Visit random California city. Get smashed. Survive hangover. Repeat.

Seriously, it almost seems like that's all we do here.

Anaheim, January '03: Get trashed in my hotel room with 20 of our "closest friends". Go to Disneyland with a hangover.

San Diego, January '03: Drink a good bit poolside at the Hilton. Same friends.

San Francisco, January '03: Drink too much in my hotel room with Hunter, Obi, Reagan, and Larn.

GDC, San Jose, March '03: Free drinks at the conference, and way too much wine at Bucca di Beppo with Hunter, Larn, and Obi.

Our Place, 2 weeks ago: Larn and Obi drive up from San Jose. Major drunkenness across 2 apartments.

Los Angeles, This Weekend: Downed a bottle of wine by myself while everyone else got plenty drunk on margheritas, Smirnoff, and white russians. Severe hangoverness.

This weekend, we'll be travelling to Pleasant Hill to get drunk with our co-workers. Good times. Oh, and maybe San Fran with Larn. 2 cities in one weekend! Am I up to it?

Thing is, we don't "go sightseeing" or "go clubbing" or anything. We just change the city the apartment or hotel is located in, and we get drunk.

Sooner or later we're going to need to stop being hermits. We're really well-traveled hermits. That's all.

Regardless - If it wasn't for all of the real-life crap, this would all be pretty fun.

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No progress, no progress. Still gonna be unemployed. No response from my program director, and it's been nealy 2 weeks. Fuck him, and fuck it all.

Writing lots of catalog text at work.

My job title might as well be "writer" - which is really funny, because in the list of things I'd call myself, writer is not one of them.

(my 3rd grade teacher Ms. Tickel would beg to differ, but that's beside the point.)

But it's still fun.

Whoa. The internet radio station I'm listening to just started playing Vertical Horizon: Everything you Want.

Hello sophomore year?

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LA was fun, when we weren't hung over or somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Northern California.

It's exciting just to go there. As someone who, like most of the population of the world, entertains daydreams of running away and becoming an actress, you just feel like you're right where you need to be. We saw the Warner Brothers studios - they look just like they did in Animaniacs. :)

And our friends are right there - a few blocks from the Hollywood Bowl and Studio City. Awesome. Lucky them.

We spent most of Saturday at the Walt Disney Company Picnic. (Our friends intern for Imagineering, so they count.) They rented out this entire ranch, and there were billions of people there. This thing was HUGE.

We're talking the whole disney company - not just the parks or anything.

It's funny seeing a company like Disney try to be "normal".

Executive: We should have a company picnic. It's what companies do.
Assistant: Sir, we have thousands upon thousands of employees.
Executive: No problem. We'll rent out a ranch. Let's make it pirate-themed - you know, like Pirates of the Carribean, only with Mickey. We'll get real pirates.
Assistant: Very good, sir.
Executive: Oh, and we should sell pins. That's what we do. We're Disney.

They did have pirates (imported from local Ren Faires), and they did have pins. They also had a ferris wheel and one of those big wave swingers and inflatables and a really horrible cover band. And lots of food.

It was pretty fun. But man, did I wear the wrong shoes. I thought it was going to be on a beach, not in the middle of the forest.

But we played lots of Dutch Blocks, this weird rope-pull game, with the pirates, one of whom was the female heavyweight shotput champion of the world, or something. Seriously.

Saturday night, as previously mentioned, we bought copious amounts of alcohol and played poker for pretend money (we forgot it was pretend after a drink or 2 anyway) and talked and stuff. It was much fun.

Smirnoff Black Ice? I was skeptical, but it's even better than the original. How is that possible? It's really like water - but really tasty water.

I smell some drunk evenings ahead.

I managed to prevent getting drunk-depressed for awhile - by the time I did, I had convinced myself I was going to get sick (I didn't) and camped out in the bathroom.

Hope I didn't miss much.

Yesterday we just went to Hamburger Hamlet across from Groeman's Chinese Theater (it was a site of repeated visits during our Hollywood stint in January). There was a Storm Trooper in front of Groeman's - I'm not entirely sure why.

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If you want to know what long-distance driving is like around here, well, check this out. Very exciting stuff. :P

On the way home, Hunter accidentally took a wrong turn when Route 5 split off from Route 99. We didn't notice, though, until we were already northeast of home, when we had started out south and west. I think we were almost at Lake Tahoe. That was stressful, but we got home after a 2-hour detour.

And that brings me to the subject of the Best Western Map.

When we were in Elko, Nevada, I was checking us into the Best Western there, and I noticed out of the corner of my eye a "California/Nevada/Hawaii" map [just in case I want to take a scenic and mildly soaked drive to Hawaii], and thinking it might be useful, tossed a copy into my bag.

That map has saved our asses countless times.

I'm not a map conniseur or anything, but it's really handy and has clearly marked detail maps of most of the downtown areas around here. It's awesome. Saved us in Emeryville, saved us to San Jose, and saved us on the way home from LA. I can't fathom what we'd have done if I hadn't grabbed it, because we have nothing else that comes close.

Thanks, Best Western, for your totally free awesome map.

We'd be in Oregon by now if it were'nt for you.