January, 7, 2006 archives

i had one last walking tour pass from my los angeles conservancy membership, so i decided to go on the city hall walking tour. i had a major brain failure and didn’t crank up the iso setting when i started taking pictures inside, so not as many shots turned out as i would have liked. an excuse to go back!

after the tour, i checked out the downtown arts district farmers market. it seems a little smaller than the one near the library, but they’re just getting restarted after moving to little tokyo.

i also stopped in at the little tokyo branch of the los angeles public library, and it has an incredible interior. but i didn’t take any pictures, because i didn’t want to annoy all the people using the library.

while i was making dinner (and tomorrow’s lunch), i decided to take some pictures. the crust is just some dough from my basic bread recipe. the sauce is also homemade, with a very basic recipe (onions, garlic, whole tomatoes from a can, red wine, salt, pepper, and fennel seed). sausage, mushrooms, and green pepper have been my toppings of choice lately. i’ve been thinking i should probably sauté the mushrooms, but i’ve just been adding them raw so far.

i was out of sauce, which means i had to make some. which means i had to go across the street to get canned tomatoes. but which also means i had to crack open a bottle of wine. woohoo!

the big sleep, the 1978 version, is unsurprisingly not as good as the bogart/bacall incarnation. the setting is 1970s england, apparently before the bra had been invented. this version is more faithful to the book (and actually sees the story to conclusion), but the acting is pretty universally flat, if not bad.

the castle is a goofy little australian film about a family fighting to save its home from an eminent domain land-grab to expand the airport they live next to. but it’s really about the quirky family, and their blind geniality, especially the dad’s.

this completed my full weekend — going on the city hall walking tour, to the los angeles auto show, and finally to the japanese american national museum and the oshogatsu celebration. (oh yeah, and made a pizza.)

the taiko drum performance and rice pounding were both amazing. you aren’t actually supposed to take pictures inside the museum, but i didn’t notice that part of the sign until my second or third trip inside, so i took a couple of pictures of the drums in the exhibit inside.

i’m exhausted (both because of everything i did, and waking up at 4am today), but i hope i can keep coming up with things to pack my weekends with like this. maybe some weekend i won’t do all of it alone.

time to veg out.