leftovers

Dad Helping me unwrap my gifts at Grandma & Grandpa Strecker's. After last year's commitment to post a blog entry each day, I've understandably been pretty absent this year. I think I've averaged one blog post per month. To end out the year, and to pay tribute to my second favorite holiday season, I am going to write each day from now until Yuletide, also known and formerly referred to by myself as Christmas. Each day I will touch on a different topic either relating to the holiday season, or completely unrelated. Today, I will recount the typical holiday seasons of my youth. At school, we would all be very excited about the arrival of Santa Claus but were busily concerned with things like the winter musical or concert, the gift exchange, and all the tests and assignments we'd have to finish before the break. At home, I would anxiously thumb through the pages of the JC Penney catalog, dog-earing the pages that had the toys I hoped so desperately to find under...

I have been doing extremely well on my diet!!! So proud of myself. We had a security committee meeting at 10am which I usually go to, but decided not to today because I had other stuff to work on. It turned out to be a bad one to miss, because some of the "characters" came to the meeting - these are the people who used to dress up as famous characters (without any permission from the copywrite owners, or studios, or anyone else) and stand on Hollywood Blvd. harassing tourists to give them money in exchange for taking photos with them. LAPD did a crackdown on them awhile back and as the BID we have tried to help prevent their return because they are bad for business and are a blight on the District. Anyway, they are of course completely upset and trying to make it seem like they are just these innocent people who are trying to make a living and that the tourists love them - all of which is hogwash, of course. They are territorial and are constantly getting in fights with ...

I didn't make it to boot camp since I stayed up so late working on music last night. Nothing too fantastic happened at work. At home, Dylan and I were going to watch our shows, but it turned out they were not on because of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. I have weird feelings about this because I should really have watched the male figure skating. When I was a kid, I LOVED the figure skating so much that I begged my dad to build us a skating rink in the yard and being that I generally would not shut up, I got my way. My dad dug a flat little pool in the yard east of our house and lined it with plastic tarp, then filled it with water. Once the water froze, it was our own private ice skating rink! It was one of the coolest things my dad ever did for us, although he did a lot of cool things for us kids. But this one was really impressive. How many poor farm kids had their own ice skating rinks? Anyway, I idolized Brian Boitano and Brian Orser and would make up my own figure ...