It's Not Tundra

Some thoughts after flying across the country to move. You try to teach your kids good manners,but sadly, the rest of the world doesn't want to help... The behavior on commercial flights has changed since my father insisted on a coat and tie to fly coach. It is not well known that Lindbergh flew his legendary trans Atlantic flight togged up in white tie and tails. Memoirs of barnstorming pilots would include passages about flying biplanes in top hat with his platinum tipped walking stick doubling as an especially dashing aileron control. Sad to say, these standards no longer apply even to first class cabins, let alone steerage. Please allow me to offer a few humble suggestions to make air travel a more pleasant experience. Do not berate TSA employees for their lack of speed. Most of them are honest, caring, hardworking people dedicated to ensuring our safety. The rest are mildly retarded and may cry if confronted. Such behavior will result in a cavity search and proper standards of...

Here's the kind of story you just don't see on the news around here... http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/06/porn-actor-goes-on-rampage-at-video-production-office-1-dead-2-wounded.html Of course, most stories here do begin with "The Buffalo Bills today..."

People are surprised at the woman who greeted President Obama with "You're a hottie with a tight little body," when he went to lunch at Duff's in Buffalo last week. Me, I'm just happy she didn't greet him with "Gee, you're a good-looking colored guy."

I've turned into one of those neighbors my mother would hate. I don't play loud music or get into fights with my family (well, I do, but I try to hiss my anger between my teeth instead of yell). I don't have a barking dog or a big 8 bore hobby car that I rev late at night and drive people crazy because I am insecure of my penis size and need to compensate by making lots of noise. But I do clean. I cut my lawn. I trim. I edge. I use a leaf blower. These were things that, in California, we'd hire people to do but here I/we do 'em (I get the kids out there). Part of it was that in CA they were cheaper and we didn't have that much to do. Here we got screwed by the first company we hired (they just stopped showing up after cashing the cheque) and the other companies --- well, let's just say that there's one called "White Collar Landscaping" and I think they're more white collar criminals. Perhaps the people who did the lawn in CA were illegals...

Holy Christ! See my March 19th post but I just saw ANOTHER Chistmas tree out at the curb. It's almost April. But, truth to tell, the real thing is that I'm just jealous because it was still so green! Maybe it was one of those "Lost" time shift things? Maybe it was really a Dharma Christmas Tree from 1974? In California, that sucker would have been burning by now.

I worked out at World Gym in Woodland Hills, CA for years until the Spinning Class -- which seemed like it was run by Moonies -- drove me away. It wasn't the spinning, it was that the class' music was so loud and they shouted so much that it seemed more like some kind of indoctrination than cardiovascular exercise. There were a lot of people who trained with partners, but at World Gym in Williamsville, I've noticed the partner phenom has become more of a pack mentality. It's not just 2 people working out together to egg each other on, there are groups of 3, 4 and 5 working out together and egging each other on. At what point does it stop being a training partnership and become a training cult? I'm not too worried. I've also noticed that the bigger the group, the bigger the waistlines. Perhaps they're not egging each other on. Maybe it more of a support group. "Yeah, we can be fat and workout, too! We can have our cake and eat it, too! And eat it. And ea...

seen at the grocery store: Three fat guys, each buying a six pack of hard lemonaide/sweet vodka drink, a bag of chips and a pack of cookies. All laughing. Could only guess they were talking about why they were still single.

While most Targets are SORT OF laid out the same, Targets in California don’t sell a LOT of snow shovels, so I had to go looking. When I saw what I thought were them down an aisle, I walked down there and went past a woman with a baby in a shopping basket. As I walked by I thought: “Hm. That looks like Stephanie and Fiona. But they live in Amherst so it can’t be…” And then I stopped. Oh. Yeah. Reality check. This was going to take awhile. Right. We had moved. Check. Luckily, Stephanie, who we had seen just a few weeks before when we were looking for a rental, was just as surprised to see us. We chatted for a bit and then chose our snow weapons. They had a snow shovel with a cooked handle that they called “ergonomic”. Now I’ve looked it up since and I guess it means that it’s easier to shovel because it has a crooked handle. It’s also designed as a “pusher” [1] , but I’d been taken in by that before. Still, it looked like the best bargain and we got two of those and one sm...

Saturday morning I got up, put on my snappy all-cotton genuine Japanese kimono and walked downstairs. I turned at the bottom of the stairs, heading for the kitchen and then stopped, thought for a second and walked back to the front door. Did I really see what I thought I saw? Why, yes. I did see what I thought I saw. There was a dead deer on my front lawn. Now that was something I never saw in L.A. Dead cats once in awhile, yes, usually with their innards chewed out by a coyote who went only for the tasty parts. Perhaps by a raccoon. I'm not Daniel frikkin ' Boone. But not a deer. You'd see them sometimes in the Hollywood Hills, very occasionally. A few times I'd seen them at the corner of Coldwater and Mulhullond and they WERE near Dead Man's Curve, but the deer were alive. Once during a heavy rain I'd seen a family of deer on the 405. Well, actually I'd seen them on the side of the 405. Traffic moves slow but still not slow enough for deer. But even thos...

IN HONOR OF THE FIRST BIG SNOW IN THE 367 DAYS WE'VE LIVED HERE... THE DRIVEWAY!!!!!! [1] “Oh, how can you handle shoveling all that snow!” people would say. The cold was the first thing people commented on, the snow was the second. And it’s true. You did have to move it out of the driveway and the sidewalk. God knows that I was yelled at often enough to get off my ass and go shovel the driveway. My father would get pissed off occasionally at my lack of concern for snow removal and would bestir himself to do it. My mother would then go into something resembling a religious fervor [2] and scream: “Your father’s going to have a heart attack! Your father’s going to have a heart attack!” And the implication certainly was “Because of you”. And I would drag myself outside. Begrudgingly. [3] We had a large collection of snow-removing implements in my childhood. My father, far from a handy man and who I don’t think I ever saw swing a hammer, seemed incapable of parting with ...

For a creature that naturally gets by in the wild, everything you read on rabbit pet blogs (and yes, there are a ton of them) point out what a fragile creature a bunny is. They can’t stand direct sunlight, they can’t stand extreme variances in temperature, and a sudden shock can kill them. It was like keeping my grandmother as a pet. [1] So you had to be careful, especially with stories flying around of prize-winning super-champion dogs dying in cargo holds because they froze to death or someone didn’t get them water or they got their rhinestone collar mysteriously magnetized to the propeller or something. So you have to choose carefully. You have to ask them what experience they have in transporting rabbits – no matter how embarrassing it is. [2] I finally settled on the company that said they had just transported a rabbit to Germany from Los Angeles for a family where the father had been transferred by the army. Well, not only did they fly rabbits, but they flew them for t...

Gravy was a part of the family. A fat lazy part of the family who would cuddle up next to you, would assassinate me if it meant more time with my wife and was a total whore for a piece of banana, but a part of the family [1] . After re-reading that description, he actually sounds like my brother. And you can’t leave a part of the family behind. No matter what Connor thought. “If we give Gravy away,” he said, “We could get another bunny. Or a dog. If we got a bunny and it was young, it might let us hold it.” “YEAH!” Lauren said. I confess, that I started this in a playful manner saying, “You know, if we gave Gravy away…” never dreaming that they’d bite. See, the BIG problem with Gravy was the holding, lap-sitting issue. He’d come up next to you. He’d snuggle himself up close. He’d nudge you. But he did not like to be picked up and he didn’t like to sit on anyone’s lap. To be sure, part of this is God’s fault, because he made rabbits prey and therefore chances are when ...

“Well, she’s worried about this beam…”, Tripper said, continuing on about the apparent danger in the garage. “Stuff’s been up there since before the Martin Luther King Day Earthquake, Tripper,” I said. “The only time I went up there was to pull a door down to see if I could fit it on to take the kids’ door with us.” “What?” “We’ve been measuring their height on the door since they could stand. Seemed like a good thing to take with us.” He looked through the papers on the house sale agreement. “I don’t think we have an exclusion on that.” “It wouldn’t work,” I said. “The door didn’t fit and it started to seem like too big a thing. But the point is, I pulled the door down and nothing fell.” “Well, we’ll have to get it looked at.” “The agent’s trying to screw us, isn’t she?” “Well, she’s…” “It’s okay. Just say it. We’re in a corner and she’s trying to take advantage of us.” “They’ve got someone coming out to look at the garage. Okay?” I knew he was serious, be...

The kids finished school in June, Connor finishing Third Grade and Lauren finishing Fifth. It was a pretty good year. Lauren was finishing elementary in the L.A. school system and would be gong into middle school the next September. We didn’t think we’d be there in September, but we filled out the paperwork anyway, just in case. Being in the magnet program meant that if we hadn’t filled it out, she would have to go to the home school, which was just down the block and we didn’t like that. We didn’t like the kids we saw coming out of that school. Maybe the kids around the corner WERE just kids. Maybe kids are just kids and I’ve read enough to know that kids in the 30’s, 40s and 50s, 60s and so one really weren’t THAT different than kids are today. Perhaps the language was coarser, perhaps not. One has to think that kids who grew up in an agrarian world were better informed on sex and that kids who were a few years away from the draft probably either knew cuss words they’d learned fr...

If you’ll recall from our early reading, this house had an interesting history, at least as far as we were concerned. Patricia was TREMENDOUSLY pregnant when we moved in. Her sister sent her some baby stuff packed in Styrofoam peanuts. I was at the studio and she decided to throw the box and the peanuts out [1] . The wind came as she was waddling toward the curb and suddenly we had a lawn covered in Styrofoam peanuts. Patricia started to pick them up when she saw the woman next door come out. She looked at Patricia, then went inside and came out with five little kids to help Patricia pick up the Styrofoam. “You know,” she said to Patricia, “I run a daycare next door…” Honest to God. We moved in pregnant next door to a family run daycare. A good one. Run by a great woman names Maya who became not only one of our best friends, but also the children’s Godmother [2] . But things end and eventually Maya’s landlord decided to stop renting and sell the house as the market was clim...