New Year's

Yes, I know.  It's the 10th, and I'm finally blogging about New Year's.

My friend Jenn was in town for the long weekend and staying with Angelique.  Since they are both zoo people, we spent one day at the LA Zoo.  I'll admit I'm not that thrilled with zoos, but it was a fun day until we were ready to leave, or so I thought.  I wanted to hit the road and try to beat the traffic, but they kept stopping to take lots and lots of pictures.  But in the end, I beat the worst of the traffic, so it turned out okay.  What was really funny was we ran into three families I know while at the zoo.

Saturday, New Year's Eve, I got up early and came to the college for a 5K put on by the cross country and baseball teams.  I finished in 33 minutes, so I need to work hard to get my 10 minute mile pace back.

The rest of the day was a laze around the condo day.  I wrote some reviews and I played some Wii.  I got a couple new games for Christmas, plus I've been playing through Lego Star Wars. 

That night, I stayed up until midnight not to ring in the new year (I was tired enough to go to sleep at 10) but to register for the Camp Pendleton Mud Run.  Yep, I'm doing it the third year in a row.  Signed up for the second Saturday again, too.  Planning on doing it with Luke again, and he's got a couple friends talked into doing it with us.

I was up early the morning of the 1st to head down to Disneyland.  Unfortunately, not the parks, but Jenn, Angelique, and I went to brunch at the Grand Californian.  It was expensive, but so much fun, and their carmel French toast is so delicious.

The rest of the day was spent hanging around Angelique's.  We did venture out late in the day to figure out what we were doing for the next day.

See, the whole reason Jenn came out was to do the Rose Parade, which was on the 2nd this year.  Every year, I saw I'm going to go.  Well, this year I did.  It was an experience.  We had tickets for seats, which really helped.  It was very crowded with people everywhere.  We took the MetroLink in, which was a great idea with how bad traffic was going both ways.  In many ways, it was surreal since I know that part of Pasadena pretty well.  Seeing it without cars but this many people just didn't seem right.  And many shops that weren't planning to be opened boarded their windows up so they wouldn't be valdalized, which was sad.  And all the garbage afterward was also sad.

Am I glad I did it?  Absolutely.  Next year?  I think I'll enjoy it from home.  It was fun and worth doing, but I don't see a need to do it every year.

I'll say this, we couldn't have asked for nicer weather.  Since we were walking all day, I didn't want to bring my backpack.  So I just wore jeans, a shirt, and a sweatshirt.  I had the sweatshirt off by 9AM and honestly could have been wearing shorts by the afternoon.  It hit the mid 80's that day.  I love weather like that.

It was fun, but it was also exhausting.  I made it home and crashed by 10 PM that night.  And the next day it was back to work.