The Long Road to Normal

Hey all, life is good. I got paid for some of my guidebook work and am paying off debts, gassed up the car, fooded up the fridge, and am cranking away on work. (Yes, I know fooded is not a word). My next humor book, What Color is Your Jockstrap? is almost out so it's past time to pitch to magazines, and this year I have some connections to work with. If anyone knows anyone who reviews books, send them my way. There are some big names in this book including Tim Cahill, Elliott Hester, Susan Orlean, Rolf Potts, and....
It's a zany, gross, amusing book of travel mishaps, and I love that we've included men this time around.

I'd like to say hello to Katherine Colvin. I heard she requested this website address, and I appreciate her interest in following along! John and I had great fun with Jenn and Bob this weekend. They are good friends. We went out for Thai food at Chan Dara near Larchmont Village on Friday night, then headed over to the first Big Lebowski event. And I'll be the first to say it was a bust. Pretty darn lame. Hardly anyone was wearing costumes, and they didn't have a proper screening of the movie, which is what I was expecting. They just wanted to show it on the bar's tv monitors. It was a convention of Kahlua guzzling LA slackers, without their name badges. We took our mini party to a bar called Daddy's and had a much better time there. Bob and Jenn got to walk on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and we passed stars like Mae West, Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra, and Art Linkletter.

The best part was getting to experience a better side to LA. We took a walk up at the Griffith Observatory on a sunny clear day, had lunch at Mexico City, one of my fave restaurants in Los Feliz, and showed them Atwater Village where I'd like to rent a house if we decide we'll be here longer than a year. Then we got John and trucked down to Long Beach for dinner and the rest of Lebowskifest. Now this was a party! About half of the three hundred people there were in some kind of costume, and Jenn got a bunch of pics. We drank Caucasians and had fun watching these movie lovers.

My computer is still down and there's nothing to be done except take it to Apple and pay out the nose. But I've got several deadlines going on, so maybe I'll get to that tomorrow.

Current: Burbank, CA
Next: San Francisco at the end of the month