To top off my last day at school, I felt my first genuine California earthquake.

After my last class, I went to Big Lots (aka Cheap Shit Emporium). After shopping, I got in the car, made a phone call, then put the key in the ignition and my foot on the brake. Then, the car started wiggling. I didn't know the brake did that ;)

Here in the East LA county library, the Internet tells me it was a 5.3, with an epicenter less than 70 miles from here. Cool! (That's how you know I didn't grow up here. Locals are either nonplussed, or wetting themselves recalling a really destructive quake here in 1994.)

I'm hanging out in the neighborhood until the 8th grade awards assembly at 4pm, but I can't get back on school grounds. It's locked down for the standard earthquake procedure, which is like a fire drill except that you stay outside for some undetermined amount of time waiting for aftershocks.

Rick, in the concrete bunker that is our apartment building, felt nothing :)

And now for something completely different:

Well, I am having a better day than this. Or this.

We had some out-of-town visitors this weekend, and boy did they bring the noise.

During a mere hour and a half in Hollywood, they were treated to a shoplifting, a police car tearing down Hollywood Boulevard at about 80 with its siren on, and what must have been a transplanted New Yorker pounding on the hood of a cab and cursing out the driver (after said pedestrian nonchalantly walked into the crosswalk on a Don't Walk and was nearly squashed by said cab).

On the way back from Hollywood, all of Venice Boulevard was closed down near our apartment because an old car had driven headfirst into, I believe, a telephone pole.

On the freaky animal side of things, we went for a little hike on the unpaved part of Mullholland drive and saw a swarm of bees and a huge-ass (like 2-3 foot) snake.

Welcome to California. It wants to kill you. Have a nice day.