Car Trouble in Los Angeles

Our car started making more and more constant bad noises during our explorations yesterday. This morning I held out dwindling hope that it was just a loose fanbelt or "bad gas" as we dropped off the car at the Honda service center in Santa Monica. We went to a nearby coffee shop and within an hour Honda called with the bad news: it'll cost $1200 for a new AC compressor!!!!! And it's one of those things that MUST be fixed because it's linked by a timing belt to every other subsystem. Shitshitshitshitshitshitshit!

But it's a beautiful day in sunny California! To kill time while they fix the car, we set off on foot towards the ocean. Who says nobody walks in LA? We make it as far as the brand new tens-of-millions-of-dollars Santa Monica Main Library somewhere around 7th St. Here's a shot of the library courtyard:

Pretty sweet huh? The library is packed with state of the art PCs which is where we spent most of our time. Just out of the shot to the left is the coffee shop they're still constructing. And check out the upper right hand corner - that's where a large section of the wall has been slid open to merge inner and outer spaces on this fine day. But apparently not everyone is happy about this new library. They're still writing letters to the editors of local papers arguing about whether the old library should have just been expanded, not completely replaced.