So working on cover letters for Public Interest Career Day at UCLA was a lot more like work than I had hoped, taking up the entire morning of my first day off. But at least it’s done now. And I was pretty useless after that.
I did go for a walk around campus yesterday afternoon, which is one of the unbelievable privileges of living here. It even counts as exercise!!! Other than that, though, I watched multiple episodes of Law & Order and Everybody Loves Raymond. Excellent time-wasters.
Hillary finished school yesterday and went ice-skating with a couple of her friends. Our instructions were to pick her up around 6:30 or 7:00 last night at a friend’s house we’d never been to before. We had basic directions, but no specific house number – armed with cell phone numbers we took off around 6:45 since this house was only six miles away.
Our first clue as to what we might encounter was that we were to go three miles down the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway – hint, on the beach), followed by turning right (stay with me here, AWAY from the beach) on a road with the name “Canyon” in it. After going three miles AWAY from the beach on a CANYON road, we were destined for an address on on road that implied a view of the ocean. In other words, we were going UP!
And we were. Well we drove around in the dark for quite a while, since in these mountains our cell phones were useless. It took us an hour in the dark on windy mountain roads to eventually find this spectacular house where we had the privilege of meeting the nicest couple and the sweetest HUGE dog you’ll ever meet (and a 15-foot tall Christmas tree in the living room). Hillary’s friend’s dad is an executive in the entertainment industry, along with being a very gracious guy.
On the way back down the windy mountain road Hillary said she had no idea that her friend (and her family) were as well off as they are (although in Malibu it is often a safe bet), but her point was how unpretentious they were to her. Which reaffirms one of my hopes in moving here – that she would see firsthand that people are people from Arkansas to Mississippi to Malibu. If she can learn that at such an impressionable age, she will be way ahead of… well… the biggest part of humanity.
Minutes to Memories 