[Eds. Note: Apologies for this just coming out today, it's been germinating in the unpublished items all week.]
As I am sure most everyone who reads this blog is aware, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was released last week. I really wanted to see it and so did my dad, so we made plans to go on Saturday morning. I checked the show times and saw that the first one was at 9:30 a.m.; in an effort to miss the large crowds later in the day we opted for the early show. The theatre was still pretty busy that early - about two-thirds full – including a lot of families. The film was great, of course, I don’t think that you can go wrong with a Spielberg/Lucas combo. I will say this, there were some parts of it that I thought were a little implausible, even for an Indiana Jones flick, but the overall story was still entertaining. I totally didn’t realize that Cate Blanchett was the Russian doctor until I saw the credits – what a chameleon of an actress she is. Overall, 4/5 stars. Dad and I then traveled up to Long Beach for lunch. Dad had a friend who opened a pizza / sandwich shop in Downtown LBC on Broadway and Pine (Broadway Pizza). It turned out to be really good, so if you happened to be in the Long Beach area and are looking for lunch, stop in.
After fun and frivolity in the morning it was time to head over to church to say goodbye to our current video control room. It marked the last weekend in that space and we will be moving into our new control centre with side-by-side control rooms and a its own green room this weekend – it promises to be an exciting next few weeks as we settle in and learn all the new equipment. I’ll try to get some pictures up in the coming week.
Sunday was a pretty lazy day. At church we had our first training session on the new cameras - we’ll see how the trainings went in the next couple of weeks. Sharon, Becky, Kurt and I then went to lunch at another Long Beach restaurant, Acapulco’s. I had eaten there once before and once or twice at the one in Anaheim, but no one else had. The times that I eaten there before seemed fine. This time was not. Becky went with the brunch buffet. Sharon, Kurt and I all looked at the special menu and decided on the same thing – the Taquitos Grande - which looked really good. All of the food, even that from the buffet, seemed to be loaded with grease. Sharon’s taquitos literally had grease dripping off of them on to the table. In short, it was disgusting! I’m not sure of it was just this Acapulco’s or what, but I know we won’t be going back. After lunch it was back to Sharon’s house, where Kurt, Becky and I played some croquet out on the side lawn. Later that evening, we were joined by Sally, Christie and Blair and enjoyed a lovely dinner at Buca di Beppo.
A little precursor explanation to what we did on Monday, Memorial Day…a couple of weeks ago I had mentioned to Sharon that there are a lot of attractions and diversions in southern California that we had all yet to see. On Saturday night we decided to make a list, one of the items on that list was the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. So on Monday morning, Sharon, Kurt, Becky and I hoped in the car and made the trek northward. We arrived at about 10:30 and made our way inside. I will not recount the whole library step-by-step because you really should see it for yourself, but we did see the exhibit with Mrs. Reagan’s dresses, several of President Reagan’s letters and materials from his gubernatorial and presidential campaigns. And, of course, the crowning jewel of the library the 707 used as Air Force One while President Reagan was in office. It is pretty amazing to see the technology that was available to the president even back then. The battery was dead in my camera, so I will have to defer the pictures to Becky. On our way back we stopped by UCLA and drove through the campus (another item on our list), stopped for lunch and then made our way back home.
