If only there were a photo of me, freaking out as the Air & Space Museum security guard pretended to apprehend me for touching the moon rock on display, then I’d put it up here, but I would have only just barely gotten over the incident, more than 25 years later. The rock was meant […]

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I can’t say if Virginia was really next in line in my earliest days of travel, but our 1981 trip to Washington, D.C. and Williamsburg was a pretty formative experience, so I’ll go with it. I was six, and fully obsessed with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and anything that flew, so Colonial Williamsburg, […]

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It’s been a pretty steamy weekend here, with temperatures in the mid-90s, a little early for summer heat, but what can you do? I guess we could be in Anchorage, which just got two feet of snow yesterday… We got up early Saturday morning to avoid the heat and headed out on a hike, or […]

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Thanks to a tip from Aimee, I spent my lunch hour at LACMA yesterday, watching Fluids melt – and it was more exciting than it sounds. On display in the courtyard was a 30 foot long, eight foot tall rectangle of ice blocks, assembled that morning and left to melt over the course of the […]

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Seattle always seemed like it was almost part of Alaska – or rather, that Anchorage was somehow a suburb of Seattle – when I was growing up. Everything shipped to Alaska came through Seattle, every trip to the Lower 48 went through Seattle, Alaskans followed Seattle’s pro sports teams – even one of the things […]

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Arizona, as the home of my mom’s parents, was the other state we visited most often in my childhood. Not having access to photos from my younger days leaves me without the chance to use a photo of me on my grandpa’s shoulders in a swimming pool, or riding in a Stutz Bearcat at Old […]

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We had a few minutes before our last concert of the season at the Disney Concert Hall this past Sunday – finally, the organ comes to life! – so I took some photos of the exterior, making my way around through the labyrinthine passages and staircases that seem to lead to nowhere.More photos here.

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I’m sure I’m getting the order wrong, but regardless of where I actually traveled first, Colorado has always been the most important state in the Lower 48 for our family, and I have many fond memories of visiting grandparents, my aunt and uncle, cousins, and family friends there over the years. This photo shows my […]

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This summer, we’ll be traveling to Hawaii with Aimee’s family, and with that trip, I will have visited all fifty states in the country. Being born in Alaska proved to be an advantage in the endeavor; it knocks out a tough one for many people and makes traveling long distances a routine part of life. […]

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We had a fascinating weekend, especially if you start counting the weekend on Friday afternoon, when we participated in a fact-finding hearing with the city’s rent stabilization board and our old landlords, which was truly riveting and involved some crazy revelations. On Saturday morning, we headed to USC for an L.A. Conservancy tour of the […]

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All day Friday, these guys made steady progress on a spray paint and vinyl mural for the movie that will eventually cover all four sides of the building.

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Every few weeks I set up the TiVo to record every Huell Howser-hosted program for the next thirty days, whether it’s “California’s Gold,” “Road Trip,” “Visiting,” “California’s Golden Parks,” or another show in his massive educational empire. I really can’t get enough of his visits, which usually involve historic neighborhoods, local history celebrations, out-of-the-way museums, […]

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We had another quick weekend visit to Charlottesville, most likely our last for awhile, as my brother and his family were in the middle of selling their house there. It was a whole family get-together – I’m trying to think when the last one of those was, and it was probably Thanksgiving 2006? – for […]

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I’d only been to Santa Clarita once before this weekend, and it was before we moved out here, so I had no context; all I remember is nearly getting killed merging on to a freeway full of speeding semi trucks, and being amused by directions that involved turning on Magic Mountain Highway. On Sunday, we […]

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We got more done this morning before noon than usually happens in an entire weekend: rose at 5:00, out the door to Agoura Hills at 5:30, in time for a 7:00 am half marathon. It was a great race, about half on pavement and half on trails, with a couple of nasty uphills and some […]

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