Irvine police are investigating a possible hate crime that occurred early Saturday morning in the gated Turtle Ridge community. Officers arrived around 6:10 a.m. and discovered a car parked on Rose Trellis had been painted with race-related graffiti. The car belongs to an African-American family that lives there. — Orange County Register Now that’s a shocking piece of news. You mean to say there are black people living in Irvine?! Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Orange County
Grandma Died Yesterday
Grandma died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. Just kidding; it was yesterday, but I never get tired of that joke. Grandma was 94 years old. She was quick-witted almost to the end. She died at St. Jude Medical Center, the same hospital where I was born. She was 47 when I was born, the same age I am now. It’s the circle of life. Grandma was a Presbyterian. Everyone else in the family, except me, is Catholic. The Catholic chaplain at St. Jude anointed Grandma before she died. I’m not sure what that means, but I know that my mom asked the priests at her parish to do it and they wouldn’t because Grandma was not a Catholic. “He said he was deeply sorry,” Andrew savagely caricatured the inflection, “but it was simply a rule of the Church.” “Some church,” he snarled. “And they call themselves… Read more →
At the Dog Park
This is a picture of me, Lightning Epps, at the Irvine dog park. I love the dog park! Even though I’m not a puppy anymore — I’m almost 3 years old — I still like to chase and play a little bit. The bigger dogs try to dominate me sometimes. Usually I can stop them with just a look, but not always. The puggle in this picture, for example, kept blindsiding me and trying to climb on top of me. I chalked that up to youthful exuberance for a few moments, but when he kept doing it, I had to knock him down, leap on top of him, and sink my fangs into his neck. Not hard, just enough to reestablish the natural order of things. I don’t instigate this stuff, but I don’t put up with a lot of nonsense either. You know what they say — it’s not… Read more →
They Call Me The Hammah
My son’s holding a gigantic inflatable mallet that he won at Dave and Buster’s. “They call me The Hammah!” he announces in a loud ghetto drawl. “Do you know why they call me The Hammah? Go on, take a guess . . .” Read more →
The Semi-Gifted Students Academy
I’m driving my son to UCI this morning . . . he’s taking a couple of classes at the Gifted Students Academy. “Only about half the students are gifted,” he informs me. “The rest are stoo-pid.” “How can you tell they’re stupid?” I ask. “I can just tell.” “I mean are they actively doing stupid things, or they can’t answer questions?” “Both.” Then: “Drive faster. Mom dropped me off late yesterday and I almost had to run to get to class on time.” “That’s good. Your years of athletic training are finally paying off for you.” “I said I almost had to run.” “Oh. What happened next? You got to class and almost had to think?” Read more →
Orange County Fair
[UPDATE: Macphoto1 has a better set of OC Fair photos than mine.] Read more →
Why Asian Girls Like White Guys
These are from the same photo set on Flickr, taken at a local beach here in Orange County: Any questions? See Also: Why Asian Girls Like White Guys II Read more →
California Adventure
My Hair is Too Short
The girl at Fantastic Sam’s cut my hair too short. She was telling me about a car accident she had yesterday and I asked her, “Were you drunk at the time?” “In the morning?!” she yelled. “Hel-lo!? I was drinking coffee!” O-kay, like, overreaction! Probably in major denial mode, and does in fact have a serious drinking problem. And like I said, she took it out on my hair. Read more →
Notes from the Asylum
My son’s on spring break and my wife — a moderately functional paranoid schizophrenic — is taking a day off to spend some time with him. Read more →
Building a Boat
Two men within a mast length of Rick Hedrick’s homemade 32-foot sailboat have toiled away on their boats for 30 years each. Another for 25 years. Another recently died before his life’s work saw the briny sea. By comparison, Hedrick, 61, of San Clemente, has practically set a land-speed record. He only had to give up 17 years – working every weekend and two or three nights a week after work to complete his life’s dream. . . . “Yes, I’m anxious,” Hedrick said last week at the Boat Yard, where men dream of water, sometimes for half their lives. “The only thing I have ever wanted to do is go sailing. But now that I’m here, I’m reflecting on everything. I’ve spent so much of my life here. I haven’t lived a normal life. I’m never home. I’m 61. I wonder, did I pay too great a price?” —… Read more →
A Day at the Art Museum with a 7th Grader
I took my son to the new Landscape Confection exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art today. I don’t know much about art, but I do have a couple rules of thumb: Read more →
Medical Front Office Ass
The job ads on the right were dropped into a business article I was reading last weekend. Evidently the job titles get truncated after 24 characters, which is probably a bad idea, given the unintended consequences . . . Read more →
HW Solves the Problem of Poverty in America
According to a U.S. Census report released yesterday, the nation’s poverty rate rose in 2004 for the fourth straight year. Read more →
The Jennings Boys
I’m dropping my son off at a UC Irvine sports camp. We drive past some construction workers and I heckle them through my rolled-up window so they can’t hear me. “Closest you guys ever got to a college campus, huh?” I say. “They’re probably high school dropouts like Peter Jennings. I hate to speak negatively about the recently deceased, but Peter Jennings was not that bright. He used to say that he learned something new every day, but that’s easy if you don’t know very much to begin with.” “Ken Jennings is smart,” my son chimes in. Read more →
Argumentation
My wife signed our 11-year-old boy up for a week-long class in argumentation — sort of a moot court thing, I think — at UC Irvine. The cost: $400. Read more →
Hockey Boy
My son’s hockey team won the TORHS West Coast Conference championship. They got jerseys and a trophy. I took some team and individual photos. Read more →
OC Real Estate Report
I recently sold a house in Laguna for $3.5 million. It was on about 2,000 square feet of land, maybe a twentieth of an acre, and the house might cost about $500,000 if you wanted to replace it. So the land sold for something like $60 million an acre. — Warren Buffett Read more →
Something I Learned Today
There’s a good Chinese restaurant in Orange called Yen Ching. The last four digits of the phone number are 3300. If you make a mistake and dial 3000, you’ll get Children’s Hospital, also in Orange, but they won’t take a dinner reservation. Read more →
High Noon
“I can’t believe people are playing tennis at high noon,” my son says as we drive by the local courts. “They’re building up their stamina,” I suggest. “They’re getting skin cancer,” he replies. “They’ll need stamina to battle the skin cancer.” Read more →