Ke$ha

So, because luck runs in our blood, we recently got a couple of tickets to see Ke$ha perform on Conan.  It may interest some of you to know she looks better in person than on her videos... she should fire somebody about that.

We didn't see the interview, but we were able to travel in time to see her in June as she perform as part of the summer concert series.

Ke$ha has become one third of a joke in our house - yup we remixed the classic rock-paper-scissors (or "ro-sham-bo" if you're so inclined) with Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Ke$ha.

We couldn't bring in phones or cameras, so no pictures :( but we did get some TeamCoco stickers.

They also spent some money and got some fancy fliers to put on the dashboard.

Since we were in the 'hood and it was getting dark we went on down to the Griffith Observatory to see what it's like at night.

It was pretty cool, although I thought the Hollywood sign was lit up at night - it wasn't.

The highlight of going at night is looking through the Zeiss telescope.

Supposedly more people have looked through this telescope than any other in the world and considering the line of people that wanted to take a look through it I believe it.  So being the good tourists we are we waited along with the other interplanetary stalkers and caught a glimpse of Saturn.  What's that you say?  You's like to know more about Saturn?  OK, well did you know that it's basically a star that never became a star and 'if we had a better naming system it would be a called a sub-star.'

All in all it was pretty fun and earlier in the day I got a call from our buddies at KROQ to tell me that I won more stuff (of course) and we'll be going to see Gogol Bordello in concert!  They're opening for System of a Down, but GB will be the reason we're going.  And thus, from the time we won tickets to Rango we have always had tickets for something to look forward to.  Hint, hint, KROQ, we need Weenie Roast and LA Rising tickets!

saturday is a special day

How could we possibly follow up the wonderful day we had Friday?  Well we started by going to the 20th annual Santa Monica Festival.  The festival was pretty fun: we saw Ozomatli in their family friendly reincarnation - Ozokidz, had lots of great food and saw a band that plays a variety of music (to quote the band "Gypsy love songs to Russian lullabies to Serbian ballads to Spanish Copla to French pop to what sounds suspiciously like rock n roll").

First things first, the food:
Indian from the India Jones, blueberry lemonade from the Sweets Truck, yogurt provided by Chobani (mmmm black cherry!), and OF COURSE to top it all off Andrea HAD to get a dirty mint chip ice cream sandwich on double chocolate with grey sea salt cookies from Coolhaus - gross, right?!

 (had to get this sneaky picture of the guy in the hat for obvious reasons)

Can you guess that we were stuffed?

The music:

Ozokidz was pretty entertaining, and it's the first time I heard kids music that didn't make me wish I was deaf. I highly recommend checking them out if you want some fun for everyone tunes.

The one thing I was looking forward to when I saw what was going to be happening at this little shindig was the "Gypsy caravan across old Europa" - AK and Her Kalashnikovs.  Happily, they did not disappoint.

Just as Ozokidz was family-friendly Ozomatli (are Ozomatli not family-friendly?), AK & HK are a family-friendly Gogol Bordello.  They definitely the closest thing I've ever heard to the Gypsy Punks but still different.

It was fun to see people of all ages getting into the music.

I was impressed how well my little camera picked up the music and now that I know about the capabilities of my little buddy I hope I remember to take more video!

Even though we seemed to be here for four hours or so, the day was FAR from over when we left.  After stopping by the great Costco we went home to rest up for the main event: the Dirty Heads at the House of Blues in Hollywood!

It was a really fun show, but the best part was provided by a little boy.

He was probably seven or younger and sat on his, presumably, dad's shoulders in front the whole show.  At one point near the end of the show the Dirty Head's lead singer was talking to the crowd and made some comments about how cool the kid was and how cool the parents were for bringing him to the show.  While it's debatable how "cool" the parents really were for brining this little kid to a reggae concert where there was quite a lot of "funny" smoke in the air, it was pretty cool when the lead singer gave the boy the microphone during the chorus of their "big" song during the encore AND THE KID KNEW THE WORDS!  The audience cheered when the lead singer pointed the boy out, but they ERUPTED when he sang along!

So I guess we found a way to follow up the fantastic Friday we had after all.

PS, here's what part of the field behind the apartment looks like now.

got to get down on friday

Friday means half day and half day means party time!

For this particular party day we planned on doing a little hiking down in the good ol' Orange County - word on the street is some great exercise can be found here accompanied by some fantastic views.  If there is one thing that makes a pilgrimage to the O.C. complete it's a stop at IKEA for lunch.

Now fueled by meatballs we were ready to tackle the treacherous trails that lay ahead.  Aided by google maps on Andrea's droid we found something that was close to where we wanted to be.  After a few U-turns on the PCH we finally found where to park and then we found out they wanted $15 to park so we went to the beach instead.

We started to walk along shoreline but as particular beach isn't very wide we decided to move on to another beach that would give us a better work out - Thousand Steps Beach.

We even found some delightful artwork to photograph ourselves by whilst on our little adventure!

Once we were about to finish our ascent back to the car my calves started burning, so I got a little hike in after all.

With our day all beached up there was only one thing left to do - Pedro's!  This time while sitting and eating I read a review they had posted about their fried chicken burrito and I thought to myself,

"Self, I think I should have ordered that.  It sounds tasty and even I don't especially like chicken."

Not that the fish taco I had was bad, I was just a little hungry still and a burrito probably would have filled me up and the review was making me really want to try it (bravo marketing, bravo!).  Luckily for me they had fried chicken tacos too!  Well I ordered me up one of them thar tacos and boy howdy was it delightful - not quite as good as the fish taco but definitely a close second.

Yeah, that was fun.

just another manic monday

So there I was, minding my own business when all of a sudden I hear an ear-splitting alarm.  It didn't take me too long to figure out that it was the building's fire alarm - which is immensely louder than the puny little smoke detector in our apartment.  It did, however take me a little while to find out that it wasn't just a prank, which I thought it might be.  A little investigative research in the form of sticking my head out the front door and sniffing smoke made my mind go into "what do I need to get out of the apartment?" mode.

I'm a little surprised at how quickly and efficiently I was able to think about and gather our two laptops, documents and camera and get out the door.  I was looking for my phone a shortly before the alarm off so I already knew I didn't know where it was and not to look for it - which saved me a few moments of panicked searching.

As I opened the door, the smell of smoke was intense and when I started to make my way toward the one stairway that I knew about it took no more than 3 steps from the door way to see that the little view of the airport down a corridor was now completely obstructed by a wall of white smoke - and I'm talking a wall that started before the end of the building was visible -yes this was in fact a REAL fire.

Great, so the fire seems to be on the backside of the building and the stairs lead to THE BACKSIDE OF THE BUILDING.  Thankfully I only had to walk all the way around the place to find another stairway by the pool/spa.  First thing I did was walk around the building so I was under our apartment and could use the wi-fi and e-mail Andrea that I was out and was OK (I e-mailed her that I couldn't find my phone and was getting out of the building because of a fire alarm - just in case she tried calling me and was wondering what was going on).

Now I'm not one to be overly paranoid or anything, but as we live by LAX and there was a worry about travel because the termination of Osama I was wondering what in the world was going on.  Further investigative research (walking around the side of the building) revealed that part of the field behind the complex was on fire.  What a relief that a field was in flames and not the airport.

Yes, this guys is ONLY wearing board shorts.  Even being so under dressed he helped out the firefighters with their hoses and even went into the field - STILL WITH NO SHOES - to assist them , so I guess that's OK.

 Palm tree's on fire; you don't see that every day.

 I wish I was thinking about it more but I totally should have been filming this helicopter.  It flew in and dropped a load of water on the palm trees to put them out.  I thought of filming it about two seconds after I got over how cool I thought that was.  I guess that's the kind of service you get when you live right by a fire station and an airport with it's own fire department!

 Fire truck

These firefighters are NOT flocking the palms for Christmas in May, just in case you were wondering because that would be ridiculous

And thus ends the most eventful experience I've had in LA so far.  The fire didn't actually make it to the building thanks to that board-shorts-guy and his quickly calling the fire in.  The only damage we've heard of is that the heat melted some blinds where people had their windows/sliding doors open on the side of the field.  Many were overheard to say that it was a shame because they wouldn't have minded letting this place burn down, I'm sure only partially meaning it.  The scuttle-buzz is that the little inferno started when someone flicked their cigarette out their window into the field and the fire just erupted because the field was so dry.