It is super-hot again here in Los Angeles. My strategy has been to get up really early and get to my desk on campus well before the heat gets going. This means that I’m not walking or waiting for the bus in too much heat on the way to work. The drawback of this strategy is that if I want to avoid that same sort of heat, I’d have to stay until the evening, which makes for a series of very long days. Not so good. So I’ve been sometimes walking home from the bus or subway very slowly, picking nice clumps of trees for shade, and stopping at this nice liquor store on the corner and emerging with a nice cold (nostalgic) cream soda, which is in a brown bottle that must look suspiciously like a beer. But I don’t care. It is hot.
(Photo: Someone was flying a kite that was a long sequence of kites on the beach in Santa Monica a week or two ago. Very pretty. Being on the beach seems like an excellent idea right now.)
With the official end of Summer sort of here, there are all of a sudden far too many events and social things going on, so my evenings have all been rather more consistently full of late than I normally care for, but each time it is something so very good, from a night of games at a friend’s place and outdoor movies a nearby home (Midnight Cowboy – actually really great – and with fresh popcorn), to a Labor Day barbecue at some other friends (lovely evening sunset from the parts of the house looking West), to dinner and interesting film-making conversation with some friends at the ever-fantastic La Casita Mexicana, consistently the best Mexican food I know anywhere in the city (I cannot recommend it highly enough), with some special appetizers and desserts sent out compliments of my friend Ramiro, one of the chef-owners. Does not look like it will end soon, as there’s an event on campus through the evening I want to attend, the downtown artwalk on Thursday, and so on… I need to start hiding again to work on so very many things I need to get done.
My introductory quantum field theory class yesterday was fun. I added an infinite number of spacetime points to what I did on Thursday and lo and behold we were doing fully grown up quantum field theory and computing scattering amplitudes for mesons. Yay! Now I have a decision. The next step in Zee is to stop and do a bit of canonical quantization approach, but I am not sure I want to do any of that at all. Tempted to stick to entirely path integrals for this class… not sure.
We shall see.
-cvj
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As an LA native, when it comes to Mexican food, I really have seen it all. It remains some of my favorite cuisine, and I eat it all the time, but still — I never taste flavors or see dishes that I haven’t come across before.
Except for at La Casita Mexicana. It is so unique, and so so so good.