Double Feature

I got two photo albums to show you this time! Two weekends ago, Joyce and I made for the heights of Los Angeles to see what the city looked like on a clear day. We originally went to the Getty, but the cars were way backed up so we decided to explore on Mulholland instead. Man, that was way better! Not only did we get a more phenomenal view of the L.A. basin and the Valley all at once, we also accidentally came upon an old Nike missile control site which had been preserved and is now open to the public. It gave me some flashbacks of my days in North Dakota. It was a pretty cool day. Check it out here.

And this past weekend, we went to Mammoth with some old friends. I can't believe it was my first time for this late in the season. It's been so hot. It was forecasted that a storm was coming in on Sunday evening. So the plan was to leave in the afternoon since I don't have chains. It looked like the storm was coming early though cuz there these black clouds on the horizon and the wind was getting pretty fierce on the slopes. I figured we could go down the slopes one more time before the storm hit. It started to snow by the time we got to the car, but we were out of there before the storm hit. Beat the system again, no chains, hah! One of my coworkers asked why I didn't just buy chains. That's a good question. One day I'll buy them when I actually need them I guess. Check out some sweet Mammoth views here.

Stickin' It to the Man

This past month I've received two separate notices that I'm a plaintiff in a lawsuit against some company I owned stock in like more than 6 years ago. One is specifically against AOL/Time Warner and the other was against about 100 companies of which I owned stock in only one. I don't own stock in either anymore, but being a stockholder back in 2000, basically I lost like everyone else. The AOL/Time Warner didn't give details on a settlement yet if I win, but the other one, if I win, will award me 4.4 cents per share I owned during that time. Sweet! This will bring my settlement (if I win) to the grand total of...88 cents! Stickin' it to the man one cent at a time! Aw yeah!

African Painting

Two blog posts today! (Well, two blog posts in one hour over two days.) Don't forget to read the one after this one.

My parents gave me this painting for my 30th birthday a while back. My dad bought the painting in Africa from an art student on the side of a dirt road. He painted pictures of people in his village doing various things. It's a pretty cool painting to sit and look at for a bit. I notice new things every time I look at it. The frame is from Aaron Brothers and cost about 10 times what the painting cost. Since my parents haven't seen it in the frame, they've been asking me to send them a picture of it. So today I finally remembered. The thing is it's tough to take a picture in my apartment without SOMEONE taking the opportunity to be silly.



Then Harrison gave me a great idea when I took this picture...



Since I don't have much to blog about lately, I'm going to post once a week (or once every other week...or once a month) an imitation of every person in this painting. Harrison helped me this week, so you get an extra treat with two imitations!

Here's Harrison...




And here's me...




It'll be my mission to get Chane to pose for one of these. If you see him, encourage him to do so. Thanks!

iPod

For Christmas, I got a Video iPod. It's pretty awesome. So I put all of these...



into this...



So it took days to put all my music on there and after going through all that effort, I don't really like about half my music anymore. So iTunes categorizes all your music. I was interested to find the breakdown of my music went like this...

Alternative & Punk: 18.2%
Country: 1%
Folk: 1.6%
Gospel & Religious: 10.9%
Hip-Hop/Rap: 0.4%
Metal: 17.1%
New Age: 0.9%
Pop: 0.4%
Rock: 43.7%
Soundtrack: 7.2%

What the heck? New Age? Country? Folk?! Ha ha! Well, the 50% isn't all in one genre, but some genres I dislike more now than others. Who knows how much folk, country, and new age I'll amass in the coming years. So I have 1289 songs and it would take 3.9 days to listen to it all straight through. It's nice to know if I'm ever totally bored, I will have something to do for 3.9 days nonstop. Now I'll end up selling half those CDs and deleting them off my iPod after spending all that time putting them on. Oh BTW, if you added all those percentages to see if it added up to 100%, you are a true engineer.

Can you guess what video I am watching in that picture? I'll give you a hint, it has something to do with rap and Narnia. Still don't know? Check the comments for the link.