Several ordinary life stories, if told in rapid succession, tend to make life look far more pointless than it really is, probably. — Kurt Vonnegut Is that a fact? Let’s try it and see! Here are some excerpts from this week’s obituaries in the Irvine World News: Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Irvine
Introducing a 10-Year-Old to Poetry
Me: (reading aloud from syllabus for UC Irvine Young Writers class, in which my kid is enrolled) “We are going to be doing a variety of activities, including a facade poem, a four season poem, journal writing, and a memory snapshot story.” Him: Poems blow. Read more →
Happy Birthday
We celebrated my son’s birthday yesterday by going to his favorite restaurant of all time, BD’s Mongolian Barbeque in Irvine, only to find that they’d gone out of business, finally beaten into submission by the ultra-popular BJ’s Restaurant & Brewery next door. Fortunately, 10-year-olds bounce back from these kinds of setbacks pretty quickly, especially when they get the Kung Fu Chaos game they really, really wanted . . . Read more →
Another Reason I Let My Wife Handle the Grocery Shopping
IRVINE — A mentally disturbed man wielding a samurai-style sword killed two workers and slashed three other people at an Albertsons before police shot and killed him Sunday. — Orange County Register, June 30, 2003 Banzai! Read more →
Three Ways to Find My House
I love living in Irvine but . . . the lots aren’t very big, the houses are close together, and they all look about the same anyway, so even after 2-1/2 years, I still have trouble picking out which house is mine as I’m driving down the street. I’ve devised a couple of methods for handling this. Read more →
Christmas at Starbucks
I noticed this weekend that Starbucks has rolled out the Christmas menu — Egg Nog Latte, Gingerbread Something-Or-Other . . . also that my local Starbucks has mounted a wreath on the inside of the entry door, anchored only at the top, so when you pull the door open, the wreath swings out and smacks you in the head. Merry Christmas! Ouch! Read more →
Welcome to Irvine!
Education is important in our community . . . Word came home last week that this year’s Stanford 9 testing starts the first week of May. Immediately, my wife got a call from another mom announcing that she’s cancelling all play dates through the end of the testing period so her kid can spend every waking moment on test prep. The gauntlet has been thrown! Meanwhile, in business news, thanks to the tech meltdown, office space vacancy rates in southern Orange County continue to hover around 30 percent. The screaming rent deals this creates were enough to induce the company I work with to pack everything up and move one off-ramp further south on the 405 . . . Read more →