Home Sweet Home

Wow. How's this for a long time between posts? I win the award for laziest blogger.

I just got back from LA. I drove down to pick up my roommate who rode the Aids Lifecycle. For those not in the know, everyone on the ride has to raise $2500. Then they ride their bikes (pedal bikes mind you) from San Francisco to Los Angeles over 7 Days. It's pretty ridiculous.

But so is LA. I can believe how weird and not city like LA is. It's all freeways and strip malls. You can tell when you are leaving one city and entering another, because it all looks exactly the same.

We ate dinner down there at an In and Out Burger attached to a (non-strip, but indoor) mall. I had a 6 hour drive ahead of me, but after eating, I was dreading the walk back through the mall. It was the longest mall I've ever seen. It just kept going, and going, and going, and there were only 2 directories in the whole place. It probably took us 20 to 30 minutes to find the In and Out, and we may not have if we hadn't met up at the last minute with someone who had been there before.

Beyond the strip mall ugliness is the air and driving ugliness. It was round about 90 degrees yesterday and the sky was blue. But only if you were looking straight up. As I moved my head down toward the horizon, the sky went from blue, to blue-grey, to grey-blue, to grey. Things that weren't very far away were hazy. Yuck.

Finally, everyone in LA drives like they are the only one on the road. This is not to say that every car in San Francisco is piloted by Mrs. Manners, but these people just assume they have the right of way in ALL situations. Apart from the numerous freeway near-hits, the most blatant stupidity was the guy driving an El Camino out of the parking lot of a gas station. He just drove right out into the very busy street I was on without stopping or checking to see if there was room. (There wasn't any.) Am actually not sure how he managed not to hit anyone. Maybe he drives like that because it's a magic car.

I'm glad I live in San Francisco.