Click this link to the Air Quality map for the greater Los Angeles area. Hover over zone 2, Northwest Coastal L.A. County.

If the AQI Value is anywhere over 50 (yellow), that’s bad, and I am probably cranky and complaining a bit about my athsma, but mostly just being bored and unemployed and watching too much TV.

If the AQI Value is anywhere over 100 (orange), that’s awful, and I am probably completely miserable and whining about nothing but how much my lungs hate me.

If the AQI Value is anywhere over 150 (red), that’s atrocious, and either a) I’m dead, b) I’m in the hospital, or c) I’ve grabbed the cat and just started driving someplace where I can actually fucking breathe, and will send for my stuff at a later date.

Repeat for the next week or two to know how my life is going.

Photos from my trip to D.C. last week are finally up on Flickr, divided into two sets, and thus two slideshows for your time-killing and/or general perusal.

My set of wandering around D.C. with Jill, with quite a bit of stuff from my trip to the Air and Space Museum:

And my set from Maggie’s wedding:

You’d think someone who does enough cocaine that they’ve bothered to purchase a coke spoon would realize that turning the overhead light off in their busted-ass Benz while they’re snorting a giant pile of cocaine would probably be a wise idea.

Or perhaps you’re just doing so much coke that you really don’t care who sees you inhaling a small ski mountain.

Either way, thanks for being an L.A. cliché. This will be an awesome story I tell to people for years to come, even once I’ve fled this (often literally) flaming cesspool.

Also, I’m very glad I managed to make my way out of that parking lot before you even considered starting your car. As amusing as that was, I doubt it would have been anywhere near as funny if you’d attempted to drive instead of simply sitting in your car, high as a goddamn kite.

Another pair of unemployment funnies around the internets for your time-killing pleasure. From Indexed:

From Garfield Minus Garfield:

I went to my erstwhile hometown of Washington, DC this past weekend to attend my friend Maggie’s wedding. It was quite fun and more than a little trippy, considering we’ve known each other since we were five years old and went all the way from Kindergarten through high school together.

Photos of the wedding and some of my wanderings around DC will be forthcoming when I stop being so goddamn lazy about getting stuff up on Flickr, but I wanted to post a few scenes that stuck out in my mind about my trip:

• I’d totally forgotten about the People Movers at Dulles. Seriously, you feel like you’re riding in a time capsule. They’re gone in a few weeks though – When I left I saw them doing test runs of the new train system that will transport everyone between terminals in a more standard fashion.

• The guy working for the woeful Nationals who was at Union Station when I went to meet Jill, practically begging people to come to some of the rest of the games. He got shooed away from the entrance by security.

• Checking out the Air and Space Museum with Jill for the first time in about 10 years, and definitely the first time since I became a major space geek. I practically had a nerdgasm over the Apollo 11 Command Module. I also could not believe how freakishly small the Mercury capsule was. It’s one thing to read about it, it’s another to look at the capsule and wonder how anyone could get in it buck naked, let alone with a spacesuit on.

• Realizing how much DC has changed. And I mean REALLY changed. I came of age at one of the city’s low points, having one of my very first political memories being the mayor getting arrested for smoking crack and then the subsequent mayor proving even more incompetent at managing the city than a convicted crackhead. The city was just beginning to pull itself out of what was basically a death spiral when I left for college in 1999.

  There’s been a great deal of “urban renewal” in the ten years since I fled, and the difference, particularly along the U Street corridor, is jaw-dropping. Areas where my parents used to freak out that I was going to get shot during broad daylight are now yuppie-filled and almost unrecognizably nice. I half-jokingly texted another friend from high school who fled that “Everything is now postmodern, gentrified, and/or unnecessarily huge.”

• Mom, who I was staying with, spent two solid days bitching at me about how I was going to be so deeply under-dressed for a wedding in a black jacket, black slacks, and a red shirt, when it turned out I was hilariously overdressed, as the groomsmen weren’t even wearing ties.

• This was the smallest wedding I’ve been to in a while, I think with about 40 people, tops. I think the only smaller one I’ve been to was my dad’s wedding to my stepmom, which was literally only family. I must say, it was nice since it meant I actually got to have a couple conversations with the bride, who I hadn’t seen in person in several years.

• Going out for drinks with Weigel after dinner Saturday and having a friend of a friend of his turn out to be one of the presenters of a BBC podcast I listen to all the time who was in DC on assignment for six months. It was hilarious, I recognized her voice immediately. She said it was the first time she’d met someone who actually listened to the podcast.

• Sunday brunch with another pair of folks who I hadn’t seen in a few years – one friend from when we were little kids and another from high school, both of whom I’d gotten back in touch with via Facebook. I suppose falling out of touch can happen when you only go to your hometown about once every four years for 2-3 days.

Anyway, overall it was a great trip, and while I was also reminded of several reasons why I don’t spend a lot of time there, I’m really glad I went. As I said, pictures to come.

I went to Denver for my stepuncle’s stepdaughter’s wedding (my step-step-cousin, I suppose) a couple weekends ago and hauled my camera along with me. I also got to see my cousin Jeff for the first time in about six years, and there’s some pictures of his family in here as well (or at least the members of his family who weren’t off at college or work).

If you can’t see the images below the set’s also available here at Flickr.

Photographically, I focused mostly on the drive through Nevada this time, which is through an otherworldly beautiful part of the desert where there is literally nobody around for hundreds of miles. So spectacular and incredibly relaxing.

There’s also some good shots from my hike to Titus Lake with my dad. For two people whose combined age is 100 and who have two good legs between us, we did pretty damn well.

Photos are from my D50, but a bunch of fun ones from the iPhone mixed in. If the slideshow below doesn’t feel like cooperating, the set is here on Flickr.

A quick trip to Denver for a family wedding seems to have cleared out my lungs pretty well, and the progress that’s been made in terms of getting the fire contained and directed away from LA proper seems to have done the trick in stopping the series of asthma attacks I was having last week.

This is a phenomenal set of time-lapses from August 30th, when the fire really started raging out of control, which will go a long ways towards explaining why I was so goddamn miserable for a couple of weeks.

That video is ONE DAY of smoke being shot into the air around L.A., and it did that or worse every day for almost a week and a half. I don’t even live that close to the fire, but it’s easy to see how bad things got for those amongst us with craptastic lungs.

Nothing quite so brick-shitting as the drive with a clone of your main hard drive up and dying just as you need to reimport its contents onto your main hard drive after doing a clean install of a new operating system.

Thank Jeebus I’m paranoid and made a second backup on a different disk before I blew away the main drive. That’s what’s reimporting to my computer at the moment. If I didn’t have that, I’d be completely screwed.

What kills me is that I’d just gotten the computer to boot off the cloned drive half an hour earlier, and there were zero signs the drive was about to die. Second I hooked it up after installing Snow Leopard, it started clicking and refusing to spin up, dead as a doornail.

Now I just have to hope to hell this copy works right when it’s done importing in…1 hour and 15 minutes.

Edit, 2am: Couple nasty bugs in the 10.6.0 version that took me a while and a bunch of Googling to squash, but I think I’ve got the nastiest issues squared away. And even if I don’t…I’m going to bed.