Until about 6pm, Traci, Amanda, Ashleigh, and I didn’t have any set plans. We were really cutting it close, since most things-to-do required tickets or reservations, and we knew we didn’t want to stand in Times Square for hours to watch the ball drop.

Our ideal New Year’s idea was to go to a bar or a restaurant, have some dinner and a few drinks, and then somehow watch the ball drop (if possible) or at least some fireworks, preferably from a place that wasn’t too crowded.

We managed to get a reservation at Beacon, a really fancy, expensive restaurant on 56th between 5th and 6th. Since most restaurants in the city were charging upwards of $100 per person for buffet-style dinners tonight, we decided it was worth it to buy ourselves expensive dinner for any amount less than that. And instead of mediocre food from a place like Friday’s (which was charging $195 per person) or Planet Hollywood ($225 per person), we got AMAZING high-class dinner for about $80 each.

After dinner, we decided we would go up to Central Park so we could at least HEAR the ball drop (or rather, the crowd’s reaction to it) and see the fireworks in the park. When we got to the park, it had a crowd, but it wasn’t stuffed person-to-person like all of 7th Ave and Broadway were. There was plenty of room for us to move about, and… best of all… WE COULD SEE THE BALL IN TIMES SQUARE, ONE MILE AWAY!!!

So sure enough, we got our wish. We watched the ball drop, and we watched the big “2005” sign light up in Times Square, and we watched the fireworks behind us in the park and in Times Square. It was great.

Why would anyone want to have “Dinner with Shamu”? Like really, if I wanted whale snot on my food, I’d eat sushi.

Last night was long and full of adventures.

After the show, we had our official cast party at the Depot. It included a great deal of crappy food, so I just had a Diet Coke and some cream puffs. Heather informed me that she really liked my jeans. I asked if she wanted to borrow them sometime, and she said yes. Then I asked if she wanted to go trade pants, and she agreed to that wholeheartedly. So we went into the Amtrak and traded pants, after which her ass looked very hot and I looked very ridiculous. Eventually it got old, and we traded back.

Heather gave me her keys to hold at some point (which is generally a bad idea). I took her car key off the ring and discreetly handed it to Sammi. I asked Sammi to give it to John and have him do something (anything) to Heather’s car. Then I stayed within Heather’s sight at all times and audibly played with her keys so she wouldn’t notice that anything was amiss. A while later John walked up to me, and I took the car key back from him and put it back on Heather’s key ring.

The cast party eventually became boring around eight o’clock, and we decided to figure out what was next. My suggestion was Harbor House in Dana Point because no one else had ever been there. They’d been to the one in Sunset Beach, but not Dana Point.

So we caravanned to 840 to drop off some cars. Heather never said anything about her car, so I asked John what he did to it. He informed me that he didn’t do anything; he thought Sammi had done something and that he was simply supposed to return the key to me. So yeah, Heather got off easily. Anyway, we carpooled in two cars to Harbor House in Dana Point. John, Colin, Kyle, and Heather rode in Sammi’s car, and Donald, David, Danny, and I rode in Chelsey’s car.

Trenton and Jill joined us later at Harbor House, bringing our total to twelve. Our waiter was Guillermo, and he was extremely polite (especially compared to most Harbor House employees) and spoke several languages. We really liked him. He called everyone “friend,” and responded to our thank yous with “it is my pleasure.”

Apparently Harbor House didn’t pay their electric bill, though, as just before we left, the power went out in the restaurant. I don’t think any of us had ever experienced something like that before, and I’m pretty sure the employees hadn’t either. They were walking around holding up lighters to try and illuminate the place. Fortunately we were all paying cash, so we were able to pay the bill and leave. We included a really fat tip for Guillermo because we liked him so much. Just as we were leaving, the power came back on, so they didn’t have to walk around with lighters for too long.

I decided to teach everyone about the clever placement of the two Harbor Houses, explaining that Golden Lantern practically turns into Anderson, so both Harbor Houses are basically at the same intersection in two different cities. “What’s the other street?” asked John jokingly. “It’s PCH,” Heather answered brightly.

Jill went home after Harbor House, but the rest of us (now in three cars because Trenton had joined us) decided to visit Main Beach because I informed them that it was open past ten o’clock. Chelsey (who is twenty) had ordered a couple of beers at Harbor House, so she let me drive her car for the rest of the evening. We drove our three cars up PCH and parked near Main Beach.

For a while, we just messed around on the beach. Some of the group had blow-pops (thanks to Jenn, who brought them to the show as a gift). The boys found a large crevice that looked like a vagina and played with it for a while. Meanwhile, Heather and I went to Diedrich because the sound of waves made her want to pee. I ordered an iced coffee while she used the facilities, and then we walked back to the beach to join our friends.

Donald and Danny had picked up Chelsey and were threatening to throw her in the ocean, and when they finally put her down, she freaked out because her phone was no longer in her pocket. She made us all start looking, but when she turned away, Danny held her phone (which he had taken) up in the air and showed it to the rest of us. After a couple more minutes of “looking,” Danny suggested that he should call Chelsey’s phone to see if we could hear it ring. He pulled Chelsey’s phone out of his pocket, right in front of her, and dialed her number. It rang a few times, and we all stood there watching, wondering when Chelsey would notice that “Danny’s phone” suddenly looked just like her phone. Finally she caught on, and she got her phone back.

As we were laughing at Chelsey, we noticed a large man with long hair and a purpose approaching us. His name was Pascha, and he was most definitely on drugs or schizophrenic. He got right in our faces and demanded a cigarette, but all we had were blow-pops. He made fun of us for having “lollipops” instead of cigarettes, and he called us “the lollipop guild.” He was very scary, and he had a habit of walking up to people as though he was planning to plow directly through them. There were eleven of us and only one of him, but I’m pretty sure we were outnumbered.

He wouldn’t leave us alone, so we eventually left that part of the beach and walked up toward the Laguna Inn to get away from the crazy Pascha. We took the walkway that goes past the hotel and then walked down the stairs to another part of the beach. It was low tide, so there was actually beach there instead of just rocks. Danny told us a “scary” story about being at a similar beach in Santa Barbara and seeing a woman in a white gown standing on the rocks. It was extremely dark, so we didn’t stay very long because we were concerned about encountering more Paschas.

On our way back to our cars, we briefly encountered Pascha again. He informed us that Satan is bad, and we were very grateful.

Next, Sammi’s car and Trenton’s car followed my car up to Top of the World. I even took Third Street so they could experience the unbelievably steep hill. We stood on a cement bench at Top of the World for a long time, looking out at the lights of Aliso Viejo and Laguna Hills below us (to the northeast). “We should really call someone,” Danny suggested. He took out his phone and dialed, and then he asked us all to say “Hi dipshit!” into the phone. We complied, and he informed us afterward that we had just left a message for our friend Matt.

Heather went to Sammi’s car to get her phone, and Danny informed us that the message was actually for Heather (who had therefore called herself a dipshit), not for Matt. We all found that very amusing, and when Heather returned with her cell phone, she reported, “The dipshit message was for me! It wasn’t really for Matt! Danny called my phone instead!”

At some point, everyone got really quiet while looking out over the city. I told them a “scary” story about being at a similar hill in Santa Barbara and seeing a woman in a white gown standing on the rocks.

When we’d had enough nature, we drove our three cars back toward 840. The people in my car raved about what an exciting adventure we’d had, and I secretly gloated because I had suggested every single thing we had done that evening. It made me really proud, knowing that I had introduced almost a dozen people to new places and new experiences in one evening.

Back at 840, we watched John’s home video of the show. I had refused to watch it while the show was still in progress (because seeing myself would have made me self-conscious when performing), so I was excited to finally see it. I’m normally very critical of all shows, including my own, but our show really was enjoyable. It was also a great way to end an eventful closing night cast party. The video ended around two o’clock, and I said my goodbyes and headed home to write in my journal.

Last night after the American Idol concert, Nicki and her friends Gary and Kelli were bored and looking for something to do. They called me for ideas, so I read them my entire list of “Things To Do When There’s Nothing To Do.” Well, they liked number twenty, “Scavenger Hunt,” so they challenged me to come up with a list while they were on their way over to my apartment.

Here’s the “List of Things to Get” that I came up with:

1. A moose
2. The Queen of England
3. An American flag
4. A postage stamp
5. A striped sock
6. Your mom
7. The autograph of a famous person
8. V.D.
9. Another moose
10. The Anaheim Angels
11. A smurf
12. Something old
13. Something new
14. Something borrowed
15. Something blue (besides a smurf)
16. A Christmas ornament
17. A Christmas tree
18. Gravy
19. Jesus
20. Gum

Since there were only four of us, we decided to go together to get the things on the list instead of splitting up into teams. In that respect, it wasn’t truly a Scavenger Hunt. That’ll have to happen some other time when I’m hanging out with more people. Also, we decided to make it a Pictorial Scavenger Hunt, meaning that instead of obtaining the actual objects, we’d just have to get photos of the objects. Thank goodness, because live moose are quite heavy and surprisingly expensive these days. You can imagine the horror of having to cart around two of them in Nicki’s Civic.

Anyway, our first stop was obviously a twenty-four hour Sav-On. Almost every item was either there at Sav-On or already in possession of one of the other three people (including “Your Mom,” because Nicki had a picture of her mom with her). So after spending an hour or so in Sav-On, and then visiting some other nearby locations in Newport Beach, all we had left was item number two, “The Queen of England.”

Now, I was hoping we could just find some Canadian currency somewhere, because that has pictures of the Queen on it. But we couldn’t think of anyplace where we could get Canadian currency at one o’clock in the morning. We called some friends, but they didn’t have any.

Next we tried going to Fashion Island, thinking that although the Barnes & Noble would be closed, we might still be able to find a book of British Royalty in the window or something. That didn’t happen. We couldn’t even get near the bookstore because large parts of the parking lot were blocked off. So we gave up on Fashion Island.

Nicki suggested downloading a picture of the Queen off the internet, but Kelli and I informed her that using the internet would definitely be considered cheating in a Pictorial Scavenger Hunt.

After that we drove to Laguna Beach to look at the closed art galleries, in the hope that one would have British crap in it. None did.

We also tried several different newspapers and tabloids at a Shell station, but there was apparently no news about the Royals this week.

Finally I got the idea of going to the Five Crowns Restaurant in Corona Del Mar. It’s the only British restaurant I’ve ever seen, and although it would obviously be closed at two o’clock in the morning, I was hoping it might have a picture of the Queen outside or in one of the windows.

This is when our evening became… creepy.

The Five Crowns looks like an old tudor mansion, sort of like the kind that they visit on “Haunted Hotels” on the Travel Channel. It has stone lions guarding the entrance, an old-fashioned British phone booth out in front, and ivy growing all over the building. Narrow paths lead from the front entrance around to the sides of the house. All of the windows contain lace curtains that you can just barely see through.

There was no one around on PCH at that time of night, and although the building was mostly dark, there were a couple of rooms that were still lit by chandeliers, although very dimly.

We saw two photographs near the entrance, but one was a picture of a guard and the other was a picture of an old manor house.

Gary decided to check out the phone booth. Inside was a phone book, and for some reason he thought that the Queen of England would be listed. There was some kind of dried, red liquid on the cover of the phone book, though, and we weren’t really sure what it was. It kind of resembled… blood. But we laughed it off and continued with our search.

While Gary was at the phone booth, Kelli and Nicki decided to walk all the way around the side of the building to a room with its lights on. This room was some kind of wine cellar, and they took one look in the window and decided to give up and move on. The Queen of England obviously wasn’t in there.

Then Kelli, Nicki, and I came upon the corner room.

The lights in the corner room were very dimly lit, and the lace curtains were almost completely shut, leaving only a crack to peer through. Kelli and Nicki climbed through the bushes to get as close to the window as possible, while I went around to the other side of the room to try and look through the other window.

Sure enough, on the walls of this room, there were old etchings and drawings of past members of the Royal Family.

As I leaned in to get a closer look (and to try and figure out how I would shoot a photograph of the far side of the room through the window and the lace curtains), Kelli screamed, “Nicki!.”

It sounded to me like a scream of “A figure just walked into the room and is heading toward the window.”

I ran back around to the side where Nicki and Kelli had been standing, and I quickly realized that the scream had actually occurred because Kelli had spotted a very large black widow spider, which was quickly descending toward Nicki’s head as she stood in the bushes by the window. Nicki screamed also and hopped back onto the path. Gary came out of the phone booth to find out what was going on. At that point they stood back and noticed the huge spider web which was covering the entire window, and which Nicki had almost destroyed with her hands and face as she had leaned in.

We took a moment to recover from the discovery of the giant spider and its web. Everything was quiet, and then we were shocked by a sudden, loud, hissing noise that came from right behind Gary. Kelli screamed and reached over to grab Nicki’s arm, but she accidentally grabbed Nicki’s boob instead, and Nicki also screamed. The hissing sound was just the sprinklers starting, but it had scared us pretty well.

Kelli and I decided we couldn’t get close enough to the spider web window to take a decent picture of the etchings, so instead we had to take one through the side window (the one which I had been investigating). Gary and Nicki stood watching the spider and made some more attempts to take pictures with their cameraphones through the front window, while Kelli and I walked back around to the side.

When we walked back to the side window, we noticed that a single dinner fork had been placed on the window sill. Its presence there was completely unexplained, and it put us even more on edge than before.

Both Kelli and I had digital cameras, so we tried to take pictures through the window of the Queen of England’s head, which was in the middle of a very large etching on the wall. We took them with and without flashes and at different angles, but it was very difficult to get the far wall illuminated without getting a glare from either the glass or the lace curtains (which were mostly in the way). Finally Kelli got a shot in which she could see “something,” and then her battery died. Then I tried one more time to line up a shot through the separation in the curtains, using the flash, and I finally took a picture in which I could faintly make out the Queen’s head.

“I got it!” I yelled out, and we ran back around to the front of the building, grabbed Gary (whose cameraphone had just died) and Nicki (who couldn’t get any of the photos to come out on her cameraphone), and booked it to the car. As we approached the car, we heard a whirring sound start inside the Five Crowns. We got into the car as quickly as we could, and as the sound grew louder, we sped away.

We went to Denny’s. I looked at my picture of the Queen, and sure enough, if I zoomed in enough, I could see her there on the wall, albeit very faintly. Kelli realized she suddenly had enough power left in her battery to look at the pictures we’d taken, and in the picture she’d taken just before her battery had mysteriously “died,” we could make out some kind of ghostly image on the wall… but it wasn’t the Queen. It was just… something.

Needless to say, I want to return to the Five Crowns sometime and maybe even have dinner there. And if possible, I’d like to sit in the corner room. The one that’s always dimly lit, even when the rest of the place is dark. The one with pictures of past members of the Royal Family on the walls. The one with the fork.

Last night at Downtown Disney, there were hundreds of people standing in the courtyard outside the movie theaters, watching the final game of the World Series on a giant television screen.

Amie, Jonathan, and I just wanted to go to Rainforest Cafe to have a Volcano (if you’ve never had one, you’re really missing out), and it didn’t occur to us that there would be a huge crowd at Downtown Disney watching the game.

We went up to the elephant and told the hosts that we had a party of three. We were expecting to have to wait between forty-five minutes and two hours, just like usual. But then an amazing thing happened: They seated us immediately! There was no wait whatsoever! Apparently although there was a huge crowd outside the restaurant, there was barely anyone inside the restaurant.

Unfortunately, both Amie and Jonathan ate way too much food and ended up feeling really sick. And then when we were leaving the restaurant, the game ended, so we had to make a mad dash for the car to avoid the exiting crowds.

We were watching Monsters, Inc. at Jonathan’s house, and it came to the scene where an octopus-like monster is preparing several dishes simultaneously at the sushi restaurant using his many tentacles.

So Jonathan said, “I wish I had more than one arm.”

Because Dustin is into crossword puzzles (the ones that appear daily in the newspaper), Amie is now into crossword puzzles. He let her work on one at his apartment, and now she’s hooked. Of course, he’s way better at it than she is because he’s been doing them for a long time, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s determined to solve them.

So last night, Amie, Shauna, and I went to Ralphs just before it closed (at midnight) and bough a whole book of crossword puzzles. Then we went to Mae’s Cafe in Garden Grove (which is open twenty-four hours and serves excellent food for really low prices) and ordered some junk food and hot chocolate and worked on crossword puzzles. We quickly decided that the ones in the book were too easy, though, so instead we worked on one from the Saturday L.A. Times which we had purchased “just in case” on our way into Mae’s. It was so hard! We ended up only solving about a quarter of it during the couple of hours that we were there, and then we got tired of staring at the newsprint and called it a night.

Because I love Café Pascal, a French café at South Coast Plaza, I decided to try the Champagne French Bakery Café, which is another French café at South Coast Plaza. My mother and I went there for lunch today. I can sum up our experience very simply: The lack of quality in the service was surpassed only by the lack of quality in the food.

I just realized I haven’t been to Denny’s in weeks.

There was a time when we went to Denny’s on Culver (which we affectionately referred to simply as “D.O.C.”) almost every night after rehearsal. We liked D.O.C. because it had the best service of any Denny’s we’d ever been to. They could do anything a customer wanted (except, of course, serving mashed potatoes after ten o’clock).

However, over the past few months the wait staff has changed. None of our favorite waiters or waitresses are there anymore; they’ve been replaced by typical Denny’s waiters and waitresses who don’t care about the customers and don’t deserve more than a fifteen percent tip.

I’m not saying they should be really nice to us, nor am I saying they have to be totally attentive. But they do have to genuinely want our business. Dee at the Westminster Cafe was a horrible waitress both in the quality of her service and the casual attitude she expressed to the customers, but we knew she appreciated our business. She was sincere. The new waiters and waitresses at D.O.C., however, treat us like an inconvenience.

I guess it’s time to find a new Denny’s.

I’m at Cafe Ruba and I’m waiting for Lindsay, Jon, and Juliet to join me.

Lindsay and Jon should have gotten out of class about an hour ago. Juliet just called from work (she should have been off a few minutes ago) to ask if I knew where they were, since they were actually supposed to meet her at work and come here with her after she finished. Of course, I don’t know where they are. I’m sitting here waiting for them.

And just my luck I wore a short-sleeved shirt and it’s breezy. I should have ordered a larger drink to keep me warm longer. My bad.

Meanwhile, my battery is at twenty-three percent, so it won’t last much longer. Especially if I keep typing at this furious pace. (For your information, this “furious pace” mostly consists of hitting the backspace key since I make so many mistakes when I type quickly.)

I’m cold, I’ve finished my drink, my friends aren’t here, and my laptop is quickly dying. Remind me to have two things in my car at all times from now on: a pad of paper and a sweatshirt. Batteries only last two hours (with “normal” usage, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t involve running any applications), but a pad of paper lasts at least two and a half.

Shit… twenty percent. When it gets to ten, loud sirens and flashing red lights go off and the computer forces me to stop working. It’s anal like that. It really likes to save the last ten percent for its own selfish needs, like finding pictures of naked peripherals on the internet.

It’s late. They’re not here. What the heck could they possibly be doing? Don’t answer that. I know what they could possibly be doing. But dammit, they’re not supposed to be polishing chairs, they’re supposed to be meeting me for coffee.

Juliet just called and told me they’ve arrived at her work. They’ll be here in five minutes. Thank goodness, since my battery is at eighteen percent, so it prob’ly won’t last any longer than that. Heck, maybe I should shut it now so it can check out that new PCMCIA S&M site.