Day One-hundred-and-twenty-three: Walt Disney Concert Hall

Another first! My daughter and son-in-law took me to see a silent movie at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. It was the 1925 "Phantom of the Opera" with live organ music. It was great start to finish. The organist started by talking about the movie, which was actually the third release. Then played some superbly choreographed music, non-stop. The door chime, or alarm, was so superbly matched up it took me a while to realize that it wasn't part of the film.

Great conversation on the Metro going and coming. A lot of people were dressed up for Halloween, or in the warm weather, not dressed so much. Certainly many of the females had on relatively short skirts. Several had on weird leggings or stockings or whatever they were. If they were characters, I didn't recognize them. Sitting in our row at the hall was a Joker, straight out of Batman. I saw a guy with the "Back to the Future" colander on his head. As we were riding back to their place, a gaggle of butterflies got off the train as we boarded. There must be a party somewhere downtown.

Nobody came around before we had to leave for the treats I brought down. My daughter did take some to the next door neighbors and at least got rid of three.

I will now get less sleep when I visit as they have wireless. It is too easy to sit on my bed and use the Internet. At least I will be current in my blog entries. Staying current in my Life after Layoff is something to be desired.

I had a good drive down here. The day started out a little on the wet side. There were a couple times I had to put my wipers on constant rather than intermittent but once out of the Bay Area, the rain stopped even though the clouds didn't. They were spectacular the entire trip. I also noticed quite a few less pleasant sights, the cattle feed lots and the super sized bales of cotton. I know that cotton takes a lot of water to grow and the feed lots are sick cattle hell. The latter makes me glad I'm once again a vegan. California has a proposition on the ballot, Proposition 2, that mandates better treatment for the animals in the factory farms. I don't recall whether or not there is anything in it about cattle but chickens are supposed to be able to spread their wings.

I listened to The Secret again all the way through. It's long enough to take up most of the trip but still short enough to get all the way through. But then again, I didn't always get it paused when I got phone calls, one of which was yet another attempt to sell me an extended warrantee for the Prius, which I better already have.

Tomorrow, which is already here, wake up will come rather soon so I need to head to bed. As I can say with some regularity, "I'll write more later."

Day Seven: Reading by listening

This officially is my first full week of layoff. I spent six and one half hours driving over 390 miles from Pasadena to Pacifica and I most likely wouldn't have done this trip, or been able to have done it this way without having been laid off. I'm truly enjoying this different Life after Layoff.

I was looking forward to the long drive to do some deep thinking but instead, I listened to part 2 of How the brain works and Ian Flemings' 1953 book "Casino Royale." (I don't have parts one, three and greater, which is a long worded way of saying I only have part two.) It was short but quite informative. In it, I learned that we don't really learn anything without adequate rest. In fact, sleep deprivation can be a killer. I also learned that there are declarative, procedural, perceptive, and emotional learning / memory and that dreams are the association of those four for storage and eventual retrieval.

Casino Royale was both amazingly like and substantially different than the movies of the same name. The movies stayed very close to the intent of the book, with some updating and perhaps making the Bond character more, well, likable.

Perhaps more amazing was that I made it most of the way without having to back off of cruise control. I was only trapped once on I-5 and once on 152, before I had to drop off of it all together at the construction on 152. Then is was on and of several times up 101 and I-280. My Prius calculated mileage was 52 mpg.

While I was in awe of the gold and black hills and loved looking at them whenever I could do so safely, my lasting memory is of the acres and acres of bare ground of a cattle feed lot. This lot had thousands of cows, mostly under strips of tin roofs held up by metal poles, separated by more land. Every once in a while there was a sprinkler going off to keep the cattle cool.

Now that I've caught up on my Life after Layoff blog, I will definitely be going to bed earlier tonight than I have in the previous three nights. However, my to do list is growing. I'm getting excited about some of the things coming up and while a lot of work, it will be fun work. While work may be a four-letter word, fun definitely is.