WHO NEEDS A POOL?

The things we love most about visiting our kids in California are:

1) Getting to spend lots of time with them & staying with them at their apartment. A good deal for them in that we love to cook and eat and Carol is a chronic, can't-help-herself cleaner/scrubber/tidy-upper--not that they need it because they're neat & tidy types too. I, on the other hand, am a disgusting, disorganized slob and tend to leave a trail of small, random paper sheets & scraps with apparently vital numbers and/or snippets of information scribbled across them, along with a trail of partially used paper towels, discarded nose & wet-eye tissues and a general spoor of cookie crumbs, leftover scraps of protein and food-residue sludge wherever I go. Not that I'm bragging.

2) That storied and beautiful SoCal weather! Unfortunately (you probably saw it on the news), the past week has included three solid days of chill, gray skies, gloom and R-A-I-N (I'm talking a "better start building yourself an ark and gathering up two of every species" deluge!) which is neither what you want or expect here in LaLa Land. Which made it slightly less of a blow that the very nice and not-all-that-expensive bicycle I kept out here, which had been safely chained up in Adam and Tara's supposedly secure parking garage under their building (and which had been there for a couple years without incident) got itself STOLEN just a week or so before we came out. BUMMER! But I was fortunate in that one of son Adam's writing partners' husband (VERY nice & interesting people, both of them) had a well-used but better-than-decent TREK road/gravel bike I was kindly allowed to borrow, and I did get in a nice long ride last Wednesday before the weather turned to shit and plan to do another today before I cook the small organic turkey we bought at a bargain, post-Xmas SEVENTY-FIVE-PERCENT OFF, after which we hope to our beloved Chicago Bears rise to the occasion up in San Francisco.

3) All that California car shit and the people who make it happen. Did a more-successful-than-expected book signing at AUTOBOOKS/AERBOOKS in Burbank yesterday and met some auto-scribbler luminaries whom I knew of by accomplishments and reputation but had never met. Including Preston Lerner (who wrote the definitive Scarab book which I both love and have used/plagiarized from for my books and stories) and Mark Vaughn from AUTOWEEK, which published my first-ever newspaper/magazine stories and sent me my first-ever "writer checks" for embarrassingly small amounts of money. But I still remember the joy and thrill of opening that first envelope and holding that check in my trembling, wrench-scarred fingers. That was a big fork in the road, and although the path it sent me down was occasionally thorny and went through some truly crap neighborhoods, I'm a lucky, lucky fellow for getting the chance.

In any case, I'll be doing a guest segment on Mark Vaughn's "OUICK SPIN WITH AUTOWEEK" podcast this coming Friday, and you can bet I'll be brushing up on old Henny Youngman one-liners in preparation. Another local internal-combustion luminary/car and motorcycle guru also dropped by. See pic below. He got one of my new Lotus books (the "Preview Edition") and I'll be finishing up another chapter of the "REAL" book as soon as I'm done with this e-blast.

THEN I'm gonna take that bike ride and cook that heavily-discounted turkey!

Pix below that are of the fabulous Scarab sports car (they only built three) and the far-less-than-fabulous Scarab Formula One car, which laid an egg the size of "The Bean" sculpture in Chicago's Grant Park but is a great story anyway. And, yeah, that's me driving the 003 Scarab sports car AND the F1 car. Nyaaah!

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!

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