Travelogue IV: LA Living

Yesterday was my dad's 82nd birthday, so we drove from his place in the Coachella Valley to my sister's place in Los Angeles (well, Van Nuys; she lives in the Soup Nazi's neighborhood, I'm told, which is cool and all, but not nearly as cool as when my eight-year-old self learned that my grandpa lived a couple blocks away from Batman). So Dad got to hang out with everyone for his birthday—his hubby, his sister-in-law, his kids, his son-in-law, and his grandson. (And a friend of my sister's that was visiting, but I don't think he'd met her before.)

Pretty low-key, my brother-in-law made a kind of Mexican buffet and we had cake and I quizzed my nephew on what episodes might have been shot at Vazquez Rocks (he failed the quiz and agreed to study up). Dad had a good time, which was the most important part of the day. I hadn't seen my nephew in a while and as per usual he failed to match his prior physique by becoming something like two feet taller in the interim. Plus he's growing his hair out like Shaun Cassidy for some reason. I dig it, it's retro.

Around the corner from their house is a home that traditionally does a huge Halloween production with their front yard, so we went and had a look at this year's edition. Pretty impressive, though I think I would have preferred last year's, which my sister described as having a kind of "Area 51" theme. Still, a lot of work going into this one, which apparently is still being added to judging from the tools and materials seen on site here and there.

My brother-in-law does a smaller-scale Halloween yard every year, which is also in progress. Sadly, my photo is poor, but anyway:

Of course, we also had to get the marking-of-time family photo, and whenever we do these I am struck by the fact that I actually do look my age, which kinda bums me out. I mean, for the longest time I was the skinniest of skinny dudes, the beanpole, the stickman, and now I have a gut and my face is considerably pudgier. At 150 lbs, I don't think anyone would judge me overweight except me, and that only because I didn't crack 115 until my thirties and thus my baseline self-image norm is, well, less than 150 and without a belly and flabby pecs that can be discerned through my T-shirt.

I cropped the lower part of the pic a bit to eliminate the worst of it. Everyone else looks good, though. :)

On the return drive, which is considerably more than 100 miles, we encountered the only truly bad traffic of my trip thus far. Much as had happened that same day (or the day before? I read about it the same day, anyway) on I-5 back home, someone was on foot in the Interstate and was fatally struck by a car at freeway speed. We didn't know that in the moment, though, all we knew was that five lanes of traffic had come to a standstill, with sporadic movement of a few feet at a time. It took about an hour to cover six miles, then we arrived at the accident site, which by then had been largely cleared except for some late examinations to make sure nothing potentially important to investigators was left behind.

When in Los Angeles, do as the Angelinos do and spend an hour in your car to travel six miles.

Back here on Dad's street there aren't many kids for whom to decorate yards in Halloween regalia, but there is one house across the street that has some pretty frightening stuff displayed for the season:

That's a damn sight scarier that any goblin or ghost you could conjure.