Quick Watering Hole Note

Question: Is this a Pynchon bar or a lesbian bar?



Answer: Neither, as far as I can tell, but that was my first question when I saw it.

Ai Wei-wei Update

Ai Wei-wei has been released, looking thinner and tired, as he was reunited with his family and friends.

One of the conditions of his release, he said in a statement, was that he was not allowed to discuss in any detail the conditions of his imprisonment. He said that at a podium. Last time I checked this was the twenty-first century, and not some Tsarist Russia where bad vibes get you sent to Siberia.

I guess that shows you the power of the Chinese state.

Catholics and their Relics

After getting my clothes into the washer and while I waited to hear the sound that told me it was time to put in the detergent and bleach, I stood at the machine doing a preliminary perusal of our local newspaper, the Long Beach Press Telegram. An article on the front page had a title like "800 Year Old Relic Stolen from Church".

After soaping and bleaching my wash, I sat to wait for the wash cycle to end and read the article. It said that St. Anthony's Catholic church had on display an 800 year old relic, that it was to be on display for all five of the Sunday masses, and that it had disappeared in between them. The article had a sketch of a mysterious woman who was a person of interest in the case, as she had been aggressive in trying to touch the relic, or the relic's housing as it were, and she had attended all of the masses.

What is this "relic" you might ask, like I did, since I have a basic understanding of what a Catholic relic is, but had no idea how a church in Long Beach could get one. Relics tend to be bones of saints, and this relic is no different. The St. Anthony's relic here at St. Anthony's church is a finger bone from the guy, Saint Anthony himself, encased in a glass vial, surrounded by a gold housing apparatus that looks like a sun on a pike. The vial is so small compared to everything else surrounding it you'd never know what the hell it is.

The Vatican sent it out to the St. Anthony's here in 1902 when the parish opened, so that answered my other question. The last sentence in the article mentioned the location of the church, 6th and Olive.



I shook my head and had to read it again. This place is very close to us, and both Corrie and I have parked in its vicinity many times, her in the evening, and me late at night.

One thing I've noticed in my distanced contact with, or readings and dealings of things Catholic, is it's always a woman's fault.

That being said, it turned out that when police found the woman's apartment nearby, she had an 800 year old golden sun on a pike with a finger bone in the middle sitting on her coffee table and visible from the closed front door. She had no explanation for how or why it got there. No joke.

It was returned safely.

St. Anthony is patron saint of lost and missing objects. Is irony dead or is it just me?

One last thing to take from this (once I stopped laughing) is that the woman was charged with commercial larceny among other things. I never really thought of it like that, that robbing a church is the same as robbing a moneymaking venture, but hey, many things can affect one's perspective.

Professional Volleyball Notes

One of the free channels we get here in the LA area is Universal Sports, apparently an NBC entity that shows various sports that otherwise never get shown on television: cycling, track and field, rowing, obscure water sports, rugby, etc.

The other day I checked it out to see what it would be, and it was international volleyball.

I'm not sure who's heard or not, but the AVP, Association of Volleyball Proffesionals, has dissolved and is no more. This is the organization that used to represent the tours, the prize money givers, the television rights, and the general marketing for professional volleyball players. It's been replaced by a new organization, the NVL (National Volleyball League). We fans of volleyball hope it remains financially viable.

But, the AVP and now the NVL, most matches on television, all marquee events, and our national volleyball identity (Misty May and Kerri Walsh) are all beach volleyball entities.

I would never complain about a sport and television product that has scantily clad young women getting sweaty and covered in sand hitting the crap out of a ball. Beach volleyball is exciting, with the two-on-two game, but it has a rather halting pace. The back and forth and lack of rallies sets the pace closer to NFL than to soccer. Bikinis generally make up for that.

What I got to see the other day was the volleyball both Corrie and I lettered in in high school; the six-on-six hardcourt variety. That shit was exciting. Excuse the profanity, but I'm vehemently in favor of showing more 6-on-6 volleyball on television.

I was watching the men play, and watching twelve sweaty guys on a gym floor is not the same as girls on the sand, but try comparing two-on-two men's beach to six-on-six men's hardcourt? Oh my goodness, it's not even close.

I was watching a middle round match between the American team and the Brazilian team. The Americans squeaked by the Brazilians in Beijing for Olympic gold in 2008, and the Brazilians wanted revenge. They spent the past two years building up their volleyball infrastructure and professional leagues. They beat the Americans in the match, but it was pretty even, with the Yanks just not executing when they needed. The arena where they played was in Brazil, and it was packed. A fifteen thousand plus sellout was partisan and loud. They wanted the Brazilians to avenge their silver medal.

It was said that in Brazil, Serbia, Hungary, and especially Russia, the professional volleyball hardcourt leagues are able to give the volleyball players enough time, since they're making money playing, to mature into their prime. It was said that the prime is early to mid thirties, while in America, since there's no money for players to play competitively for that long, that our good players bloom earlier but never peak.

The lack of a pro league has something to do with that, but really, there's another factor. If you're a person who's 6'6" but have a wingspan (middle finger to middle finger) of 7'1", you play basketball here, not volleyball. Over there it's pretty evenly split between basketball and volleyball.

It was said that Brazil has the best volleyball teams, and some of the best players (some players in Brazil make the equivalent of a million dollars a year playing for a six month season), but Russia had the deepest crop of raw talent, of guys who just kill the ball and think that hitting it hard is the same as playing well.

Back to the excitement on my idiot screen: it was six giants playing against six other giants, in a cramped space that fits on the TV without panning a camera, with just non-stop action. The serves are all jump serves, basically a spike from way out, every pass is nice, the sets are crazy accurate, and every spike is loud and beautiful. Digs happen more often than in beach, but so do kills, which ramps up the pace. Since they did away with the side-out rule (the rule stated you could only score on a serve, and winning a volley that you didn't serve generated no points and just gave you the serve) and changed it to what we call rally scoring (every serve generates a point), the games go by fast.

It's the perfect sport for television. It might even be the best and most exciting sport I've ever watched, which means something if you know my thirst for sporting entertainment. The pace is fast, so it's never boring; the kills are hit as hard as a tennis serve but are louder and usually directed at a person; and the scoring happens on every serve, so the games are over fast.

It's fast paced, action packed, violent, loud, and over quickly. It's perfect or America and American television.

Happy Anniversary

Last year I wrote a "Happy Summer Solstice" post and mentioned my and Corrie's anniversary, but this time I thought I'd switch that up a bit. So, it is the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, and here in Long Beach the marine should burn off soon (almost surprised it hasn't yet).

Also, three years ago, in 2008, Corrie and I uttered vows in Mexico and got hitched. Two years ago, in 2009, we were living in Brooklyn, but happened to be visiting Chicago during a trip to a wedding reception in Wisconsin. Last year we were living in Austin and went to dinner at a "fancy" restaurant and sat next to a couple who were also celebrating their anniversary, but I remember theirs at something like forty years.

Love you baby!

(Unable at the moment to do sappy. Probably not the worst thing ever.)

(I'll let this picture be my thousand sappy words.)

Late Night with a Local

Our last night in Avalon had us dressed up and going to dinner at a fancy restaurant. I even utilized our room's iron and ironed my shirt and pants. Corrie wore a dress, and out we went, feeling completely overdressed for what amounted to a stroll through Pismo Beach. After eating, we returned to the hotel so Corrie could change into a more comfortable-but still nice outfit, and we hit a local watering hole for cocktails.

We did our best to find the places where we totally stood out and everybody else knew each other, you know, the local's hangouts. We like to see how life on the island (or anyplace, really) churns.

We ended up meeting a young man roughly our age who was visiting his younger brother for his high school commencement (they had different fathers). The young former local said that he grew up split between Florida and Catalina, knows just about everyone on the island, and lives currently in Huntington Beach.

After we started talking, he started buying all the rounds, and the night went on. He eventually offered to give Corrie and I a late night tour on his family's golf-cart. We enthusiastically jumped at the opportunity. In hindsight, taking a tour on a golf-cart with a local who kept referring to himself as "someone on the island" after last call might not have been the best idea, but that's how we roll, and that's how you get to experience the realities of people's limited worlds.

I'm not trying to say that "people's limited worlds" is a bad thing, because
nearly every single person on earth has a limited world. Mine is Long Beach, the 405, and Costa Mesa. Corrie, with her new job close to mine, is pretty much the same.

In any case, this gentleman took us around to spots and overlooks we wouldn't have been able to get to ourselves, and even offered to take us to the real interior, where most full-time residents of Catalina can't even get to (see, he was somebody on the island). We would have loved to have taken advantage of that, but our ferry was returning the next day, and a long uninterrupted stretch of work got in the way.

He dropped us off at the St. Lauren around 4, and we caught some shut-eye before having to check out at 11. I realized that, sadly, those types of late night adventures take a certain toll on my old body. Since our ferry didn't leave until nearly four, and our hotel wouldn't hold onto our stuff, and even if they would hold onto it we didn't really feel like doing much, we ended up st sleeping the hours away on the beach.

My last view before I rolled over and really got some sleep is shown below. It was cloudy on our last day, but beautiful our other days.



Can you see me, with my frizzy blond locks, slumped in a diner's booth slowly eating biscuits and gravy, propped by my bag, wearing sunglasses? Definitely nap time ensued.

Interesting Photographic Compositions from Avalon

These are some of my favorite pictures from our trip. This first one is a picture of a locally famous house, visible upon arrival by boat, and has made it onto postcards and decorative tiles.



I like this picture because of the kids playing on the platform in the swimming area in the foreground with a moneyed neighborhood straight up the hill looming over the scene.



I don't know why, but I like this Two Palms picture.



This is more of an action capture: in the direct middle of the picture is a person on a zip-line ride. The Eco Zip-line ride was something we looked into doing, but was all sold out during our short stay.

Avalon from Above

Because Avalon is a bay town located at the foot of surrounding mountains, it's easy to get to a vertical point to be able to look down and take pictures, something someone like me is wont to do.

What's noticeable about Avalon is that there are some wealthy places to live (up on the hill overlooking that bay) and the normal people's place to live (in the small valley that stretches away from the bay). 3700 people can't live on the hillside, and all those folks taking your orders and making your food who speak Spanish at home generally lead humble unassuming lifestyles.

This first picture is from one wealthy enclave looking out at a different wealthy enclave and the harbor between them.



This next picture is from our golf-cart excursion into the limited areas of "the interior" they let tourists, and it is relatively the same angle as the first one.



This is a picture of the small valley the regular folks live in. It's taken from a wealthier area. Our hotel, the Pink One, is in the upper right area of the frame.



This last picture is an extreme closeup, as it were, of the regular neighborhood. Without being told, most people would have no idea this exists on an island 20+ miles off the coast of LA.

Avalon: Our Hotel and some Peculiarities

We stayed at the Hotel St. Lauren (of course I was initially pronouncing it "LOR-inn" instead of the preferred, "lo-RENN"), which, you can see, is what a local we met called "the pink one."



It was far enough away from the beach-front promenade that it was relatively quiet, but really, all of Avalon is quiet after 10 pm. Our room was on the third floor, but since it was at the back, we were nearly at ground level with the upward sloping road.



Here's a shot from the roof-top patio/sunning area.



If you look close at the above picture, you might be able to see that the streets are full of golf-carts rather than autos. There are some cars on Catalina, but we hear there's an eighteen year wait for residents to get their cars over. Most actual autos are Minis (the OG ones fro the 70s) or trucks (for travel to the rugged interior). Most residents drive golf-carts for anything requiring a drive. We even rented a cart to better explore some areas of Avalon. Here's a street with some parked carts, and even a couple of rare minivans.



Even the garbage trucks are miniature. It must have something to with air quality ordinances and the necessities of their community.



Here are a couple of pictures of Corrie and I horsing around. Corrie's playing on a jungle-gym zip line thing, and I'm at a WWII monument machine gun, mounted for protection, covering the harbor during training exercises during the War.




The gun doesn't move, and I'm about to take out a palm tree.

Iconic Concepts of Avalon

There are a few things that are iconic to Avalon on Catalina Island...

Wrigley's Casino:



This giant takes up the main portion of the western city's view (they even demolished two Morro Rock type rock formations to build it):



This mural is another of one of Avalon's sacred images; she lives at the entrance to the Casino (now a museum with guided tours):



And now for something that isn't associated with Wrigley or the casino, the flying fish:



Avalon, and Catalina as a whole, like Barbados (apparently), has adopted the flying fish as it's official animal representative. There are night tours you can take where you ride around in a fast boat with a powerful light and chase flying fish swarms. I was looking up information on them and was amazed to learn that: 1) they fly on average for almost forty meters outside the water; 2) one was recorded as flying as far as 400 meters; 3) they go fast (almost 40 knots!) and rather high (averaging six feet out of the water).

Outrageous.

Santa Catalina Island Series

When I saw that I didn't have Corrie's and my anniversary off, but I did have off a three day span week earlier, we decided to take advantage of it and planned a trip to Catalina Island. I remember first hearing about Catalina from a character Bob Hoskins played in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? It helped that we could walk to the ferry terminal from our apartment.

In the next few (maybe with this post there will be six total) posts I'll discuss our adventure on the not-so-tiny Channel Island with pictures and anecdotes.

A brief background: we stayed in the city of Avalon, sometimes referred to as Avalon Bay (not anymore). Catalina Island is a part of LA County, and Avalon is the southern most incorporated city in the county. There are about 3700 people living in Avalon, out of roughly 3900 on the island. A small village called Two Harbors, named for a geologic formation noticeable when looking at a map of Catalina, has about two hundred inhabitants, while a handful of folks eek out a living on other solitary harbors or isolated mountains in the interior.

The Tongva aboriginal Californians were the original human inhabitants, as the bay at Avalon is nice; it gets deep fast, and today even there is a nice scuba diving industry right off the breaker. After that the Spaniards came and named it for their queen, Catherine. Later known as a fisherman's paradise, it began to draw wealthy white men trying to promote it as a getaway from the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles.

That really happened in earnest when Wrigley, the chewing gum magnate from Chicago took an interest while he was spending his winters away from the harsh Chicago weather in his sunny Pasadena mansion. Wrigley had the financial clout to make it happen, and was able to cultivate the right Hollywood connections to lure celebrities.

The Cubbies even spent a few weeks a year out at Avalon playing ball dung the spring. They came for almost twenty years straight.

Not only did Hollywood stars come out to play, but filmmakers as well, as many films from the thirties were made on the island.

Besides fishing, tourism, and film-making, a ceramic tile company was founded, using the island's native clay. While it was only running for a decade or so, it produced thousands of pieces, many of which are recognized as collectible prizes nowadays. There is still a few artisan pieces of ceramic tile being produced, usually for collectors or for municipal tings, like he following mosaics, which adorn the wall of a set of public restrooms:




Once the development of affordable, reliable, an quick air transportation matured, Catalina and Avalon's status a destination began to wane. It still lives on as a tourist zone, but is definitely not as important to the imagination of southern California citizens as it once was.

Congratulations Ryan

"Paging Dr. Talyat!"

That was the echoing refrain from Brady, the younger brother of one of my best friends, Ryan, during his graduation party. Ryan has graduated from Cal Poly with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He currently works as a draftsman for an engineering company that designs airplanes.

We met in 1997, in the dorms, which might show how long Ryan's been at it with finishing. We lived together from 2000 to 2004, and from '04 until '06 when we left for New York Ryan's house was Corrie's and my second place. He was a member of my wedding party. Those first few quarters in the dorms wouldn't have foreshadowed this past weekend, when the celebration of the completion took place. (The same is true of me.)

Good job, Ryan.

Now, playing horseshoes with Ryan and Brady and Sam...






...and listening to the "Paging Dr. Talyat!" refrain from Brady, him having a little fun with the timespan for Ryan's graduation, was a real pleasure.

We also got to see Valerie, Ryan and Brady's mom, as well as their grandmother and cousins, who live in the area.

The only bummer was having to leave after last call and head home to LB for work the next day.

I'm proud, Ry. You done good.

Botanical Garden of San Luis Obispo

Ryan's graduation party was at El Chorro Park, across from the southern entrance to Cuesta College. At El Chorro park besides hiking, camping, and day functioning, you van visit the SLO Botanical Garden. Corrie and I took a break from the celebrations to check out the areas. We got some funny looks from other patrons when we were on all fours and rubbing different herbs and plants on our hands and faces.

It all started with this first plant, the Coyote Mint. I'd never seen it before, so I started to touch it, working the essential oils into my hands so I could get a sense of how it smells/tastes. Very nice, quite similar to oregano and marjoram.



Next to it the exotic looking Hummingbird Sage. Also very nice, and seemed to blend well with the Coyote Mint.



The Brown Sage was next, but by then our sniffers were a little overwhelmed, and the nuance between the Hummingbird and Brown was present but not strong.



This is Mogwort, which is a cool name and sounds like out of one of the popular wizard books, but it was intense in smell. It was powerful enough to break through the sage and mint/oregano from before.



This is one of the mallows. Marshmallows, the puffy food like sugar cube, has a light and distinct flavor. That flavor comes from mallow plants, and this is in the same family. Consequently, this plant smells just like a pile of marshmallows, but only when you get your face right into the thing.



And then we got to this plant, the Teddy Bear Weed, I mean the Stuffed Animal Plant, I mean Lamb's Ear. Holy moly. This was like nothing I've ever seen. It was so soft, it was like some child's toy made in some wealthy Scandinavian country. This was the one when people started to look at us funny. I had a hard time controlling myself, what with my love of fabrics and other things soft.



We're not really sure about the rest of the Botanical Garden; we left to get water and didn't make it back. It was compact and varied, though, which is nice and typical of the flora in San Luis Obispo area.

Raul and Mary Jane

The names of these heads are, just like the title of this post, Raul and Mary Jane. These sculptures were, ahem, liberated from a creepy collection of similar heads by Ryan and myself. That was on a walk around campus late at night, somewhere between thirteen and fourteen years ago. This picture was taken some fifty hours ago, in 2011.

We were in the dorms, out exploring the nooks and crannies of Cal Poly's campus late one night and found a pile of heads. It was bizarre. We each took one, some of the more intact entries. We took them back to our dorm rooms, and kept them as items in our possession.

I'm surprised they're still intact. I think Mary Jane, my liberated head, came with me from the dorms and stayed with my stuff at Tony's folks' place in San Jose that summer, then returned to live with us in the Jungle at the Valencia Apts. It must have stayed when I moved back to Sac, ending up at Patricia, then Oceanaire, and saved by Ryan when he moved out. Raul, Ryan's head, probably had a similar journey, ending up at Patricia around the same time as MJ.

I imagine they've enjoyed a much longer life that they're creators ever would have imagined.

Two if by Car

I'll have to find out the real meaning of that phrase. Today I have a pair of photos I took from the Passat on our trip to see Ryan and celebrate with him his graduation from Cal Poly. He exhibited what Seymour Skinner calls "great stick-to-it-ive-ness".

The first in from 101, between Ventura and Santa Barbara, near the beach hamlet of Seacliff. The picture makes me think of a map, a map of the US, as in it's the edge of the continent. I also like the fog rolling in over the top, mostly obscuring it.



The second is from Highway 1, on the road to Morro Bay. We got to the park but didn't have the requisite three bucks to get in, so we went to Morro Bay to get some cash. This hill is one of the seven morros, the string of volcanic pimples that line the valley where San Luis Obispo exists, ending in the "Gibraltar of the West".

We Lost One

After seeing some strange activity on Facebook, I figured I'd have to break down and ask some folks what has happened.

A young man I worked with in Austin, Luis Medina, has passed. He drowned in the Comal River after jumping from a tree branch and not resurfacing.

The Comal is a slow, rather beautiful, meandering creek centered in New Braunfels, a city between Austin and San Antonio. It is the place where Tubing takes place. You park your car in one spot in town, rent the tube(s) (usually one for you and one for your beer), and then walk a short half-mile or so to the launch site, and ride the tube for a few hours as it chills in a circular pattern around the town, dropping you off near the tube rental hut. The public consumption laws are either relaxed, non-existent, or, most likely, not enforced.

The pace is so slow that a tuber would be able to jump off, slosh over to the side, climb a tree, and jump from a limb while friends watched. In fact, I myself have seen it happen on my one trip.

Officials say that an investigation is still open. This just happened this past Tuesday.

Minor Changes

This will only effect people who view this site using mobile devices (like me in moments of waiting to go home). I've enabled the site's mobile device setting. I'll check and see if there are any bugs or hiccups because of it.

My good friend Ryan graduates this Saturday, and we are all very excited. He was telling me how he's the only student in one of his classes who gets his teacher's references to the Bash Brothers, Alf, and Ren and Stimpy...Carney Lansford, Dave Stewart and Pervis Ellison, while lost on even people our age, are references caught by Ryan. The class is on sports biophysics.

In a third totally unrelated topic, Corrie and I are currently trudging a box of DVDs that we liberated from my brother's house up north, and we just subjected ourselves to Titan A.E. It wasn't that bad, and it has inspired me to complete a post I'd started in my head a while back about Don Bluth.

After watching 1975's Rollerball, another Sacto Salvage DVD, I can say that I liked the message, even if I found the film dull. The tension wasn't there. I can handle movies with a specific pace (generally complained about as "slow"), but Rollerball didn't create the tension that should go along with the pace. The violence, though, was mostly portrayed in an ugly manner in a concerted attempt to not glorify it. That did work.

Timothy Ray Brown's Surprising Story

If you haven't heard, Timothy Ray Brown is the gentleman deemed First Man Cured of AIDS. The vanquishing of the HIV virus from his body has given hope to people that a cure will be on the way. Tim Brown, from the San Francisco Bay Area, had a wild and accidental cure that has it's own dangers.

If you follow the thread I'v linked to, and read the article, the procedure that cured Browns HIV infection might surprise you. Paraphrasing: Brown, living in Berlin, was diagnosed with a type of Leukemia, began chemo therapy, got a little better, then a little worse, then bottomed out and lost his sight and ability to walk. Once the cancer moved to his marrow, he needed a stem cell transplant, and the stem cell donor they had was one of the 2% of humans naturally immune to HIV and AIDS. They've tried grafting immune stem cells into HIV+ patients before, with no success. This time, though, it worked, and after multiple tests, it was concluded that Timothy Ray Brown is the first person in recorded medicine to have been cured of HIV.

The reason immuno-grafts don't usually work is because the HIV has enough time in an infected patient to develop it's own attacking capabilities on those grafted immune cells. What happened with Brown was that the chemo had killed enough HIV infected cells that it didn't have the time to develop the means to attack the new immuno-graft cells.

The conclusion is that chemo and immuno-grafts might be an answer. Would this help the epidemic in Africa?

"Car-megeddon"

Traffic in Los Angeles and in the greater metro area is notorious and has even earned a place in the romanticism of the American West generally and Southern California specifically.

Because of this, the city and county officials have launched an early awareness program about a three-day, ten mile closure of the San Diego Freeway. I wrote a post back in September of 2010 about driving in California during a trip, and I had a bit about the highway numbering. In a comment, my mother, who grew up in LA, discussed the fact they didn't use numbers, rather they used names. So to her, the San Diego Freeway is more natural, but other folks might know it as I-405.

They are closing a ten mile stretch of the 405 for three days! From 101 to I-10, the 405 will be shut down for a few days in July. Some people are calling it "car-megeddon". Some officials are telling people to simply stay home, but, at all costs, stay far away from the roads around the 405 area.

For people not familiar with this particular stretch of highway, the 405 from 101 to I-10 services the millions of people living in the San Fernando Valley (origin of "valley speak", like ending declarative sentences in an upward lilt, making them sound like questions, ie, "I went to the store? Then I bought some food?") with Western LA. This could be the busiest stretch of freeway in the history of the United States.

If you take every single person in Austin, Texas, then double that, then put them all on a freeway going the same direction in the morning, and all going the opposite direction in the evening, you get the idea. More than 1.7 million people use that stretch every day. Now imagine closing it. You can do the same exercise with the residents in the city of Sacramento, only triple the number.

Car-megeddon indeed.

I'm glad I never have to deal with that stretch, unless we're driving to SLO or Sacramento.

Interesting Local Sights 3: Reminders

The previous two posts have been about the quirkiness or funkiness of Long Beach's personality, I suppose, and about their desire to beautify their town. There are some things that are in odd spots, things that are still in use today but are a throwback in a sense, especially compared to the beatification efforts exacted in other places.

In this first picture, if you look close enough, you can see one on the left side, just below the horizontal halfway line, and two more on the right, above the horizontal halfway line:



If you noticed the oil jack-pumps, then you have the eagle-eye. While they're not everywhere, by any means, when you come across them in a neighborhood, you're struck. Here you are, you think, in a cool Southern California beach town,the weather's nice, palm trees everywhere, the beach close by, venues and a thriving scene, and you turn a corner into a nice bungalow style neighborhood that's lush with growth, and at the end of the street, an oil jack-pump. It's disarming.



Most of these pictures are from the hill surrounding Signal Hill, or up on Signal Hill, but seeing as how that was a huge oil field back in the day, it makes sense that it's still producing a tiny bit.





It's part of Long Beach's character, and can't be dismissed, but it's not intrusive, and it doesn't ever smell like tar or petroleum refining like Vallejo. Just one of those things.

Interesting Local Sights 2: Painted Transformers

Along with the bicycle hitches, we've noticed another thing they've done down here: painting the electrical transformers for the stop-lights. Different artists have been commissioned, and the various boxes are as different as the sensibilities of the artists themselves. Here is an incomplete collection: