Tuesday, June 20, 2006

My So-Cal Adventure

A-Minus: 1 Month, 3 Weeks, 4 Days

Work has been quite stressful lately. Industry is experiencing a dire shortage of electrical engineers lately, so our company hired a subcontractor to help us with a job we're working on. The problem is, they are all Chinese and speak English at about a second grade level, so it's been very difficult coordinating mechanical and electrical issues, and I keep getting busted for design mistakes. Very frustrating. And they (my company) also seem to have great expectations that I am able to do tasks in which I have no experience, so it's doubly frustrating.

Add to that the burden of selling all my junk over the next month, and the stress has been piling up.

So I decided to get out of Dodge for a while. I took Friday and Monday off and drove down to S. Barbara (where I went to school) to see my old friends at Chabad of S. Barbara, and had a great time.

See the pictures below:

(Future Rabbi) Chaim Loschak. He looks pretty young, right? Looks can be deceiving. The 11-year-old fought me to a draw in chess.


Rabbi Loschak and his son Avi at Havdallah. Yes, they make Havdallah on Bud Light.


Havdallah. Notice the big black carbon smudge on the ceiling from decades of Havdallahs in the same spot.


Me with Lloyd, the S. Barbara resident charchiturist, chess master, and 60's drug experience storyteller.


Lloyd draws his Charchiture of me.

A close-up on the charchiture.

Making my grand entrance at Ventura to visit Christopher and Alicia. Yes, I'm still driving the rust rocket after a theft, a failed break-in, and innumerable bangs, scrapes, and collisions. You can see the sunroof where thieves tried to pry their way in with a crowbar. I had sealed the cracks with duct tape. Notice the streamers of duct tape peeling off the sunroof and trailing over the rear window.




My ex-roommate Christopher and his wife Alicia. And I remember when they had just met. Notice Christopher's Christ-like hairdo. Last year the look was ZZ-top.

The Stubbans took me to the Baron Herzog kosher winery in Oxnard. They even had a kosher restaurant, but it was too expensive to even think about.



Wine tasting at the Baron Herzog winery.

No comments: