Kyu's Wedding

not shown: when zoe saturated her diaper and leaked pee all over my pants. sweet!

The pathetic and the sublime

I had lunch with my friend Taras at a so-so phillipino place called Tribu Grill in San Bruno. Parked across the street was this:

The Mercedes high performance division has apparently come a long was with its new Black Series. Who knew it came from such humble origins!
Later that day, on the way to a family friend's wedding I stumbled upon this:

A Ferrari 365 GT 2+2. Beautiful.

One note about AMG. A long time ago, before AMG was part of Mercedes, they made a car called the AMG Hammer, which was a tuned 300E with a massive 5.6 L engine. That a four door luxury sedan could give many supercars of the day a run for the money was pretty impressive, and inspired much teenage car lust. I never actually saw one in real life until much later, when I was visiting my friend Keith in San Francisco. I was still in grad school, so this would have been around 1998 or so. We were walking down Guerrero from his apartment on Fair Oaks and a Hammer came rumbling southbound. The fact that it was a Hammer didn't occur to me at first: I was too busy staring at the driver, who was smoking a cigarette through a long cigarette holder, and at the occupants of the back seat (three prostitutes, or women dressed as prostitutes)! The car pulled a high speed U-turn, then sped off back up Guerrero, at which point we saw the word "AMG" on the left side of the trunk.

Zoe at large

in the artists studio.

Christa and Stephanie visit

And we did a one day alta trip, doing the customary stop at Awful Annies in Auburn



After a brief rest, and an attempt to find the damn northeast corner of the property again, we walked down to Smart's Crossing. We have a new hiking GPS -- a Garmin 60csx with the ultra sensitive Sirf III chipset. The performance of this GPS compared to any other GPS I have used is staggering -- it maintains locks under dense tree cover and acquires satellites quickly. It also has a mode in which it averages readings, and got us down to 7 foot accuracy, if you trust the Garmin error estimates! My workflow was to download shapefiles from the Placer County GIS CD, import into Google Earth, output to waypoints, and upload to the Garmin with GPSbabel.

Anyway, back to Smart's Crossing: It was a hot day, and perfect for a dip in the glacial waters of Bear River. This time, after much shaming and "Baaaaawk bawk bawkbawkbawkbawk" noises from Chloe, I did the jump. The last time I had jumped was in high school, and it didn't seem any shorter of a jump this time. On the way down, I had a 2001: Space Odyssey moment of dilated time, and began to wonder when I was actually going to hit the water. Here I am:


And here is Chloe, doing the by now casual jump off of the ledge (which she did twice)


Christa, being a health care professional, thought better of potentially back shattering jumps and opted out, after conferring with her more reckless sibling

Meanwhile, grandma entertained Zoe, who seemed to really enjoy splashing, trying to drink the water and taste testing the smooth river stones (Zoe enjoyed this too!).

winner: most amusing wifi network name:

"fit birds only, no mingers", at the corner of Dwight and Piedmont Crescent.

Family visiting

A few pictures from the recent visit

Baby vs Phone

Zoe covets all things electronic, and will quickly grab them and submit them for oral testing. Here is Zoe vs. my antiquated non 3G iphone:


Hopefully iphones conform to the RoHS directive

Zoe's first ball game

My company rents a box at the Coliseum (next to the owners box -- woo!) and our department had a foray to the Seattle game.

Sushi

after a long sushi ban for chloe, she was finally able to eat the delicious heavy metal laden miracle-food known as Hamachi

not for Zoe though.

Donner, Smart's Crossing

We got some parental babysitting time and jetted up to snowshed for a few routes. Unfortunately we got absolutely bouted on a 5.9 (?) on the right side of the gully which was no fun at all


but then climbed the beautiful arete (ariel?) with no problems at all. Actually, that route seems like a good warmup. I am now more resolved than ever to learn how to place gear; there really look like a lot of fun gear lines in the gully there.

After heading back to the cabin, Chloe's friends from the lab showed up and we all headed down to Smart's Crossing. Luckily, the tiresome solitude of the river was soon broken by a swarm of hood flaring teenagers. Chloe and Christine got swept up in the tide of testosterone and both jumped off the ledge

Happily, they both survived.

I summoned up the courage to swim in the freezing cold water for a bit and tried to climb out of the water... next time I'll bring some old rock shoes with me.

On the way out, little ZZN fell asleep in the Baby Bjorn

and we discovered that she has a prediliction for beer bottles

Lunch was potato and fruit salad that the lab-crew brought up, grilled corn and potatoes, and grilled grass fed beef burgers (RED MEAT WEEKEND!!).

After cleaning up, we decided that a second night in the tent with the baby was going to be too hard, so we drove back to Oaktown, stopping at Machados for an excellent apricot pie.

July 4th In Dutch Flat

We headed up to Dutch Flat and Alta for the Dutch Flat Parade today. The air was smoky from the American River Complex fire, but not TOO bad. We got to Dutch Flat just as the parade was starting and sat down on the grassy berm across from the Dutch Flat Hotel (It's still a little strange looking at the Hotel in its new found glory... I have a permanently burned in memory of a chain link fence surrounding the grounds)


In past years, water balloons and various other water weaponry have figured prominently in the parade, and this year was no exception



A few more images of the parade:






After a healthy 4th of july meal, we drove to the cabin where the parents had already been at work cleaning (YES!). I unlocked the bathtub and discovered a new friend living in the tub: Hopkin Green Frog



My parents had brought up a carpet, but there wasn't quite enough room to fit it into the middle of the vast cabin floor without completely nullifying the days of Feng Shui work that I had put in, so I suggested moving the wood hopper to the wall. We did this, and after cleaning up a bag full of dust and putting down the rug, the cabin is looking fantastic:

For dinner, I grilled up one of our grass fed skirt steaks and made a chimichurri sauce out of the cookbock that Christa and Tom bought me (thanks guys!).