Road Trip to Los Angeles

On January 2nd Ceara and I departed from northern California for a four day to trip to the Los Angeles area. Ceara was going to conduct research on her batchelor's thesis in architecture that she is working on so that she can graduate from Brown University this May. She got a $400 grant from her university to conduct the work, so she was able to rent a car and have money for us to eat. She is researching low cost housing on the U.S. - Mexico border for migrant farm workers. In the future she hopes to be able to help alleviate the problem of people sleeping in cardboard boxes, under bushes, and in metal culverts like they most commonly do today.

We departed fairly early in the morning in a driving rain storm and the car was soundly pummeled all of the way south until we got over the Grapevine, which are the mountains just to the north of LA. With some time to kill in the late afternoon we headed down to Santa Monica where we wandered around the 3rd street promenade. We walked out to and along the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean and we also went to Hennessy-Ingall, which is one of the largest architecture bookstores in the western United States. Unfortunately for Ceara, she is a poor student and could not afford any of the really expensive books that she liked. Fortunately for me we did not have a lot of time left on our parking meter which meant that we did not have to spend all afternoon in the bookstore.


After we hung out in Santa Monica we headed down to Costa Mesa in Orange Country on the southern side of greater Los Angeles to see my friends Ian and Linda. Linda was one of the very first people that I met at college and She Ian and I all lived in the same dorm freshman year, which is now nearly a decade ago. In addition to them my sister and I also got to see their new baby girl Lindsay who was about 11 weeks old when we where there. She is absolutely adorable and as you can see she has a full head of bright red hair that sticks straight up no matter how hard her parents try to get it to stay down. As the single batchelor that I am, it is a little weird to have friends my age already married. It is even weirder to have had two of them produce a child. There is this perfect little human that is 50% Linda and %50 Ian. I have not had much experience with babies and was quite pleased when I was able to hold her for a few minutes and she did not start screaming. That being said, I am very glad that she is not mine and I have no plans to have one of my own any time soon!