Remember Muffy?

Muffy on the white chair.



Muffy sleeps on my bed, she takes up an entire side.




Muffy's mad.



What we had for dinner. Beans, duck, and sausage.

Cardiff by the Sea

Today's mission: Cardiff by the Sea. It's a enclave of 12,000, part of the city of Encinitas. About 30min north of where I live.

Cardiff's a town full of modest homes and broken roads. Typical beach town. We had lunch at Las Olas, this place that supposedly created the fish taco. Here it's popular to bring your kids and drink alcohol cleverly disguised by orange juice.

On one side of the restaurant is San Elijo Lagoon, this huge 900 acre estuary. Oh and ya, I got some pple cleaning palm trees, they're showing us how it's done.


Cardiff the beach is right across the restaurant, it's one of many beaches accessible by this road that runs from god knows where down to La Jolla. It's not a very deep beach, rocky and dirty. Nonetheless it's popular because it's a dog beach. We saw dogs of every type everywhere...the most popular being the muscular killer type. The smaller dogs had trouble with the waves. There's also a lot of surfers b/c the water is very churny.


Someone paragliding.

Catching up

Finally uploaded some pix from the cam.

This is Henrick when we took him out to celebrate his new job. He's going to be a rockstar.



And this is Santa Monica Beach. My continuing saga of various beachs in socal. I've photographed Coronado, Mission, La Jolla Cove, Rosarito, Malibu, Huntington, Laguna, Newport and now Santa Monica.

Low energy so far this week =(

It's a bad thing, I need to be bright and perky at work, and equally energetic at all the start of school type things. Coffee isn't working either.

Scheduled to be 87 degrees tomorrow =( All I want to do is lock myself in a room and sleep.

I went to work today.

I need to keep a journal for work. It's here.

Why Law School Sucks

If you haven't noticed, I'm trying to blog more often. I read a commentary on Myspace that wondered, why do all these millions of people, with this versatile software, choose only to discuss and glamorize their own life? One guy answered, it's because the common public doesn't have anything under the surface, that all we can think of doing is talking about our menial daily lives.

So, I'm like that. I'm not a brilliant creative awesome writer. I'm not especially funny, I think I'm boring. I'm not even a concise boring writer. And ya, I'm shallow, thats why my blog is about the boring details of my life. It'll stay that way.

Back to why law school sucks. Law school sucks b/c everyone at my school is insanely egotistic, scared to ask for help, and insecure. I feel like I need to keep my mouth shut, least I offend someone's ego, and end up with a letter explaining why I'm wrong and that person is rite. Of course the letters are always very polite, people try to practice their legal writing skills on me. (I edited out some very offensive not very nice stuff here) I'm sure I won't amount to better, but I'll try very hard (and believe me it's hard), to not treat people unfairly.

Vacation b4 school

We went to the Natural History Museum in LA on Saturday. OMG they had SO many dead birds, all stuffed. Some of them looked newly dead. We saw drawers of birds, and their feet, and their sawed off heads. The special exhibit was about Europeans who sacrificed gold and bodies to a bog. For some reason, the bog preserved skin but not bones, so the bodies were patches of leather. It's an awesome musuem, it's huge and took entirely 2hrs longer than I thought. It's also right across from USC, which is a beautiful school. I wish I went there for undergrad.

Then we went to Santa Monica Beach, which is like Mission Beach, done properly. Fewer timeshares, deeper beach, same deep blue water. I love Santa Monica, it's got an excellent shopping district, it's close to good Japanese food, I saw this bar that's just made for me, and it's got that beach! I dragged C and C shopping. They've got a Zara there (black and white European clothing). A sizeable number of female shoppers sported Zara shirts. We got gelato at this incredibly good gelato place, with a hundred flavors. I got strawberry. Damn good.

Had dinner at Shabu hachi...which is a shabu shabu place, but we got shabu nabe. It's like kimchee soup flavored hot pot. It's what sumo wrestlers eat. It's a good way to start the school year. This guy's blog has a picture, we didn't get the seafood, we got beef and chicken meatballs.

Yep, school starts tomorrow. It's never ended for me though, I've already got 4 meetings set up next week. I've been reading up on this new "Get Things Done" system by David Allen, which breaks terrifying projects down into manageable components. I think the key is to focus less on school and more on other things.

Beaches to Attend

I'm going to visit the following beaches:

Imperial Beach => close to the border, home of the U.S. sand castle building competition

Windansea (La Jolla) => surfing, snorkeling, kayaking

La Jolla Cove => best snorkeling in San Diego

Cardiff by the Sea + San Elijo Lagoon => old surfing town

Moonlight State Beach (Encinitas) => family oriented

Sunset Cliffs (san diego) => 68acres of cliffs, no facilities

Black's Beach => past torrey pines state beach, swimsuit optional hanggliding dangerous to access beach

Silver Strand Beach (Coronado south) => camping, Navy Seals training center

Muffy

Torrey Pines State Beach

My goal...go to every beach in San Diego. I'm waiting for my picnic basket to arrive first. ETA 3 weeks.

Torrey Pines is the beach between Del Mar and La Jolla. It costs $6 to park, doesn't have a whole lot of sand, but it's got that multi colored water reminiscent of tropical areas. I saw a baby shark in the water, or at least a foot long fish that looked like a baby shark! I went on a Thursday afternoon and the beach was absolutely packed with children learning to surf. A fair number of people simply walk to the beach, lucky persons who live in Del Mar.

The marshy river that empties into the beach:


Condos in Del Mar overlooking the beach:


The beach, packed!

Liquids on a Plane

Flew back to Los Altos right during the no liquids on a plane scare. No one searched me, the worst I got was a verbal question, are you carrying liquids?

Saw cousin Grace, visited Santa Cruz. It was one of those days when there were a million sardines in the ocean, and everyone had fish in their coolers. People went nuts with happiness.

Would have been a good trip but GM tagged along everywhere. Would be ok, but she didn't even know I came back, she didn't want to go to Santa Cruz, I don't understand why she got into the car.

Here's Grace with a cat.

So I made it. I got on the plane, they didn't search me, they just asked me if I had any liquids. I got my assigned seat on Southwest, and it was the best seat I've ever gotten on a plane. Sad in a way, it's the closest I'll ever get to first class.

Grace is here too. Yesterday we went shopping at Valley Fair, where I got a skirt and a shirt. No one else bought anything. Today we went to Santa Cruz. It wasn't really hot, foggy. We checked out the botanical gardens where I held a stripped tabby, went to the pier, the beach, and then downtown. The ocean was packed with sardines today, you could see them, dense and thick. Everyone was catching fish, people, birds, sea lions. I bought a cat lunchbox. It's plastic, neon pink and blue, and has drawings of cats. I'm going to take it to work.

Tomorrow we're going to Mayflower for dim sum, and we're going to hang out with the super dense Chinese crowds. It'll be a China day. China days make everyone (grace, grandma, parents) happy, b/c they all understand each other. I'm kind of left out.

Monday....I go back to SD.

Burj Al-Arab

I want to stay at this hotel. It's supposedly 7 stars. Located in Dubai over the Arabian Gulf. It's about $1000/night, and you get a concierge on every floor. They're also building an Atlantis hotel in Dubai, set to open in 2009. It'll be on the Jumeirah strip, where they built an island shaped like a palm tree. Dubai will be the next big tourist destination, and I'm going to go before anyone else does.

Catalina

Went to Catalina today, boarding from Newport Beach. Catalina is a 1.5hr boat ride, in the choppy Pacific. There's a good chance of getting seasick on this ride. On the way there, I saw a million dolphins. Yes. The boat went straight into a pod of dolphins. There were dolphins as far as the eye could see, thick and shiny, flipping through the waves, and it went on and on and on. There was no space of ocean without dolphin. Hard to think they're endangered, or that any fish was left in the sea.

This is a picture of our boat. It's a catamaran! It seats a lot of people, passage is $50 per person round trip, and the boat's packed at 9am. It's docked in Catalina.



Catalina's really rocky, when you land you go to this small town called Avalon, with a few restaurants and shops. Houses are small and thick stacked high on the hills. People drive around in golf carts. Boats are a big deal, people just dock their boats anyplace, and kayak/raft out to them when they need. What's popular today is sitting with a bunch of friends and beer on your anchored, non moving boat.



The island also lacks beaches. This is Descanso Beach, a private beach that really didn't have sand, and was made of rocks. People don't care, it's a place for beautiful women to show off their new bikinis. This is also where we launched our kayak. We kayaked out around the island. There's ships everywhere...even on the parts of the island with no beaches and no real shore access at all. People just park their sailboats wherever there's space. I saw kelp forests, sardines, and starfish from the kayak. The water today was warm and clear, and the ocean very choppy.



This is another example of how there isn't a beach. People just sit on a raft in the water. Note how the area is packed with boats, people, and housing.



All in all, it's nice to see once, but I'm not sure I'd go again. It's a long trip, both driving up to Newport and then the 1.5hr boatride.

Muffy's 8.5yrs old.

That's getting on in years for a cat....=(