crayonbeam

The dance was great. One of the callers was kind of too hard for my little pea brain, and apparently also for a number of other people's little pea brains, but there was a lot of stuff that I did understand in real time and able to execute, and there were a lot of good moments of teamwork, getting the whole square to do all the parts, and not just one person pushing, but really working together where some people understood some parts and were able to explain them well enough in tiny soundbites to get other people to understand other parts and really make the whole thing work.

I wanted to put my feet in the ocean this trip, since two years ago I had failed due to weather. Somebody said there was a nice restaurant on the beach that had its own parking lot (parking is always an issue) and we could go there. 6 people wanted to go, so we split into 2 cars, with one other person was assigned to my car to help navigate. The other car got going a few minutes before the two of us got going. The other person didn't really know where she was going, and was just using Google, which was fine, until it ran us into a traffic jam that seems to be being solved by the cars ahead of us making three-point turns and coming back the way from which they had come. When we got to the head of the line, we discovered that there were barricades across the road, so we made a three-pointer etc.

We called the other car, they had successfully arrived at the restaurant, and were giving us various advice about which roads to try, and we tried one and then we tried another and then we discovered there was another thing that was blocked off and then we went really far east so that we could get around it, and then we were on the south side and that should work, but it didn't, and there were cops everywhere and it was just a mess. Turned out it was a St. Patrick's Day parade. Nevermind that it was really pi day. Anyway, at some point the two of us realized that we weren't getting there in time to have lunch and get back to the dance, so we bailed and went somewhere else that was quick. Bummer. Sunday, there was not a St. Patrick's Day parade, and the two of us and one of the people in the rest of the group who actually liked this place a lot so happy to go again did succeed in going, so I got the beach view experience at this restaurant. And I got my feet wet.

But, since I didn't know that that was going to work out, on Saturday evening I said to some people "I want to go to the beach this evening after dinner" and a couple of them said "sure that sounds like fun let's do that". So we had dinner and we headed towards LAX because there's a giant parking lot on the beach very close to the airport. We dodged some airport traffic successfully and were heading towards the beach when we discovered a road closure with a lot of police activity. Didn't seem like a time for a parade. So we tried to dodge the closed road, and we discovered a giant amount of traffic. There's a lot of hills right near the ocean in some places, so we were able to see down to the actual beach from the road we were on, and there was this enormous crowd and a lot of lights and more police cars which seemed more like security as they didn't have their lights going, and a ton of traffic where we were, apparently trying to find parking and/or get down to the beach area with the crowd, and we were like "we don't really want to be here; we don't know what this crowd is all about, but we just want to walk on the beach", so another three-pointer. After about 15 minutes we got away from the horribleness and found a place where there was a beach, with less parking but we were able to park legally, and I got to get my feet wet on Saturday evening as well as Sunday afternoon. It was extremely foggy, so that contributed to the delay, because you couldn't really go fast even if it wasn't heavy traffic. Fortunately it's not like I had anything else to do that evening.

Here's hoping that traffic is not insane tomorrow morning when I am driving to LAX. There could be some excitement returning the rental car, because they have just opened, and I mean just, it was the first day when I rented my car on Friday, a new consolidated rental car center for the airport. I hope there are signs. I did see some signs when we were returning from the beach, though I'm not planning to go that route, so hopefully it will in fact work out.

I started by visiting my mom's old assisted living place, where I had a nice chat with some of the staff and one of the residents who still remembered me. Everybody was sympathetic to my plight with Claudia in having been denied access to Clyde for the last year of his life and also denied the ability to go to the funeral.

Then I picked up a salad and took it to Bidwell Park, which is a nice park with the Little Chico River running through it where I sometimes took my mom on an excursion. We would either walk slowly with the walker or I would trundle her in the wheelchair around the paths. So I sat on a bench by the river, ate my salad, and then walked on some of the paths.

Finally I drove up to Paradise where Clyde is buried. I had been given instructions on how to find his grave by the cemetery people, who I had called earlier. Instructions didn't quite work, but I wandered around for a while and found him, before I resorted to visiting the office in person.

Most of the headstones in the cemetery are the flat kind. It's odd that be hole that they dug for it is 2 inches larger on each side, so it looks unfinished. I suppose a few years of rain and lawn growth will fix that. It's also very white, and stands out from the others. Again, time will fix that. The engraving looks to me like the standard picture of Multnomah Falls up in Oregon. Not particularly a place I associate with Clyde. Maybe Claudia just picked it out of a catalog because she liked it. Waterfalls are good.



It was still a little early for me to check into my next hotel, so I sat on a bench in the shade and read my book for half an hour. Clyde was in the sun or I might have sat on him. And now I'm writing emails and posting.

In theory I'm supposed to get together with Clyde Jr. this afternoon, but he's in San Francisco for some medical procedures, and he says it's taking forever. So I might not actually get to have dinner with him. Hope he's okay; he didn't tell me what the nature of the issue was.

I had a little adventure trying to charge the electric car I rented, because somehow it failed to charge my credit card, so it stopped charging in the middle. Trying again made it work, so perhaps it's just that I had added a new payment option and somehow the credit card company decided it would decline it the first time and then allow it the second time. Sometimes they do that. But it was annoying because it stopped while I was off buying the salad, and when I returned I was surprised at the fact that it thought it was done.

Today was International Women's Day. There was a thing in Boston Common. Yesterday there was a thing for "stand up for science", which they had a year ago, also in Boston Common. I went to both of these things. One of the speakers at the science thing said "are you pissed that we have to do this again this year?" (Audience yells "yes")

Both of them were only moderately attended; 300-400? I noticed some of the same people at both. Of course I was there also; perhaps people noticed me.

Ken wonders if having all these little protests is actually worth anything. I don't know. It's my retirement activity, so far at least. Anyway, there will be a big deal on March 28 for No Kings and I will go to that also.

I discovered a website called protest.boston, which doesn't have everything, but that's how I discovered these two things. I don't know if there's some better way for me to find things (other than being on Twitter or Facebook or some other thing I don't want to be). Just searching for "protest Boston" doesn't work very well, because it gets news articles about protests six months ago. Even saying "protest Boston March 8" doesn't work.

I rode my bike to the train station on Saturday, but on Sunday I did not get my act together early enough and had to take a car. I blame daylight savings time.

Meanwhile I'm getting ready for a trip to California, where I will go visit my stepfather's grave and walk around Chico for one last time, and then fly down to LA for a square dance.