Mitt liv som Tobin

holy molé! check this out!

hmm. just watched catch me if you can with squibb. Check fraud by itself is not interesting, but there's enough depth to the characters to make it a fun movie. I wonder how much of it is true?

I know I haven't mentioned it in a while, but the wiki is still going strong. Check the RecentChanges to see what's been going on. In particular there are some nice campus updates from JennyJoReinhart, and AlexStorer has created something really great: BerkeleyGuides, with nascient guides to San Diego, Houston, and Chicago. Moreover, there is a growing database of SummerPrograms. I hope all of you who are out doing something like an REU, or have done them in the past, will add to it.

I thought 11.5 hours had to be a new record for the SF - LA drive, but then I remembered the time that Chris, Toyoko, James, and I were all squeezed into the Golf and driving back after thanksgiving. Interstate five was slowed to a crawl with the post-thanksgiving traffic and the slowness was driving me crazy. With the help of Chris's goading, I was inspired to turn off five to zoom off onto some crazy backroad (I believe "This is what we call the 'illusion of progress'" were my words) that would connect us to the 101. Some ten hours later we arrived in Berkeley, after various oddball stops, such as in SLO to visit/wake up shamster and bobolly and for donuts at the wonderful twenty-four hour donut shop there ("Late night or early morning?" is the clerk's friendly greeting).

ANYWAY. My crazy craigslist adventure turned out to be all that I had hoped. The first passenger had warned that he had "a few boxes," and, emphatically, "BUT NO FURTNITURE!" I was already surprised by the amount of stuff he had piled up in front of his apartment when I stopped by to pick him up. "Only six more boxes!" he said in a voice I mistook for irony but which actually was understatement. Jack certainly lucked out in getting a ride from a craigslister with a huge, almost entirely empty van.

Then there was a couple from the City who barted over to Berkeley to meet me, and who wanted to go "anywhere in LA." They were at the start of a three-week Grand Hitchhiking Adventure, with their first selected destination Deek Creek hot springs. ("You've heard of it?!") They invited me along, and had I not had work to go to and the entire contents of someone's apartment in the van, I just might have gone along. It was a fun ride and they were all interesting people. Jack and I independently decided that Sarah reminded us of Lola from Run Lola Run, and then we had to explain that this was actually a compliment. A police cruiser tailed us as we drove through the Military-Industrial lands of El Segundo in search of fuel; and while searching for Jack's friend's apartment on the UCI campus in the dead of night another cop had cause to drive up in his cruiser, shine his big spotlight at us and yell "get out of here!" in a menacing voice; apparently us recent-college-grad types are Not Welcome in this town. (Being awake at 3:00am in Irvine might itself constitute Probable Cause.)

Sarah and Keith planned to sneek-a-camp somewhere and hitch a ride out 15 towards Vegas in the morning. The chose Ortega Highway as a good spot to camp and to hitch a ride towards Elsinore. I told them about the hot springs there, but didn't mention the murders or the mountain cats; I hope that doesn't count as irresponsible.

I dropped them off on 74, then drove home over new streets through neighborhoods ("Starting in the low $500,000's") that didn't exist last year, over the Oso Parkway bridge. the spatious streets with tree-lined meridians with sound walls and zero other traffic, and back into Mission Viejo and finally down my street, noticing that the number of monster trucks parked outside houses might now exceed the number of minivans, but prehaps slightly fewer American flags than in my August 2002 return.

• a year ago: leaving oscar wilde (the first time).