decidedlyodd

It’s been a while since I last posted. I guess the business of the holidays lead me to forget about writing here.

Anyhow, this year’s trip to southern California for Christmas was probably the shortest one I’ve done in a long time. I flew out on Sunday afternoon from Seatac and came back Tuesday night. On my way in, I was able to get a $50 upgrade to first class which I took. It’s nice to have the extra space, a lower chance of screaming children and faster security.

While I originally planned to drive to the airport and park my car there, I instead decided to take the bus in and taxi it back. The bus ride there was relatively uneventful although the traffic between I-5 and the airport was pretty bad. It took at least 20 minutes to travel that short distance in the stop-and-go traffic. Strangely, once inside the airport the security line near the B gates was the shortest I had ever seen. I think there were 2 or 3 people in front of me in line for the checkpoint, which meant there was virtually no wait at all. As always seems to be the case with Alaska, the plane ran over an hour late. Still, I made it to Orange County safe and sound the drove out to my brother’s house in Ontario before it was too late. My brother, his fiance, my other brother, my parents and I all grabbed dinner at the Marie Callendar’s near my brother’s house. Afterwards, we hung out for a bit before I decided to head back to my hotel in Placentia.

I was awoken the next morning by the maid pounding on my door at 7:55am. I’m sorry, but that’s just too early. I hadn’t seen a do not disturb sign to put on the door, but later discovered there were refrigerator like magnets for that purpose that could be affixed to the door. I shouted out to come back later and of course the maid came back at 9am. More shouting and she came back at 10am (!) at which point I yelled out that I didn’t need anything. By then, there was no way I was going to get back to sleep to finish my night’s sleep so I got up, wrapped my gifts and headed to my grandpa’s house where we did the usual family stuff.

That night, my friend Chris (lives in San Francisco but visits family in Orange County every year too) and I went to a gay bar in Garden Grove called Frathouse. Despite the website’s claim, it would be a stretch to call the place a “club”. It was basically a divey bar with some regulars and a pool table. For the most part, it was low key. Chris and I grabbed a drink and caught up after not having seen in each other in quite a while. The highlight of the evening was when some drunk dude who only had like 3 teeth hit on me by telling Chris something like “How lucky are you to have such a hot man!”. Uh, ya. Compliments are always nice even if they come from strange, toothless drunk I suppose.

After finishing our drinks and game of pool, we headed over to The Brit on Broadway in Long Beach. The place was pretty quiet being Christmas Eve and all, but I liked the environment and the crowd. It wasn’t quite Chris’s crowd, but I think I’m more into the whole low key, scruffy 20-something crowd and less into the plastic WeHo crowd than him. On our way out, we walked by the Mine Shaft and the Falcon. I didn’t realize there were sections of Long Beach with clusters of gay bars as I was always under the impression that everything was pretty spread out. Granted, I know very little about Long Beach so I’m not sure where I got that idea anyways. I definitely liked what little I saw of the bar scene there in comparison to West Hollywood with its plastic people and $8 bottles of beer. We didn’t stay out terribly late. In fact, I think we left around 12:30.

The next day started early for me since I left to drive down to San Clemente at about 8:45am. I visited Beth for a couple hours at her house where I also chatted a little with her mom. We then drove down to the pier to walk around and chat some more, before I headed back to Kevin’s house in Ontario for present opening and playing Wii with my family. After that, we went back to my grandpa’s house for an afternoon Christmas dinner after which I quickly headed to the airport to catch my flight home. Partly because I was in a rush and partly because taking the 55 freeway south to the airport exits you directly into the airport, I forgot to fuel up my rental car. When the guy informed me that it was going to be $6.99/gallon, I drove around looking for cheaper gas. Still, I got to my gate in plenty of time. The flight was even on time too.

Arriving in Seattle, I called Yellow Cab to send a taxi to pick me up since I didn’t feel like waiting to take the 174 bus at night back home. I’m still avoiding the wasteful, greedy, bullshit STITA taxi monopoly. See, there’s a taxi stand at the airport but only that one cab company is allowed to use it. Other taxis aren’t generally allowed to pick passengers up at the airport. Moreover, STITA doesn’t seem to drive anybody *to* the airport because they’re not a general purpose taxi company. At the same time, all the other taxi companies in Seattle are driving passengers to the airport, only to return back to the city without passengers. There is fortunately a loophole though where another company can pick you up if you call and explicitly ask for a pick up. Even then, they can only pick you up in the departure drop off area. The driver I’d got seemed to have just dropped a passenger off when he picked me up. When I told him I was going to Capitol Hill he got really excited probably since that puts him right back into a busy area with lots of potential fares.