Hollywood Land

Yes, I saved you all from having to look at my ridiculously disgusting face by replacing it with a loving heart. Much better, no? Jared and I "hiked" the Hollywood sign on Saturday. Quotes are surrounding the verb because I wouldn't really consider it a hike, but rather a gradual winding incline with horse poop infested dirt switchbacks. Nothing really beautiful about it, but we did it in the later afternoon so the sunset was nice. It took us about 30 min to climb to the bottom of the sign, which apparently ends at a neighborhood that we could have driven to and skipped the walking. Oh well. I was kinda disappointed because the closest you can get to the bottom of the sign is by standing a hill away. Helicopters are constantly patrolling the area to make sure no one passes into the restricted zone. You can also climb up the backside of the sign and look down on it by the tower, but we I was too fatigued for that. Perhaps another time. [Trivia for the curious at heart: I just did some googling about the Hollywood sign to see a history of its origins. Hollywood got its name from the wife of the developer who owned the land. Daeida Wilcox gathered the name from a woman she sat beside on the train, who had a summer home she called Hollywood. Wilcox told her husband, who named his subdivision "Hollywood Land." The sign used to read the whole thing, until it was in shambles and Hugh Hefner of all people held an auction in 1977 to restore the sign. Then it just read Hollywood. There you go.]


I celebrated my 24th year of living on this earth last Thursday.
Birthdays were much better when I was in elementary school.