Today we flew home. That’s pretty much all we did. Except I woke up this morning officially sick instead of just feeling poorly. I made it home fine, except for the descent into Washington. I think a combination of the October 2006 scuba accident and being congested from the cold combined into a terrible situation in my left ear, and I thought I was going to die. It wouldn’t pop no matter what tricks I tried. I was literally in tears from the pain. I thought for sure my eardrum was going to rupture again. Fortunately a flight attendant talked me through the “pinch nose and blow” trick, which I had tried and not succeeded with…she said the trick is to do it very slowly. The pain when my ear popped was intense but it quickly subsided after that.

So yeah, I feel pretty crappy today. I am planning to spend most of tomorrow in bed, but I do want to run over to our house - we’re still house-sitting - and get the mail and whatnot. I miss California already, and not just for the weather. A has wanted to move back there for years, and I’m considering the possibility after I’m done with school. In fact, I kind of want to pick up and go now, but Gallaudet is the only place to get the experience I want.

I am backdating this slightly because I have had connectivity issues and browser issues, and if they hadn’t happened I would have posted before midnight. Also, I am a little fuzzy because I am finishing off the last of the Drunken Egg Cream. It’s a drink of my wife’s creation - chocolate vodka, chocolate milk, and club soda. It’s good. Also, pictures will have to wait, because I am too woozy to operate the camera and upload them.

A let me sleep late this morning because I didn’t get to yesterday - I had to take her to training on my actual birthday, so I got to sleep late today! (I can’t believe I’m 27.) Once I was finally ready, we went to the Farmer’s Market and got crêpes. There were plenty of interesting places to look around, but we vowed to come back for dinner and tore ourselves away. We had been planning to take a bus tour of the city, but instead we decided to drive it ourselves; next we went over to the La Brea Tar Pits. They don’t look like much; I was kind of surprised how small they are. In fact, while growing up, I’d always thought they were huge pits on the outskirts of town, instead they are little blobs in the heart of the city! Most of them are contained behind fences, but we saw at least two that were bubbling up in the middle of everything; people seemed to enjoy poking at them with sticks. We didn’t bother with the Page Museum because it cost money, and we mostly just wanted to see the pits themselves.

After that, we wanted to go to the Chinese Theater. I took us on a rather roundabout route to get there, though - down Wilshire all the way to Western and then back along Hollywood Boulevard. It probably could have been done more directly, but I enjoyed our trip through Koreatown, Little Armenia, and all the other interesting places we saw. The trip along Hollywood Blvd was rather boring though - it was a long sequence of tattoo parlor, smoke shop, souvenir shop…tattoo parlor, smoke shop, souvenir shop…sometimes one was combined with the other, as with the tattoo parlor combined with the smoke shop. I can just picture the tattoo artist saying “whoa dude…lemme smoke another joint…okay gimme your arm” and it doesn’t sound pretty! At any rate, parking was a total pain in the ass. We finally managed to get parking outside a Famima!! store, which I found terribly amusing. Famima!! is based on Japan’s FamilyMart convenience stores, which - I’ve heard - are based on American convenience stores like 7-11. So it’s all a big circle. Soon there will be Japanese stores based on Famima!! stores, which are based on…you get the picture!

From Famima!! we walked to the Chinese Theater; I took pictures of a few stars along the way. I was astonished by how many street shows and buskers there were along Hollywood Blvd. We had been rather surprised to see Jack Sparrow eating sushi as we drove along the street…later we spotted him posing for pictures with tourists, which I assume he got paid tips for! It was hard to get any pictures at the theater itself, because the courtyard was so crowded - I had to say “excuse me” several times in order to get a decent photo. After that we went up the stairs to the Hollywood & Highland Center to take pictures of the Hollywood sign; next we went to the Disney Soda Fountain across the street where I bought way too many pins! I’m still not sure what the purpose is of the Disney Soda Fountain, but they have their own special pins, so there you go. Next we got back in the car and went to the Farmer’s Market. After struggling to find parking, we went to Lotería for dinner. We did a little shopping, and then we finally saw Sweeney Todd at the on-site movie theater. After that we came back to the hotel!

Our flight is at 11:00am tomorrow so we are waking up at 8:00am. So I am going to go to bed so I can try to get a little bit of sleep. I definitely had fun in Hollywood today, and I’m glad we drove ourselves rather than taking some dumb bus tour. It was much better that way!

Well, my 27th birthday could have been more enjoyable. I had a great time relaxing in the hotel room, but I felt vaguely sick part of the time - oh well. Dinner at Inn of the Seventh Ray was fabulous, though I am making a late New Year’s Resolution to never visit such a pretentious restaurant again. If I’m paying $25 for my entree, I expect more than four ravioli squares. (I had wanted the butternut squash risotto but it wasn’t even on the menu.) I don’t mind paying high prices for a big plate of fancy food, but paying high prices for a TINY plate of food is ridiculous to me. I enjoyed everything I had - Oregonzola Blue Cheese Tart, Cauliflower and Red Pepper Soup, Vegan Mascarpone Ravioli, and Mascarpone Cheesecake - but the prices were just appalling. Dinner for two, including four courses, one glass of wine each, tax, and tip came to $175. Ouch.

The waiter who brought our receipt was not our usual waiter, and he said “happy birthday” to me. I wondered how he knew it was my birthday, and I figured it must have been on the bill. How tacky, I thought, to charge for a single birthday candle on my cheesecake! But when I checked the paper, I was tickled to see that we were actually charged $0.00 for “1 fire soup” - I guess that’s just how they noted the candle! How funny. There was a new age shop on the premises, and I had A buy me an $8 pendant with a little glass vial of pink fairy dust and a silver fairy wrapped around the vial. I think it’s adorable!

Tomorrow is our grand tour where we do all the cliché stuff - the Hollywood sign, the Chinese theater, etc. I am NOT looking forward to going home and having it be all cold and yucky. I know some cool stuff will have arrived in the mail though, so I am at least looking forward to that - and to grabbing and squeezing the first kitty I see!

Today I went to Universal Studios. The traffic was actually pretty bad both there and back, and I didn’t even enjoy the park. It was very uncrowded all day, but there just wasn’t anything fun to do there. I headed for the studio tour first, and I took a ton of pictures during that, but then I noticed my camera battery was dying so I figured I should give it a rest. There were only a few more things to take pictures of in the park itself anyway. The tour was kind of cool, but also kind of hokey. It was hard to believe that anybody actually worked there - a few film academy students were on the streets, and I saw craft services setting up a table, but that was about it. Other than that it was deserted. There were a few special effects sequences that were pretty cheesy, but I suppose they look cheesy to the actors too, and yet they end up looking good on screen.

I went on the Revenge of the Mummy ride, which was even more tame than Space Mountain. There was essentially zero line, so they let you ride twice in a row - when you got back to the loading area, they sent you through again, and then made you get off when you came back the second time. After this, I got some food, and became the best friend of a bunch of little tiny birds. I went back up to the upper level (the park is on two levels, separated by a HUGE set of escalators) and caught the Terminator show, which was nifty; my favorite part was the blast of fog that blinded you for several seconds. After that I didn’t really do anything else, because nothing else really called to me as something to do.

I left the park and went to Universal CityWalk, the mall plaza area just outside the theme park. I wandered around there and bought a pair of Skate Buds, which I immediately regretted, and really regretted after I discovered I couldn’t use the damn things, and really really regretted when I discovered you can get them for half what I paid if you shop on eBay. Fortunately I was able to return them, though it was a little bit of a hassle. I left shortly after that; one thing that was really weird about the drive home was hearing Marketplace come on at 3:00pm! It’s the same time as when it’s playing on the east coast, but I’m used to it being an evening thing, whereas out here it airs in the afternoon, so I guess fewer people out here get to hear it because it’s playing while they’re at work rather than during drive time.

No idea what I’m going to do tomorrow. It’s my birthday, of course! I know I want and egg & cheese sandwich from Subway for breakfast, but after that I’m not sure if I will go to West Hollywood or not. I bought a bottle of chocolate vodka today and it was delicious but I’m not supposed to drink when I’m alone, so I dunno. Maybe I will knock around the hotel room, maybe I will knock around West Hollywood, maybe I’ll figure out something else to do.

Well, there isn’t really a lot to say about today, because I stayed in the hotel room! I finished off that bottle of wine and ran around the room naked all day. I did go to Disneyland yesterday though, and those pictures are now on my Flickr, as are the pictures from Monday, which I spent in Long Beach.

One of the things I did today was research restaurants for my birthday dinner on Friday. (Holy cow, in 36 hours I’ll be 27!) I asked on Yelp for recommendations, and I think the place I’ve settled on is Inn of the Seventh Ray in Topanga. It gets high marks for being romantic, fancy, and vegetarian. Tonight we went to The Spot down in Hermosa Beach. It was nice - the portions were huge and the prices were good! It was a little bit woo-woo and hippie-dippie, but I liked it! I wasn’t feeling very well, though, so we ended up getting most of our food boxed up, including dessert. The beach was only a block away, though, so I insisted we put the food in the car and go check out the beach! We walked all the way out to the water, and I bent down and touched it - the first time I’ve touched the Pacific Ocean. And then I ran away squealing because it was cold! We walked back to the car and came back to the hotel room, and here we sit.

Tomorrow I am going to Universal Studios Hollywood to use the last coupon in my SoCal City Pass booklet. I’m not sure what it will be like there, I hope I enjoy it. I didn’t have any plans for Friday until a few minutes ago, but now I think I will go to West Hollywood and see what’s there. It’s supposed to be the gay district of L.A., so we’ll see how it goes. On Saturday we are going to do a hop on/hop off bus tour that stops at the Walk of Fame, Rodeo Drive, and all the other classic places.

Today I went to Disneyland by myself. I was going to take today off and go tomorrow, but I read that MLK Day is coming up and it will be getting busy, so I figured I’d go sooner rather than later. It was fun, and I will write more about it tomorrow. Right now I am just writing to share a funny thing that just happened to me.

I decided I wanted to have a drink, so I went over to the 7-11 two doors down and bought a bottle of wine. I checked to make sure it had the twist-off top. I paid for it and brought it back to the room. After peeling back the outer wrapping, I discovered…it was not a twist-off top after all, but a regular cork, buried in the bottle! Remember, I’m on vacation…of course I have corkscrews at home but nothing here. I tried feebly poking at it a little bit but of course the cork didn’t budge. My wife suggested I take it down to the restaurant in the lobby, which has a poorly-stocked bar but was sure to at least have a corkscrew. So I took off my pajamas, got dressed again, and brought down the bottle; there was a corkscrew right there on the bar but I didn’t want to use it without permission. The host asked from halfway across the room if he could help me, and I beckoned him over. “I bought this at the store, and I thought it had a twist-off top, but it doesn’t! Can I borrow your corkscrew?” He handed it to me, and I proceeded to fumble with it…because I don’t actually know how to use one! He saw the trouble I was having and kindly did it for me, even removing the cork from the screw and giving it back to me.

So I now have 1.5L of 18 proof wine from some local winery…hey, I said I bought it at 7-11, right? It was only $7.50! Now I can actually enjoy it, because it’s OPEN. Thank goodness.

Today was A’s first day of training. It was pretty easy to drop her off at the right building in the morning, but as I pulled away I realized she’d taken the directions with her! That’s what I get for letting her navigate! (Just kidding.) I managed to find my way back to the hotel, even though I had to take various exits and ramps to avoid ending up in the LAX parking lot. On the way, I passed a Budget Car Rental store with a sign outside saying “Don’t Get Lost, Rent a GPS” and I wished Hertz had that option too!

I knocked around in the hotel room for about an hour and then I got on the road to Long Beach. I was due to meet Maria at 11:00, and I got to the aquarium much faster than I had expected to! I talked to my mom on the phone a little bit, and then when Maria arrived we went inside. I think we were the only “tourists” there, but there were at least five school groups, so we ended up swarmed by children more than once. It was pretty cool though, because we got to pet rays and even a shark! I have never touched a shark before, though I did read Sevengill growing up, so I knew about the denticles. It was just a little bitty shark though, I think it was a leopard shark. But still, I got to pet a shark!

When we were done at the aquarium, we got lunch at a nearby restaurant and then hopped the free bus over to the Queen Mary. We had bought combo tickets at the aquarium, so it was inexpensive! I am a little bit of a ship geek, so I really enjoyed looking around, though I wish it had been a bit brighter so it would have been easier to read the displays. I would have liked to have gotten a book about her because there was a lot I think I missed - we saw the whole ship, but there must be more story that I missed. I find it strange that she is such an icon of ocean liner travel, when she really only sailed for 31 years, and for many years she was a troop ship during World War II. But the books were all expensive, of course, so I didn’t get anything. We did take a break and got smoothies at an on-board shop, which was kind of cool…but I know there was more story there that we didn’t get. I wish we could have spent a night in the hotel section on the ship, but it’s pretty expensive.

I made it back to El Segundo in about 25 minutes, and I waited 10 minutes, and then A came out, 30 minutes before I was expecting her! We had a boring dinner…just IHOP. I think tomorrow I am going to take the day off and just hang out in the hotel room all day. I can have my leftover Mexican food for lunch before it gets too old…it’s from Saturday night. I have been walking all day for six days in a row: (1) Disneyland, (2) Disneyland, (3) Sea World, (4) Tijuana, (5) Balboa Park, (6) Long Beach. It is time to sit and rest for a while. It was A’s idea, she said she feels reinvigorated after just sitting in a classroom all day. So I will probably do that. And at the same time, I will work on uploading photos from the past two days. The connection here is great, so it should be easy! Unfortunately A accidentally had the camera in her purse all day, so today’s photos were taken with my camera phone…better than nothing though!

We went to the San Diego Zoo today, and walked around Balboa Park a bit. The zoo was both delightful and disappointing. Many of the exhibits were really outstanding - the habitats for bonobos and gorillas in particular. But I was surprised how many of the exhibits were depressing. I know animals in zoos don’t have much to do, but they were all just sitting there. I think the most excited ones were the birds, just hopping around in their little cages without much going on in their heads. The hippos were bored, and so were the tigers, although I think actually we just happened to catch the tigers at lunchtime. We got to see a really funny looking pig eating his piggy chow, and of course we saw the meerkats rolling around in their rascally way, though we had to walk quite a ways to get to them. I think my favorite part was the clouded leopard. When we got there, a keeper had the young leopard on his lap and was petting him the way you’d pet any cat. Eventually kitty got bored and hopped down, and then rolled around on the ground and marked things just like a housecat! He may have been a very expensive and exotic cat, but he was a cat just the same. The zoo settings were just gorgeous. The whole place is wooded, and it’s basically on a hillside so there is a lot of opportunity to go up and down to various levels of the park.

But what really amazed me was that as huge as the zoo was, it was less than a quarter of the size of Balboa Park as a whole. We wandered around in the park a bit, including taking a ride on the little railroad that A remembers from over 20 years ago. She went into lots of museum shops, which I wasn’t interested in because I always feel clumsy in them and I worry about breaking stuff. We had a snow-cone thing, and just sat in the sun and enjoyed watching all the other people enjoying the park. There were several buskers and it was just a really perfect day. Of course, then we had a two-hour drive to Los Angeles ahead of us, but that was okay. We were tired from walking all day plus cramped from sitting in the car, so we have been sitting around staring at each other since we arrived. Tomorrow I plan to wake up, drive A to her training, and come back to shower and get ready for the day. I’m going to meet a friend at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, and we are also going to visit the Queen Mary.

Too tired to upload today’s photos and videos - I got clouded leopard and meerkat videos! This hotel’s wireless connection is superb though, so I’ll be uploading everything sometime tomorrow.

We spent most of today in Tijuana, Mexico. The one-hour trolley ride down to San Ysidro was fine, very pleasant. Crossing the border was easy, they don’t even check identification or anything - apparently the prevailing feeling is, “who wants to escape the U.S. and go to Mexico?” I wanted to get my passport stamped as a souvenir anyway, but the immigration officer didn’t seem to understand and kept insisting we didn’t need a stamp if we were Americans just coming in for the day. He declined to stamp it, oh well.

So we walked across the border and into downtown Tijuana. The high-pressure sells start instantly. Everyone you pass has something to sell you. It was supremely nerve-wracking for me…I have such a hard time saying no, I feel bad for declining because really they’re just doing their jobs. And there are little kids selling gum, bracelets, etc. but they are supposedly also pickpockets, so you have to turn them down too…and I just felt bad for that, like their parents would beat them if they didn’t sell all their trinkets that day. A says they wouldn’t do that, and nobody is starving, but it was still hard for me. I was kind of tempted to shop in some of the pharmacies…wouldn’t it be nice to have a supply of Cipro in case of anthrax attacks, or maybe some Flexeril or Ultram in case of muscle spasms or major pain? I didn’t bother, though. The only price I saw was Viagra for $4/pill, and that’s four times what it costs in the U.S., so none of these were a good deal anyway…it would just be a way of evading the need for a prescription. Plus, who knows what’s in that stuff?!

The only things we did buy were sunglasses ($7 down from $10, because I couldn’t SEE) and a handcrafted cat ($3 down from $5, though she originally said $1 and then said $5 after she had wrapped it up!). A collects little native cats from places she’s been, and even if this one was made in China, it still looks cute. We ended up having lunch at the Tijuana outpost of the Hard Rock Cafe, partly because the restaurants hassle you on the street as much as the vendors, and partly because I knew they would have something vegetarian - everywhere else would probably have lard beans, etc. The pedestrian line to get back into the U.S. was horrible, it was almost an hour from when we joined the line to when we finally made it through and got on the northbound trolley. Turns out Tijuana is one of the busiest border crossings in the world!

When we got back to the Old Town area, we walked around the Old Town San Diego State Historic Park for a while. I got a sweater that doesn’t really resemble anything Mexican, but I thought it was pretty anyway. It was $37 but I could picture it selling for $80 in a catalog. For dinner we went over to the North Park area, to a restaurant called El Comal that I read on Yelp would have good vegetarian options. Unfortunately it turned out they use chicken stock in both the beans and the rice, so I just ate my enchiladas with molé sauce (which didn’t have meat or anything, we asked). They had pretty good drinks…I had two and a half of their tequila, Midori, and pineapple juice drink…I forget what they called it. I couldn’t even finish my food, there was so much! I think tomorrow we are going to the San Diego Zoo before driving back to Los Angeles.

We spent today at Sea World! We drove down from Anaheim in the morning and went straight to Sea World. We saw the dolphin show, the sea lion and otter show, the pets show, and the orca show. I was actually rather underwhelmed by the orca show…they make such a big deal out of it, and it’s cool that they fit four of them into one tank, but they didn’t even do very much. The dolphins, which we saw earlier in the day, were much more impressive. I couldn’t help feel a little unsettled during the marine mammal shows, though, because I know they are smart animals and keeping them in captivity isn’t the best thing for them. Neither is doing tricks over and over. But I really liked the pets show, which starred mostly dogs, several cats, two pigs, and a few ducks. Most of those animals - especially the dogs - are happy doing that kind of thing. They are domesticated anyway, and they live for the chance to play around. There was at least one cat who declined to do what it was supposed to, which was entertaining. They had the dogs come around at the end of the show, and because I asked for it, they brought out a cat as well! We wanted to go on the “Journey to Atlantis” roller coaster but it turned out to have a flume element, and it was too cool for that, so we ruled it out. We did end up on the “Wild Arctic” simulator, which was pretty lame and hokey, but it was still amusing for a few minutes.

Right now my network connection is not too good…again. It’s better than in Anaheim, where it didn’t work at all one night and then worked poorly the next night (and cost $10!), but it’s still really slow. I hope the HoJo in El Segundo will be better. I’m trying to upload pictures from today but I’m having a tough time of it…I may not get all of them up there tonight, we’ll see. Also, I am sunburned! Whoops…not enough shade at Sea World, and I forgot that it’s possibly to get a sunburn in January. Welcome to California, I guess! Tomorrow we are going to visit Old Town and take the trolley down to San Ysidro, then walk across the border into Mexico. I hope to have Mexican food for lunch…har har har!