“There’s too many repeats on the BBC!” A refrain heard up and down the land of Britain. All I’m saying is sit for a week in a car tuned to NPR, and you’ll be begging for Only Fools and Horses. The amount of repetition is mind-boggling; although, to be fair, it did allow us to plan a voyage to Pasadena and get a rather splendid cheeseburger and a mac’n’cheese that used Valrhona white chocolate. So, perhaps worth it, but I heard the trials and tribulations of a voice-over artist far too many times for my sanity.

For the past week, I’ve been lucky enough for Stacie to come over and visit. Not just Stacie, but a rented car, too! It’s a little depressing that in the first night, we went further into the Los Angeles area than I had been during the past three months (and taking my LA food truck count from zero to three). Still, I can’t grumble with eating Italian, Japanese, Austro-Hungarian, German, Chinese, and yes, even a humble cheeseburger (made with rib-eye steak and two different artisanal cheeses, obviously. We’re nothing if not foodie hipsters). Oh, plus two different farmers’ markets. We also went to a science museum where I came face to face with an A-12 Blackbird, which was a bit of a flashback to my childhood. It was actually smaller than I expected, to be honest.

Anyway, a fun week, though it’s sad to be back on my own again. Still, the size of my stomach will probably be helped by a diet of cereal again in the evenings. Plus, I have a few new places to go back and explore this coming weekend (the farmers’ market in Santa Monica on a Sunday looks like a great place for breakfast or lunch. We had plans for ramen instead last week, so I get to return!).

Still, despite all that, I will be very happy to get back to Durham next weekend, if only for a few days. There’s changes afoot, some of which will be sad, and some hopefully will be great, but more of those in due course.

I’m off to watch the State of The Union like a good citizen.

Allo Darlin' - Tallulah from Will Botting on Vimeo.

As the hip kids say on Twitter, this is current jam. It’s the bit at 2:27 that currently cuts me to the core.

I do seem to be falling inescapably into the well of nostalgia on this latest extended visit to LA; finding myself watching Father Ted and The Fast Show, reading the George Smiley novels, realising that I haven’t had a McVitie’s Digestive for almost six months, and so forth. It probably hasn’t been helped by not really going anywhere except back to the hotel room for the past couple of weeks. All I’ve done is drift between Marina Del Rey and Santa Monica for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, before getting bored and heading back to be distracted by the Internet instead. Today, I went to work for a few hours, partly to make up some time, but honestly, because I had nothing else I wanted to do.

Hopefully, that’ll change when Stacie gets here on Tuesday. Not that we have any concrete plans, but having somebody else around (and a car!) will probably make things more likely to happen. And I suppose I could get my act together and work on other things from my hotel room. I do have a range of new kitchen ideas to try out…but no kitchen just yet. Maybe in February…

Goodbye, then, 2011. You were long, drawn-out, interspersed with big highs and deep lows, but you’re gone now.

I’ve had my family with me for the past two weeks, the first time since August. Which was fun, but also difficult, because I knew that they wouldn’t be here long, and that no matter how long I spent with them, it wouldn’t be enough. But, I got to watch Die Hard with my sister, so it was a good visit.

Meanwhile, 2012 is starting out in a similar way to the last few months of 2011; on a plane across the country to go to work. Not something that I expected at all, to be honest, nor whom I’m working for. Back home in Durham, plans are afoot for food adventures, of which more will be revealed in due course. And with each return visit back to our new house, I’m slowly making my mark on the place (although a lot of that is just filling it up with stuff).

2012 will also be the year of the next US Presidential election, of course. I’ve already made my first donation to Obama 2012, and will see what else I can do as the General Election looms closer and closer. In the meantime, I continue to enjoy the GOP’s long desperate hope for somebody, anybody, no matter how crazy they are, just as long as they’re not Mitt Romney. Eventually, though, they’ll settle for the man in the magic underwear, and then the real fun begins. First caucus in Iowa tomorrow!

As for resolutions, I’ve long stopped trying to hold myself to those, but I do have some things I want to do this year. Be a little more creative, at least start some of the side-projects that have been whirling around my head for the past year or so, write more, read more, experiment in the kitchen, be a little more active, and try to settle down and explore the new world I find myself in. That’ll do for a start. Plus, chocolate (as I’m sure you’ll all hold it against me if I don’t!).

And now, back to Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and California.

postscript: The Lunch Hour is one of the few British farces I’ve actually enjoyed - a two-handed 1962 film where a typically British attempt to avoid being straight involves a sad ending for all concerned. You can get it as part of the BFI Flipside series (I bought quite a number of the collection before I left, in a transparent attempt to take my culture with me. And The Likely Lads. Champion!).

Being in a different country, I don’t reall get to hear my four favourite Christmas songs on the radio. So here they are; have a Merry Christmas and lots of fun. Apologies to Simon Sweeping The Nation, who should think about visiting here during the festive period to get a break from The Pogues…

Okay, so the title is a little out-of-date at this point, but come on, it’s just begging to be used (for those of you who aren’t fans of seminal British indie bands, just shake your head sadly and carry on reading. And for those of you that are, you can most likely do the same).

My first Thanksgiving in America was a bit of a disaster. I’d link back in the blog archive to the posts in 2002 that detail the misery at length, but it seems that I enacted a great deal of self-censorship at that point in time. To sum up, I got thrown out of Carmichael dorm, got assigned a room with six other people in Odum Village, and instead spent the entire weekend in the Computer Science department, sleeping in the Graduate Students’ common room and using their showers every morning. Not fun.

However! My second go-around at Thanksgiving was much better - dinner and a great day with Stacie’s family (plus Thea and Kyle), stopping off to visit some other friends on the way back home (damn, I now really want mac’n’cheese with truffle oil. Stacie, we must do this when I get home!). And all this plus Black Friday.

Black Friday is one of those things that gets America mocked around the world. We’ve all seen the footage; riots in department stores, people getting trampled in order to get to those bargains, having queued all night in freezing temperatures. And tonight, that was going to be us. I was, I think understandably, a little afraid. But it turned out not to be such a horrifying event. Okay, somebody did get pepper-sprayed in Los Angeles. But she was only helping that person have one of her five-a-day, wasn’t she? We, on the other hand, had a leisurely stroll through Wal-Mart, avoiding the insane queues for XBoxes and waltzing out with $5 pillows. We then headed to Target to track down a new phone to replace Stacie’s rapidly dying iPhone 3G. This time we had to queue, but the atmosphere was quite lovely. For once, Americans obeyed the British laws of queuing to the letter (look, I’m at bus stops a lot, and if I may be frank, it seems they just don’t teach that here. So it was quite a surprise!), while Target employees handed out energy bars to everybody in the line. The only odd thing we saw was a girl dressed in a very shiny gold short skirt that seemed to have wandered in from some other climate. Or maybe she was late for Hallowe’en on Franklin Street. We got in, found the phone, and then proceeded to do grocery shopping because that side of the shop was completely deserted. And we found it amusing to do so. Hey, we’d been up a long time at that point!

Anyway, survived Black Friday. Enjoyed being in Durham. Briefly. Back in Los Angeles. Missing the South. Listening to Christmas songs and The Long Blondes. How was your Saturday?