Dreams, Moments, Travels
This is Mark Shimer. I hired Mark for his first graphics assignment following his graduation from a Phoenix Technical School.
We are meeting Mark in Little Tokyo, Downtown Los Angeles, for some Shabu Shabu and shopping at Kinokuniya Book Store, maybe even a walk down 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. Mark is now a recent nominee for a Technical Emmy – congrats, Mark. Part of the weekend was spent visiting my father, who was ill at home, but thrilled with our visits.
We stayed overnight at the Regency Inn in Huntington Beach (later changed to Best Western Surf City), which is where we spent our first night in America when we came over from Germany to get married back in 1994. So, while this woman might look kinda nerdy at other times, at the ocean, she looks downright sexy and cute.
This is the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda, California. This bulletproof Ford Lincoln was built in the 1960s and was used by Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan.
This is also the final resting place of our 37th president, with his wife, Pat Nixon, on his right. With this visit, it was time to leave for our 376-mile drive home to Scottsdale, Arizona.
We left Friday night in order for us to get an early start this morning as we are meeting up with our friend Mark Shimer again, this time for a visit to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. This is our first visit to this aquarium after our long infatuation with the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
There are some beautiful exhibits here, and I can imagine that if I were a kid on a field trip, I’d fall in love with all things ocean.
I guess this finally answers the question once and for all if anyone else was wondering if fish had lips.
Jellies must be a universal display item in aquariums due to the weightless otherworldly floating tranquility they embody. Add some ambient music and mute the sounds from the rest of the aquarium, and the visitor nearly mind-melds with these gelatinous Medusozoas.
Before those jellyfish were allowed to get their tentacles into our brains, we managed to escape for a visit across the water at the Queen Mary. From here, we parted company with Mark and started making our way back across Los Angeles.
Our first stop was at the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, where we focused on visiting the gardens.
From there, it was off to Puddingstone Lake at the Frank G. Bonelli Regional Park in San Dimas. When I was a kid, and my primary means of transportation was a bicycle my friends and I would pedal the 8 miles up this way to go fishing. This was a lot closer than the 15 miles each way when we’d push our bikes up into Los Angeles Crest Mountains north of Azusa or the 31 miles down Hacienda Blvd to Beach Blvd and Huntington Beach when we were feeling seriously adventurous. During our visits to L.A., I try to share with Caroline some of the sights I grew up with at the same time, trying to discover the places I never saw.
My father, who is now shorter, just had his left leg amputated though it was taken off below the knee, so it is longer than the right. He’s been on the “chipping away” plan with doctors starting by taking toes when gangrene set in years ago and then a bit more foot, the whole foot, the leg up to the knee, and then over the knee. At this point, you might wonder why he doesn’t start dealing with his diabetes in some sensible way. Well, first, he would have had to stop smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Once he finally accomplished that feat ten years after having his first and second heart attacks, he felt that his diabetes could be kept at bay with a strong will. Now considerably shorter than the six-foot frame he once had, he’s still not ready to deal with the ravages of diabetes and would rather live in denial. Visiting my father is difficult.
This is the World Famous Oki-Dog at 860 N. Fairfax Ave in Los Angeles, California. When I was an angst-ridden punk rocker in the late ’70s, I used to go to their original location on Santa Monica Blvd and get their pastrami burrito and fries for a few bucks, and both were enough to feed two or three people. The pastrami burrito is one of the weirdest concoctions ever: it is made of two massive overlapping tortillas, grilled peppers, onions, and a mound of pastrami; cover that with chili, pickles, and mustard and there you go: a grease bomb. I introduced Caroline to this kind of indulgence back in 1991 on her first visit to the United States, probably within her first 48 hours in America.
Family from left to right: Mike and Penny Knezetic, me, Ann, and Woody Burns. And in the front row, Sarge’s butt (Woody’s dog), John Wise (my father), and his wife Diana. We were meeting at Ihop in Calabasas, California. This was the last time I saw my Aunt Penny, as by the time Caroline and I visited Buffalo, New York, later this year, she was in a nursing home.
While we were here at Siggraph for two days, apparently, I didn’t shoot anything yesterday. Siggraph is a computer graphics trade show that is most appealing to those in the film industry. Because we are in love with computer graphics for the sake of art, we decided to come over from Phoenix to check things out. The Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics holds its show yearly, not always in California. This was the second most attended conference held by the group; this year, over 42,000 people attended. Two years earlier almost 49,000 people were in attendance. During the conference, we had a peek into the future, with many of the displays focusing on cyberspace, while on the conference floor, over 300 vendors showed us everything from 3D graphics software to virtual reality gloves. The 21st century promises to lead humanity into the machine.
With no recollection of exactly what this is we are looking at, I just remember that it was astonishing at the time I saw it. Computer graphics have been a large part of our lives for the past ten years, starting with a Commodore Amiga, Deluxe Paint, and TurboSilver, which became Imagine in 1990.