New Job!

For those of you who haven't heard, I got a job a few months ago! I've been working as the Logistics and Vendor Relations Assistant at Tissla (formerly AllDorm), a marketing firm in San Francisco that specializes in the college market. That's taken up most of my time for the past few months, so sorry I haven't updated the ol' blog lately. Hopefully I'll be having more updates in the future.

In case any of you would like some more info on the company that I've been working for, the website is http://alldorm.com/.

That's it for now. I'll try to get some more posts up soon.

South San Francisco Hike

Angie and I did a few hour hike near her house in South San Francisco yesterday. Most of the part we climbed up didn't have a trail and was pretty steep, but there was a pretty great view of the city once we got up there:

Valentine's Day Weekend (AKA: Reasons to Live in California #2: National Parks!)

Reason #2 to live in California: its National Parks make great Valentine's Day trips. While I'm sure the Sam Houston National Forest is beautiful this time of year, it's hard to beat Joshua Tree. I find something about its stark landscape and vast expanses very appealing.

When we arrived, I had a little Valentine's Day surprise ready for Angie. I set up a little picnic while the sun was setting with bread, cheese, grapes and the wine I bought at the Peju Winery in Napa earlier last year.
The next day, we did the one big hike that Joshua tree has. We hiked up Ryan mountain, which is only about a 3 mile hike up a mountain, but it offered some great views of the park being the highest point in the park.


Apart from that, we mostly just hung out at our campsite, built a fire (with the help of a 10-year-old boy scout from the campsite next to us) and did some non-technical rock climbing on the big rock features that dot Joshua Tree's landscape. Here's some pictures from the rocks that we climbed on our last day before leaving.

Right after we left to go back to LA, we found a little Antique shop. I bought some Life Magazines from 1958 that are pretty entertaining, but we also found time to take some goofy photos:





And to cap off any good California vacation, on the way back we stopped by the ocean for a bit of relaxation.

Jeff's Guide to Unemployment #4: If You Splurge, You Better Have a Reason!

I finally decided to splurge a bit last December when thinking of what to do for Angie's Christmas gift. I got us two tickets to see the San Francisco Symphony play in January.

Here we are inside the concert hall, with City Hall in the background:


The concert consisted of a 4 pieces and focused on classical interpretations of folk music: a modernized, short polka piece; a piece by Sibelius; a short piece by Ravel (one of my faves); and to end it, Tchaikovsky's 2nd Symphony.


After, we met up with Jen and La'Ron at Limon Rotisserie, a Peruvian restaurant that had rotisserie style chicken and a whole bunch of small versions of Peruvian entrees to share.

Reasons to Live in California #1: Amazing views!

While I've hinted at my obnoxious, rigid view that California is the best place to live in this great country of ours before in my blog, I thought I'd come right out and say it in what I hope to be an occasionally occurring column on my blog. That's right, CA might have pollution, traffic, crazy people (I would actually argue this is one of our best traits), high priced houses, and could possible go bankrupt at any point...but it's damn pretty. So without further adieu, I choose to illustrate my point with pictures from a recent hike along Runyon Canyon, which is about a 20 minute walk from my apartment:

Here's the view from Downtown (on the left) to Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean (Right)
Here's the Hollwood Hills (the sign's back there somehwere)
This is the beginning of the hike
And finally the sunset over the ocean

I should probably spread things out more...

After not doing so much for the past 6 months, I finally decided to try and have a busy day. It started at about 630am and ended with working a concert til about 2am. I'm thinking maybe I'll try spreading things out a bit more for now on.

I"m finally done with the LSAT. I got to Southwestern School of Law at about 8am, ready to go with my 8 sharpened pencils, pencil sharpener (just in case all 8 of them broke, I guess), eraser, apple juice, snack bar and LSAT ticket, all within a gallon sized ziplock bag (they actually specify how big of a ziplock bag you can bring in to the testing area).

I had a bit of a different group at the test this time than the last time I took it. While during the break at my last test I walked past one guy crying just before I walked into a cloud of smoke being produced by the jittery test takers trying to get a nicotine fix, I instead walked out of the testing area to find all of the 40 testers sitting in complete silence, quickly scarfing down food (Well mostly all, there was also quite a line for the women's restroom...).

After the LSAT, I went home for a quick nap, and then got ready for running the lighting board for a band called Fight From Above at the Troubadour here in West Hollywood. I had some notes from rehearsal to go over, listened to their album another time through and then headed over to the show around 10am. I ended up running lights for their opening act as well so I'd be up to speed on the board by showtime. Here's a fuzzy looking picture I took from behind the board, up on the balcony, during the concert: Not sure if you can really make that out, but that's the lighting board, and way down there is the band. It ended up being a fun day all in all, with a bit of the studious and a bit of the creative mixed in. Now the hard part comes...waiting the three weeks for the LSAT score...

Jeff's Guide to Unemployment #3: Travel Cheap!

Though it's obviously not recommended to do this often, if you must take a trip, pack as many people into one car, don't drive far and once you get there, pack as many people into one room as possible. I got to put this theory into practice (as I did many times throughout college) while venturing up to Napa Valley this past fall with Angie, Chris, Ryan and Maha. We just stayed the night, but we were able to check out a number of the vineyards in the area.

Here are some pictures that we took in front of the Golden Gate bridge as we made our way up in the morning.


Once there, we quickly went to our first vineyard, Peju, at the recommendation of some of Ryan and Chris' friends. While I felt quite decadent just getting to try some of their wines, I got to witness a man with a large belt buckle and a woman with very large hair from Dallas spend about $400 on a few crates of the stuff. Here we are entering the place.

Here's a few shots of Angie and I out and about. The first is us walking up the stairs of the sparkling wine vineyard where we all shared one of the samplers where we got to try about 9 different types of their very nice, fizzy sparkling wine. The building and surrounding landscaping was apparently a replica of the company's original vineyard in the Champagne region of France. The second picture is of us in a parking lot in front of the grapes.


And on our way back, we headed to the coast, unfortunately to find it completely covered in fog. Luckily we did find a jelly fish to entertain us:

Jeff's Guide to Unemployment #2.5: Parks with Beaches are the Perfect Combo!

Trying to take my own advice, Angie and I took a trip across the Golden Gate Bridge and headed over to hike along the coast.

We ended up finding an abandoned military building that was built into the side of hill. This was apparently the site of a large artillery gun used during WWII, along with a number of bunkers that were placed around it. Here's some pictures from the building used to house the artillery gun:



After that, we kept hiking up the hill to find the bunkers. WWII era bunkers and views of the ocean from a hill posed too big a temptation to have fun with our cameras for us to resist:

Jeff's Guide to Unemployment #2: Beaches are Free, TOO!!!!

Luckily another one of my favorite outdoorsy pastimes is free, as well, and I've tried to take full advantage with my time. When I'm not hiking, I've tried to make it out to the beach. It's a bit farther of a trek from my new home in West Hollywood, but it's usually worth the 30-45 minute commute to get a view of the ocean. Apart from trips to Venice Beach and Santa Monica Beach, I've also made it out to Half Moon Bay up in Northern California and also had a pretty amazing trip down the coast along Highway 1 with Angie a few weeks back. I tend to forget to bring cameras to the beach, but luckily Angie and I like to go to beaches together pretty often, and she always seems to remember to bring a camera along.

First off, here's Angie and I at Santa Monica Beach, one of our favorite spots:

Here's a picture at a beach on the northwest corner of San Francisco. If you look closely, you can see a bit of the Golden Gate Bridge. While dissapointingly lacking the nice sandy beaches of Southern California, it provided some pretty good views:

Here's the first beach Angie and I stopped at on our way down the Pacific coast. In the second picture, you can see a kind of see the hippie that had pulled his van off by the ocean so that he could dramatically spin around while holding his guitar off to the side and staring into the sky. I found him pretty amusing:


And here we are near Big Sur a bit further down the West Coast. We stopped at a few places with views over the cliffs that line that part of the coast when it was nearing sunset, in order to satisfy my unquenchable thirst for emo pictures: