At our bonfire on Saturday night, I got a call from a friend in Southern California who was driving by our old house in Redlands that night. She said that there were something like 15 police cars around and the front yard was taped off in police tape with a forensics unit on site as well.

This was somewhat scary because my mom had sold the house to my sister’s friend a few years ago (after we both moved to San Francisco). I told my sister about the incident on Sunday and she called her friend to find out what happened.

Apparently her parents were vacationing in Mexico and her brother decided to throw a party… which turned into a massive event. They started trying to kick some people out and somehow some people got into a fight. A 19 year old was sent to the hospital with a punctured lung and one other person was stabbed in the hand! Ugh!

A local paper has a small blurb about it.

Officers who were called to break up a house party Saturday night in the 1400 block of Cambridge Avenue arrived on scene to blood in the street and reports of a stabbing. Four people were taken into custody following the incident, including one man believed to be a gang member, but none is a primary suspect in the stabbing, police said.

At 11 p.m. police arrived at the intersection of Cambridge Avenue and Lincoln Street where dozens of people were filtering out of a house party that had 50 to 75 people, said police spokesman Carl Baker.

I took my car in on Friday for its 3,000 mile checkup. This is the first time I’ve delt with any dealership up here since I moved to the Bay Area. The Saturn dealership in Southern California has been absolutely phenomenal so I expected no less from the dealership up here.

I was wrong on so many levels.

Evidently, what normally costs me a nice and affordable $40 in So Cal (which includes a car wash! Swanky!) will now cost me ~$200 in Nor Cal.

“Oh, but this is different!” says the sleezy fat slime ball behind the counter. “This is technically a 6K checkup and we also thoroughly inspect your car to make sure everything is running okay!”

Fine. Whatever. My last “3K” checkup was nearly 5,000 miles ago, so I’ll go with the 6K service they wanted.

They found out my car was in nearly perfect condition, minus a “collapsed engine mount.” Apparently, getting this fixed will cut down on vibrations into the passenger compartment (note: there are none) all for an affordable price of $200!

After telling them to sod off, I finally liberate my car from this fine institution and I drove it back home, happy that my car had a fairly positive report and everything was in working order.

Fast forward to late last night.

My sister and I drive down to Daly City to score some food. As we wait in the drive-thru, thick clouds of steam start to billow out from beneath my hood! We panic… I open the hood to find out that the cap isn’t even on my coolant reservoir!!! The stupid bastards FORGOT to put the cap back on! Interestingly enough, it was sitting off to the side (and by some miracle, didn’t fall beneath the car and onto the freeway). I screw the cap back on and notice that now my car is saying it has no coolant (makes sense as we just watched it turn to vapor right in front of us).

We pull across the street to a gas station and fill up with water. Only to realize that NOW MY CAR DOES NOT START. Lights work, radio works, it actually cranks once but doesn’t turn over. So we struggle with this problem for 15 minutes and start calling some random people for advice. I’m beginning to think that we may have to call in a tow truck.

I notice my lights are now quite a bit dimmer and decide to flag someone down to give us a jump. It worked! My car was back to running. We thank the people for their help and get back inside to go home.

I look down to find out that my car is now out of coolant AGAIN! Evidently, I have a leak somewhere in my coolant system (and it doesn’t appear to be the radiator).

We fill it up again and things appear stable. We get in the car and start to drive home. After 2 minutes, my coolant light comes on again! Of course now we’re in the middle of the freeway. Ugh!

Anyway, we find another gas station, fill up and repeat the process. We finally get my car to limp home.

It’s great to know that the thorough inspect that I paid for basically amounted to jack shit. I mean come on… they didn’t even put the damn coolant cap back on!

This is going to be a fun week.

Alright, since I’ve been lame and haven’t had the time (or patience really) to write anything in awhile, I’m going to post a photo journal. Just a bunch of random pics taken in the last month and a half basically.

Mount Wilson Observatory (just outside of Los Angeles/Pasadena) while on my way back to San Francisco.
Our roommate’s pug eating a playing card in my room.

One of the many random photos of sunsets from my room.

The 16th Street Tiled Steps Project (about 5 doors up the street from our place). This was just completed last month (and done entirely with private donations. Roughly $80,000).

Luxor Hotel and Casino at 4:30AM when we drove into Vegas for Michelle’s birthday.

A nice blurry photo of more of the Las Vegas Strip.

A syringe outside our hotel room at St. Tropez.

Crazy rays of sunshine one afternoon.

Driving from San Francisco to Las Vegas takes just over 9 hours. It’s been an interesting and eventful weekend celebrating my sister’s birthday.

Meghan, my sister and I left at around 7PM on Friday and eventually got into Las Vegas at around 4:30AM. We checked into the St. Tropez Hotel and noticed that our hotel room was definitely not up to par (this is the SAME place we stayed at in 2001 that had blood all over the hotel room… I’ll have to find and post that story for those who don’t know about it). There were dried remnants of vomit near one of the beds, the pillows and sheets were stained and dirty (thankfully, not with blood this time) and the place just reaked of cigarette smoke.

We slept for a few hours and awoke to the sound of a cell phone. It was our parents informing us that they were going to drive to Las Vegas for the weekend as well! That was awesome. However, this denied us getting anymore sleep (only 3 hours), so we awoke to straighten up the room and wait for friends. While waiting, we noticed how horrible this place actually was. There were needles in the parking lot, as well as used condoms. Definitely a classy looking place.

Michelle called our parents to complain and they offered to upgrade our accomodations! For Saturday night, our entire group of 11 people would be staying in the Bellagio! That was an amazing hotel and all of our friends were extremely thankful to our parents.

We had a quick blitz around Vegas, checking out various things such as a museum at the Venetian, the swimming pool at the Bellagio and then went out to eat at the Hard Rock Cafe with our parents. Afterwards, we went out on the strip to examine more casinos and drink/gamble away money.

Michelle ended up feeling sick, so she didn’t go out. A few of us checked out the Excalibur and Luxor and then headed back to our hotel to catch up on sleep we missed the previous night.

On our drive back on Sunday, Interstate 15 was shut down since there was an accident about half a mile ahead of us. We must have just missed it. After a half hour of sitting on the freeway, they began to let traffic through. The hold up was a motorcyclist that had somehow crashed.

As we drove by, we noticed things weren’t entirely right. In the middle of the road lay a body partly covered by a blanket. It’s legs and feet were sticking out from underneath in a very contorted position and a motorcycle pulled off to one side of the road. It was a horrid sight.

Besides funerals, this is the closest I have ever experienced to human death. It hits especially close, since that person was also most likely returning from Las Vegas for the weekend and had probably passed by our car not more than 10 minutes before hand. They were probably thinking of the money they had spent this weekend, or how anxious they wanted to get home… crashing probably wasn’t even on their mind. Ugh.

It’s also kind of sobering since I know quite a few friends, as well as my Dad, who ride motorcycles. You can be the most cautious driver/rider in the world, but it only takes one idiot to change everything. Meghan believes that she explicitly remembers the rider and believes it was a female. I haven’t found any news reports on it yet though.

In anycase, we finally made it home at 11PM on Sunday night. This weekend was a lot to deal with, physically and emotionally and it’s good to finally be home. Now to tackle school.

Since it’s International Talk Like A Pirate Day, I thought it is time to celebrate by combining two of my favorite things: Pirates and Haikus!

Avast ye Mateys!
It’s Talk Like A Pirate Day
Let’s plunder booty!

Anyway, I’ll post more on this past weekend in Las Vegas later (class soon).

Yay for modern technology! I just left school and am currently writing this on my laptop as I ride BART to go to the airport.

Anyway, September is going to be an extraordinarily busy month for me. Last weekend, I went on a camping trip with Meghan and friends to a place called Salt Point State Park. It’s a beautiful area along the coast of California, about 100 miles north of San Francisco. We spent a total of 4 days there.

On Saturday, we hiked roughly 8 miles around the park from our campsite, down to the beach and up into the mountains, checking out a variety of geology along the way. 😉 They have a pygmy forest there that is similar to one I’ve seen on a previous geology trip in Mendocino.

Sunday was interesting. We went canoeing on the Russian River, which is evidently a popular area for people to rent canoes in. It’s about a 10 mile canoe trip and we arrived at 10AM and were done by about 5PM. It was a leisurely trip that took the whole day. Before we began, we received an orientation that said about 1 in 5 canoes would flip over. Our group had 5 canoes and 3 of them flipped over. 2 of them within 5 minutes of starting!

We also had an interesting experience in giving some extra beer to a group of ladies who flashed us in return. It was interesting in the sense that they were the ones who offered to do that. We would have probably have given them some extra beer if they had just said hello to us. Regardless, it was a fun time for all involved, despite the moral accountability of some… or lack thereof.

We drove back home on Monday… having lunch at In N Out of course. The weekend was actually framed with In N Out, since we stopped by a new one on the way to our campsite on Friday. So that basically would make it a perfect weekend, no matter what happened.

Dan was on vacation this weekend as well and called me when he was in Lake Tahoe. I gave him some (limited) information on where we were going to camp and invited him along to hang out with us for the weekend. However, we were kind of flying by the seat of our pants and nothing was set in stone. I figured I would just call him when we got to our campsite.

So we get there, only to find out: NO CELL PHONE SERVICE! Crap! A forest ranger directs to an area down the road where there is limited cell phone coverage, so we go there. I leave a message on Dan’s phone (apparently it was garbled due to crappy reception) letting him know where we are. So we wait up the rest of the night for him and he doesn’t show up!

Damn!

Apparently, he ended up camping not more than 20 sites down from us in the same camp ground… looked for us in the morning but couldn’t find us and then took off back to Tahoe. I felt rotten that it didn’t work out. Meghan thought she saw him in a camp farther down when she went for a walk in the morning, but wasn’t entirely positive. And Dan thought he saw Meghan but wasn’t entirely positive either. Ah well!

I’m currently on my way to the airport to fly home this weekend. Nate, Nic and their significant others are going out to Lake Mojave this weekend, where we will partake in some water sports with Nate’s boat (his graduation present)! I haven’t been to the river in so long, so I’m just itching to go. Of course I doubt I’ll get a load of homework that I have to do done, but regardless!

Then next weekend is Michelle’s 21st birthday, which we’ll be celebrating in Las Vegas. So yet another weekend that I won’t be able to get stuff done. But it will be a great weekend, regardless.

Hopefully September doesn’t screw me up for the rest of the semester. It’s kind of a bad start. I’m basically doing everything that I didn’t get a chance to do this summer.

I somewhat enjoy my classes, though I have absolutely no clue what is going on in my Physics class. I understand the concepts of physics quite well. Explain something to me, I’ll be able to explain it back and give examples. But calculating things? Ugh! Math has never been my strong point, and the math in this course is intensive! Plus, since I don’t have a strong grasp on it anyway, I feel behind. (However, I did somehow manage to pull off a B+ in my Calculus II class.)

Hmm… I’m almost to the airport. Time to put away the laptop and actually post this on the site later! Until next time.

It’s almost like an unwritten rule of nature, or a law of physics that no one speaks about. The exact moment school started last Wednesday was the first time that we have seen blue skies in these parts of San Francisco since early June.

And it has been absolutely clear every day since! Not a cloud in the sky. The moment school begins and I no longer have time to take advantage of it, the weather clears up. Wonderful! At the moment, I can see the lights of the Sunset District going all the way out to the ocean (usually they are hidden in fog).

I took a photo this weekend out my bedroom window as the sun was setting. This is seriously the first time there’s been sunlight here in over 2 months. It feels great. 🙂

In other news, my roommate Kasi and I decided to venture into Golden Gate Park last week to verify a rumor. When you think of New York’s Central Park (and maybe Tracy can attest to this), what kind of animals do you think of? A few squirrels? Some pigeons maybe? (Of course there is the occasional alligator, but whatever, Los Angeles has that too. 😛 )

I’m willing to bet there are no BUFFALO in Central Park! However, you can find them in Golden Gate Park! Oh yes my friends. And I have the pictures to prove it.

There is a full on herd of buffalo in Golden Gate Park. It ranks as one of the most awesome things I’ve ever seen. And it’s pretty random. You’re just driving/walking/running through the park and all of the sudden you come across this paddock full of buffalo.

Lastly, I was actually able to knock off two books on my list before school started! East of Eden and The Monkey Wrench Gang. I’m nearly done with A Walk in the Woods, but that might take awhile thanks to the amount of reading I must do for school now.

School begins tomorrow. Since I don’t have “priority registration,” many of the classes that I wanted to take are now full. Ugh! So I have to fight and try to add them.

Regardless, the semester has some HARD classes, but I have a lot of time available to study. The classes I need/want to take this semester are Chemistry II, Physics III, Environmental Solutions and Problems, Swimming, and an independent research class for my senior thesis.

Providing I get into everything I want, I’ll have the following school schedule.

M: 10AM – 10PM
T: 9:30AM – 5PM
W: 10AM – 11AM
Th: 9:30AM – 5PM
F: No Class

So I have one particularly brutal day (at the beginning of the week… go figure), but it has about 3 hours in between each class (3 total classes that day). Sounds good to me! Here’s to hoping I get it.

Part of me kind of wants to not try and take a swim class… then I wouldn’t have to go to school on Wednesdays AT ALL. We’ll see what the next two weeks is like. Perhaps I won’t care much for it and I’ll decide to drop it.

Courtesy of my room mates, I went to Lake Tahoe last weekend. Despite it being relatively close to San Francisco (roughly 3 hours with no traffic), I hadn’t had the chance to go there. The clear blue water and overwhelming size of the lake were amazing things to behold. The water temperature was almost perfect as well! All five of us in the house ended up going. It was basically the first “field trip” that we’ve all done since we have lived together. It was an absolute blast.

After returning Sunday night, I left on Monday and flew back to So Cal for a few days to visit my parents. My sister was also down here, so it was the first time we’ve all been together as a family since last Christmas. Michelle flew back to the Bay Area last night and I’m leaving early tomorrow morning.

Among the things I accomplished on this trip: A surprise visit to the dentist that my Mom had quickly scheduled. Wonderful! Luckily, it was a good report for my teeth. Usually I don’t like going because I feel berated for the fact that I don’t floss as often as the dentist wants me too. I’ve been doing better though and she said there is a definite improvement! Yes!

School starts again next week. This should be my last serious semester of school. If everything works out, I am set to graduate in May! It’s about time. 6 years to complete my undergraduate work is embarrasing. Of course once that is done, I’m going straight into grad school, so no big deal ultimately.

Lastly, in the last week, I’ve added 2 new In N’ Out locations to my list (which hasn’t yet been updated). That includes the In N’ Out near Studio City that Tracy reminded me of in a previous post. That brings the total to 24!

I present to you yet another example of time wasting techniques, perfected by yours truly! Many have heard of the infamous map that lists the locations of all the In-N-Out Burgers that I have ever been to, but few have actually seen it.

How do I remember all of these? I really have no clue. People have reminded me about the time I went somewhere with them or a random thought will appear. Anyway, I decided to map out every location of what I consider one of the most awesome burger joints around.

Enjoy!