My sister, Steph, came to visit this past weekend. Yay! It was like Xmas in April. (It’s April right? These last few weeks have been kind of a blur.) She was on spring break from teaching. For those of your who don’t know, my sister is currently a junior high English teacher for the City of Philadelphia.
She arrived late Friday night. Her flight was supposed to arrive around 9:45 PM, but was delayed in Philadelphia because of sunlight. That’s right. Apparently it was raining earlier in the morning, and a couple Southwest Airlines flights got pushed back, so the airline decided to push every flight back from that point on, kinda like a “first come first serve” deal. Even though the weather changed to sunny and seventy degrees out. Lame. She took off four hours late causing the inevitable suckiness, killing any plans for the first evening. We got back to The Hotel and crashed out.
Saturday began rather nicely with a five-mile run. Christ. Steph is training for the Broad Street Run, a ten-mile jaunt beginning in North Philly and ending at the stadiums in South Philly. It was her rest week, but she still had to do some sort of workout. I had run five miles the night before killing time until she arrived, and was again on my feet running the boardwalk. My mind was stoked to be out on a beautiful morning with my sister, but my body was screaming, “Hey asshole, I thought we were gonna watch Gossip Girl on TiVo?!” It was fun, and made the lounging on Venice Beach the rest of the afternoon well worth it.
After the bronzing session, we headed up to the Promenade so she could shop for a dress for our cousin Melanie’s upcoming wedding. While there, we made a semi-successful stop in Barnes & Noble. I say semi-successful because I found two cool AAA travel guides for Dublin and Ireland, as well as a little pocket map of Dublin for Johnny, Fever, and my upcoming trip (stay tuned!) to the green isle. However, my quest was to find a book or two to read on the eleven-hour flights over and back. I tried to find seven books, and only one of them was in the store? What the hell? That’s one helluva bookstore not having ANY books you want to read. Anyway, Steph found two dresses which were very nice.
The evening consisted of dinner at Baja Cantina with a little entertainment brought to us by UNC’s spanking of Villanova’s in the Final Four of the NCAA tournament. I was at crossroads: torn between my hatred for UNC as a whole and my hatred for Nova as an evil-member of the Big 5. Going with the lesser of two evils, I rooted for Nova. My mistake. Oh well. Post meal, we cruised up to the Whaler where we met up with Devon and her boyfriend Tony. Tony was snoggered from our friend Jesse’s last bartending shift ever. We repo’d over to Hinano’s, and despite his temperament, the night was super chill. We relaxed and threw back a few drinks while Steph and Devon caught up, not seeing each other since the Mallick winter holiday vacation.
Sunday we awoke to an even more beautiful day outside. My sister and I took a nice stroll down the boardwalk towards Santa Monica to the Farmer’s Market hoping to discover some major breakfast. On the way we ran into my [fake] twin sister, Alicia who was opening up On The Waterfront. I say [fake] because obviously we aren’t related, but through several conversations, Alicia and I discovered not only do we share the same birthday, our mothers were in labor at the same time, and with the time difference between our birth cities, we learned we were born less than three hours apart. So literally share the exact same birthday. I think it’s cool.
Not that it really matters, but for breakfast we each got giant turkey sausage, egg, pepper, and onion quesadillas with some homemade apple-pomegranate juice. So good. The perfect way to start Sunday Funday.
While breakfast settled, we took in another beach session, which I had to cut short due to the fact my back began to sizzle under the noonday sun.
After showering up, we cruised down the boardwalk south to participate in the usual Sunday activities. We posted up on window seats at The Whaler while Devon served us ice-cold beverages. We joined up with my buddy Ray. Eventually our party grew with the additions of Bron, and then the tan-man himself, Ed. Steph was a huge hit with the guys. She was instantly accepted into the circle and we all ended up at pulling a reverse from the night before, this time ending our night at Baja. Only this time, instead of taking it easy, Steph purchased a number of lemon drop style shots. Dunzo. So dunzo.
Monday I sadly had to work all day. Steph spent her afternoon split between the beach and bullshitting with Johnny, who was eventually joined by Devon when she came over to borrow a lens from Roger. We kept it a mellow evening since we had to be up at 5:00 AM to hit the airport.
You can’t even begin to understand from this post the excitement and fun I had with my sister in town. It was the first time we got to spend time in Cali together just to the two of us. Usually her boyfriend Joe joins her on her excursions, which I don’t mind, Joe is great, but it was nice to be only brother and sister for a few days. What made the trip so perfect was, to a huge extent, the way my friends made her feel at home. Saturday and Sunday every single one of the hoodrats, whom I spend day in and day out with, treated her as if she were a Venice local.
I couldn’t have asked for a better spring break.
This is a fraction, a piece of the truth. A justified action for reason of proof.
