Dore and I had a fun, but really tiring weekend. On Saturday, we went out to Magic Mountain with our neighbors, Ryan and Adrienne. He works at Google, and they were doing a private party that let us get into the park for a reduced rate and stay until midnight.
What none of us knew is that Magic Mountain’s definition of “private” is pretty loose. This party felt private in the same way a celebrity sex tape is private. As in, not very.
But the crowds did die down from horrendous to only mildly atrocious, so that was something. Still, waiting in line for 30 minutes — no matter how good the ride — just doesn’t seem like a good use of my time anymore. In part it may be that I have outgrown the excitement of roller coasters (it’s hard for me to get scared when I know how much safety factor is built into the system). But I also think  that traveling has made me realize that, while the thrills may not be quite as great, you can have more fun hour after hour just cruising around a town popping into various attractions, talking to people, and getting delicious tastes of everything in sight. On the whole it’s usually cheaper, too.
But despite my premature descent into curmudgeondom we did actually have a really fun time. Dore and I finally ran out of energy about 11pm, and headed home and to bed.
We slept in nice and late on Sunday. We lazed about the house for a while, and then decided to go on a small outing to the library. We took the bus down, which I’m finding to be a pretty decent form of transportation, if seemingly always a few minutes late.
When we got down to downtown Santa Monica, we took a detour to find lunch. We ended up finding a really nice cafe that had great sandwiches and even offered gluten-free bread, which was really nice for Dore. (We’re actually finding that Dore’s being on a gluten-free diet is relatively easy to deal with, even at restaurants. Still, it is nice to find accommodations sometimes.)
After lunch we finished our trip out to the library. Dore hadn’t been there yet, so it was fun to show here around. I eventually drifted up to the photography section, and Dore looked at some craft and health books.
We had planned to visit the craft store after the library, but we both ended up being so tired from the previous day that we decided to head back. Just in time, too. I was nearly exhausted by the time we got back. A big glass of water and some tea perked me up, though, so we decided to go on one last adventure for the day: a trip to the animal shelter.
Recently, we’ve been kicking around the idea of getting another cat to keep Mochi company, but aren’t sure whether we want to take that on right now. But we figured that at least we can always go hang out with the kitties for a while, just to see if there’s an offer we can’t refuse!
We ran into a couple of pretty adorable cats at the shelter, which seemed to be really well run. All of the staff were super nice, and the cats seem to be living pretty comfortably. It was a bit sad to see how many had been living there for a long time, though. The shelter we visited was a no-kill shelter, which I guess means that the cats pretty much just live there until they get adopted, so at least some of them had been there for several years or more.
You can see a few pictures of our favorites (with notes in the captions) on my Google+ stream.
When we finally made it back I was definitely ready to relax. We heated up some leftover gumbo for dinner, watched some TV, and went to bed.