Halloween is much bigger over here in the US than it is back home. Pretty much every house, bar and office is decked out in all kinds of Halloween costumes and decorations.

Seems like a pretty good excuse for a few ales.

Last weekend I had a mate from back home staying with me and it would have been rude not to take him to a Halloween party - California style.

Once again I had to rely on my camera to provide my memories of what went on. Although I do remember walking home, but the presence of leaves and bushes on my clothes the morning after suggests that I took a “detour".

It seems as though the fires of Southern California are now under control. The winds have dropped, the temperature is now around 30C and there are going to be no more evacuations.

But the air is still thick with smoke. Lots of people are even walking around wearing gas masks. Perhaps this is a step too far, but the air is pretty smokey.

There is one good thing to come from the smoke however. Today saw the start of the Perigee full moon when the moon is at its closest approach to the earth. Normally you`d not be able to see the moon clearly through a telescope because of the brightness, but the smoke darkened the skies just enough to make viewing possible.

I even managed my first ever Astronomical photograph:

Not great, but could have been worse.

…. there’s an emergency going on.

For the past 2 days the air around where I live has smelled as though a giant bonfire had been going on just down the road.

Thats because there has been:

It turns out that most of the towns surrounding Fullerton are all on fire - and they are coming this way. According to fox news:

Los Angeles – Wildfires blown by fierce desert winds Monday reduced scores of Southern California homes to ashes, forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee and laid a hellish, spidery pattern of luminous orange over the drought-stricken region.
At least one person was killed in the fires, and dozens were injured. Nearly 130 homes had burned in one mountain town alone, and thousands of other buildings were threatened by more than a dozen blazes covering at least 310 square miles.

It must be bad because penny pinching Governor Schwarzenegger has declared the region to be in a state of emergency.

I would feel slightly better, but tomorrow is forecast to be 38 degrees Celsius and the building where I work in nothing more than reinforced cardboard.

I would suggest that we go to Red Alert - but as you all know - that would mean changing the bulb.

Yesterday I watched the mighty mighty England cruelly beaten by the lucky South Africans in the rugby world cup final in France.

A whole gang of us were watching the match in The Olde Ship in Santa Ana.

For some reason Setanta Sports - who were broadcasting the game demanded that every pub charge a 20 dollar admission fee for anyone wanting to watch the match. Luckily for us the landlady at the Ship realised how unfair this was and gave everyone there a free pint of beer and put out an enormous buffet for all to enjoy during the match.

It was a pretty good atmosphere - it was mostly people supporting England although there were a few South African supporters too. Although they were kept to one side of the bar away from everyone else - I think that is called Apartheid.

The pub was all dressed up in its Halloween gear too:

In fact most places are dressed up for Halloween here - Albertsons have nothing on their shelves these days apart from Pumpkins.

Any kids come knocking around here looking for treats - they`ll get a shock of their lives.

Its taken until today for me to really get a grip on what happened last Saturday.

Sure, I did a quick update the other day, but even as I was typing that I still had huge gaps in my memory of what exactly happened.

I think I know now.

Oh dear.

Put it this way, the rugby kicked off at 9pm in Paris which is noon here in California. We got to the bar for 11am and started drinking straight after. The drinking continued until about 6pm.

Then I passed out on my bed until 9am the next day.

Still not completely sure how I got home.

But hey - I cant be expected to remember everything.

But one thing I do remember for sure is that the Barman in Brannigans bar in Fullerton was the best barman in the world. This guy was buying us drinks, we were buying him drinks, he was even on the shots of sambuca with us. This is actually quite ironic really considering that I personally was the worst barman in the world ever.

I was a barman in The Tickled Trout in Preston for a wonderful 2 days.

The main problem - apart from the fact that I would rather have been in Iraq than behind the bar in that place was that I could not read the prices for any of the drinks on the till. This meant that people got charged whatever button I randomly pressed after they had ordered their round.

I remember my last customer well.

This guy came to the bar and ordered a large glass of white wine, which I then poured carefully into a brandy glass, hovered my finger over the till for a few moments before stabbing some random button. It came to 4 quid.

“WHAT!!!!! I ordered the same drink from one of your colleagues half an hour ago and he only charged me 2 pounds”

“Wow” - I was genuinely impressed with myself. “Well its me you`ve got now and the prices have just gone up mate!!!!”

I never pressed the buttons on that till or any other again

Yesterday the mighty mighty England took on the French in Paris and won.

I know because I was watching the game live from The Harp Inn in Costa Mesa, which it seems is the only place in Southern California which was showing the rugby world cup. Needless to say the place was rammed full of ex pats - including myself and some friends.

Most people in there were either English or French - or people who claimed to be English or French, but were really Americans who claimed to be from Europe because their family came from there several hundred years ago. Seems no-one in California wants to be American.

You cant blame them.

Some interesting folks in there too.

I met one guy from Yorkshire who had a beard the size of a rhododendron bush who kept buying us all beer.

Then there was one guy from Liverpool who had been living in California for the last 15 years. He only got his green card last year so he had been illegal for 14 of them. He said he managed to get his green card by marrying a local girl, living with her for 3 years and then divorcing her once the card came through.

Nice

So we`ll be back there next week for the final. Who knows what characters will show up?

I thought I was hallucinating today at the gym. 40 minutes into my hour long cross training I saw a mate of mine from work walking towards me. He is not a member of the gym, nor is he ever likely to be.

I must have gone nuts trying to break my cross training record.

So I ignored him and figured that my brain would sort itself out shortly and he would disappear.

He didn’t. Not only that he told me that he had come to “rescue me” from the gym and take me to the Orange County Auto Show.

And go we did, and it was top!

They had all kinds of cars there from the usual super cars

Like Lamborghinis, Porsches, Ferraris and Maseratis. But there were some other really cool concept cars too.

The one below was made entirely out of Aluminium:

One of the most bizarre was this little fella which the creators (some independent company) claim can do 200 miles on just 2 gallons of petrol.

But my favourite has to be this Jeep Hurricane:

This thing has 2 Hummer engines each giving 750 horse power, but even more impressive is that the wheels all move independently so it can turn on its axis and even move sideways.

Like a crab.

I think I might give the gym a rest for a little while.

Someone in there is after me.

I don’t know the name of the person in question, just that us regular gym members refer to her as Kronenberg because she looks 16 from behind and 64 from the front.

Anyway Kronenberg was on the cross trainer yesterday and I managed a sneak peak at how many calories she had burned up so far during her workout.

It was around 970.

That cant be right!! I – the mighty gym master only burn up around 1000 on my cross trainer sessions. Kronenberg was nearing my personal target and did not look like she was about to give up.

I was not going to be bested by a girl.

So I ran past her cross trainer and pulled the plug out of the wall with my foot.

And then legged it.

So basically I won – she did not beat me and if she tries it again I`ll do the same in the blink of an eye.

And just so you know – I`d do the same to YOU!