I'm at Kyle's house right now, visiting for the weekend + Monday. Yesterday we did a whole bunch of stuff. My flight got in pretty early, so we went to get breakfast at this strange cafe that was located in a business center. The front of it was a vape shop, and it seemed like it had just been set up temporarily, but also kind of looked like a Chinese restaurant. The dishes they gave us our food on had a "grandma's china" feel to them, and were strangely ornate compared to everything else. Both of us got omelettes, and the omelettes were weird too. Not bad per se, but they looked like they had been prepared in a circular mold, and instead of being folded over like a normal omelette, they just... had all the ingredients kind of suspended in the middle of the egg patty. Mine looked like it was injected with cheese.

After that, Kyle took me to this awesome bird store nearby. It had parrots just sitting out in the store! Realizing now that I was so wrapped up in looking at the birds that I didn't take any pictures... The birds were friendly though, and you could pick them up. I held a Hahn's macaw and it climbed up my arm and bit my ear. >.> It also bit Kyle's ear, so... I guess it got both of us, haha. Despite the pain, it was a cute experience.

Met up with a friend from IRC in LA once we were done at the bird store. We visited the Museum of Death, which was... kind of weird. Very graphic and gory. It wasn't quite what I was hoping for, but it was still interesting. They had conjoined twin turtles! Honestly that was kind of cooler than seeing all the horrifying pictures of dead people. We also walked around Hollywood a little. Nothing too exciting there, but it was somewhat enjoyable.

On the way back from LA, he and I stopped at Chick-fil-a because I had never been there. As it turns out, they have almost nothing to eat for people who don't eat chicken, but we both got an order of waffle fries because we were hungry. That took the edge off the hunger until we got to the Indian place near his work that we'd been planning to try during my visit. For... whatever reason, in between chill electronic songs, the restaurant played the Ghostbusters theme song.

Kyle bought a smoker recently, and wanted to try smoking fish, so we bought some salmon and mackerel after dinner.

Surprisingly, I didn't pass out at any point. I barely got any sleep the night before, but I stayed awake all through the day (got kind of sleepy sometimes but not badly). Was even awake enough to watch The Matrix at his house together and go for a walk. It was Kyle's first time seeing The Matrix somehow, and it had been a long time since I saw it, so that was fun.

Today was more laid back than yesterday. We got some wood chips for the smoker and some cheese from Whole Foods to try smoking, then got pizza for lunch. Man, that pizza was really good. @.@ Hard to go wrong with spinach, garlic, and feta. After eating, we seasoned the smoker and played a game, then watched some movies. The first movie was really awful and cringey and had three separate scenes within 30 minutes where women surprised a guy by stripping to naked when he wasn't looking. After the third time it happened I'd had enough and we switched to a different movie. Ended up picking Grave of the Fireflies, which neither of us enjoyed. It just dragged on and on and one of the main characters was annoying... I'm starting to think I just don't like Studio Ghibli films. Kiki's Delivery Service was similarly boring and unenjoyable to me.

I guess we stayed in more today because we were smoking fish and had to stick around for it. The salmon turned out pretty good though! The mackerel... eh, not so much. It was too salty, I think. Shouldn't have put it in the same brine as the salmon for so long. It's okay though, it was a learning experience.

We walked again for longer tonight, and went to a playground nearby. All the equipment was slightly damp, which surprised me. Kyle said it's probably because we're closer to the ocean than where I live, which I guess makes sense. We wandered over to a shopping center after the playground, but barely anything was open, so we got Choco Tacos from a weirdly upscale gas station store because I'd never had one before. It was pretty good, but I think mine might have been defrosted and refrozen at some point, because the shell wasn't crunchy at all. It reminded me of Drumsticks I'd had that had that problem. While we were headed back to his house, we passed a big fenced off lot that had a former car dealership on it. Kyle mentioned that he'd thought about climbing the fence to go see if the building was open before, but had never done it because he didn't want to get in trouble for trespassing. I suggested we go in anyway (there was a huge gap under the fence we could have crawled through), but he was very reluctant. We ended up walking around the fence and finding that it was open in a certain spot, so we just walked right in and looked in the buildings, a couple of which turned out to have open doors. Given the trash and stuff we found, it seems safe to guess that someone had been in there not too long ago. There was mostly just debris and abandoned furniture inside, and we didn't have flashlights so we couldn't see everything anyway, but it was cool. He took a picture of me in the second building we went into, which smelled gross. It had that San Francisco/homeless person/old urine odor. Didn't stay in there long, though if I'd had a flashlight and it didn't smell disgusting, maybe I would have wanted to?

Once we'd returned to the house, we melted some of the cheese we bought on pretzels and ate them. I don't think either of us was particularly hungry, but he'd realized that he wasn't sure if he could smoke cheese in his smoker, and we wanted to try the cheese if we weren't saving it for smoking. The pretzels were good with the cheese (New Zealand white cheddar and three chili Gouda), but I'm not sure if I thought they were significantly better than microwave nachos.

I've been asking Kyle a lot of hypothetical questions while I've been here. Mostly "If they were otherwise perfect, would you date someone who ___?" format. That's been fun, haha. I used to love asking people hypothetical questions, but I toned it down a lot after high school... I think my favorite one this trip was "If they were otherwise perfect, would you date someone who had a badly done full back tattoo of your face and they only wanted you to do it with them from behind with the lights on?" He said he wasn't sure, but maybe. Somehow though, when I asked "If they were otherwise perfect, would you date someone who played Candy Crush for three hours a day?" he said no instantly, hahaha. Apparently he wouldn't be able to respect someone like that, which I can't blame him for. I don't want to date people I can't respect either. Anyway, I've had a good time visiting him, and I feel... pretty good in general.

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