Like most folks our age, we thoroughly enjoy spending time with the wee folk but at the end of each visit we usually find ourselves curled up in some comfortable niche in a saloon that caters to the walker and wheelchair crowd pondering, “What the hell just happened?”

Another of those Los Angeles anomalies is the preponderance of folks driving along with a cell phone in one hand, a coffee cup in three fingers of the other and a mascara brush daintily poised between thumb and forefinger while piloting their Smart car at 35mph down a freeway on-ramp trying to squeeze in between two fast-moving eighteen wheelers with one knee on the steering wheel while delicately balancing an open book on the other…

Los Angeles is home to a seemingly endless array of both natural and man-inspired tumult inclusive of wildfires, mudslides, smog, radioactive rain, tsunamis and the ever popular earthquake…

 Hoppy Easter                                                                April 24, 2011

Although the Angelinos have learned to co-exist with this multitude of miserable mishaps, they have yet to adapt to the tornadic activity which follows in the wake of the two resident Bryan grandkidlets…

While these things are the epitome of political correctness, I have often wondered just how safe they would be in an accident.  That question was vividly answered by a friend in Arizona who owns a scrap metal “slice and dice” company.   He purchases the accordion-shaped carcasses of these vehicles in lots of 30 or 40 at a time and while his operation can reduce a 4-ton Buick to baseball sized chunks of metal in four and a half seconds, a Smart car disappears in less than one. These things occasionally arrive plastered with Obama bumper stickers, wrapped in “Bio-hazard” tape and accompanied by a state official requesting an expeditious rendering of the vehicle and its “contents.” Smart car?  I think not.

We escaped from Los Angeles a few days ago and, after a couple of nights in Oxnard, we are now enjoying the hospitality of the Santa Maria Elks.  Having made this trip following this same route many times in the past and then boring you folks with all the minutiae of the journey, we have decided to bring this edition to a hasty conclusion to allow you to engage in some endeavor more productive than reading this drivel.

Here’s wishing you, one and all, a hoppy Easter with baskets full of colorful eggs or, if you are anything like us, an enjoyable dining experience at a free flowing champagne Easter brunch…

See y’all next time with news of alien abductions and never before seen pictures of Bigfoot.  
Hugs, Chuck and Kalyn