whirlwind tour

Sunday, March 21, 2004, at 08:18AM

By Eric Richardson

Kathy and I just dropped her parents off at the airport this morning, but it's been a bit of a go-go-go last couple days. I worked all day Friday, headed back to USC for a 4:30 meeting, and then at 7 picked up Kathy and co and took a little drive up Fig to the Bonaventure Hotel. We had dinner reservations at LA Prime, and got there a little early to sit and take a swing aorund the revolving cocktail lounge. Actually, we only made it about halfway around in the 45 minutes we were there, going from north to south by way of the east. Upstairs at the steakhouse we had a cool south view, which gave me nice visuals for talking about 1100 Wilshire (this google cache contains the contents of a fascinating LA Times story about the property) and the Transamerica Building (which recently got bought by Magic Johnson and will likely become housing). The steaks were great, and the desserts were very odd, but good. I got a cheesecake, and it actually was sort of three pieces of different kinds of cheesecakes, and an assortment of fruit.

Friday night / Saturday morning Kathy and her dad decided they really wanted to go see tennis, so Saturday morning we got up and made the two-hour drive out to Palm Desert to the Indian Wells Tennis Garden. We saw 3/4 of the Saturday matches at the Pacfic Life Open, watching Federer defeat Agassi, Henmen beat Labadze, and a womens doubles match with names I won't even attempt to copy and paste here. weather.com said the temperature was going to be 96 in the desert and I believe it was every bit of that. It was dry heat, though, and we lucked out in getting tickets on the side of the court that got the early shade, so we only really had to endure the heat until 1:15 or so. The people around us were great. The lady sitting next to me offers Kathy a straw hat that she made use of for the next few hours, and the lady sitting next to Kathy knew everything you wanted to nkow about who was ranked what, and who was coaching who. Finally we drove back and then caught dinner at CPK.

Now Spring "Break" is officially over, but my schedule's anything but back to normal. Wednesday I fly out to Arizona to watch my sister play softball in Tucson. I didn't know until I went to look that link up that Taylor was also the Trojans. I'll have to find whatever Trojan stuff I have from here to wear while I'm out there. I fly back from that Saturday and then hop in the car and drive right back to Palm Desert for a weekend of waterskiing.