. And I do believe having nothing to do with us Megan really does maybe want to move here/Monrovia next year. YAY!!! That could mean many more adventures to come.

soupy

Sickness has been making it's way around our house this week. We are each at varying phases of a cold. Not fun. Out of laziness, and the idea of soup being sick person food, I brought a can of soup for lunch the other day. I believe it was called zesty vegetable, the fancy can kind with the pull tab easy open top. One of my favs. So lunch time rolls around, aka the clock strikes twelve. Everyone congregates in the kitchen.

I grabbed my bowl, and pushed up the tab on the can and attempted to pull the lid back. Nothing happened. A small crack had started, but the tab itself broke off. Now I am going to blame my next actions on my illness and assume that if in full health and not under the influence of Dayquil I would not have done such a thing. But at the time, my desperately hungry self decided it would be best to just push down on the can lid, applying a generous amount of pressure to the area with the crack.

Can you guess what happened next? If you guessed the lid fell in and "zesty" broth went flying you would be right. The counter, floor, cupboards and myself were covered. It was a big sticky mess. Half a roll of paper towels later I had the kitchen back in rights, and my whole right side was wet, from my sad attempt of cleaning off the broth.

When I eventually poured my soup into the bowl, all that was left was the vegetables. It was quite sad looking, not really soup at all. And even after my clothes dried, I smelled the rest of the day. Zesty does not make for a good perfume. It smelled as if I had thrown up on myself,  I tried to solve this small problem by spraying a lot a lot of air freshener in my area, which helped caused me to gag a little when I got it in my mouth, but it did cover the smell, as long as you didn't get too close to me.

star gazing

Since we headed all the way up to Griffith park to go to the old zoo, we had to go up to the observatory, hike up to the Hollywood sign, and explore more of LA while we were in the area. All through college the observatory was closed for renovations, so this was Megan's first time up there.

Unfortunately it was not a super clear day, but you could still see a lot of the city.

 [photo by Angela]

We asked a passerbyer to take a photo of all three of us and let's just say she did not mess around. She kept trying different angles, flash, no flash. It was really funny. Ten minutes later we had two photos haha.

We got to check out some telescopes (Angela did that satisfy your great desire to took through a telescope?) Touch some meteors - ponder why they all land in the desert, find out how much we weighed on different planets, and learn all about Griffith himself.

Not only did we see lots of stars in space, we saw some right here on Earth too. We took turns spotting the celebs over the course of our adventures. While exploring The Grove Angela spotted Daryl from The Office. Then when while we were driving home I spotted the Grill em All food truck, which yes may not sound like much, but it won the last season of The Great Food Truck Race on the Food Network. I thought it was pretty cool. And finally while we were stopped in traffic in Pasadena, Megan spotted Bob Harper from The Biggest Loser. Quite the weekend.

We rounded out our Saturday night with dinner at Maggianos. It was of course fantastic [mucho thanks to the Brown's Larry, Lisa and Megan who treated us]. However we successfully left the restaurant with more food than we ate while we were there. Since we all got a free entree to go, plus the second half of our entrees we ate there......it was pretty funny when we had 6 to go boxes to cram into the fridge. And there may have been a small fight for our table when we left.

*Angela my spelling has reached an all time low. I managed to misspell your name twice in this post, but thank goodness spell check caught it.

the ZOO

If you know me at all you are probably a bit shocked by that title. Me being the non animal lover that I am (don't even get me started about all the new super depressing music clad  five minute long animal rescue commercials that play nonstop now) would probably not choose to visit the zoo for fun. But guess what - not only did I but it was my suggestion. CRAZY, no?

Well possibly not as crazy as it sounds. With Megan in town we have to of course tour all of the fine things of LA and Orange county. Convince her how grand our land is, and make sure that she is convinced beyond all that she should move here next year. So off to Griffith Park we went and wondered the "old la zoo" which is abandoned. Meaning there are no animals there. Just really cool rock formations, run down buildings, cages galore and lots of mud.

[my favorite exhibit....is that what they are called in zoo's? my favorite animal? hehe the Megan and Angela - and no I did not try to lock them in the cage, Megan made me promise I wouldn't]

It's really no wonder it was closed and moved to a new location (2 miles away) it was really small. The cages in this picture is probably about half of what was there. Not too many animals could have lived there.

FUN to come!

Preparations have been made. Food was purchased, a personalized shelf was set up, a bed was made, plans have been researched and an airport run has gone down.

 Because ..... we have a visitor!

(illegible last minute made while sitting on the baggage claim sign says "WELCOME MEGAN")

So wonderful. I am looking forward to a few days of catching up, hanging out, watching movies, laughing, eating, adventuring and not sleeping.