Aaaaaand we're back!

I have legos!!! I can't tell you how happy this makes me, or why, and you can call me a doof if you want, but I don't care. For the first time in my life I own my own legos!

And I bought them at DISNEYLAND!!! Along with a pin for my fedora commemorating the 50th birthday of Disneyland. Just think, the 50th anniversary of the park that started it all. And by all, I mean the incessant and inevitable conversations between my father and my uncle Tom in Donaldese. Their grandparents took the three boys to Disneyland once to get them out of their parents' hair during a move, and Tom and Daddy taught themselves some mean Donald impersonations on the way. Sigh. :-) I may have only shopped in Downtown Disney, which wasn't there when Daddy was, but somehow... seeing the desert scrub mountains and palm lined hills coasting down into the pacific as they must have seen it, knowing it was getting closer, close close closer until... WE'RE THERE! Disney must be so much about that childhood anticipation of what you can only imagine, it's so magical, and even my tiny little side trip gave me that.

Teebs is a pill, cuz he stood us up for HOMEWORK that day. :-P Amy and I had to get by with just our own combined levels of snarkiness at the La Brea tar pits. It was incredibly cool and fun and stinky and fascinating, but man, the cheesy educational films and moth-eaten animatronix were ASKING for snark. Don't worry, we were cool, we could deal, we got by. ;-) Would have been cool to chat with some of the workers from pit 91 if they'd been around and chat-with-able. They seemed to have their own dimension of snark, judging from the whiteboard at the excavation. Among listing numbers of fossils found, etc., it answered some very important questions up front.

"No dinosaurs are found in the tar pits. Dinosaurs became extinct about 65 million years before the tar pits formed."

"Tar is not hot."

"Fossils are not found in liquid tar."

"We are NOT graduate students."

"What smell?"

When we did finally catch up with Teebs, he showed us around Mudd and Scripps and we got to visit a cool library with a cool expanded stacks thingy, and shelves that you could open and close and move by spinning a wheel that looked like the ones on safes that get cracked in movies. Very fun. Then we ate dinner at Buca di Bepo, sang happy birthday to about three people, and stuffed ourselves in general. Amy and I went home and watched The emperor's New Groove which I had somehow never seen, and I was wearing my Eeyore shirt, so it was a thoroughly Disney day, really.

Monday was my last day in Cali, so we had to pack a lot in. We grabbed caffeine and breakfast in the form of a chocolate chip scone and a cinnamon roll. Then we headed out towards Ventura, through fruit orchards and soy fields. We passed a sign that said, "Free honey tasting, 1 mile on the right," and broke into a simultaneous "Ooooooh yeah."

There was sage honey and avocado honey and orange honey (my favorite). There was buckwheat honey, a little traditional clover honey, wildflower honey, cactus honey, which was really granulated and thick, and finally molasses, which is not honey, and is not made by bees, but which they had some of, so they bottled it. I cannot tell you how happy I was to be standing around eating honey off of little wooden popsicle sticks. It was... divine.

Further on down the road was a sign for a winery. It seemed like a tasting kinda day, so I said, "Hey, let's go taste wine." Amy was nothing loath. :-P We walked into the white-washed cave of a tasting room, walk up to the bar, and were greeted by Rosie, who I don't believe stopped talking for longer than it took to draw breath from the moment she greeted us to the moment we left her with other tasters.

We learned all about her family, her boss (a German-French Ph. D. laser physicist whom she described as working with Sponge Bob Square-pants, AKA Rosie herself), and a little about the wine. Not all of them were very good, but I really did enjoy one of the dessert wines, and even ordered a bottle, that will probably ship tomorrow. I tried port, cuz it was there, and Chuck said I might like it, but I dunno. It might be a *little* too sweet. There was another really interesting wine that was as sweet and heavy as the port, and had a definite taste of chocolate and strawberries. Very interesting, but really not for me.

We were a little light-headed at that point. Okay, *I* was a little light-headed. Amy was pretty much fine. So we decided it was time to head back and eat lunch, since I couldn't remember the exact time of my flight, but thought it was around 5:30ish. We went back and had some very yummy steakhouse fare, returned to Amy's apartment, and found out that my flight left at
6:40.


That meant time for another movie. :-P We watched Drop Dead Gorgeous, a mockumentary about a Minnesota beauty pageant. It was pretty funny. Three movies! Three new movies I'd never seen before! Yay! Then we bundled me off to the airport where the security guard minding the walk-through metal detector grinned and told me I had cute socks. (For those who know, I was wearing my orange/red/pink striped ones with an orange t-shirt.) I met a guy headed back for Houston who's in the Rice MBA program. He looked kinda familiar, so I'll have to see if I see him around.

Then I got home incredibly late, fell into bed, got up way too sleepy, smumbled through a day of work, and here we are!