DAS ALTE JAHR VERGANGEN IST ...

(Bach chorale title "The Old Year Is Past")

I sit here in atypically gray, rainy LA this morning listening to Brazilian pop (to brighten my spirits) and think back on a wild, anomalous year. Glad to be done with 2005, but it was a necessary evil. Many events to catch up on here since the last posting, so just quick overviews:

December 21-24

Drove up to Bishop, California through the beautiful Owens Valley (east of all those famous parks like Sequoia and Kings Canyon) with snow-capped Sierras on the western range to visit old Aramco pastor Alan Tichenor (literally "old" - he turns 90 next year!), the man who married Mom and Dad in Bahrain in '55 and baptized me in '57! He pastored the church in Dhahran in the mid-50's, when Mom and Dad were newly-weds. I thought he would be the perfect person to fill in details from those pre-Paul years. He is cared for by his niece Ruth and husband. (Ruth is practically his own daughter, brought up in the Tichenor home as a child.) They live in a mobile home park with 1st-class views.

One added attraction in the trip was driving up the access road towards (not to) Mt. Whitney, the tallest peak in the lower 48 states. It isn't an obvious lone peak like Fuji or the Matterhorn, merely one of many very jagged peaks in a comb-like range along the Sierra Nevada on the west side of King's Canyon Nat. Park and totally visible from the wide and easy Owens Valley floor the days I was there. (I was the beneficiary of an earlier heavy snow and rain in the area, so the peaks were at their whitest!) The access road leaves the town of Lone Pine way down on the valley floor and drives gradually up and up through total wilderness (past many scenes filmed in Hollywood westerns). The air was unbelievably fresh (and up in the 40s and 50s) and I barely passed a single car the whole way. Just me and the mountains. I opened the windows and drove about 25 mph. I wanted to savor every minute.

December 24 (SAT)

The traditional Christmas Eve party at Linda Barens', Ann's old colleague at her plastic surgeon's office in the '80s and old friend now. Usually, they serve turkey, but this year it was all Christmas tamales and cocina mexicana (Linda, her mom and brothers are Angelinos of Hispanic background dating back to the early 20th century.) Yum! Cam and Ann had driven up from Fallbrook for the occasion despite an earlier scary episode that morning, when he felt strange pains in his neck and arm. They came anyway since the pain went away and LA had better cardiac hospitals than Fallbrook in case it was heart-related. After all the guests had left and Linda, Annie, Cam and I were sitting around Linda's sofas, Cam again experienced even more pain around midnight. These, too, subsided, and everyone went to bed and I drove home.

December 25 (SUN)

I get a voice mail from Ann that Cam has been rushed to Cedars-Sinai hospital with a heart attack. (Cedars-Sinai, a Jewish-affiliated hospital in LA, had one of the nation's best cardiac units, and luckily, it was just down the road from Linda's.) They rushed him into surgery immediately and, after his Indian surgeon did an angiogram to find out where the blockage was, went ahead and implanted a stint in one partially blocked artery. He needed a second stint, too, but they didn't want to chance that at the same time. (Tuesday they finished the job.) It was a scare, but by the time I got to the hospital that afternoon, Cam was awake and watching a Green Bay Packers game on TV in his hospital room.

December 28 (WED)

I am awakened about 7 am by voices in the courtyard. Sounded like a domestic argument, but as I listened, it seemed more and more unusual. I peek out my door peephole and see about seven or eight LAPD policemen (and a woman) standing at the stairs just across the courtyard. My Amenian neighbors in the upstairs apartment - mother, father, teenaged daughter - are standing in their sleepwear in the courtyard, and police are ascending and descending their apartment stairs like some bad dream of Jacob's. They end up arresting a younger male relative (I'm assuming) and cart down some incriminating stuff in a box. (Couldn't really see what was in the plastic bag.) I overhear the police talking about a loaded handgun found in the apartment, as well.

Good news that day: Cameron is released from the hospital and returns to Fallbrook with Ann. They don't even bother to cart him out in a wheelchair, as usual, since he seems so hale and hearty. That is our best Christmas present this season! Now, of course, the smoking and fat in the diet have to go ...

December 29 (THU)

I meet up with old Aramco friend Kim Ayers and her new husband and choral composer/director Alan Petker at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) to see the Pissaro-Cézanne exhibit, with paintings from museums from all over the world (Russia, Argentina, US, etc.). They are both members of the museum and get me in for free. The trend in art exhibits at major museums seems to be increasingly pedagogical - teaching the visitors some mini Art history course material. This exhibit paired artist friends Pisarro and Cézanne (French impressionists 1870s-90s), who painted together and cross-fertilized each other's techniques. They often painted exactly the same scenes, so it was fascinating to see the different takes each artist did in side-by-side paintings.

December 30 (FRI)

One of my frequent exercise options here has been a 40-60-minute walk on the beach. For a while, I would go weekly. This time I headed towads Venice Beach on the north end of the ship inlet to Marina Del Rey. In preparation for the expected storms and high surf, huge berms (20-foot sandunes) had been put up the length of the beach from trucked-in sand. These were REALLY BIG berms. And not gradual slopes. I climbed up to the top of the berm by the pier and found about a 15-foot drop-off to the beach flats below. Not really something to tramp down easily! I eventually found a path to the beach itself. With low tide there must have been about 30 feet of flat, wet sand reflecting the sunset. Pretty but a bit worrisome being on the "wrong side" of the berm. The storms would arrive later that evening. I've never seen berms like these on LA beaches.

THE LONGEST DAY

I'm glad yesterday (Dec. 19) is over. It was one of my longest this year. (Of course, dissertation deposit hell earlier in April was worse.)

I had planned a critical "informational interview" (see last posting) with an editor at a major textbook publisher (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston) at 9:00 that morning , so couldn't really sleep well. So, I got up around 6:30 and was out the door to get a big breakfast for the day ahead. It helped, however, to be fully awake during the call at 9:00, which lasted a good hour and went very well, I thought. I then typed up my notes (see last posting).

I was planning to leave town the next day for several days and drive north, so it was my last full business day in LA before Christmas, and it all had to be done NOW.

My library privileges with UCLA are set to end Dec. 31, and the library system shuts down pretty much between Christmas and New Year's, so Monday 1-5 pm was my last chance to be able to check out family history materials to scan on the computer - mainly UCLA yearbooks from '40 to '48, when Dad attended. I was aiming to get to the library about 1:00, but with traffic etc. didn't really make it till 2:00. UCLA takes an hour on a normal day, although it's only about 15 miles away, because it's all surface streets.

But, I also had a tenant emergency affecting my sleep and thoughts. (Short version: I have been waiting for a revised, accurate lease from the landlord to sign since *August*, and after monthly letters of request, I finally decided to withhold 1/2 of December's rent to get their attention. It did. They sent me a "pay up in three days or quit the premises" form letter. I didn't think this was quite kosher, so I made an appointment to see a legal rights counseler Monday afternoon at 3:00. (This crimped my UCLA library time drastically.) Turns out the tenant does not have the right to withhold payment for bureaucratic disputes (only repair problems), so I had to get the money to them ASAP. (The counselor had other advice as to how to complain more effectively to my landlord's management company and get action.) I drove back home. By the time I had a good, well-worded letter ready (giving in on the last December payment check but putting the fear of God into them from other angles), all local post offices were closed. So, only one choice in LA: the LAX airport central post office, open till 11:00! (another hour-plus trip)

I'd been up since dawn and driven all over town earlier in the day, but there I was having to schlep out to the airport around 9 pm just to send my check. I knew it was a bad sign when I saw two ABC television news trucks stationed in the very full parking lot. Inside was a line almost out the door of pre-Christmas customers - not only a long line, but one in which most people had multiple boxes to ship! Ay ay ay! The resigned patrons had decided it was OK to chat with total strangers, so I had a nice chat about online vs. in-store shopping with a Vietnamese-American mother ahead of me for the next 15 minutes.

For some short R&R at the end of the day, I headed out to Playa del Rey beach (nearby) since I was in the neighborhood just to watch the waves. It was after 10:00, so I and a dumpster diver on a bike were about the only two people out.

A bit calmed, I headed home on the 10 freeway. Minutes after I got on the freeway, all four lanes came to an abrupt halt. "What now?" I fumed. "It's almost 11 pm!" A police helicopter with a spotlight was circling around the freeway just ahead of us. Around and around. Around and around. "What the heck is going on?" I wondered. We were so stopped that one motorist had even gotten out of her car and was standing on the shoulder to watch. After about 10 minutes of screwing with LA traffic (affecting over 1000 vehicles, to be conservative), the LAPD opened the freeway, and the cars started moving on. I strained my eyes to see what all the cop cars were surrounding. Probably a chase car that had been cornered. Probably the driver had ditched it on the side and tried running away. (We see these scenarios all the time on TV.) We weren't encouraged to stop and ask, however, so I drove on home and zoned out to some late-night TV. (Should have gone right to bed, I know.)

Ah, another day in LA - six days before Christmas!

Today (Tuesday), I take off on a drive up north later this afternoon up to Yosemite, then Bishop, way east in the Sierra Nevadas. I had planned to leave before the past weekend, but my hosts had been sick. It's to visit the retired pastor who baptized me and married my parents. More family history research. But more later ...

THE JOB FRONT: INFORMATIONAL INTERVIEWS (December 19)

More progress on the career front.

This morning I arranged to call an old Aramco schoolmate who is a senior executive editor (Language Arts) for Holt, Rinehart, and Winston (HRW) publishing house in Austin, Texas. It wasn't a job interview; I reassured her ahead of time that I was after information about the publishing industry and her perspective on its future - where hiring was occurring, etc.

We chatted for an hour (I kept stopping every 15 minutes to make sure she was OK with continuing). Some highlights of our talk:

The future of the textbook / educational publishing industry:

The Big 4 (HRW, Pearson, Glencoe, and MacDougal), among others, are inexorably becoming "dinosaurs" that will either become more flexible to meet the fast changing needs of US education or become "obsolete". Currently, they are too big, too byzantine in their corporate bureaucracy, and too slow at getting information and communicating it within the company. The future, she feels, is with smaller, more flexible publishing houses, especially those that specialize in multimedia. Increasingly, the model for success will be for the old, mainline companies to develop "smart partnerships" with smaller "development houses", where the real innovation is occurring. The larger corporation will then become a "shell" to select and manage projects in which smaller houses do the actual work.

The place of Foreign Languages (her company calls them "World Languages") within publishing:

The school textbook market depends on volume of orders. Math and language arts, for example, are required year after year in school programs, whereas World Languages may only be required for a year - or not at all. Consequently, language arts takes up 50% of HRW's budget, whereas World Languages may be only 15%. However, she said that HRW's World Languages division is more progressive and innovative than most other departments. She's envious!

My best bets for jobs in the *creative* side of the business (actually doing the materials):

*"Development houses," such as Word and Numbers in Baltimore, smaller companies (from 2-member "mom-and-pop" businesses to houses employing a couple hundred employees) that do project work for many mainline publishers, making video and audio content, writing textbook chapters, and image acquisitions (getting legal permissions to use images), etc.

*While the big companies are "right sizing" (laying people off and rehiring to get the right balance - 40% laid off in the last 3 years at HRW), smaller media groups are hiring by the score.

* Conceptual liaison positions: acting as the middle man between editorial groups in the corporation (who want, for instance, a new biology text for Middle School) and the end producers (e.g. software programmers in India) - someone to translate the wishes of the company into methods and prototype exercises/lessons that the end publishers/programmers can use to make a finished product to sell.

Who actually writes foreign-language textbooks?

While a university professor's name may be on the outside of a textbook, in reality, s/he normally contributes only large-scale elements: the chapter topics, main methodology, review of final manuscript. The real word-by-word and exercise-by-exercise writing is done by "grunts" either in-house or, more and more commonly, outside consultants.

Advice for job hunting:

* Bring work samples (a portfolio of your ideas, past materials) in addition to a résumé

* Attend conferences on technology in education (e.g. NCEA)

* Know the publishing market and industry - which products are most successful (both financially and educationally - e.g. view "efficacy studies" on how well a text worked in the classroom), which companies are important in the business, how companies are doing financially, how textbooks are ordered (whether by state "adoption" - a big state selects texts for the entire public system - or "open territory" - each school district selects).

* Be open to various kinds of employment: full-time with a company, project employment (hired by a company for the life of a big project), or free-lance.

Companies to look into:


* Words and Numbers - Baltimore (a "development house" she admires)
* Prentice Hall/Pearson - far northern New Jersey
* Eureka Software - Austin (mainly in tech, but moving more into making its own educational content)

Ironically, at a time when I'm looking to get *into* the industry, my friend is looking to get out! She's thinking of going back to school either in nursing or social work to help Palestinian human and economic development. She also has a side consulting business, Moggie Editorial Group ("moggie" is British slang for a tom cat), in which she serves as a kind of "ghost writer" for textbook projects. (Often the assumed textbook authors with the knowledge of the field are HORRIBLE writers!)

Christmas is coming soon, but my current lease ends January 31! Time to get serious about the job business! ...

DISNEYLAND'S POOR COUSIN (Dec. 11)

Since the 1950's, Southern California has seen the rise of the "theme park", beginning with Disneyland in 1955 (this year was their 50th anniversary - see my blog from October), Knott's Berry Farm, Magic Mountain, Universal Studios, etc.

Disneyland was always our family tradition dating back to the 1960's, but I do recall visiting Knott's Berry Farm once or twice in those days. It was kind of a hokey Grand-Ol'-Opry-meets-Hollywood-western-set, and pretty small. There was a Western town main street with an apothecary with a bunch of (probably authentic) old medicine bottles in the window. "Lydia Pinkham's Pink Pills for Pale People" was one that became part of our family jokes.

This past Sunday, I met a few friends at Knott's Berry Farm to see another friend who's an "actor" - really jack-of-all (media) trades who performs wherever there's pay involved on TV, movies, live stage, etc.. Paul Avidisian has been performing at KBF for several months now in their faux Western saloon, and recently, due to the Christmas season, in an abridged version of Dickens' "Christmas Carol". I believe he plays the part of the obsequious Bob Cratchit, Scrooge's clerk.

I had forgotten how low-key (and down market) Knott's Berry Farm was/is. It's only a cut above a small-town Fourth of July fair, and about as well organized. In comparison with Disneyland it fares pretty sadly. Disneyland is slick (and extremely well-organized) in every detail. Parking there is fast and seamless, and a little trolley picks you up by your car (parked still miles from the park) and moves you comfortably to the entrance gate. At KFB, it was catch as catch can. I had to drive around to three sides of the park before I could find a parking lot that was open, and the signs to keep you from wasting time looking were hard to find. And if you didn't have cash, they couldn't handle your credit card. (What, are we still in the '50s?) Once parked, you still had to walk all the way to the main entrance.

The mainly working-class families walking around (many proving the epidemic of obesity in America) looked tired and grumpy. Even the kids. Every schlock-y Christmas doodad was on sale in their Western store arcade along with sad souvenirs made in China - or Burma. Lines at the few amusement rides were as long as Disneyland - with none of the meticulous organization or in-line entertainment Disney has developed to keep kids happy for the hour and a half it takes to get into Space Mountain.

In the 1950's the two parks probably started out somewhat equal, but you get the impression that, while Disneyland has continually adapted, evolved and improved, KBF hasn't bothered to learn (or research) one thing about better crowd control, experience engineering, etc. Fifty years of decay rather than fifty years of self-improvement.

Anyway, Paul A's shows were fun to watch in a hokey kind of way (although the saloon pianist was off sick and the leading female actor had laryngitis and could barely sing). For the second show, Dicken's "Christmas Carol", the American cast did their best to conjure up some Trans-Atlantic version of an English accent. Paul's was not quite half-way to England. But he surprised us all at the quality of his singing voice (more of an Irish tenor), and he appreciated our efforts to turn out to support the home team and later mugged for our cameras in his Western costume.

The rest of the group then headed out for a restaurant to celebrate Paul's acting accomplishments that day, but I had to leave during the applause for a "A Christmas Carol" to hop in my car and drive an hour to a formal Christmas concert at a Catholic college directed by another friend, Allan Petker, who was the groom in the wedding I attended in Santa Clarita back in November.

Combined with church that morning, Sunday was one of the busiest days on my social calendar this month!

THANKSGIVING SAN DIEGO-STYLE

The weekend after Thanksgiving, after I got back from my Baltimore conference, Ann invited me down for a late turkey meal with her and Cam and Cam's younger brother Doug. (They had spent the holiday itself at one of Cam's cousin's, while I spent it with old Urbana friends now living in Princeton, NJ.) Talk, as usual, centered on the woeful adventures of their oldest brother (and my ex-Dhahran classmate), who has been on and off the wagon many times (mostly off). They are fond of their sister-in-law, however, so they aren't too thrilled that older brother (unemployed, unemployable, and not really seeking) is suing her for support in their messy divorce. Doug, in the midst of a separation himself, and fathering three small girls, is looking into a career in nursing (pays surprisingly well, these days) - after night school for a few years.

HAPPY TRAILS

Rummaging around in one's family history is fun! And it's inexplicably breath-taking each time you come across the name of a late relative, especially one you never knew. "So they really were real!" you think. Some recent adventures in family research (post-Riverside) packed into last weekend:

December 3 (Saturday)

Went to a LA Philharmonic concert with Norwegian guest piano phenom Leif Ove Andsnes playing Grieg's famous piano concerto at the new Walt Disney Concert Hall, an LA landmark architecturally. (See more on the building at: wdch.LAPhil.com/about/overview.cfm).

Since I was downtown, I decided to head over to the main public library building - also an architectural landmark from a previous era to start some genealogical research. This "library" is more of a city unto itself with restaurants, study rooms, lecture halls, computer labs - state of the art. I've never seen a library like it! Taking the escalator down the cavernous addition (ceilings 100 feet high like some Hollywood set for Ancient Babylon) to level 5, there is an entire floor dedicated to genealogy and history.

A very helpful Chinese-American woman librarian got me started and I got a lot accomplished in a short two-hour span on what was mainly a reconnoitring trip. I discovered I could look up keywords from the LA Times archives going back to the 1880's! (By comparison, most newspapers are searchable online only back to the 1990's.) I was a bit skeptical that the lives of an immigrant Swedish tinsmith from Omaha and his high school math teaacher son would play prominantly in the annals of a city like LA, but a search of "Sundberg" turned up a surprising amount of relevant articles:

* A celebration of Gustavus Adolphus day planned by the Swedish community, including my great-grandfather (1899)
*A long article on the tragic drowning of my grandfather's brother Hjalmar at age 16 swimming off Long Beach (1902)
* The sale of some LA property by my great-grandmother Elsa (1906)
* An article on the mortal fall off a ladder that killed great-grandfather J.E. Sundberg (1909)
* Death notices for my grandfather (1958) and grandmother (1963)
* A marriage article on Mom and Dad's wedding in Bahrain (1955)

December 4 (Sunday)

After contacting Angelica Lutheran Church and its hispanic pastor Carlos Paiva months earlier, I finally got to a service there - the English Service (they also have Spanish, Korean, and Maya) at 10:30. I am not exaggerating when I say that there were only 8 people there; I counted them all! (Not too demanding.) And that number included Pastor Todd (an ordained Catholic priest who teaches high school normally), the organist, and (I'm sure) a professional singer in the form of a regal young Korean-American woman. They invited me to coffee afterwards - we all fit comfortably around one table. They were interested to hear of my family connection with the church (my great-grandparents, grandparents, and father and aunt attended). Apparently, the scattered sons and daughter and ex-members living in other parts of LA still have a paterntal feeling towards their old Swedish parish and have reunions periodically, so the actual number in attendance on any one Sunday don't reflect the real "base" Angelica has in LA. And then there are the current "members" who are in their '80s or older - many shut-ins, in hospital, or in hospice care. This is, I think, typical of urban ethnic congregations that have suffered "white flight" to the suburbs over many decades.

The Pico-Union neighborhood the church finds itself in today is mainly Hispanic, and not even Mexican, but from other parts of Central America. In 1925, it was mainly a white neighborhood - my great-grandparents lived just two blocks south. The church secretary (a Danish-American woman doctor married to a Mexican-American) told me that nearby blocks are still considered Cripps turf - a notorious black gang, even though most blacks have left the neighborhood, as well. "I wouldn't walk around here after dark," she warned me. So, it's a sign of health that the church is administered by a Latino pastor. Pastor Paiva and that the Spanish (and Korean) congregation members are numerous. And he has been extremely involved socially as an advocate for the mainly poor, non-English speaking residents of his church turf - getting day care started, involvinv the city council members in improvements in law enforcement, services, etc. I asked the secretary why she stayed (she had joined in the 1950's). She said it was habit, and also a fear (not her words) that, when the old white congregation was gone, the current inexperience (non-Scandinavian) congregation wouldn't properly respect its past traditions and infrastructure or keep it up properly. She did express a lot of respect for Paiva, however.

The pastor kindly allowed me to look at the ancient church membership books dating back to 1888, when Angelica was first founded. I was thrilled to see my great-grandmother Elsa Sundberg's name written in it, along with her two (surviving) children: my grandfather Arthur and his sister Esther (Astrid Elvira Ingeborg). Just as in the huge book at Eden Lutheran in Riverside, Angelica's book contained fully two pages per entry: name, birthdate, birthplace, dates of baptism, confirmation, reception into membership, discharge of membership to other congregations, marriage, death, address. A genealogist's dream.

The most exciting tidbit contained in all the dry data was the year Elsa (and kids) arrived in LA from Omaha: 1896. In family oral history, we knew the J. E. Sundberg's had arrived in the 1890's SOMETIME, but we didn't know the exact year. Now we know. And in 2006 it will be 110 years since the first Sundberg's arrived in LA!

December 6 (Tuesday)

Since my UCLA extension class this term has been on Monday evenings, it has been a plan for many weeks to get to UCLA main campus to walk around and research Dad's years there, when he was a chemistry major (1939-43) and later in the MBA program (1946-48) after the war. Somehow, I always ended up finishing my class assignment Monday afternoons and not having the chance to get to campus early. So, the day AFTER Monday this week, I decided (since it was very late in the term) to go Tuesday.

I parked in one of the many general parking garages, and walked up some very extensive stairs to the main quad, where I sought out Murphy Hall, where admissions and records offices are. Dad's UCLA ID was obviously antique: 000063035. (In the 1940's, you could get away with 5-digit ID's, apparently.) $16 and a death certificate got me his white-on-black microfilmed transcript - and all his grades! (Our parents made critical use of our report cards when we were small and defenseless. Now the tables are turned!)

Next, I visited Powell Library. (You've probably all seen UCLA's Italianate gold and cream buildings in many Hollywood movies. Powell is one of those beauties.) I was first on a hunt for the old UCLA yearbooks, which turned out to be in another library altogether. I found them finally: "Southern Campus" was the unimaginative name - from an earlier era when Berkeley was obviously the prestige "Northern" campus of the University of California (THE University of California), and brand-new UCLA had to distinguish itself. It was obviously the height of the war years. Page after page listed different military organizations. Dad was on the "Coast Artillery" page. He also showed up on his Christian fraternity (AGO) page, and a wanna-be basketball team page: the "145 lbs. Basketball" team (those who didn't quite make the weight cut-off for the varsity or even "frosh" teams). He was also part of an honorary chemistry fraternity: Alpha Chi Sigma, along with opera singer Jerome Hines (they were both chemistry majors in their early years). Did Dad ever look young - and skinny! Ann and I only knew him when he was battling his weight. (He got up to 220 lbs. in the year before he died.)

BLOODY RENTAL CARS

I'm back in LA (since November 25).

The day after Thanksgiving, I caught a flight back to Los Angeles from Baltimore-Washington Airport, landing safely at LAX. So far, so good. I caught the Avis shuttle to the Avis lot to pick up my rental car (the cheapest available) and set out to do some errands near the airport before heading back to my Los Feliz apartment. (This is Ann's old neighborhood, where I lived from January-March, so it's very familiar territory.)

It was at the parking lot by the Bank of America ATM machine that I opened the trunk of my car looking for something in my luggagge and banged my right hand against the top of the trunk. A minor inconvenience. Then I noticed these odd, sticky drops on things - like an orange juice cup was leaking out the bottom. Strange, I thought. Examining the drops, I realized they were blood. And the drops were coming from my own hand!

I didn't feel anything, really, but it was extremely inconvenient to be stuck far from home with a very productive wound (it must have gashed some major vein in the top of my hand). I wrapped an handkerchief around my hand and tried to drive home, but got about five minutes away when the rag itself was soaked. Uh oh. I stopped at a nearby Target to pick up some bandaids and Bactine to do a little first aid on my own. I must have looked like some drunk who had stumbled or a gang member fresh from a fist fight as I walked around the aisles full of Target Christmas shoppers! When cleaned up in the men's room, the wound looked like any normal 1/2'' cut, maybe just a bit deeper than usual.

The rental car must seem a bit puzzling to you reading this. "Paul has his own car, doesn't he?" you're probably asking. Well, yes, but due to a fender-bender back in October (an SUV backed into my stopped car at about 20 mph), my Infiniti was in a body shop in Glendale over the time of my East Coast trip (a convenient time to leave it for a week or so). Instead of paying about $10 a day for parking fees at LAX while I was gone the ten days ($100 plus dollars on top of the cost of my airline ticket), I killed two birds with one stone by getting a rental car both to the airport on Nov. 14 and another when I returned Nov. 25. Because the rentals were all covered by my AAA auto insurance (while my car was in the body shop), I essentially paid nothing for the rentals - and nothing for airport parking! (Dad would have been proud! :-) Not to mention paying no hotel bills during my time out east by staying with friends every night. (Hey, I'm in a job-hunt phase at the moment!) Oh, and the conference expenses plus meals are all tax deductions for 2005!

With the 4,000-plus frequent flier miles on United for the trip, I should now have accumulated over 25,000 miles total, enough for a free United ticket somewhere else. All in all (except for the bloody hand), a fairly economical vacation/business trip!