Live from Santa Monica

Wooo!

So I'm sitting here in a hotel room on the West Coast, pondering how to spend the rest of my day. Here for work, I just finished the hardcore training aka sales megaconference portion of the trip. My flight doesn't leave until tomorrow so I think I'll just idle the day away... staring at...the ocean! I can see it from my balcony window (sorta). As I anticipated, Cali has been idyllic and nothing less than awesome. Monday and Tuesday were literally booked from the time I woke up down to the minutes I grew too tired to hold a salty margarita. But not to fear, we managed to squeeze in some fun betwixt all the chaos... fo' sho'.

At first, Los Angeles reminded me of Jersey with a lot of palm trees. I think it was all the flat buildings and stale surroundings. But everything got better once I saw the ocean. The clean, tropical smell in the air replaced thoughts of Jersey with thoughts of Florida. Unlike muggy Fla., mornings here have been foggy and cool - the beach photo above was taken at noon.

Last night, bleary-eyed after a day spent staring at PowerPoint slides, our sales crew of 50 people headed to this awesome Mexican restaurant in Santa Monica, El Cholo. Afterward, most of us headed to a chi chi bar across the street, Temple. Old School jazz tunes circa 1930 filtered through the club from Suzy and the Solid Senders. Solid they were. A few minutes into the night, this random guy came up to me and asked, "Are you Laura from __(insert fictitious company name here)__ ?" Umm, no. I spotted a few co-workers across the room and slowly headed their way for safety.

As for the rest of the evening, good times all around.