Clustertruck!

We decided to check out the gourmet food truck fad that is sweeping LA (and, to a lesser degree, many other cities). They usually don't make it out to our neck of suburbia or do so at times inconvenient to boring-married-people-with-a-small-child, but there was a food truck "festival" at the Santa Anita Park racetrack, with twenty of the beasts.

Fail. Twenty trucks and 5000 hungry attendees meant lines that were 2+ hours long and trucks that couldn't keep up with demand. They ran out of stuff and shut down. I spent two hours in line to place an order, waited another hour in vain for the food, and finally left, grumpy and starving. We ended up getting a salad at a sit-down restaurant nearby. No wait.

Burgers al fresco

  

One advantage to living in LA is the practically year-round outdoor dining. At a local gourmet burger shop, we have a warm and sunny lunch in mid-January.

Why don't waiting rooms ever have THIS month's issue?

At the vet. No, really. I'm not sure if this is a real magazine or an (intentional) joke. I'm afraid to Google it to find out.

Sunday in the Park

Griffith Park, that is. We finally got out to one of LA's iconic recreation areas, a big hilly park in the middle of the city. We didn't go to the LA Zoo (I'm told it's almost impossible unless you get there first thing in the morning) or the Griffith Observatory, but we went to an historic carousel and Train Town, and had a nice picnic lunch. In this shot, Ellen and one of her friends are enjoying a miniature train ride.

Birth of a food blogger

She decided she wanted to take a picture of her meal. Is this the start of her career as one of those food-porn bloggers?

(For the record, the mass of unattractive beige is baked chicken schnitzel, spaetzel, and roasted Brussels sprouts. I get four stars out of five on Yelp -- please "like" this review, blah blah blah...)

Toy Story: After Dark

I came home from work and found this scene on the bed. Apparently, I missed a hell of a party.

The Retrospective That Wasn't

It’s mid-August, and I’m writing the retrospective post for January.

I wasn’t planning on doing this. My contribution to this photoblog began to taper off around the end of 2009. In part, that was because I was using Facebook more and more to upload photos and post commentary on my life or things that amused me. But mostly, it was because I wasn’t sure this blog had anything interesting to report.

When I started a Project 365 blog in 2008, it was to take up the challenge to take a picture every day to document my life. The first year became more interesting than intended, when routine was completely disrupted with the loss of my job. 2008 became about the search and the adjustment to unemployment and consulting life. Early in 2009, we made the decision to take a job in California and try to make a life there. The blog in 2009 documented the moving process and the transition to a new way of life.

There wasn’t really a story in 2010. We continued to rent a home in California. Rachel got some part-time work that was out of her field (and paid not that well, to boot). Ellen’s behavior problems posed real challenges in preschool and kindergarten. We felt that we were getting by but not really settling in or making a future. And, as the economic news continued to be bad, it didn’t seem like there was any change to the new status quo coming. 

Our family aspirations are pretty boring – stability, a nice home, friends, family, health, good jobs. Since I was let go from my job in 2008, we haven’t had all of that. We’ve made it through each crisis, but it’s felt like we have been in survival mode for a long, long time. 

There wasn’t much I felt the need to photograph. Routine is boring – get up, go to work, come home, sleep. I wasn’t about to start a running log of my lunches. If Rachel had been able to find a good job in her field, that would have shaken things up, and we would have started planning for the future. But our hope for that outcome was dimming. I figured I’d eventually finish uploading pictures from 2010, write a wrap-up post, and let the photoblog end.

Then, well, this opportunity came along …

Keep reading. 2011 is NOT more of the same!