California Expedition

This is the story about how I got to go to California.

John works for a company and they want him to expand his knowledge. So they said, we’ll send you to this Adobe conference in LA. You know Adobe, right? If it’s on the internet they’re trying to talk about it. So John was like, sure thing! Then, because he’s a sweet guy, he was like, hey, do you want to come with me?

Hell yeah I do.

For some reason I wasn’t attracted to all of the attractions in LA and instead focused on shopping and seeing what was different about it from other places. These animal print leggings? Choice.

This was one of the many places in Santee Alley. Which, LA definitely does things differently because our alleys don’t have their own websites.

I thought this place looked cool. It was in a mall that we went to eat in. After, we tried to find this other place called Q Pop Shop. Meaning: we got terribly lost.

It was a neat little store… but I like Wholly Craft better.

We also visited a Fry’s while out there because there aren’t too many close to us here. I loved all of the random displays they had in that sci-fi themed version. (Julie told me she’s been to an Aztec themed one before. I feel compelled, like I should catch them all.)

Then I headed out for a day to visit the Winchester Mystery House and San Francisco, so I could visit/meet my internet friend TeeKay[rav link]. She told me that I had taken the less scenic route, which I found hilarious because ^that^ is way more scenic than 70.

On the way, I unwittingly stopped at Casa de Fruta. A place that had both a peacock and a two-storied carousel. Way crazy, I know. So far I feel like I’ve posted some pointless photos and words because I know what you really came here for. It’s to find out if this internet stranger murdered me.

Maybe you think you’re being really clever and are like, well obviously they didn’t murder you because you’re sitting at your computer, probably naked, typing this whole thing to us right now. But you don’t know! I could be a brain in a glass jar sending out electron waves that the internet/you are receiving right now.

AVENGE ME INTERNET! AVENGE ME!

This is her sweet group that meets every Tuesday. It’s called Purl Jam, if you’re in the area and interested. Which you should be. It made me all nostalgic for my old group, because these ladies are a fun time!

This is me and teekay! Aren’t we the cutest? (Even if I look a little crazy.) She even tried to show me some of her beautiful city while I was visiting her.

Although, I feel like I disappointed her because I was only there a tiny amount of time so she really only got to show me a small area of her city. But it was her neighborhood and I was excited to learn more about her, since we’ve been exchanging ravelry messages for a while now but that doesn’t tell you everything about someones’ personality, you know?

This is the kiln at her ceramics studio where she’s like the SUPER LEADER IN CHARGE. Once, she sent me the coolest mugs, out of the blue, just being nice.

Now here she is showing you a Porta-Pagoda.

I’ve always heard them called Porta john’s or Porta potty but she called it a blue room.

Not to keep you in suspense much longer, it was a fun, successful trip and she did not murder me. I didn’t murder her. Nobody got murdered that I know of. Yay! In fact, on my way back to LA, I saw three rainbows while leaving SF. The last one was super brilliant and was a double rainbow. All the way.

If you’re interested, here are the rest of my photos from my trip. So far we’ve had a pretty exciting year. I’m hoping to buckle down and knit some holiday presents now.

One seriously rad book signing

One day I was whining on the internet about how no books were holding my attention this summer. (I know, you can’t imagine me whining, right? But it’s true sweet blog, it’s true.) Luckily, instead of telling me to stfu, judahthor came to the rescue. He sent me a whole slew of book ideas.

The one that has really caught my attention so far is Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. For some reason I got super caught up in it. Even though I don’t share the same obsessions as Cline, I still got wound up in thinking about obsessions. I wrote about his book on my goodreads if you’re interested. But! What’s more interesting is that thanks to judahthor’s quick recommendation, I was able to see Ernest Cline here in Columbus doing a book signing. Eeeee!

He answered questions and got very animated with the hand gestures. He definitely struck me as the type of guy who would get really excited about finding some lost episode of an 80′s cartoon.

At one point he said that when he was describing the evil corporate headquarters that are in the middle of Columbus (in his book) he was totally thinking about Nationwide. I found this even more funny since I was sitting in a ‘dudes who work at Nationwide’ sandwich at the time. Mostly because I think they’d agree- giant buildings that dominate downtown and they sell insurance? I’ll bet they have a department that’s completely just guys with mustaches tying ladies to train tracks.

But yeah, I’m recommending this book to everyone and their mother. Because even though I didn’t really care about some of the main 80′s things he focused on (I want to stress this- I really don’t give two shits about Rush), I still loved the book.

Plus…

Ernest Cline also collects 80′s memorabilia, which he is taking with him on his book tour and he totally lets people play with it. There was even a proton pack from the Ghostbusters just chilling in his passenger seat. The passenger seat of what else–

But a ghostbusting knight riding back to the future DeLorean.

Which I totally sat in but man, that thing is low to the ground and small. I didn’t want to sit all the way in it for two reasons. One- I might never get out of the thing, it’s like a pit. Two- he left it on and playing Huey Lewis and the News and I thought… if I really sit in this I’d definitely feel the need to look at John and say “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.” Then you’d all see me on the evening news being pulled over in what would seriously be the most stupid car heist in history. Because it’s not a Honda Civic, stealing a DeLorean means the police are actually obligated to throw your ass in jail.

 

Home again, home again

Jiggity jig

So, a little over a week ago I posted this tweet:

The weird thing to me though, was that nobody responded. Since I had a 13-14 hour car ride to mull this over, I came up with a few thoughts/questions.

1) Do I say random crap like this so often that people are just like, oh Lindsey’s being crazy again…?

2) Maybe people are like, yeah, quick jaunt to Minnesota (in January), no biggie. Or you could assume I was just going to hop on a plane and go, living the jet-setter life that I tend to lead.

Actually, I used to go to Minnesota every summer growing up and my parents would send me there on a plane. They used to pin a little tag on my shirt so that the flight attendants would pay extra attention to me. Have they stopped doing this? Because if I were going to steal kids, I would totally target the ones with that paper on their shirts.

It was pretty sweet actually, I got extra peanuts and they would always give me those pilot’s wings. I have a notebook covered in them.

Let’s be honest it’s probably:

3) One tweet in many, getting lost. Or, people just honestly don’t care what you’re up to on twitter unless it somehow connects to them. You know, like in life.

So, it led me to reconsider twitter and also, reconsider some friends and the kinds of relationships that we have with people. Look, I had A LOT of time in the car. I told my close friends what was going on before I left because we talk often enough that it would just come up. Plus a lot of them aren’t actually on twitter anyways. I’ve had a lot of fun on facebook lately playing frontierville but I’m sure that will pass pretty quickly too. The internet isn’t holding my attention like it used to but I still find myself sitting in front of it all of the time. Why?

Anyways, these are the things that are on my mind lately. I’ve got pictures and stories to show and tell you though, so stay tuned!

Feelings

So I’m tooling around my new flickr homepage (if you haven’t already, enable it!) and I get totally crazed the second I realize that I can view my photostreams STATS.

STATS! people. One of the STATS that they have is how people get to your photos in the first place. A majority of my views come from flickr itself, which is pretty obvious and makes sense. However a couple of views came from a totally wacked out website:

We Feel Fine.

You need to check this out. (If you haven’t already because I’m usually pretty slow on these trendy things.) So I searched through my photos to see how many times I had the word ‘feel’ or ‘feeling’ in a description.

This one is because that sidewalk feels weird.

In this one I felt like a doll.

However, when I went to the We Feel Fine website it really kind of terrified me because it reminded me of the movie Suicide Club. Has anyone seen that movie??! Because as I was staring at the dots swarming around I thought: I know what the dots really mean.

Besides that this was kind of fun. What’s another good word to search for in a flickr photostream? Have? Want? Need? Don’t you think this could be kind of a cool completely time absorbing sort of game? Oh internet, how did I waste my life away before you?

Oh yeah, that’s right, TV.