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Cali 06 September 23rd 2006
This being the first year that I've flown solo to Los Angeles, I think I muddled my way through it with a fair amount of finesse, despite the service being completely lousy. I know that the airlines have been cutting corners to compensate for the rising cost of fuel, but I think its a little ridiculous when they charge you money for a lousy box of snacks. (And I do mean these things were completely wretched) Northwest had this mystery box called the "Tokyo Smart Snack Box" - which you had to pony up $5 to get. Normally I wouldn't have looked twice at this festering pile of transfats, but it was 7 p.m. and I hadn't eaten a single bite all day. So I paid the cash and choked down the thing, trying to get my poor stomach to shut up. Well, I wasn't hungry afterwards, but noises were still plenty to be heard. A word to the wise... avoid the Tokyo Snack Box at all costs!
Saint Paul International was horrendous too. I'm not sure if it was the 400 people crammed into the terminal ( Gate G2 I believe it was ) or the trash that obviously had not been removed for a long time, but it smelled all to high hell in that airport!
When I got into LAX, I ran like hell to the suburbs. (What can I say? LA is a pit) Once I got out of the valley, the weather started to cool off, and I could tell that the day had taken its toll on me. I wound up crashing on my mom's couch shortly afterwards. (since I'm an insomniac, I actually like the jetlag effect going out there, it puts me on something resembling a human sleep pattern) The next day it would be off to the Sierra Nevada's and June lake for a few days of fresh air and fishing.
If you've never taken a sealed bag of potato chips up 8000 feet in elevation, all I can say is that you're in for a bang. Literally! On our way to June Lake we hit a mini mart, and grabbed some munchies for the road. As we were nearing our destination, I heard this loud bang. I turn around and see potato chips flying everywhere, it scared the bejesus out of me. heh Apparently the air pressure was so dramatically different that the denser air inside the bag, overcame the seal from the factory; resulting in the shrapnel spuds effect.
The lake was beautiful as always, but the fishing was slim pickins. There was a million dollar fishing contest on labor day weekend (we showed up the day after the contest ended) and I guess that the lake had been so stirred up by all the people gunning for the money, that the remaining fish had completely had it with the notion of going after lures. We trolled for almost 3 straight days and only caught 7 fish!! Geeze : ( Still I got some incredible shots of the lake, and surrounding mountains.
I just wish I had a better camera. Thats probably the next nice thing that I'm going to wind up giving myself. Something that can take photos in raw format, and has the ability to manually adjust the focus (auto focus is soooo over-rated)
After June Lake I met up with a few friends who work at Blizzard Entertainment, to play some old school D&D. (Yes I am a closet Über geek) It was pretty damn cool to be sitting at the same table with 3 WoW gamemasters, but what was even more impressive was when they let me visit the Blizz corporate campus.
It wasn't exactly what I expected at first, their operations are spread out through 3 different buildings in the UC Irvine business park. At their main building they have 3 really cool replicas of characters from their video games, Varimathras, A Dwarven Hunter, and Nova from the now shelved Starcraft Ghost project.
Things are really tense right now at Blizz with them in full crunch mode on developing for their first WoW expansion, "the Burning Crusade" so I didn't actually get to go into their main office, but I did get a quick walkaround the building that their internal servers are in. All I have to say is damn, these guys are swimming in cash. Their breakrooms are insane, we're talking every kind of console you could think of, fooseball, air hockey, pool table, even an old school stand up arcade version of Street Fighter II LOL. I wish I could thank you by name fellas, but I know how it is. : )
By the time I got back from visiting with the Blizz guys, there was only 1 last thing for me to do, get some small cheesy gift from all of my friends back in Dayton. I wound up settling on Jack in the Box antenna heads. (You see them all over LA, but not a trace of them in Ohio, so it seemed like a cute idea)
And what was my thanks for bringing back such "lavish" gifts? My co-workers decided to make my Akira figure sitting on my desk at work feel a little more pretty. They gave Kaneda a frilly pink ball gown, and put purple / pink flowers all over his motorcycle! Nice LOL.