Our Trip Down to California (and bizarre childhood pictures of Lou Ryan)

` There isn't much to say, so I'll make it brief: We faced torrents of road hail, and I dare not have driven without Ritalin to keep me paying attention to the road! (My ADD has gotten me into accidents before, though for once in my life, I don't seem to have it at of now, which is surprisingly difficult to cope with.)
` Lou and I left after a vigorous workout session at the YMCA in preparation for sitting still during the 24-total-hour drive to Long Beach. The first night we stayed in Oregon at the house of Lou's not-insanely assholish brother, whom I'll call ArkMan.
` We were greeted at the door by a small black and white terrier-mutt, which barked insanely and ran around in an attempt to confuse us while we lugged our things through a treacherous gate that seemed to want to sever our limbs as well as across a fun ice-skating rink in the driveway!
` ArkMan actually lives in the upper part of a garage, strangely enough. The lower part was full of Vespas, which he is famous for, and which I would have taken a picture of if it were not for a small problem (which I'll get to in a minute).
` It turns out that the dog was named Milo and that every time you come in the room, leave and come back in again, he seems to think you're a different person and freaks out!
` After much in the way of ArkMan's sarcastic remarks, our admiring of all the brightly-colored and shiny objects around the room and on the walls, as well as Lou's annoynce with one of The Thin Man movies playing at the time, we eventually got a good night's sleep, woke up when it was still dark, and trucked on down into California.
` I didn't take many pictures because in my experience, my camera could only hold twenty at a time! Understandably, I set the resolution down a notch so that I could at least have about thirty photos of my trip or so.
` Carefully, I chose this view of Mount Shasta and what we call 'Mini-Shasta', which I took from a rest stop. (You might want to click on that to get a better view.)

` Not the greatest quality with that resolution, no. Eventually, we got to Lou's mom's house where we went to a mall to get a few things before our trip. While we were there, thanks to Antonio at Best Buy, I found that the only thing wrong with my camera was that the memory chip - which is the type meant to be in a cell phone anyway - wasn't completely locked in all the way.
` Thanks, Antonio!

` That evening, we looked at a couple of old home movies of Lou. On one of them, he was a long-haired, skinny fourteen year old on a Costa cruise, doing a 'Great Balls of Fire' lip-synch. The lights were flashing, his then-long hair was flailing about wildly, and he was jumping up and down on a dessert cart, pretending to play it like a piano!
` I was highly disturbed. The announcer was right - he was the biggest nutcase I've ever seen!
` Too bad I was interrupted from taking his senior photos - which I can barely believe are his! He looks like a girl! At the same time I looked at them and wanted to run my hands through all that silky, long red hair, which at one point had grown down to his cute little butt.
` *Ahem.*
` Well, I had those photos out, was about to take a picture of the best one, and then Lou's mom informed me that she already had them all scanned into her computer. So, I went onto her computer to find that, apparently, she has a one megapixel scanner! Seriously, I looked at the photos in her computer and they were not only smaller than the originals, but several shadings of colors had been skipped, as in an old video game, giving blocky, solid patches of the same color... well, you know, like this!
` I did, however, think to take this picture - Lou's business card being held on the fridge by a magnet photo of himself as a young and nerdy schoolboy.

` Now, I know this is cheating, but on our stop on the way back from California I also thought to take a picture of this photo, which is one of many I particularly liked - a cast photo from a college production of Oliver (which we also watched video clips from)!

` The little guy in front is actually Lou - the boy on the right is ArkMan, and the boy on the left is the smug, asshole brother. As for the heavily-made-up man-creature who played Fagin, they have no idea who he was, they just know he was good!

` Well, I'm off to the Medeival/Reniassance fair! Tootles!