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Showing posts from October 20, 2019

Expidite the expidited

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I am headed to the passport office this AM to get a new passport. I didn't have time to do the expidited renewal after getting back from Japan. So I made an special expiditing appointment with the passport folks in Atlanta. I am glad I only have to drive into Atlanta, not fly up to NY or Washington DC. It seems I have had to do some expiditing everytime I have renewed my passport. Passports are good for 10 years. When you get a new passport it is a time to ponder where you will be and what the passport will look like in 10 years. The pic belows shows the wear on my now cancelled passport. it was a 50 page book (the extra pages version) and 46 pages are fully used. Many countries require 3 empty pages to enter their country. So, I got full use of the larger size passport. If you need more pages, you send the passport in and they will "sew-in" more pages. The thickest passport I ever saw was at the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border. A truck driver I saw had a Uzbekistan passpo...
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I went flying at my new flying club in Long Beach CA today. It is complicated airspace and lots of traffic and airports, Class Delta, Charlie and Bravo. That didn't keep me from reaching over from my left seat and snapping a picture of The Queen Mary. We will be doing more flying from Long Beach (KLGB).
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Angie and I went to a rock concert Tuesday night at the Fonda Theater on Hollywood Blvd in LA. I hate traffic, so we took the Metrolink train to Union station in LA (we ate our dinner on the train) then 10 metro stops to Hollywood/Vine. It took about about an hour an 45 minutes. It was a Мумий Тролль (Mumiy Troll) concert. He is from Angie's home city - a 9 hour flight from Moscow (Vladivostock). He is very popular in Russia. He has a unique whimsical style that is a cross between Russian folk Balalaika, and David Bowie. He uses decent poetry placed on top of simple -sometimes mocking melodies for popular effect. He has been called "Russias biggest rock band, Mumiy Troll began as one of the most socially dangerous bands in the world as noted by a local Communist party chief in the former Soviet Union; yet, was hailed as Best Band of the Millennium by leading Russian music critics after the fall of communism. Mumiy Troll are the most influential and successful independent arti...
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Angie and I were seen at a tasting event this weekend. https://events.latimes.com/taste/ It was fun and different. Angie received complements on her jacket. It is actually my jacket from when I was 18 years old. It is the real thing from my punk era (before punk was cool).