I just had a feeling about the day when we got there. Its a weekday morning and this place is full of model san marino women. Most of them are nice people who are very polite and act just like normal people. BUT there's a element in this city that you have to watch out for. Take the woman sitting at the table directly behind me. She's alone eating breakfast, and on the cell phone. Now i have nothing against people sitting talking on cell phones. As far as i am concerned you can talk on the phone all you want as long as you are not operating heavy machinery. For those of you who are fuckin stupid out there.... An automobile is a piece of heavy machinery. So she's talking away. Now most people when they talk face to face with a person have one volume of speech. when you're on the phone, you have another volume that is usually a little louder. You speak as if you have headphones on and you have no perception of how fuckin loud you are. Well this lady was a little past that volume. She was just plain fuckin annoying. BUT that's not the best part. She sat on the phone the ENTIRE time Jen and I were there. She was on the phone when we sat down, and she was on the phone when we paid our bill and left. AND... she did nothing but complain about EVERYTHING while she was there. It seems that this woman had recently been to a wedding and needed to critique everything about it. It also been out to dinner with the In-Laws on the other end of the wedding and did not appreciate their methods on tipping in restaurants or really more to the point their ability to NOT TIP and smile and walk away. This was hilarious. Jen and I were entertained for our entire breakfast. Just when we thought she had calmed down she would start to say ,"thank you... thank you... THANK you... yes yes yes yes, i know, THANK YOU." progressively getting louder and louder and louder, then she would take the conversation again and start on another rant.
All in all the breakfast was good, but the atmosphere of it was just a little off.
So then we went home to deal with random crap. We still at this point of the morning have raccoons in a trap on our roof. The pest control guys have not come, and we're starting to worry about the coons cause they're sitting in the sun on a black roof and they are panting cause its so fuckin hot. We call them again and find out they will be there in an hour. I go outside and hose down the raccoons, and trust me on this one, Mamma raccoon was SO happy to get soaked. As soon as i turned the water on her, she started to rub her face like she was washing herself. She rubbed the water into her fur and tried to soak it all in.
We left the house now with the Getty Center as our next destination. Getting there was not too bad. I just had to drive around the westwood area for 20 minutes trying to find this fuckin parking lot that you have to park in if you don't have a parking reservation. So by this time Jen is already car sick. AND now we have to get on a shuttle bus to take us up to the top of the hill. So jen gets even more sick on the shuttle ride up. She's already pissed, but i am too blind to see it. I walk her around the gardens and through the galleries. And finally we sit down for 10 minutes to take a little rest. This is when it really hits jen that her birthday sucks so far. Well at this point we are both dog tired and we both want to go home. the 405 the 101 and the 134 all stand in the way of us getting home. So it takes us over an hour to get back to our house.... which is fuckin 90 degrees anyway cause the A/C does not work.
INTERMISSION
so we try to stay cool at home. we try, but there just no way in hell that we can. we take a nap for an hour and then we get ready for dinner. jen puts on a new dress and i (just after waking from a nap) say something that i will not repeat. My brain was not fully functional at the time i opened my mouth and so the dress comes off and Jen changes into another outfit. We go to cafe Bizu in pasadena and have a great dinner, but we're both so fuckin dead tired that i don't think we enjoy it as much as we should have. We both are in bitchy moods, so we end up going home, getting in a stupid fight and going to bed.
I get up in the morning and the trap didn't catch any raccoons. how fitting.
so that brings us to Thursday. Jen and i get up and try to let cold air into the house and then close the house up to keep it cool. Hahahah i know it's funny, and we didn't end up doing any good. jen runs out to say goodbye to the Bell's before they leave for their long trek across the nation. Later John stops by to check his mail and we went to Twoey's for lunch.
We stop by his house and i help him a little with loading things into the car. I say my final goodbye to both John and Kate and get back home... where jen is waiting frantically trying to figure out where i went.
It seems that we had been invited to the Hollywood Bowl that night by Jen's parents. So off to the bowl. I check the web site before we leave and i realize that the LA phil is playing July 4th selections as well as a performance by Kenny Rogers. So i spent the night looking up Kenny's nose cause the seats that Jen's parents got are in the box that is literally the front row.
Concert was good. I have to say that the LA phil's performance of Aaron Copeland's Appalachian Spring was by far the best piece of music played. I really hate to say this, but "the gambler" just does not do it for me much anymore.
We get out of the bowl and head directly for the valet line for the car. We were one of the first people out, and 45 minutes later we still don't have out car. So after bitching out a large number of valets we are told that we should have been handed the keys and the car was parked in a lot below the valet line and we could have gotten in it at any time. Well let me just say this... the hollywood bowl has always had bad parking. For a time they figured out how to deal with cars, but the addition of valet parking in the last season has just fucked over everything. They actually charge people $25 for valet and then make you wait at least 30 minutes to get your car. Can you say "SCAM". I think there were a total of 8 guys moving over 100 cars. Each of these guys was getting tips from everybody at the beginning. You can bet the tips were fuckin small by the end of waiting. So now i am sitting in my house that has finally cooled down to a reasonable temperature, and i think i am calling it a night.
