Hair.

I'm generally not a girly kind of girl, but I do a lot of things with my hair. And when I say "a lot", I'm really not kidding: it has, at some point or another, literally been every color of the rainbow (or at least parts of it have been) except white and every length between almost 3 feet and just over 3 inches.

So, when I moved to LA, I had what was then a pretty normal, somewhere-between-chin-and-shoulders, some-color-between-red-and-blonde style going on. Then on one bright, sunny, probably near-100-degree day, I decided to go hiking in Griffith Park. If you've been reading this blog, you know that the phrase "Griffith Park" should be prefaced by the word "misadventure", and if you know me very well, you probably also know that I'm not the most coordinated person in the world. I ended up hitting my head on a tree, and of course it was a pine tree with a big bit of sticky sap on it.

I turned to Google: since pine sap apparently cannot be easily removed with shampoo, and since I'm the type of person to choose the quickest, easiest, and most importantly, simplest (see: Murphy's Law) option available to me, I decided that the best course of action would be to cut it out. The only problem was that I didn't have money for a professional hairdresser, but I had scissors, right?

I ended up cutting the sap glob out of my hair, which left an awkward chunk on the side, so I chopped the rest of it off to match. This resulted in my hair being very short, and for a few days after I cut it, looking very much like it had been blindly attacked with scissors. But, as my hair does, it managed to look cute after a couple weeks - in fact, the girl working at the $4000-sparkly-purse-store (right around the corner from the $284,000-handcrafted-from-unicorn-horn-watch-store) was the one who used the word "cute".

Since I can't leave my hair alone for more than a month, I decided to dye it red again. I went down to the drugstore to pick out a shade of red that hopefully wouldn't fade out in two weeks' time. As fate would have it, the L'Oreal Feria "Power reds" was on sale and I had a coupon! I bought it, figuring that it looked like the best candidate for "not fading out".

So I mixed up the dye and put it on. Now, I've never actually tried to dye my hair with blood before, but if I was to ever become a serial killer and decide that would be a fun idea, putting this dye on was exactly what I imagine dying my hair with blood would be like. Not only was it the right shade of dark, opaque red, but there was some sort of exothermic reaction going on that made it warm, and I was wearing some of those blue nitrile gloves that I had swiped from a lab. The only thing that was off was that of all the colors that bloodstains can be, bright pink isn't quite one of them, although salmon, grey, brown, and even a kind of greenish shade are possibilities.

If you've dyed hair before, you probably have read the part where it says to put the dye on unwashed hair. In the excitement, I had entirely forgotten that the reason my hair was unwashed was because when I tried to turn the shower on earlier, there hadn't been any hot water. So, when it was time to wash the dye out and I turned on the shower again, I suddenly realized that what I had just done was probably not a smart idea. As it turned out, there had been a maintenance person desperately trying to fix the problem all day, and with no success, but I figured if he'd been at it all day, he'd have to be close to fixing it, right? An hour later, still no hot water, and it's been in for WAY too long, so I decide to suck it up and rinse it out in the freezing cold shower. Cold water, aside from being painfully unpleasant to shower in, also happens to cause dyes and stains to set into things, whereas hot water usually makes them fade.

So, after leaving the dye in for 3x as long as I should have and rinsing it out in a way that made it brighter, what the box described as "auburn" turned out to be something on the border of "blood red" and "magenta".


(imagine this in the sunlight, so it's more intense and more magenta-ish)

Despite this incident, there was one awesome thing that happened: I was riding a bus, and sitting across me was an adorable, rather flamboyant teenager with blue hair. When the person sitting next to me got off the bus, he got up and sat down next to me. We didn't need to say anything like "nice hair" - we just looked at each other, and smiled, and went back to listening to our respective mp3 players and happily being different than everyone else on the bus.

So guess what I'm going to do over winter break, since I'll have weeks for it to fade back to a work-acceptable color?

I'M GOING TO DO IT AGAIN! Only, with warm water this time...

Exploring LA!

So, last week, I decided to take some time to explore the city. I started out by going to Santa Monica beach. I'd never been to the Pacific ocean before, but I was of the impression that it would generally be like the Atlantic Ocean. Actually, I haven't even been in the Atlantic that much, so 90% of my beach experience up to this point involved me frolicking in the warm, shallow waters of the Gulf Coast. So, when I visited the Pacific, I was surprised by a couple things.

First off, the water temperature was COLD! At the moment, the water off Santa Monica beach is a balmy 59 degrees. In addition, you can't walk out 50 feet and still be waist-deep here, but only a few feet from the water line you're knee-deep, and people were shark-fishing off the end of the pier (I didn't see anyone actually catch a shark, but they were using 10-inch-long fish as bait). Plus, there are lovely mountains along the coast.



Tuesday was the second Tuesday of the month, which means it was free admission day at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art! This is a fantastically large museum, consisting of multiple buildings, and it houses an impressive art collection. They also have a "Children's Gallery", which is really for people of all ages, and a room in the Children's gallery contains supplies for the general public to make their own drawing or painting. It was pretty awesome to see an 80-year-old man at one table painstakingly working on something while at another table a dad helped his toddler girl finger-paint. My favorite parts of any art museum, though, are the ancient art exhibitions. The LACMA was no different, as they had ancient art from all kinds of different cultures. My favorite piece was a calendar wheel - if I had to carve one of those, there's no way I would've made it go even as far as 2012!



Later that week, someone recommended that I look around the Echo Park neighborhood. This is an almost painfully trendy little area, but as I came out of a used-book store, I saw this next to it!



Yes, that does say "Echo Park Time Travel Mart". Yes, if you walk inside, it sells everything from medieval helmets to "dinosaur eggs" to posters encouraging proper robot self-maintenance, or would that be robot hygiene? But, things get even cooler: The "Time Travel Mart" is actually a source of funding for a non-profit tutoring center, which runs out of the spacious back part of the building.

Then, on Saturday, I took the bus up to the observatory. Since I've already been there, I decided to take a hike instead, and right off the parking lot was a sign for the Mount Hollywood trail. I walked along it for a little while, saw warning signs about rattlesnakes, mountain lions, and rattlesnakes again, but fortunately didn't encounter any of those animals. From that high, it was painfully obvious that there was a temperature inversion going on, literally blanketing LA in smog. Here's a photo of Griffith Observatory with the smoggy Los Angeles skyline behind it:



Last but not least, as I was waiting at the observatory for the bus back, I noticed a humminbird. Then, another, and another. It turns out that there were at least six of them hanging around the area. It was hard to get a clear shot of them flying, although my camera's ISO 3200 setting came in really handy here, but I got some beautiful shots of them resting on branches.



That's pretty much it. I have a volunteer position at an animal rescue as of now, so I've got something to do other than wander around town and take photos and post them on this blog. On another note, I wound up getting a tiny bit lost in Beverly Hills today, and wound up walking by City Hall and down Rodeo Drive - the amount of wealth on display was mind-boggling. For a second I thought "Hey, lots of stores in a small area, this would be a good place to job-hunt" but then I figured that I'd need to be wearing fancy clothes and heels just for them to give me a job application.

Switchfoot, Tesla Coils, and Rogue Vampire Hunters.

Let's start out by saying that I've been trying to see Switchfoot in concert for years, but on at least 3 separate occasions I've come within hours of going to a show and not being able to swing it at the last minute. At some point it started being less about me liking their music and wanting to see them live (although that still held true) and more about how I simply needed to prove that I *could* make it to one of their shows. Even if that involved hiking a mile into Griffith Park to get the tickets and nearly getting eaten by a mountain lion after the show (OK, that may be a bit of exaggeration).

So, last night, I caught the shuttle bus to the observatory into the park, and persuaded the driver to stop at the Greek Theatre. If you've never been there, let me describe it to you: It's an open-air theater, with the stage shaped like the front of the Parthenon, in a dip on the east side of a mountain, so that the seats are basically going up the slope of the hills and you're shielded from the sunset. There are trees and stuff coming right up to the edges of the seating area, and it's just gorgeous. Here's a photo:

The show starts out with some band who I have never heard of before (and whose name I had already forgotten). They were OK. Then Switchfoot starts their set, and they put on an amazing show. The lead singer, Jon Foreman, has a wireless mic, and he's jumping down from the stage, walking through the crowd, climbing on seats, climbing on railings, climbing on amps, climbing on and jumping off of anything else he can find, while singing. It was a really high-energy show. Afterwards, I get in line and get my copy of "Nothing is Sound" autographed =)

After Switchfoot, the Goo Goo Dolls are on. I'd seen them before at their July 4th show in Buffalo and I figured nothing they could do would top that, and it was getting kind of late, and I needed to catch the last shuttle bus back from the observatory. The only hitch in this plan was that it's getting pretty dark, so I can't find a sign for the shuttle bus stop near the theater, and I'm not sure there is one at all, so the only logical alternative is to walk up to the observatory and catch it from the stop up there. After staying for a couple songs, I take off up the road.

Just past the parking area, I notice some twigs snapping. Startled, I look over, only to see a tiny little deer with two even tinier fawns. Adorable, but it makes me realize that there were animals in this park. I continue to walk up the side of the road. It's quiet, and relatively empty, with a kind of cliff with brush on top on one side (the right side, which I'm on) and a sharp drop-off on the other. As I'm walking, I think I hear a twig snap on the top of the cliff above me. I look up, and don't see anything. Maybe 20 seconds later, I hear some leaves rustle, and again don't see anything, so I continue walking although some kind of primal "You're being stalked!" instinct is starting to set off alarm bells in my head. Then, another 20 to 30 seconds after that, I notice a few small stones sliding down the side of the cliff. It's at exactly this point that I remember that there are mountain lions in California, and they live in mountains, and I'm walking through mountains in the dark.

I panic, and move to the other side of the road faster than I knew was possible, figuring that a mountain lion probably would only want to jump down for its food, not up an embankment and over a guardrail, or all the way across almost 4 lanes of road - although they're animals, they've at least got a basic understanding of gravity. I don't see anything else following me for the rest of the trip, although since it got a bit hilly on both sides of the road I'm now dodging cars because I'm refusing to walk anywhere except the middle of the road. Fortunately, later went online and didn't unearth any evidence of a mountain lion being seen in the park recently, so it likely was a curious deer or coyote or bobcat.

So, I finally make it up to the observatory without becoming a late-night snack for some carnivore. There's a spectacular view of all of Los Angeles (and probably everything for 30 miles) from there. I managed to get a lovely picture of downtown:


I stop on the lawn and look at Jupiter through a random telescope, but it's quite blurry - being on a hilltop on one side of LA, there's naturally an entirely obscene amount of light pollution there, and I can't even see all of the stars in the Big Dipper (although I can see enough to make out that it's there, and since I'm at a different latitude the angle looks really weird). Not at all like the observatory back home where you have to turn off your headlights at the turn-off from the main road, a couple hundred yards from the parking lot, which is maybe another 100 yards from the observatory itself, and there are thousands of stars and the Milky Way is all glittery. Frustrated with this, I go in an wander around, only to find a guy demonstrating a Tesla coil that's inside a Faraday cage.

If you're reading this and don't know anything about Tesla Coils or Faraday cages, let me explain what you need to know: There was a guy named Nikola Tesla, and he was basically the 1900 version of Da Vinci (ie, probably a time-traveling mad scientist if half of what he claimed was true). Anyways, Tesla invented a coil that was super-awesome and makes LOADS of lightning. A Faraday Cage was invented by Micheal Faraday, and it prevents lightning from getting out and radio waves or anything like that from getting in.

Anyways, the Tesla coil produces lightning, but the guy demonstrating it says he can only press the button for a few seconds a couple times an hour to prevent it from overheating. He also says that the setup is so old Tesla himself had seen it. Which is PURE AWESOMENESS!

Then, as I'm waiting for the shuttle bus back, I notice the "Hollywood" sign on a hill nearby. So, I take a couple long exposure shots - this one I'm super proud of because it was a 5-second exposure with NO tripod!


I catch the shuttle back with no problems, but that's still not the end of the entertainment. As I'm waiting for the train, I notice a guy walking through the station. He's wearing a long-sleeved black shirt, black fingerless gloves, black cargo pants, black combat boots, a black backpack, a black beanie, and in addition to all that he's got a black eyepatch over one eye. The only non-black thing he's wearing is a large, shiny, simple cross necklace. Since I've maybe watched a little too much Angel, all I can think is "Whoa, rogue vampire hunter!" Then, at the next stop, I see another man out the window, also dressed all in black. Only, this guy doesn't have an eyepatch or cross - he's got a scarf or something wrapped around his face so that only his eyes are showing, making him literally look like a ninja.

That was how yesterday went. I'm ending up with endless material for this blog, although in the future I will try to avoid becoming a set of toothpicks for a large carnivore.