boredom + cell phone camera =

a silly ass blog post ;)

my cousin C, the kid's most favoritest family member ever, called yesterday morning begging for a "giant favor", as she called it. apparently, she was off to san francisco for a fun trip with some old friends and needed a ride to the airport. she'd managed to score a great deal for a round trip ticket on southwest, but had to depart from LAX as opposed to the oh-so-convenient ONT or BUR. meh. but luckily for her, we had absolutely no plans for the day. and then i asked her what time her flight was. "5:00", she says. oy vey. RIGHT in the midst of rush hour. ack! but being the helpful soul that i am, i threw on the plastic smile (so as to sound cheerful over the phone, of course) and said "of course we'll take you! we'd be happy to help! be here at 1:30, so we can beat traffic, okay?"

well, at least we were able to avoid traffic going DOWN there. i knew coming home would be a bitch, so we left knowing we wouldn't be home for hours and hours.

and how did we kill the extra time? shopping and snacking, of course! i dragged 'em to the right start to look for the car seat we've been wanting, which is a european import and was scheduled to finally be available mid-august. didn't find it, but they had fun playing with the toys and laughing at the potty-training books. ha! and then we went next door to mrs. beasley's for some treats and took them to coffee bean & tea leaf to enjoy. btw, mrs. beasley's cupcakes? NO BUENO. all frosting and just gross. ew.

by the time we were done snacking, it was time to take C to the airport, which was only about 3.5 minutes away. this put us at around, oh, 4:10? so we headed back towards manhattan beach and decided to walk around manhattan village - a teeny, tiny "mall" chock full of fun stores like victoria's secret, sephora, apple, babystyle, etc. small but powerful! and it was inside babystyle that we took these:


i tell you, when the kid made this face at this tee, i thought i was going to pee my pants. "that's disgusting!!" she muttered out of the corner of her mouth. but she gamely reenacted the moment for the camera, like the sport she is. and these are quite possibly the most fun board book and playset i've ever seen. "realistic choppng noises as you cut your sushi rolls!" it took all my willpower not to scoop it up and start playing with it immediately.

then, at pottery barn kids, the kid somehow managed to find a superhero costume - mask, cape, and gloves - that she absolutely fell in love with. she put it all on and zoomed around the back end of the store, and of course i had to capture it (it's horribly fuzzy, but you'll get it anyway):



i loved every moment. it's times like these that remind me that she really IS still a kid - my kid. as grown-up as she is most of the time, when she gets really silly, it brings a tear to my eye and i remember what a sweet girl she is.

we went through all the stores that caught our attention and then it was "stick a fork in us, we're done." and on the way out of the parking lot, i drove by this car and HAD to throw it in reverse to snap this picture:

nice, huh?

so it took about 42.9 seconds to hit horrific traffic trying to get home. we'd talked about going out to the valley to hit up our very favorite pizza/pasta joint, but i'd nixed the idea because i thought it'd be a royal pain in the ass to get there. but sitting in the stopped carpool lane, i re-evaluated and decided that i'd rather deal with traffic and have yummy dinner at the end vs. going home and most likely picking up some drive-thru. i called my brother to see if they were available (sadly, they weren't) since they live right around the corner from the restaurant (chi chi's in northridge), but no go. ah, well, we went anyway. and it was DELICIOUS.

thank goodness, because our adventure wasn't quite over - on the way home, we hit even MORE horrendous traffic. thanks to an accident, what should have been a 40-minute drive home turned into 90. yay. and then as we set foot inside the house, we quickly realized that the A/C was on the fritz - it was going like gangbusters, but no cold air was coming out. that meant it'd been running all afternoon, sucking up power and running up our electricity bill for nothing. son of a...