Hothothot Exciting Times

It's been so damn hot. Seven weeks of hot and the weather people keep promising us a few days of cooler weather, but they always get moved ahead a few days, and we're stuck with hothothot.

Meanwhile, the entire Los Angeles area was majorly distracted by the arrival and flyover of the space shuttle Endeavor on the way to its final home at the California Science Museum, somewhere in or near Exposition Park. I'm sure you've seen footage or photos of the shuttle riding piggyback on the 747. Everyone has a photo, it seems, but me. Even at work, Steve heard it and went outside and saw it (although he snapped no photographs).

I was very dutiful and watched its progress on the television on Friday morning, and when it was scheduled to fly over JPL here in Pasadena, I was out on the street, my iPhone ready, for a shot I could share here. I heard the rumble of the low-flying jet but saw nothing. Feeling rather bummed out, I broke down and took this photo on the way home from grocery shopping on Saturday: it's the Goodyear Blimp hovering over the Rose Bowl during a USC football game. Not quite as stunning as the shuttle, but an unusual sight in most people's skies.

I've been working on the design samples for the Chamber of Commerce Directory and finishing up the work Martha sent me on the ASC handbooks. I've also been working on putting out a weekly e-mail newsletter which links to the blog page on my business' website. There will be no newsletter this week, however, since I quickly realized, after four newsletters, that there's just not enough of interest to put out something on a weekly basis. So the next newsletter will come out on the 1st of October, explaining that it is now monthly, much to the relief of everyone receiving it, I'm sure.

You probably have heard about the older woman in Italy who decided to "restore" a fresco of Christ in her local church and ended up botching the job. The final image was horrific but, as shown here, even the most tragic of results still points out that we are made in his image. (Or so Bob Ross, here, would claim; do you remember his how-to painting show on PBS?).

Steve and I have decided to head to Eureka between Christmas and New Years (his only paid week of vacation at Pearce Plastics) as a much-needed getaway. Testing out the travel websites for that week, it soon became apparent that the only way we could possibly afford the trip was to fly on the actual holidays themselves, when the fares were reasonable.

So we leave on Christmas Day and return on New Year's Eve. In between we don't have much planned except checking out more housing in the area with our Realtor up there. The whole trip was predicated on my sister's belief that we needed to spend a week up there in the winter to make sure we didn't mind the cold weather. I don't think it will be an issue, though, since it's always in the 50s or 60s and rains most of the year. Steve and I both like rain and cool cloudy days, so I don't think there will be a problem. The rain gear will be packed in any case.

That's about it for now. Work on the directory will be starting in earnest in a few weeks, and a lot of the initial work is just building and resizing advertisements to go in the directory. The real build won't commence until November, I think.

Hope this finds everyone well and happy. And now that I'm not churning out a blog and newsletter a week on my website, perhaps there will be more punctual submissions here.