VR apartment

big thanks to Mark Banas for a quicktime panorama here

Our new place

Stairs

The stairs on the outside of Gail and Kenji's deck had disintegrated to sawdust, so Kenji and I spent the day ripping down one set and building a new one. I'm sooooo glad I have those new power tools.

The floor is done!

And Gail and Kenji came by to check it out

1000 square feet

Painting

I had the idea of surprising chloe with a fully painted floor (she's in San Diego at the moment), so I headed down to the paint store on High street (Pursel), bought two gallons of concrete stain (GROUNDWORKS Concrete stain in "Desert Beige" ), concrete crack sealant and rollers and got to work

Acupuncture

I've always been a little skeptical of acupunture. I think I can trace it back to seeing my dad on an acupuncture table with needles all over his back and legs with little trails of smole coming out of them. At the time he was desperately trying any and every therapy to try to cure the tendinitis that he had developed from printing. It gave him temporary relief, but the image of him cringing and covered in needles left a negative impression on my young mind.

Fast forward twenty something years: one of my old friends is now a chinese medicine and acupuncture specialist. My other friends have told me that he knows what he's doing, but I haven't really had the occasion to get any help from him until recently. I know from pulling my hamstring in my other leg that you need to be pretty careful with it, or things can get worse very quickly, so I called him up and managed to get an appointment at the end of the day.

I go there a little before five, and he sat me down on the automatic back rolling table, which loosened up my back and legs. From his email, I was just expecting to get a few ointments and medicines from him since he's teaching a physiology class and needed to get there right after five. However, before I really knew what was going on, I had electrodes hooked up to my leg and needles getting poled into my legs! He finished off by putting four or five needles in my left ear, but I'm not sure what those were for. After a short break he came back and pulled the needles out. I got up and could immediately feel the difference in my leg. It was still stiff, but much less painful, and seemed to already have much more mobility. I don't know which of the treatments did the magic, but I'm sold!

arrrgh

I pulled my hamstring tonight while climbing in the gym

ultrasound

Today chloe had her first doctors appointment and I am SO DISAPPOINTED, because neither of us realized that they would be doing an ultrasound ... so I missed it. Argh. It's exciting and a very strange feeling; all of a sudden the baby has gone from an abstract notion to something very real, and growing inside Chloe!

Alameda

went kiting at Alameda after work today. The tide was the lowest I had ever seen, which made it feel a little like launching at third ave (always in danger of getting pulled across the mud). The conditions were challenging for me, and I seem to have greatly lost my upwind capabilities -- I was fighting hard just to keep ground. I felt overpowered on my switchblade 12, but it doesn't really seem like I should have been having looked at the wind graph (avg 18, gusting to 24). Hmmm. Next time I'm going to steal Chloe's kite, I think.

Kiteboardin' Alameda

I went out in pretty light wind conditions today. It was tough, but I got a few runs in before giving up and heading back to the beach. There was some guy out there on an RRD kite of some kind actually getting up wind... I'm really wondering what kind of board and kite he was on. The rest of us were getting worked

Risotto

Risotto with prosciutto, Parmesan and Arugula

Moving continues...

In baby steps. We're doing our part to keep Ingvar Kamprad in lutefisk and Swedish fish.

Chicken

A chicken from one of the neighborhood coops has escaped into our back yard

The delta

Christa, Tom , Chloe and I headed up to the Delta. They dropped me off at Sherman Island so that I could kiteboard while they toured around for a while. I hadn't been to Sherman before, despite it being one of the premier places to kiteboard in Northern California. I wasn't disappointed: strong, consistent wind, non salty water, and a pretty relaxed atmosphere. The launch is pretty small, but I was there early enough that there weren't very many people around. It was a lot of fun, and I'll hopefully have more chances to head up there this season.

Chloe and the crew very nicely came back to pick me up, and we headed out towards Locke. Along the way, we had lunch in Isleton.


There was an outdoor patio with live singing and the server looked like your grandmother, except that she had lot's of piercings. It was a little uncanny, actually and reminded me of that scene in "Death in Venice" when Aschenbach sees the old man on the vaporetto. The food itself was nothing special -- very fried non locally sourced fish and meat. But let me get back to the music, because that was really the most memorable part.

The main singer was pretty good, but the volume of the sound got to be a little painful by the end. Although he had impressive stamina and belted out song after song while we basked in high cholesterol goodness, he took a break after a while and had one of his buddies come up and sing. His friend's name was "Big John", was well over six feet tall and had a military buzz cut. Basically it looked like he just stepped off of PT109. In any case, while he could hit the lower notes admirably well, things didn't turn out so well when he sang solo. It sort of reminded me of that scene in Young Frankenstein when Gene Wilder dresses Peter Boyle up in a Tux and has him sing "Putting on the Ritz" -- "POOOIN UNNNN HUUUU RIIIIIIITZ".

From Isleton, we headed up to Locke, which was the coolest part of the trip. I'll rely on my trusty friend Wikipedia for the background on this small town. It really is a strange and cool place.




I talked to some local guys who said that all the beautiful pear trees (which were in bloom) probably would be pulled out in the next ten years because there is no market for them anymore. Additionally, whatever small market there is is saturated with Chilean pears rather than local pears. After visiting the museum, which had previously been a gambling parlor, we headed over to the schoolhouse. The schoolhouse, which had amazing pictures of the Chinese community. I thought this one was kind of entertaining though:

There were all kinds of fancy motorcycles and two beautiful Alfas in town

After Locke, we headed back to Berkeley, where Kenji cooked "Spaghetti a la Kenji"

Christa and Tom here

Christa and Tom (her boyfriend) arrived today for interviews at various hospitals. Our apartment is kind of chaotic right now, but hopefully they won't be too disturbed by it!

Grapes in the air

On wednesday the movers came to our place in the Presidio, loaded up all our junk onto a truck and dropped it off at our new place in Fruitvale; right now most of our things are sitting in stacks of boxes on the concrete floor.

After finally getting a chance to have the bladder in my kite fixed at KiteWindSurf in Alameda, I headed back to our place to meet Chloe. As soon as I got out of my car I was greeted a really strong smell of grapes in the air. However, this was not the mellow smell of freshly crushed grapes, but rather the artificial sweetness of purple grape chewing gum. As it turns out we now live next to the Gatorade factory and I'm guessing it was "purple" day. I don't mind it at all though; it reminded me of my organic chem lab in which we synthesized a variety of different aromatic (not aromatic in the chemical sense) esters, and all of a sudden our austere 1920's era Williams College laboratory was filled with the powerful aromas of bananas, oranges and apples. It certainly could be a lot worse.

I'm guessing it was this stuff

It also reminded me of a story I heard on This American Life about the gub'mit cracking down on chocolate factory emissions in Chicago

moving!

the movers from Pat Ryan movers showed up today to cart all of our stuff to the Macaroni Factory (aka our new apartment)

earthquake!

It rattled the windows a bit but nothing too serious! 4.2 on the richter scale

!

Snow Day!!!

We finally got enough snow to be able to try a little back country riding. Chloe hadn't used the split board before, and I was dying to have her experience the joy of "earning her turns". We left by eight in the morning and were in the parking lot of Negro Canyon at around 10:30 or so. After gearing up and explaining to Chloe how to put the skins on the skis and setup the bindings we were off.

We only have one split board, so I was on the excellent MSR snowshoes that I got for xmas. Those things are so light that I forgot I was wearing them a few times. I wish I could say the same about the kite and snowboard strapped to my back.

We trudged up the hill (by the topo, it looks like we went around 1 mile and 800 ft in elevation), pausing for lunch and to let the exhaust spewing snowmobiles to go by.




The snow was incredibly sticky, and since we were staying away from the steep terrain to avoid any avalanches, it was really hard to get going.

I tried out the kite in the swirling winds until the lines got hopelessly twisted, and then we boarded back down the hill.



Chloe did great but got a little frustrated at getting mired in the ultra sticky snow every thirty feet or so. We tried to get her a decent run a few times but gave up when we realized that it wasn't really steep enough to get going. Instead, I did a few somersaults into the snow

dodged more snowmobilers, and descended the narrow track that led back to the lot.

we had originally intended to stay at the cabin, but seeing all the snow



we decided to just drive back to berkeley that night and stop at In-n-out on the way back. I had read about a "secret menu" and tried the "animal style" double double, which tasted pretty good after slogging through all that snow.