Today is my brother's 40th birthday. Over the weekend, we, with our father, took a trip to Los Angeles. It started Friday afternoon when Dad picked me up at home at around 3:00. We went to GCU, where Tad works, to get him. He has a long commute, so this got us on the road much earlier. We drove for several hours and then had dinner at Sizzler in Blythe:
We continued west on I-10 and spent the night in Upland, CA. I got up relatively early to go for a walk, which I'm used to doing with a dog. Breakfast was at Denny's, then we hung around the hotel for a couple hours. (Being on a diet, I had only a small salad at Sizzler and coffee at Denny's.)
We visited Dad's college friend, Geoffrey Neigher, for lunch. At Geoff's house, we met his wife (Karen), his daughter (Julie), and his son-in-law (Alex). I believe I got all the names correct. It was nice. Tad, Alex, and I tried to explain social networking to the older generation, but it was difficult. The simplest explanation for the practical use of social networks for individuals (from my perspective) goes like this: If you're well-connected to people on-line then it's easier to make a deeper connection when you're face-to-face. We spent a lot of time talking about the basics (jobs, family, pets, etc.). Had they spent 30 minutes reading my blog, looking at my VisualCV, or following me on Facebook, they could have skipped all those questions and gotten to more meaningful questions... Here's a picture of the four of us:
After leaving Geoff's house, we relaxed for a bit at the hotel. Our hotel was on Sunset Blvd., just down the hill from Dodger Stadium. We walked to the stadium and I took this picture of Tad and Dad in the parking lot:
Here's some video that Tad and I shot in the ballpark, before, during, and after the game:
I bought Tad a birthday beer and it only cost me $11 and one inning. Having never bought beer at a ballpark, I spilled some on some people sitting in the row in front of us. On the way out, we had someone take our picture with the field in the background. I noticed later that we could have run onto the field between innings and might have been mistaken for ketchup, mustard, and relish...
The next morning, we had some problems with the car. The transmission temperature light was on and the only way to get it to go off was to stop the car and let it idle. We had to do this every few minutes at first. We stopped for breakfast at IHOP in Upland. (This time I got scrambled egg whites!) We figured that if we kept the tachometer at around 2000 RPM, we'd be okay. This meant driving slower, but we didn't have to stop as often. I got home at around 4pm.
It was a fun weekend! All the pictures can be found on SmugMug. I'm glad we had a chance to do this for Tad's 40th birthday and hope that we can do something similar in another 40 years!
Thanks,
Matt
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