Saturday we went to the Getty to check out an exhibit of Rembrandt sketches I heard about on the radio. Apparently he didn’t sign his sketches and had dozens of students that did similar work, so many sketches were falsely attributed to him. Over the last 30 years specialists have systematically come up with ways to figure out the artist behind the sketches. They paired similar Rembrandt and student sketches side by side and explained how to tell them apart. Most of the time it was immediately obvious: Rembrandt’s usually had fewer strokes and shading but conveyed MUCH more feeling. Even the landscapes. Very cool exhibit!

Next we went to Universal Studios which is about 20 minutes northeast of the Getty. It wasn’t too busy for a Saturday: 20 minute wait for the Simpson’s ride, 30 minute wait for the Studio tour. The studio tour highlights: Wisteria Lane, Skull Island from latest King Kong, flash flood, earthquake and the tour guide. We finished up at the animal show where Shannon was selected from the audience to get pick-pocketed by the parrot from Ace Ventura. She held up a dollar bill and the bird flew across the stadium, grabbed it and flew back. With that and her conversation with Craig Ferguson a couple nights before, she made quite a splash in Hollywood this week. We went to the taping of Friday night’s Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson Thursday evening. The guest was Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite). It was fun, but we missed out on the musical performance by Corinne Bailey Rae (saw her in the parking lot) and the commedian who both taped with the afternoon show. That audience also got a Sirius satellite radio with a 2 month subscription. They also cut our close-up audience shot! We were sitting right behind a pregnant lady who they zoomed in on during the email portion of the show. Also cut: CF kept trying to get Heder to swear, but he wouldn’t do it.

Friday I went snowboarding at the resort up the road from our house. They got 5 feet of snow last week, so I was anxious to get up there. I had to work last weekend, but Dylan went snowboarding with his cousin and uncle Saturday, the first clear day after a week of snow. The ski resort is only 10 miles away, but it took them 4 hours from when they left our house until they were skiing!!! Could have almost been to Mammoth in 4 hours. They had to put on chains, even though they had 4WD and the ticket line takes forever. They still had a great time. Friday my biggest delay was the line for lift tickets: 45 minutes. The snow was still in great shape and the lift lines weren’t bad. REI has discount passes, so a day pass was only $25.

Dylan and Gavin have been wanting a PS3 for months and months. Mom and Dad say: “NO, 5 game systems are enough”. We told them that they could buy it with their own money. They have been saving birthday money, Christmas money, allowance, etc and still fell well short of the amount they needed. Saturday Gavin asked what he could do to earn $. I told him to collect our various stashes of coins in drawers, jars and cars and take it to a coin counting machine. He separated out the euros, pesos, loonies, toonies, Turkish lira and Austrian schillings and put the US coins in a emesis basin sized container. I figured it might be $40 worth of coinage. Turns out it was $123.33 worth of pennies, nickels and quarters!! On the Coinstar counter if you get an Amazon gift card they don’t charge a fee. PS3 is on the way! And there was much rejoicing. They play Blu-rays, right?

I went with Dylan and his scout troop on an overnight to Anza Borrego State Park last weekend. We explored a series of mud caves. Spelunking tip: remove sunglasses before going inside caves. I’d been wearing mine all day and forgot they were on, cruised into the cave and couldn’t see the two foot wide, 20 ft deep chasm on the side right near the entrance. I promptly fell into the chasm and the crunching sound was the water bottle in my back pocket. Sounded like bones breaking. Luckily my knee bent and wedged me near the top, breaking my fall and ripping the crotch of my pants!!

Grace got a telescope for Christmas. One of the surprises we discovered on moving to So. Cal is that you can actually see stars in the sky when it’s not cloudy and rainy every day!

We went for a 10 mile bike ride on the Santa Ana River Trail today to start the new year. Beautiful sunny 70 degree day.