Summer Heat Wave

It has been really hot in LA for the past week, as with many other parts of the country. A girl I talked to today said that she couldn't take the preschool kids she works with outside to play because it was over 115 degrees outside, so they were not allowed to go outside. Where we are it is not as bad because we are near the ocean. In fact, a lot of the houses here on the west side don't have air conditioning because it only gets very hot a few weeks out of the year. Well, now is those few weeks. Yesterday at the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica a fire started underground because the transformers overheated from so much use from people using their air conditioning. The fire blew manhole covers off the street and resulted in a power outage. There have been outages all over the city because people trying to stay cool and the governor is urging people to conserve, conserve, conserve.

My birthday

For my birthday I got real diamond earrings.

Independence Day: Part II

So yesterday was the real Independence Day and we did what I predicted, we had a BBQ. We went over to Robert's grandparents house and swam in their pool and had a BBQ in their backyard. Woody brought his scuba gear and I tried it out in the pool. At first I felt like I was suficating even though I was getting oxygen from the tank. Getting your air from a little tube took me a while to get used to. I also wouldn't sink, so they had to add weights to me. Then I had to figure out how to swim with those fins on. When I finally had it figured out I realized there was really no place to go in the pool. I still enjoyed figuring everything out.

On Monday we went to the Hollywood Bowl, which is in...(can you guess?) Hollywood. It is an outdoor amphitheatre home to the LA Philharmonic Orchestra. So the LA Philharmonic played a bunch of music for the first half and the second half was Kenny Loggins. We were rockin it to seventies music. I bet not many people can claim that they have heard Footloose performed live. After that they had a cool fireworks show.

So by the time evening came on the fourth of July we were pretty fireworked out so we just went up on the balcony of the house here instead of going anywhere, and we still managed to see another 6 firework shows going off at the same time by not even leaving our house.

Independence Day

Yesterday we went to go see fireworks at Santa Monica College. It think its weird that there are all these firework shows on the Saturday before Independence Day because everyone had the day off on the fourth and can just as easily go see fireworks on the fourth. It is like a build up to the fourth of July. A lot of people don't have work on Monday either so it is this five day weekend building up to the fourth where I guess everyone will have a BBQ and the non-LDS people will all get drunk and the LDS people with play card games or something.

Anyway, so the firework show was fun. We parked at the LDS Institute and sat on the institute lawn because the place they shot the fireworks off was near there. They used to set the fireworks off right across the street from the institute and and once one of the firworks fell over and shot over to the institute and under a car. No one got hurt. Staying at the institute felt like a ward activity because everyone knew each other because they were all in the same stake. I saw a lot of people that I new from our ward.