We're in LA for the weekend. Drove down today, after driving down from Medford yesterday, after driving down from Portland the day before that, where we spent a few days cooing Baby Thea after driving up to Medford to pick up our other granddaughter so that the three of us could drive up to Portland and coo Baby Thea before we drove her back down to Eugene to participate in the U of O's Project Tomato where, she told me yesterday, they picked and transformed a whopping 900 lbs of tomatoes into organic pizza sauce. After making sure she was settled in, Mr. Lee and I drove back up to Portland to coo Baby Thea some more and that gets us back to the beginning. I think. Does that make sense? And all this up and down? Compared to what? Earth is basically round.
Well, we're not exactly in LA. We're in San Gabriel Valley, the new Chinatown, truly a country within a city, staying at a $59 a night motel run by Pakistanis. The room is huge and nice other than little details, like legacy toothpaste splatters on the bathroom mirror and no coffee in the room or office, plus we have a great view of an impressive plume of smoke rising from the current wild fires burning nearby. We had Bánh Mì sandwiches for dinner. They were great but the best part was the pigeon walking around inside the restaurant looking for crumbs under the chairs. He was an old guy with a limp and not moving too fast. The people running the bakery didn't seem to take any notice or care. Eventually he nibbled his way to the door then stepped back out onto the sidewalk. My kind of place. After dinner we followed up with moon, cassava, and mung bean cakes. Much too much but tasty.
And this evening I learned some cool things about the nearby Mt. Wilson Observatory. Given that it was threatened by the fires, LA Weekly republished an article on it by Joshuah Bearman. Did you know that the reflecting element at the bottom of the scope is 9,000 pounds of wine-bottle glass from the Saint Gobain bottle works in France? It was carried up the mountain by tiny burros in 1917 (poor critters) and is still the largest solid plate mirror ever cast.
It was up on Mt. Wilson that Edwin Hubble "first discovered that there are galaxies. Many many many other galaxies in the universe. Then, he discovered from the light of those galaxies that the universe is expanding." Full article here. Amazing, isn't it? Before Hubble's observations on Mt. Wilson, everyone thought the only thing out there was the Milky Way. After his discovery, even Einstein had to rethink things and came up for a visit.
Anyway, it's late. Given that we're in the general neighborhood, we thought we'd drop in and see The Blue Boy tomorrow, but the museum charges $20 a head. We're going to an old, free graveyard instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment