Twenty Year Time Machine

Had a really good weekend (which is good, because this week so far has been uphill both ways).

Friday night: Gaming. D&D 4th edition with some of K's tribe members. I manage to convince KF to join us at the last minute, thereby preventing him from mouldering in his office until the wee hours. J brought Fred's Burgers and old-fashioned fat-tacular ice cream. (First two ingredients: butterfat and buttermilk.) I conked out at midnight.

Saturday: Haircut, violin lesson, volunteering at the Alameda County Community Food Bank, and dinner with the Dads. I was exhausted after shelving food for 3 hours, but cheerful. My co-volunteer spoke mainly Spanish, so I was kept mentally entertained by struggling to remember vocabulary.

Sunday: loafing about, including some minor house chores, reading in the sun, and a vegetable-tacular trip to the local farmer's market. K made a giant egg bake full of broccoli and cauliflower.

The highlight of the weekend was really the violin lesson. I played violin semi-seriously when I was a kid: started when I was 9, stopped when I was 13. I like to think I was a decent violinist, and the main reason I stopped was because we had moved to San Francisco and it seemed clear to me that it was time to decide if I was going to be really serious about violin or let it go. I decided I didn't want to be yet another Asian Girl Who Plays Violin.

I've always harbored a desire to play again, Sherlock Holmes-style, and so have kept the violin with me, as well as my sheet music and stand. I even had the poor thing repaired at a local violin store a few years back. But mostly it hid in its dark case.

Earlier this year I looked for violin teachers on Craigslist and found one who just happened to grow up in the same region of LA as I did, and even played with my Junior High orchestra conductor. He's a Berkeley grad, lives not far away, and was very kind and encouraging. He seemed pleased that I still remembered a few things (including a general sense for when notes are out of tune), and had lots of good advice about my bad thumb posture (BOTH hands, drat the luck). I was really encouraged and heartened.

So, now I'm back to practicing. K says it isn't too bad, and I find it very enjoyable. Some of the stuff even seems to be coming back, which is great. Many thanks to Mom and Dad and C for tolerating the whining and screeching of my practicing all those years ago, and paying for the lessons!

Mistaken Identity

K just told me that he had to undelete some items from my gmail. Apparently I had left it logged in. He went to send an email and saw all these messages from people and companies he didn't know! delete, delete, dele-- oh crap! This is C's email!!!

Note to self: remember to log out from K's machine.

Point Reyes - On Hard Difficulty

Meaning (for those of you non-gamers), not on "Easy" or "Medium".

Been looking forward to this hiking weekend for some time. Though none of our usual camping buddies was able to join us, K and I decided to go it alone (and miss E's birthday shindig, sorry E!). I needed the mental rest.

It started off badly, as I ended up needing to do about 3 hours of work on Friday. (Boo! Vacation delayed!) That took me until 10:30, whereupon I started gathering my stuff for packing. K had already given us a good head start (with my verbal commentary) during my work phase. We headed out around 12:30, stopped by TJ's for jerky and fruit, and got to Point Reyes around 2:30. After some initial administrivia at the Visitor Center to get our camping pass, we went to the Five Brooks staging area, parked, and hit the trail. First leg: 4.4 miles up, up, up! It was a nicely graded drivable road (Stewart trail) that went up to Firtop Mountain at 1,324 feet. Oof. Oh, and it was 82 degrees out. Double Oof. And there were yellowjacket warnings. Yikes! A few groups of horses passed us, and at one point K spotted a mountain lion. Double Yikes! We considered turning around, but another group of horses gave us courage (and cover) to proceed.

At Firtop, we met a group of cyclists celebrating their ascent of the mountain. As we proceeded down the steep trail, I marvelled, "They _cycled_ up this?" We took a hiking path down the aptly named Greenpicker trail, and made it into camp in plenty of time to pitch our tent and feel exhausted before having dinner. We couldn't find our tent pegs and it was so warm out, we happily slept under a fir tree with no rain fly. We also started a steady diet of ibuprofen. Total Hike Day 1: 6.4 miles.

Some uncomfortable tossing and turning during the night. We agreed we need new sleeping pads.

Since we were both prety wiped (we both had had migraines late in the week for one thing), Saturday we decided not to go for a longer trek down the coast but to look for ocean views from the Coast Trail. We don't normally stay at this end of the park, so were looking forward to different terrain. We hiked out via Glen Trail to the Coast Trail, and saw...lots of fog. Fog, fog, fog. We were very glad not to be hiking in heat like the day before, but the vista points were sadly obscured. Finally we turned a corner on the trail and saw...a mound of white rock jutting out of the ocean. K promptly gave his best voice-over: "And now on our left, Bird Poop Rock..." as that was what clearly gave it its color. Moments after that, the fog cleared and we were able to see the coastline down to Wildcat Camp and the faint coloring of Alamere Falls in the distance. Beautiful! We had lunch at Arch Rock and ambled tiredly back to camp. K found a nice stout walking stick and cleaned it up. Napping, dinner, and some bedtime reading. The sun never really broke through, and it was spitting fog when we went to bed. Total Hiked Day 2: 5.7 miles.

During the night: incredibly loud chatty neighbors, more painful tossing and turning, the slow increase of drips in our uncovered tent.

Morning dawned gray and drippy. The fog continued to condense into spitting near-rain, so once it was light enough (and we could no longer stand the water splups in the eye) we got up, took stock of our soaked items, and decided to head out as soon as we could. K made stand-up breakfast, while I slowly assembled our things and kept them as dry as I could. Mostly, our approach was to "put everything into a white plastic bag and walk." We'd already agreed the night before that we were going to take the shortest route back to the car. Not long after leaving camp, Kyle saw another mountain lion - much smaller this time, but unmistakably a mountain cat. This plus the very damp Greenpicker brook - er, trail - convinced us to change our route out from the shorter hiking paths back to the main Stewart Trail. We would have a clear view of the road and the horse traffic, leaving much less chance of cat encounters or slipping on the wet terrain. Slog, slog, slog, 6.4 miles and we were back at the car.

This was a tough trip for some reason. Our other stays have been at campsites that are far more accessible (Sky and Coast are 1.3 and 1.8 miles from parking, respectively, with not much elevation change); this trip we started by climbing 4.4 miles in 82 degree heat. We'd both had migraines recently. We were both uncomfortable sleeping on our pads. We got soaked. (Oh, it turns out the tent pegs had landed under the tent and we just hadn't noticed. "No wonder the ground was so uncomfortable!" K said half-jokingly, half-painfully.) And we didn't see much wildlife, except for K's mountain lion sightings - not exactly encouraging. I did get to greet a few big black offrushing beetles and a banana slug, but there were none of the usual deer.

Maybe we'll try again in October, or let it rest until next spring.

Rabbits on the Runways?

At a birthday dinner in honor of my cousin K last weekend, we were discussing my Aunt P's pet rabbit. It's quite taciturn and fuzzy. I mentioned that there was one time when (my) K and I were driving through SFO's Long Term Parking Lot, and I was scanning the aisles: no space - no space - no spaces - brown hare - no spac--what?! There was a big brown hare sitting there, chilling out. In Long Term Parking. Cousin A chimed in that she had seen them at Chicago (O'Hare?!), and someone else mentioned they'd seen them at yet another airport. What is it with bunnies and planes?

K hypothesized that rabbit/hare populations are usually kept in check by predators like raptors...who probably wouldn't do so great in the airport environs. Could there be a raptor shadow around airports that allows for bunny proliferation?

CalTrain!

Took my first ride on Caltrain yesterday. Yep, first. It was civilized, clean, quiet on the inside, and efficient. I felt quite smug about the entire experience. I was on the express train, so I felt smug when I passed the local stops and slow local trains. I felt smug when I could see all the slow traffic on the freeways. And I felt smug walking from the train station past street traffic to my friend's house.

Go public transit! Now if only Muni weren't quite such a harrowing experience...