junket

Cow State Santa Claus, in common with (I believe) all the other CSU campuses, observes Cesar Chavez Day on March 31 by closing the campus. This year, Lauren and I took advantage and drove down to LA for a visit, including taking in a Long Beach Ice Dogs ECHL hockey game. (ECHL stands for "East Coast Hockey League," which indeed is how it started a few years ago. Now about half the teams are on or near the Pacific Coast, including our most proximate Stockton Thunder, who lost in overtime, 5-4, to Long Beach on Saturday night.)

Anyway, it was an excuse to get away from the 110 papers I have to grade, the paper I'm working on before the conference in three weeks, and the other excesses of work I'm doing lately. PLPLPLPLBBBHH!

On the way down, we saw


Clouds and hills on the road out of Bakersfield and up over the Tehachapi mountains,




snow on the tops of the hillsides,




a series of ridiculously picturesque train snaking around the hills and through tunnels,




the desert on the other side of the Tehachapis, near Lancaster, and




the sunset on Interstate 5 pounding into the San Fernando Valley. Lauren took all these, and especially the sunset turned out wonderfully. As you can tell, she snapped that in a moving car through the passenger side mirror.

It was good to get down there. I needed a break before the coming two weeks of unrelenting toil. And, oh crap, I've got to file taxes in the next week and a half, too.