Compliant!!

OK, time to finally blog about my weekend. My awful Monday travel day morphed into way too many errands, cooking a big pot of soup, and snuggling up on the couch for some DVR... and promptly falling asleep. I think I was asleep before 9pm, but that made for a better Tuesday, which was pretty busy.

So, the weekend was great-- Friday night Nikki and I drove over to LA and had dinner at Swingers with Rori. Saturday night was really fun as well... I had some friends from LA drive over to Long Beach and we all had dinner at The House of Madame JoJo, which is sort of... brothel-themed. It was a cute, intimate restaurant and the food was lovely, but I woke up with a nasty hangover at 5am on Sunday morning (thanks, Riesling!). I bought a 7-Up and read a magazine for a while, and then fell back asleep to a dream that involved biological warfare in the form of gas bombs, riding around San Francisco in a SmartCar with Ricky Gervais, and then trying to escape SF in a Super Shuttle (because clearly, the fastest way to get out of town in a crisis is the blue van). And the whole time I was telling myself that I really needed to text Nikki and let her know that I would be late for work, but rationalized that surely she had the television on and must surely know that San Francisco was under terrorist attack.

ANYway, ahem. So after the fastest move-out in history, I drove back to LA to drop Nikki off with her boyfriend and then go see a movie. I had very specific directions from my hotel to her hotel, her hotel to the Arclight, and the Arclight home. And since A) I never drive, and B) I certainly never drive in LA, I was a big white-knuckled during this entire affair. I got myself to the Arclight, but I missed all the 8 o'clock-ish shows by about 20 minutes, and nothing else was starting for at least 2 hours. Bummer! I was hungry, and since I had been at Swingers two nights before, I thought I could get myself there at least. After a couple of U-turns, I turned onto Beverly and spied a little one-screen theater whose marquee was advertising The Flight of the Navigator!! Screeching wheels, I did another U-turn and flew into the theater, sure I would have missed this one too. This is a movie I used to have on Beta, people. The Beta player that weighed probably... 80 lbs, and had a remote control on a cord. But luck was on my side-- I bought a ticket for the show that started in an hour, and headed down to Swingers for a fried egg sandwich and a couple of sudoku puzzles. (As a side note, the bored delivery driver was sitting at the counter as well and told me how much he liked sudoku, so I offered to rip out a couple of pages of my book for him. He lit up like I had offered him my first born. Weird.)

So I get back to the theater about 20 minutes before the Q&A with Randal Kleiser (the director, who ps> also directed Big Top PeeWee-- and Paul Ruebens voiced Max in Navigator, under the pseudonym Pall Mall, if you need a full circle connection there-- and Grease), and Jonathan Sanger, the producer (who also produced little gems like Vanilla Sky and The Producers as well as playing the NASA doctor in Navigator). I went into the theater and plopped down with my Sudoku book, only to discover that I was sitting right in front of Kleiser and Sanger, who were catching up on old times with a couple of friends while they were waiting. I hope no one noticed that I was only holding that puzzle while eavsdropping on light Hollywood chit-chat, including a couple of references to Sarah Jessica Parker (who plays Carolyn in Navigator). Maybe a commonplace thing in Beverly Hills but I was entranced.

The Q&A was really interesting and the movie was glorious, of course. It was a long drive back to Long Beach for sure, but worth it, for one of those rare gems of an evening that only ever occur under happenstance.

In other news, I'm thinking of starting a photo-a-day blog- one picture a day, all from my phone, for an entire year. Would anyone be interested in that? Here's a test entry- let me know what you think.