7.6.98

    Last night was our second night in the house. T. and I have been housesitting and dogsitting, as I have mentioned. It's so nice to be in a real house without having to hear our neighbor's breathe and to have a dishwashing and a washer and dryer. The first thing we did was laundry. Shear heaven, that was.

    The dog, Spike, is pretty adorable but is still a bit of a bratty puppy. When we first came over Spike didn't really remember us. He barked at us and backed off while wagging his tail and peeing all over. Luckily, he did the peeing on the back porch. So far, everytime we have left for a couple of hours the greeting has been the same. I hope this doesn't keep up.

    He's a blonde Weimerauner so he's not actually a Weimerauner but he is related to them, or something. Anyway, I can totally tell how T. will be with kids and pets -- completely permissive and unable to find it in his big, warm heart to discipline. Oh well. Having grown up with large dogs I know that you need to establish early on who exactly is the boss otherwise things can get pretty out of control. So, I guess I'm the boss and Spike goes to T. when I say "No" for consoling. Spike actually crawled up into T.'s lap at one point for a cuddle. It was the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen.

    For the fourth of July, T. and I joined a friend and another couple for a barbecue, which was lovely. The other couple are experienced scuba divers and I am eager to get back into scuba diving and drag T. along, or rather down, with me. I have my advanced certification but I haven't done any recreational dives and all of my diving has been in Washington, the cold water state. Warm water diving is a dream of mine. Anyway, I'm hoping that we can do some sort of dive excursion with them. Would be an absolute blast, no?

    Sunday night we made another attempt to go out dancing. We made it to The Derby but not before they closed the dance lesson. T. and I are so bad about getting our butts in gear in order to get there in time. I don't know what it is but we really need to pull our heads out if we're going to learn to swing. During the day we watched "Swing Kids," since I hadn't seen it, and the topic has been on our minds. It's a fairly decent movie with moments of greatness but ended up falling short. The ending was suitably depressing but I was glad that Robert Sean Leonoard (who I once shook hands with in London) didn't kill himself a la "Dead Poet's Society." There was a high possibility that he would so I wasn't just projecting.

    When we missed the dance class we decided to cruise the Sunset Strip. It was not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. I thought that there would be at least a few dozen clubs all crammed next to each other with long waiting lists and Johnny Depp's hanging around outside. We saw the Whisky A-Go-Go and The Roxy and something Rainbow. That's about it. Then we decided to head up into the hills to gawk at the huge, sprawling mansions/compounds that were careless enough to offer a peak through the hedgerows.

    On the way back we switched and I drove so that T. could get a gander at this massive three-dimensional billboard for Toy Soldiers. It actually had bigger than life-size "soldiers" hanging off of and rappelling across the billboard. It was quite a piece of advertising, let me tell you. I'm amazed at how much industry stuff is advertised here. You'd think that the people of Los Angeles are the only ones who go to movies. I suspect the continual blitz is for the industry types to impress each other and themselves.

    T. has this song that he keeps singing about the dog, it goes a little something like this, "They call him Spike, Spike, he's faster than light...." The dog seems to like it but I can't get it out of my head.