9:00am
Although I slept at 5am, I still woke u p at 9. I don't know why this happens. I just wake up every day at 9. Heat?
11:30am
I worked for over 2 hours on this specific slide for my presentation next week. Graphics, colors, content, sizes, everything. It looks lovely I think. I hope that Katsouleas will like it too.
12:00pm
The match starts. Germany vs Italy. We had 3 girls watching(!): Foteini, Melania, and Mark's (german guy) girlfriend, Teresa.
I also found out one of the most amazing plugins for windows, a small program that makes available for windows XP the most amazing graphic feature (to me) of Macs: the nice toolbar at the edge of the screen.
You can see it on the top of my desktop - it's exactly the same as in Macs, and it is simply amazing. It takes a while to get used to it, but once you become familiar you will never go back to the old start menu. It works much better, and it looks awesome.
2:30pm
Woa... 2 goals from Italy at the 120th minute. I almost won my bet. Del Piero made a great difference, thank god.
4:00pm
We headed over to Venice Beach to eat at the C&O Trattoria. Unfortunately, due to 4th of July the places near the beach were CRAZY. Stopped cars, nowhere to park, dozens of people walking with their surfboards, hudrends mroe at the beach. We finally ate at a different place, there was no way we could reach the beach by car withing 1 hour :-)
7:00pm
After a walk in the beach I got back, finally to work on my presentation. Then Mark calls me (he only got his cellphone yesterday, and the only number registered in there is mine). "My car broke down, we are at Crenshaw and Jefferson, come save us!"
This place is in the heart of the Ghetto: bad quality people, dangerous, gangs walking around... I got there as soon as I could, and once they got in the car I saw true terror on Teresa's face: nothing had happened to them, but they spend over 1 hour there with all the weird people passing by... brrrrr.
7:30pm
On the way back, they had started the 4th of July fireworks. Even simple people go out on the streets and start firing real fireworks this day. On our way back, it was like going through a war zone: explosions everywhere (even only 2-3 meters away from the car in the middle of the street!), I was trying to avoid the bases of the fireworks, which were flying all over the place (in front, behind and above the car!). Teresa was so scared that she begged me to close the windows, but I and Mark were laughing our asses off.
9:00pm
Since Mark and Teresa were going to San Fransisco tomorrow (but they didn't have a car anymore), I drove them to LAX to rent one. On our way there we used the carpool lane, which is elevated and higher than any of the buildings (about 30-40m above the ground). Then, we experienced the most magnificent spectacle. Not dozens, but HUDRENDS of firework explosions were visible for miles... It was just, WOW. All you could see was bright colorful explosions in the night starry and moonlit sky. just over LA's city lights. It felt unique and amazing, especially because there were so many of them.
10:00pm
After I dropped them off, I took the roof of my mustang down and enjoyed a lonely ride back home, with the air blowing on my face from everywhere, my ears beaing pleased with sounds from the music I put in at maximum volume, and my eyes not believing again not just the lights of the cars (which in itself is pretty when they actually move) but the firework spectacles in the skies...
11:00pm
That's why I sometimes love america. Despite the national holiday (their biggest one), I went to the super market and bought milk and shaving cream. At 11 in the night. On a national holiday. After all this day. For some weird reason, it felt to me as the perfect ending...
