Special thanks must go out to Laz and his lovely wife Christin for haranguing me into getting the fuck out of Los Angeles for a couple of days, and letting me crash on the couch in their room at the Encore so my broke ass wouldn’t have to shell out for a hotel room.

I really had a good time, though I’ll admit my legs are a bit sore still from all the walking. We walked from Encore down to New York New York and the MGM Grand, which looks like a 2 mile walk on Google Maps, but GMaps doesn’t account for all the detours you take into and around casinos. Next time I go to Vegas, I’m going to bring a pedometer so I can figure out exactly how far I walk.

I also need to be a bit more careful about how much food I shove down my gullet at a buffet. We went to the excellent Spice Market buffet at Planet Hollywood, and I stuffed my face to such a ridiculous extent that my appetite is still off more than 30 hours later. That’s probably a sign I shouldn’t have eaten that much.

Once again, thanks to Laz and Christin, who had to put up with me doing this for a couple days. The results of all my photography are below in slideshow form or at my flickr.

While getting some other photos off my camera, I found a few I’d forgotten that I’d taken, including this extreme closeup of Chaplin’s paw that I thought turned out pretty well:

I was so amused to find all his paws sticking out from under the blanket while he was napping.

It’s been less than a year since I first headed south on the Marvin Braude Bike Trail, a trail I’d formerly been content to ride the five or six miles north to its terminus, then turn around and stop wherever I’d started.

The first time I rode south, I got my ass handed to me. I rode with my friends Jessica and Dan to Hermosa Beach, about 15 miles south, but not anywhere near as close to the end as we thought we were when we cried uncle and went to an Irish pub for a burger and a beer.

By the time we got back, I wound up availing myself of Jess and Dan’s offer to give me and my bike a ride back to my apartment, because I wasn’t sure I could make it the final two miles without falling over into oncoming traffic.

The next time down was even sillier: I decided to ride to the end of the trail, which I thought was about half a mile south of the Hermosa pier, but was in fact at least 3 miles further, two miles south of the Redondo Beach pier.

But I managed to not only make it all the way to the southern terminus, I managed to do that AND make it all the way back to my house in one piece. I could barely move for two days afterwards, having brought nothing but a ton of water and a granola bar with me, but I did it.

I’ve been working towards riding the whole trail ever since, incorporating such radical ideas as “bringing a lunch” and “drinking some Gatorade.”

I wanted to go for it last week when my car needed the first of its two hideously expensive repairs, but last week it was so windy I had to get off and walk for long stretches of time.

But today, during repair #2, it was overcast and about 65 degrees with minimal wind. I ate a giant breakfast, and I set out with lunch, granola bars, a crapload of water, and 32 ounces of Gatorade, and I did it.

I rode the whole fucking 44 mile round trip trail in just under 5 hours, including a couple fairly long stops for lunch and another rest when I got all the way to the north end, and a bunch of shorter breaks.

Once you throw in the six miles I rode getting to and from the mechanic’s, it works out to almost exactly 50 miles. And while I’m pretty damn tired, I’m not the kind of bone-exhausted that I was after that first ride south.

While the weight is not coming off the way I’d like it to anymore (although at least it’s staying put), it’s milestones like these that make me feel like I’m still making good progress.

I really need to start just bookmarking articles I want to read instead of leaving the tabs open all the time for the rare instance where I do something stupid (like accidentally clicking a link right after Firefox crashes, then quitting when I see that link opening because I think “Oh no, that’s going to fuck up my session!”, and thereby erasing my entire record of the session) and Session Restore can’t save my ass.

Oh, technology. It makes your life so much easier until it fails, and then it totally fucks you.

Southern California has ben beset by wild temperature swings in the last week. Last Monday I was in my poorly-insulated apartment, battling a nighttime low in the high 40′s while bundled under layers of blankets with Chaplin curled up next to me for warmth.

Seven days later, it’s 11am, and my little weather program is telling me that it’s currently 93 degrees in Santa Monica, a temperature I generally do not see until late August, if at all.

I at least have the option of wandering around the apartment in a tank top and shorts, jumping in the pool if necessary. Chaplin is a bit more miserable, and is in the process of going back and forth between a) sleeping in the coolest places he can find and b) attempting to shed his entire coat.

I’d take this opportunity to at least be able to kill the pilot light on my heater, except the low for sunday is forecast to be 53 degrees. Whee!

Very, very little is happening in my world right now, and there are two things to blame for this. One is a usual suspect: Unemployment.

The more unusual suspect is my car. My car has been a rock. Ten years old, eight of them under my care. Other than routine maintenance and a couple cosmetic scrapes, it’s been quite solid.

Now, however, it’s starting to get old and cranky. It all started when my regular mechanic pointed out that the A/C and alternator belts were really worn out, and that I probably needed to get my timing belt changed.

It’s recommended at either 90 or 105,000 miles, and neither he nor I could find any record it had ever been changed. My car is currently at around 134,000 miles, and if the timing belt breaks it pretty much takes out half the engine, so it’s definitely a bit of maintenance I wanted to get taken care of ASAP once I realized it needed to be done.

My regular guy couldn’t do it because you basically have to take apart half the engine to change it. After getting an obscene quote from a dealer, I was referred by Nate to someone his friends had used, who quoted me a third of what the dealer wanted (and less than half of what my regular mechanic had guesstimated).

So I took the car in on Wednesday, and they shaped up the timing, alternator, and AC belts for exactly what they quoted me, to the penny. Great news, right? Except for one tiny detail.

There’s a thing that goes around the axle, inside the wheel (what it’s called is written on the quote they gave me, but I’m currently too hot and lazy to get up and look for it), and it has a bunch of axle grease in it to keep the axle running smoothly.

So the guy opened the hood, took out what’s basically a flashlight on a long snaky pole, pointed out this item, showed me the decent sized crack in it, and showed me the large amount of axle grease it had kicked out.

It was one of those, “I don’t know what the hell that is or what it does, but I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to look like that” moments. Obviously, it needs to be replaced before the axle gets fucked up, since I do know that if the axle gets fucked up, that’s INCREDIBLY expensive to fix.

And of course, since it involves the wheels, if you change one side, you have to change the other so it doesn’t get thrown out of whack. The quote to get it completely fixed brought the total I’m going to wind up sinking into keeping the car running to just over $1000.

Normally, that would be bad, but it wouldn’t be terrible. But since I have no current income beyond the unemployment checks Unkle Ahnuld’s been sending me, it basically means I am a LOT broker than I already was.

Where I previously thought going out once a week for a night with my friends for $25-40 was a splurge, at this point I’m finding that going once a week to In-N-Out burger ($6.10 for a double-double, fries and a soda) is a splurge.

Hopefully something will come through soon and I’ll be able to start living like a normal-ish human again. Or I’ll finally snap and convince myself that living with a roommate wouldn’t be that horrifying. We shall see.

When you’re unemployed, there is an awful, awful lot of time to kill, and you quickly become aware of what ways you best tolerate killing time without falling into a paralyzing boredom. I’ve divided my potential time killers into three categories:

I. Things I Will Do To Kill Time:

• Read entire contents of internet by 2pm daily.
• Clear off TiVo at least 2-3 episodes at a time.
• Watch entire seasons of TV shows on DVD.
• Swim at least 3km.
• Bike at least 40 miles.
• Play the guitar for a bit.

II. Things I Will Reluctantly Do To Kill Time:

• Force myself to cold-call potential employers (Note: mostly on Mondays).
• Read something printed on dead trees.
• Laundry.

III. Things I Will Not Do To Kill Time:

• Clean up this pigsty.
• File paperwork that has been piling up for about 18 months.
• Learn to cook something that does not involve disguising the fact that I can’t cook for shit with copious amounts of cheese.

Dear Guy Getting Out Of The Sauna While I Was Getting Out Of The Pool,

1. Your reverse mohawk with sideburns that go most of the way down your neck does not look cool, nor does it hide the fact that you’re balding. It makes you look like you fell out of 1997, and not even a cool part of 1997. The only guy who could even sort of pull off the reverse mohawk was the dude from The Prodigy, and even he looked pretty damn dumb.

2. When wearing flood pants, one might consider at least wearing the same color of loud-colored sock. And if you wore different colors on purpose because you thought it looked cool, then you’re even more delusional than your hairstyling choices would make you appear.

Love,
Me.

I’ve written repeatedly about how I hate Sprint and their shitty shitty reception with the fire of a thousand suns, but last night just about tore it for me.

I had what the phone kept telling me were four bars of reception and yet:

• I could not place an outgoing phone call for over 20 minutes, and did not receive an important call I’d been waiting all day for
• When I tried to text people to complain about it, I kept getting error messages indicating said messages had not gone through. Of course, the recipients informed me this morning that they’d all gotten multiple copies of the text.

I really need to line up my next job to be able to afford the switch, but I’m perilously close to flinging my financial rectitude to the wind and just buying a goddamn iPhone.

I’ve said it before (and I’m sure I’ll be saying it again): Fuck Sprint.