First, my apologies for not writing any blog entries in the past half a week. I’ve just been having quite a lot of fun, and have been rather tired (as in, falling asleep in 5 minutes) every day after coming back home and chatting with Dominic and Zoe. But before I jump ahead and start yabbering about what I’ve been doing in Toronto for the last few days, first, Los Angeles …

Mmm, the City of Angels, with unique Calcium Water™, freeways which defy belief and reason, and lots and lots of good, hard shopping. Next time I come to Los Angeles, I’ll be sure to bring at least two bags, because the one poor duffle bag I’ve brought along this trip just went from about 70% full to about 92% full, mostly consisting of new gadgets and new clothes (although it would be about 10000% full if I could buy out the entirety of Brookstone — man, that store is so evil). I’m quite scared thinking about how much money I spent only going to Fry’s, the Beverly Center, and The Grove; that list doesn’t even include the two usual shopping malls I venture to whenever I hit L.A. (Westside Century City). Somehow, I managed to restrain myself to buying no more than about 7 new items of clothing (a-ha, but not all of them are for me!), and less than USD$350 worth of gadgets.

What to do when you have clothing stores such as Banana Republic, Club Monaco, and of course, Victoria’s Secret (yeah baby)? Not to mention other stores such as the Sony Store, Borders, Barnes and Nobles, and real Apple Stores (transparent staircases, yum!), all selling stuff that’s far less than you could get stuff back home in Sydney, if you can in fact get the thing in Sydney at all! Since describing what clothes I got would make me look like a girl (along with watching Suddenly 30, of course), I won’t bore you with those details. Instead, I’ll bore you with what gadgets and goodies I got instead:

• A very very tiny Vakoss USB hub, (as in, it’s just a tiny bit bigger than a CompactFlash card) because everybody needs a USB hub. Hey, at $10, I think I was quite justified!

• A 5-1 in one flash card reader, which reads the usual plethora of memory card formats, but it’s a PCMCIA card, so it’s much smaller than other flash card readers. As a cool bonus, it has a PCMCIA to USB adapter, so in case you’re not working with a laptop (_as if_ you wouldn’t have a laptop, haw), you can still use it anyway.

• Another classy 4-in-1 pen. Gotta have more clasy 4-in-1 pens. (Those of you who went with me on the ski trip this year will know exactly why I want another 4-in-1 pen :-). Black pen, highlighter, 0.5mm, and stylus. Wicked.

• Ghost in the Shell, Standalone Complex DVD, Episodes 1-4, Special Edition, with accompanying CD soundtrack by Yoko Kanno (all praise her).

• A Brookstone blue & white LED torch which is small enough to fit on your keyring. Like a Maglite, but LEDs never break unlike torch bulbs. Hooray!

• A mini tripod. Who doesn’t need a mini tripod, I tell you? I should probably mention it was about A$10. I was very happy considering I saw the exact same model in another store for $25. Glee.

I also got a Logitech Mouseman Traveler, which was unfortunately broken, so I had to return that. I also bought and returned an Iomega Micro Mini 256MB USB flash drive, but returned that too, because I really wanted the 512MB or 1GB version. The Micro Mini is awesome, though: it’s the first flash drive I’ve seen that really is small enough to fit on your keychain.

Other than the shoppingness of L.A., I’ve of course been enjoying myself catching up with my cousins. I also played the first real game of tennis I’d played in a long time, and let me give you some advice: never play tennis (or basketball, or any other high-impact sport) in crappy $10 shoes. Your knees will be whimpering for a while.

So, Los Angeles has been fun, as always. I’ll have to come back next time with 2 nice large suitcases, and a bigger credit card limit …