this morning twiddle thumbs and i went to the san fernando mission. it's one of the older missions and there's only 2 in LA overall. i thought there were more but it's just this one and the san gabriel mission which i visited in december with nopalita. wait, actually it's one of the last missions built! #17 out of 21 in california. it's just that i felt the old history of los angeles while wandering the mission and looking at the artifacts. the full name of the place is: mission san fernando, rey de españa, (the only one named after the king of spain). you know what? i'm over the missions! i used to have a love of california history and wanted to visit all the missions but i realized with this visit that missions are boring. i think that i won't go out of my way to visit a mission from now on, but if i'm in the area and need something to do, then i'll visit a mission. or at least hit the ones in major cities or that are known for something. funny that doing stuff with twiddle thumbs always points out to me how boring things really are. hahahahhahaaaa

i did my dictator pose at the park across from the mission

we haven't ate and it's getting time to eat and we're in mission hills, out of our element. i know there's an armenian museum that's free on weekends in mission hills but i don't know where it is and don't feel like going out of my way to find it. we decide to eat and bust out the "vegan bible" or "vegetarian survival book for LA and orange counties" that i made way back when. we look up the cities close by and look at the possibilities. i don't know how to get from here to anywhere but the hotel so i get off on an exit in northridge and we're driving down the very street one of the vegetarian friendly restaurants is on and found it quickly. we had a late lunch at cafe graikos, next door to whole foods which we also browsed and picked up some green tea flavored soy milk made by vitasoy. the greek food was good but we had much more interest in their dinner menu than their lunch menu--so many vegetarian things to chose from. we will definitely have to go back one day soon to check out other dishes. by the way, i had a falafel sandwich (wrap) and twiddle thumbs had the eggplant pastitsios plate. she thought their tahini sauce was tops!

i kinda wanted this to be a very isolated weekend so that it could seem more like a getaway than what it actually was. that meant no relatives/no friends/no phone calls. but i got a call from a friend i haven't talked to in awhile so i decided that this will be the exception. since we aren't usually on this side of LA and it's the side she lives in, we went to go visit her and the baby she had a couple months back. the baby is a fellow caucAsian (half/half) like me but this time i didn't do my usual routine of running up to the parents screaming that it's gonna grow up to look just like me (so watch out!). just kidding. i don't do that, just think that. she has a good baby. wasn't screaming, wasn't crying. twiddle thumbs learned something about asian babys, (the birthmark on the butt thing). its times when you hang out with other types of people that you realize what things are specific to a people and what you take for granted that everyone knows. or maybe it's a CJK thing--china, japan, korea. as asian is so broad, we 3 seem to be closely related to each other rather than to other asian countries. i just wish i knew a better way to refer to the CJK instead of saying 'CJK' and having to explain that or using the umbrella term of "asia".

end of the day thoughts: on the news were reports of where it actually snowed due to the recent rains. we had thought about going somewhere that snows but there really didn't seem like much chance of snow. turns out we were so wrong. it rained in the usual (big bear) to the not so usual (las vegas and even a town in san diego county). those places were kinda expensive anyway which is why we didn't pick them. but if we had, we would have been playing in the snow. oh well, better luck next time.