Every day I hop on the freeway for a mile to take the Goose to preschool. She complains mightily about the freeway (note: freeway, not highway or parkway -- sigh) but we deal with it since it cuts 10 minutes out of our trip to school. I need as many minutes as I can for my office hours. Almost every day I am breezed by this double tanker truck full of hot peppers. It took me weeks to figure out what they were, in those wire basket trucks.
And then I got right behind it, and yes, two tanker trucks of hot peppers, heading west, everyday. Where are they going?
There are crews going through our neighborhood marking all the sidewalks that have tiny cracks or have gaps (less than an inch) from tree roots. They are ripping out the perfectly servicable curbs and sidewalks and remaking them all.
(Friends about to move to CA should probably skip this rant. I'm looking at you, Michael and Sandy.)
Since we just had a squeaker of a vote that approved a tiny 1/4 of 1% sales tax hike and small tax hike on those making more than 250k so that we WOULDN'T cut 6 billion out of our schools, I am appalled. There are 31 kids in my 1st grader's combo K-1st class. There are 35 in my 4th grader's class. They have no art teacher or curriculum (they only have it if their teacher applied to and was accepted for a grant by the Getty), no music teacher (the K-1st class has 45 min of music every three weeks, paid for by the PTA) and NO librarian, so the classes go to the library whenever the teacher wants to bring them and it's very difficult to check out books. Every classroom supply (whiteboard markers, tissues, wipes, copy paper, crayons, pencils) is donated by parents. Our well-regarded high school has an electric sign outside that says "WELCOME TO JOHN BURROUGHS HIGH SCHOOL! COPY PAPER DONATIONS NEEDED!"
Oscar's teacher sent home a form to me in a reused, taped together envelope, with a scrawled note apologizing for it. The school was out of envelopes. I went to Target and spent 4 bucks on 200 envelopes. She was so excited to have them -- and then had to lock them up in a supply cabinet.
And Burbank is a GOOD school district.
And yet we have well-funded libraries and recreation programs and everyone talks about what a great town Burbank is to raise a family. And we are ripping out and replacing all those cracked sidewalks. I think this might be my East Coast latte-sipping Volvo-driving NPR-listening bias (I actually drink black coffee and drive a 12 year old Honda but I am a supporting member of our local NPR) but California does not seem to have the same kind of respect for public education that the East Coast has. We are spending millions of dollars to replace barely cracked sidewalks, but my elementary school doesn't have an envelope to send a confidential form home in.
Sigh.
Well, at least the kids get to watch the guys fill in the curbs with the concrete truck. That's educational, right?
The boys have been taking karate at our local rec center. Oscar go his junior yellow belt and we were super proud of him. (Arlo didn't, but that is a rant for another time. Arlo will be starting gymnastics next month.)
Friday was really really exciting for us. We have told our NJ friends again and again -- find a cheap flight, come out and visit with us. Robyn did it last year and Jennifer and Lucas did it this year.
We met Jennifer and Lucas on Lucas' 2nd birthday in 2005. Wee Oscar and I were outside watering our pitiful garden (it was before my dad got ahold of it) and Jennifer and Lucas walked by. It turned out that we lived two blocks from each other, our boys were a month apart, we were both art directors in genre publishing (me comics, her children's books) and we were both expecting our second kids. (Maia was born a month before Arlo.)
It was love at first sight. Oscar and Lucas became fast friends. They went to preschool together and even when they attended different elementary schools, they remained the best of friends. Our families were like-minded and loving and supportive. We miss each other something awful.
So when Jennifer suggested coming out for a visit during the NJ Teacher's Convention, we were ALLLLL over that.
They flew out on Thursday and stayed with Jennifer's college friend in Venice. The Goose and I drove out to fetch them. There were many happy reunions.
If you come out to visit us, we will most likely take you to Bob's Big Boy. Friday nights are a bear -- classic car collectors congregate in the parking lot so the wait is brutal.
Luckily Oscar had his oldest and best pal to keep him company.
Plus there were classic cars!
I'm always relieved when the 40 minute + wait is actually deemed worthwhile by our guests. Jennifer loved her sandwich and Lucas ate everything in sight. I LOVE seeing kids eat. I don't see too much of that around here.
The next morning, Evan took Jennifer on one of his patented tours of the WB lot. They had a grand time and she loved the Harry Potter part of the museum -- costumes, props, illustrations from the books. Jennifer and I had a midnight date for the last Harry Potter book at the bookstore in Maplewood. We spent a couple of hours on line chatting with each other and with the teenaged boys behind us in line, who had grown up with Harry. I was pregnant with The Goose and the minute I got the book in my hot little hands, I went home and read it through in 7 or 8 hours, only taking breaks to do school drop off and pick ups.
While Evan and Jennifer were at the lot, we introduced Lucas to one of the many culinary pleasures of Southern California -- DONUTS!
(Jennifer told me later that he convinced her to try the donuts in Venice to see if they were as good as Burbank. Nope. We take our donuts [and our divorces] seriously here in Burbank.)
Low tide at our favorite beach was at 12:49pm. We made the 70 minute drive through a gorgeous canyon and the PCH and ended up at Leo Carillo State Beach, with the tide pools and the creatures and the hidden caves and the rock nests.
On chilly days when the beach is empty, we can claim one of the two rock nests as our base camp.
The awesome thing about the rock nest is that the kids will spend hours just moving rocks around.
These are the tide pools that are only accessible when the tide is out.
Lucas was really interested in the cave. The cave is full of water any time other than low tide, and there is a small tunnel in the back that leads to a secret beach which is only accessible through that tunnel or a serious rock climb.
That's the cave. I ventured about three feet in -- I have recurring nightmares about being trapped in small places, but I had to get the photo for all my faithful blog readers.
The entrance of the cave looks a lot like Texas, doesn't it?
My handsome fella, helping kids over the rocks and soaking up the (limited) sun.
Here's me, worrying about the kids in the cave.
Here's why we came: hermit crabs, sea urchins, sea stars. EVERYWHERE.
I wish with all my heart that we could explore with Lucas and his family every weekend. It was seriously magical.
Lucas and Jennifer joined us for Family Movie Night. They were impressed by our "New York Pizza" and we all cuddled on the couch and watched The Avengers.
The next morning, Jennifer and I fulfilled a LA Dream and took off to the Pasadena Rose Bowl Swap Meet. We both read Emily Henderson's blog and are enthralled by her tales of the show and blog posts about the gorgeous furniture she buys there.
(To make it a perfect Burbank morning, we stopped at Porto's on the way there for guava empanadas and meat pies and coffee. Yum.)
Evan took the kids out on a hike while we were out snacking on meat pies and rummaging through junk and sharing delicious gossip.
I saw this little tabletop letterpress for a hundred bucks that I fell in love with. It was in a homemade cabinet that folded into itself -- the bottom part of the far side you can't see is filled with 6 half-sized type drawers filled with some pitiful pied lead type. The tabletop with the press flips over into the rest of the cabinet.
The guy said "it's in working order!" but the roller looked like a Twinkie left out in the desert for decades. There is a letterpress in my future but it will not be this one.
But maybe if I could get him down to 60 bucks next month. The cleverness and DIYness of that cabinet totally charmed me.
We found a modern potter that made wonderful, inexpensive pots. I bought this hanging planter for 12 bucks. It is gorgeous and perfect in my crazy little three-quarters-bath that needed a little personality.
I bought a couple more succulents for my kitchen garden. Four for $10.
We got home, snarfed down some leftovers, and took Oscar and Lucas on their big splurge for the weekend. We checked the Hollywood Bowl schedule -- always important when driving over the hill from Burbank to Hollywood -- and parked at the always-ridiculous Hollywood and Highland. We saw the Hollywood sign, the Walk of Fame, and muscled our way into Grauman's Chinese Theater to check out a couple footprints.
Since Oscar has read 4 of the Harry Potter books and watched the first 4 movies since the last time we were there, he was actually excited to find the HP footprints and signatures of the stars.
Off to El Capitan, the fancy Disney theater to see Wreck It Ralph.
In the lobby: two "vintage" Fix It Felix Jr. games. No quarters necessary.
Here's the show starting off the movie -- a live action song-and-dance gig. It works better with the princess stuff.
The movie was super fun, although I felt like it lagged a bit in the middle. I would love to see an animated movie where a character's growth arc was NOT illustrated by a montage.
We went downstairs, where they had themed games and lots of production art to see and play with.
Okay, and a little more Fix It Felix Jr. before we got booted out for the next show.
We made our way over Hollywood Blvd., past the Times Square-ish scammers, and into Hollywood and Highland, where we'd parked. Of course the boys couldn't just walk past the dancing fountain.
Jennifer's friend picked them up after the movie, and all of us California Metcalfs were on a high for a couple days. I keep remembering one of my old Girl Scout Camp songs, meant to be sung in a round:
Make new friends
But keep the old
One is silver
And the other's gold.
I sing this to Oscar every time he has one of his I-miss-my-friends breakdowns every 6 weeks or so. I sing it in my head all the time. And I'll take this opportunity to once again invite all of my golden friends to come and visit. We love you and we miss you.
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