…or at least until 3am. we started out, just will, cameron and i, with bohnanza and 6 nimmt!, both german card games – both a lot of fun. we moved on to elvenland when jack and pat arrived. then we played puerto rico (which took hours) and tikal. hopefully this becomes a regular thing.

friday night i met up with my practice group at citizen smith for dinner (went to pat’s first to check out the new bar asa bought – it’s fantastic) then we all went across the street to hotel cafe to see ankur’s band, seneca hawk. they were really good and i stuck around to see the band after them too, the evening episode, who are really worth checking out too.

saturday meghan, josh and i met up at pat’s place so josh and pat could transfer the beer the boys are making into the secondary fermentation tank. we went to doughboys for lunch (i had the beefy mac and cheese and it was sooooo good). we had reserved tickets for the opening of the new broad contemporary art museum at the LA county museum of art and the place was crazy. this is the free community weekend so there are all kinds of activities – magicians and stilt-walkers and other performers. the museum was really cool – there’s a giant glass elevator in the middle that makes you feel like you’re an exhibit – and the collection was pretty impressive.

after bcam we went to the la brea tar pits and it was SO COOL. the museum was great – lots of skeletons! and pat pointed out that the page museum itself totally looks like the raptor enclosure in ‘jurassic park’. the museum is mostly underground – you walk up a big hill and the museum is embedded in the top, so all you can see from the outside is the very tops of the trees that are in the big sunken courtyard. after we saw the museum we went to the observation room over pit 91 where the current excavation is underway. you can see bones sticking out of the asphalt and everything!

meghan and josh had to head home to check on watson, and pat and i drove to the culver city art district. we saw a photography exhibit (very dark and disturbing – awesome) and a cool blown-glass exhibit. there is an amazing exhibit going on at project: gallery right now – tessar lo and chris devera. tessar lo is so good and also a bit unfortunate to have a very similar style to james jean (who is one of my all-time favorite illustrators – see ‘fables’ and ‘the umbrella academy’ covers). he just graduated and already has a fully developed style but it’s so similar to james jean’s he’s having a hard time getting out from his shadow.

anyway, thinking of james jean reminded pat that the owner of project:gallery had told him there was a james jean mural up at the beverly hills prada store, so we drove up there to check it out. it. was. amazing. we ended up talking to one of the associates at prada for a bit about the mural (which you can see on james jean’s website under ‘work’) then we took a look at the clothes that have his illustrations on them. see prada.com for the clothes, the mural in situ, and click on ‘trembled blossoms’ for the animation based on the illustrations.

after all of the cultural enrichment pat and i were exhausted so we took a two hour nap before getting some awesome thai food and having an impromptu party with some of asa’s friends before they went to another party. then i watched ‘casablanca’ for the first time and oh my god, that movie is incredible. after ‘casablanca’ pat and i wanted to watch something else WWII-related, so we put in band of brothers. we ended up watching 3 or 4 episodes and staying up till 5.

today i’m going over to will’s for a whole afternoon/evening/night of board games and i am SO EXCITED. some carcassonne, some settlers of catan, other games i’ve never even heard of – it should be fantastic!