hazelchaz | ...He sings a love song as we go along, walking in a winter wonderland. In the meadow... (Reply)

Photos online: Shopping for fabric with Stephanie (08-Mar-2008) Click on the picture to see tenkuudragon finding just the right fabric for a particular Pokemon costume. She was looking for some t-shirt fabric in various solid colors for a couple of projects, and she found everything she was looking for. I didn't find the "Dragon Princess" fabric to replace my missing "anime" shirt, but I did find some other beautiful fabric suitable for shirts.

Anyone want a second chance to look through some of my dad's cast-off shirts, and a few of missmea's discards? I haven't had time to take them to the thrift store yet. I'm heading to Coral now.

Did I tell you I've had two nightmares this week? One time I dreamed I was running a convention, and we'd filled an elevator to the top with cargo and stuff to move around. The elevator broke, and the hotel wanted to charge us $25,000. With the lone elevator out of service, we had to relocate the Con Suite to the lobby, which I supervised while Joyce dealt with the hotel issues. While that was going on, I went over to the Staff Lounge where I found a cup of hard candies and lollipops, a plate of five or four cold cheeseburgers congealed to the plate, and something else I've forgotten now. When I asked whether we had any hot food, the volunteer working behind the table offered to warm up one of the burgers...

And then on another night, I dreamed I was organizing a committee meeting. I got there late, and two hundred fans had spent twenty minutes talking about cardigans. I asked if anyone had actually been cold enough to need a sweater, and could we move on? The meeting broke up without discussing anything substantive about the convention. I tried to catch up with the eight or ten people I specifically wanted to talk to, and they all went off to dinner without me.

And this weekend, I'm having a few meetings including the animelosangeles Exec Saturday night (Division heads and above), and a general meeting on Sunday. Wonder if the strange dreams will go away after...

More winter bits, a short one this time. You might be wondering, why do I have pictures of Tommy's on my website? Something I've wanted to do for a while is to take a visitor from out of town on a "Hamburger Tour of Southern California." I had the opportunity, recently, when Jim Steininger from Indy came out for some special training.

Jim's lived most of his life in Indiana. They've got "Sonic" and "White Castle" and some other hamburger stands, but nothing like what we've got. It happened that he was in town for four days, so I took him out to lunch three times. (Incidentally, February in Indianapolis isn't nearly as mild as February in So.Cal., although it was a bit chilly here that week by our standards: 50 F low, 60 F high. He was delighted by our balmy weather.) Jim had bought lunch for himself on his first day at Jack-in-the-Box, which he thought was okay but nothing to write home about. Over the next three days, we went to In-N-Out Burger, Fatburger (sadly, the Irvine location doesn't really use enough pepper), and Tommy's Original World Famous Hamburgers. I'm not saying any of these are haute cuisine. As Mary Jo puts it, she could cook something as good as an In-N-Out burger in her back yard. But who has time to fire up a barbecue grill any old day?

Any burgers that you think should be part of a quintessential California experience? All three chains have a smallish number of locations. Fatburger ranges farthest, while Tommy's stays very close to home. In-N-Out is in California, Arizona, and Nevada, and that's it for them. So if you come to visit... here's some quick eats that will fill you up.