Family Hike in Wildwood

To burn off some of the Thanksgiving dinner calories, my whole family (mom, dad, wife, brother, sister-in-law, and dog) went hiking today at Wildwood Park in Thousand Oaks. My dad wanted to go there since we used to go there when my brother and I were kids and none of us had been there in a while.

We parked at the park entrance where Avenida de los Arboles dead ends and walked all the way to the giant teepee and then over to Paradise Falls.

Along the way, we searched for the Indian Winter geocache along the Santa Rosa Trail, but could not find it. We didn't attempt to find any others because my brother and his wife weren't very interested in geocaching.

We followed a different route on the way back following Indian Creek Trail back up to Avenida de los Arboles. The way back was mostly uphill and my mom had a hard time making it up the trail. We saw a snake cross the trail in front of us which freaked my mom out.

It was a really nice day for a hike. It was warm, not windy, and many of the trees were turning their fall colors. We stopped at Boba Loca on the way home for Boba drinks and then returned home to prepare a dinner of Thanksgiving leftovers.

Your American Accent

What American Accent do you have? According to this short quiz on American accents, I have a Midland Accent.

"You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.

I thought it would be able to tell I was from California, but it didn't. Try the quiz and tell me if the accent it guessed for you matches where you actually come from.

Google Image Labeler

Have you tried the Google Image Labeler? It is a game where you and a randomly chosen partner are shown images one at time. You and your partner have to type in possible labels for the image. You keep typing labels until you and your partner have a label in common which earns you both points. Then a new image appears and you start again. This goes on for 1 minute and 30 seconds. After the round is over, you can choose to see the labels that your partner typed in.

Once I started playing, I got hooked and played for about half an hour. It is kind of fun and nice to know that you're doing your part to help Google better classify its images.

Washington/Centinela Redevelopment Part 3

Recently, there has been some more visible progress on the construction at the corner of Washington and Centinela.

There haven't been any changes to the northeast corner lot. It is still an empty dirt lot with a fence around it. On the northwest corner, however, the old buildings have been demolished within the past 2 days.

Pictured here are some construction workers tearing down the facade on the northwest corner. This morning, they started to put some spikes in the ground at regular intervals. I don't know what they are for yet, but I wonder if that means that they will construct buildings on the northwest corner first even though the northeast corner has been torn down for quite some time. I am getting anxious for something to happen on that corner.

Kings for a Night

Last night we saw the LA Kings at the Staples Center VIP-style! My company owns one of the VIP suites and occasionally hands tickets out to the employees. I am not really much of a hockey fan, but I had never been to the Staples Center and I didn't want to pass up the chance to go for free and on top of that, to visit a VIP suite. It was really cool. The VIP suite is kind of like a small hotel room, but where there would normally be a sliding glass door to a balcony, there were 2 rows of leather seats overlooking the inside of the Staples Center. The room also had a couch, a sink, and some refrigerators which were stocked with soft drinks, juice, wine, and beer.


The hockey game was pretty entertaining. The crowd really goes crazy when the home team scores a goal. The players fight a lot without getting reprimanded by the referees which I think is kind of lame, but I guess that's what a lot of people go to the games to see. To me, it is a little WWF in that respect.

More California Native Plants

This morning I went back to the Theodore Payne nursery to buy some more native plants for my garden. I wanted a few that grow tall to place in the very back of my yard, and I wanted to get one that would serve as a ground cover to fill up the bare space between plants while the plants are small. I ended up buying the following plants:

Mimulus aurantiacus (Bush Monkey Flower)
Arctostaphylos (Emerald Carpet)
Arctostaphylos glauca (Big Berry Manzanita)
Salvia clevelandii 'Allen Chickering)
Sambucus mexicana (Mexican Elderberry)

I will add these near the other plants I bought at the Theodore Payne Fall Festival a few weeks ago.