Photos taken over the weekend (Saturday, 1.22.2022-Sunday, 1.23.2022).
Yup, this is the way I like to see snow---from a distance!
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Aftermath of strong Santa Ana winds, Saturday morning, 1.22.2022.
No too much damage in South Pasadena from strong Santa Ana winds we had the night before. Other SGV cities had damaged homes and no electricity due to trees falling onto houses and downed power lines. These pictures I took while walking around my immediate neighborhood.
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Everyone loves palm trees... until their dead fronds fall onto sidewalks and streets.
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Fallen palm fronds can be a nuisance. They also have very sharp barbs. You can get a flat tire driving over them if the barbs are facing up.
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I was hoping to get pictures of the street littered with palm fronds down the middle but it looks like people had already moved the fronds aside.
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Photo by me
I don't really give my home town (Cerritos) much love, and by that I don't seem to really take any pictures of it. I never thought it was really interesting to look at--bland, boring, full of 1970s (and later) tract homes and shopping centers. It was a nice place to grow up, but honestly, as soon as I got my driver's license when I was 16, I used every opportunity to drive out of it and explore and hang out at other places. Anyway, I took the time on Saturday morning to take some pictures of the Cerritos Civic Center, which has evolved over time from when I was a little kid to me being a middle-aged man now. Or am I officially old?
Anyway, this picture is of the exterior of Cerritos Library, of which the current iteration opened in 2002. When I was a kid, it was a much smaller building. But I hung out here a lot as a kid and when I was in my teens.
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The Cerritos Library is supposedly the first building in the US with a titanium exterior.
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Photo by me
The Cerritos City Hall opened in 1978. It was the first city hall in the US to have solar-powered water heating, or something. It's a very functional building; there's nothing I find "monumental" about it. The street side is rather bland and fortress-like. My guess is that that is by design. Maybe it's supposed to blend in unobtrusively with its bland surroundings. The only redeeming quality of it is the landscaping around it. I don't think it's totally ugly, it's just kind of... blah.
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I realize there are no interior hallways. The glassy area to the right are the city offices, and the city council chambers are in the background, accessed from the outside.
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Peeking into the glass front doors, I realize they don't make buildings like this anymore. We are so far removed from the 1970s already, that there's almost a certain charm to it.
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This is the parking lot and civic center plaza side of the city hall. I guess this is the more interesting side of the building, and I'm very sure that the architect figured that this is where most people would be accessing the building. It's from this side that you can see it's actually a tri-level building, and you don't enter it at ground level. You have to actually walk 2 flights of stairs to go up to the entrance and city council chambers which are on the 2nd level.
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Even in the late 1970s, the architect already thought of people in wheelchairs.
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Cerritos' own transit bus.
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I realize the Cerritos library and city hall are both very unsymmetrical (asymmetrical?) buildings. They literally both look very different at all sides, which is kind of interesting, because the 3rd building in the Cerritos Civic Center, the Sheriff's Station, is actually pretty close to symmetrical, and is the most boring building of the 3. That's why I didn't bother taking any pictures of it.
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The civic center also includes the Cerritos Sculpture Garden.
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I was 16 when this incident happened. It totally freaked me out at the time. I didn't know anyone who died. I remember our phone at home kept ringing and my parents kept having to answer and talk to friends and relatives saying that we were OK, and the plane crashed into another neighborhood miles from us.
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I guess I did take a picture of the Cerritos Sheriff's Station, kind of. I was actually taking a picture of that very old fallen tree that's still alive; I think the tree has been around since at least the very early 1900s or something. The Sheriff's station opened in 1997.
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A neighborhood near my parents'. Typical 1970s-era Cerritos tract housing, although many of the houses have been remodeled over the years. This is actually in my parents' census tract. This is the kind of boring housing I grew up in. We moved to Cerritos when I was 7. Prior to that, we lived in LA proper---we lived in Koreatown before it was officially designated as Koreatown, and then we moved to the Miracle Mile District, and then Cerritos (*sigh*). Well into the 1980s and 90s, Cerritos had a significant Korean population... so it's kind of funny how we left one Koreatown and settled into sort of another.
But I think many Koreans started moving on to other areas. Cerritos has a very high percentage of Asian residents, which started becoming more Asian after the 1990 census, when it was actually pretty racially diverse. My parents still live there, in the same house I grew up in. I went there this day to visit them and take them out to lunch.
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It's funny how after I moved out of Cerritos, the restaurants seemed to have gotten much better. Yeah, they still have some of the national chains, but the ethnic food has gotten more varied and better, and there are some good mom-and-pops.
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Lunch with my parents. I had a chicken salad. Yum!! My parents had fish.
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Sunday morning errand... Car wash! Come on y'all and sing it with me car wash yeah!
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I always go to a hand wash place. No abrasive mechanical brushes. As you can see, I don't drive a fancy car.
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Nice and clean. Just waiting for the guy to use the air hoses, dry it off, do the interior, and clean the windows.
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They usually do a good job here. The guys work so hard, I'm always sure to tip.
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It was such a beautiful day for a car wash.
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Speaking of cars...
Later in the day, I saw this 1959 Edsel...
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And this 1952 Studebaker. I thought it was beautiful. The gentleman sitting inside gave me the OK to take a picture. I'm sure many people do take pictures of his car.
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A 1961 Chevy Impala lowrider.
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And then later in the evening, we saw this somewhere on Rosemead Boulevard.
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