kiteboarding

Yesterday I had easily my best day of kiteboarding yet. A day later, I still get a warm fuzzy feeling remembering the feeling of skimming across the waves off Crown beach in Alameda, carving turns and finally feeling some of the subtleties of flying the kite. I think it was my fifth or sixth time out on the water, and everything just clicked; as soon as I body dragged out away from the beach, I was up on my board, heading out into the San Francisco Bay. A few minutes later, seeing not too many kiteboarders around, I swooped the kite back down and headed back to the beach. I lost track of how many laps I rode until the wind turned into a gentle breeze, and I noticed people giving up and heading for the beach. I doggedly kept the kite up, and as the wind died, I had the opportunity to try to generate my own "apparent wind" by flying the kite in figure eights as fast as possible, and eventually relented and headed back to the beach. Earlier, in a fit of optimism, I decided not to connect my board leash and ended up getting really far downwind of my board. Luckily Wes, my instructor from my water lesson happened to be out there and he grabbed and returned my board. Despite all my effort to stay upwind, I ended up a mile or so down the beach, and did the now familiar long walk back up to the shack.

Chloe also had a good day: she inflated, rigged and tested out her new GK Sonic in the water.

Big Chief

This morning we drove up to Big Chief, near Truckee. The drive up was uneventful, except for a 45 minute traffic jam thanks to some Caltrans morons who had shut the road down to one lane at Yuba Gap inexplicably. We had stopped at Ikedas earlier, and I was truly amazed at how much it had changed. It used to be a funky little fruit stand with a disgusting fly filled bathroom around back. They used to sell cheap dried fruits, nuts and their own pressed spicy tofu. These days it appears that Mr. Ikeda or his children have gotten a little full of themselves, and charge $8 for a bag of peanuts!

When we got to Truckee, we discovered that the guidebook that we had bought was utterly useless. I should mention that climbing guidebooks are typically obtuse and maddening things. The reasons for this are complicated. On one hand, guide book authors are frequently the ones who have invested their own time and money into developing a crag for climbing, so it makes sense to support them. However, guidebooks are also frequently absurdly expensive. More damning still is the fact that many (most?) climbing guides are produced with 2nd grade literacy, kindergarten layout skills and a stern focus on inaccuracy. It's almost as if the authors want your money, but don't want you to make it to the crags! Anyway, enough of that. Suffice to say that we wasted a long time searching for roads which do not exist, but we eventually made it. By the time we were at the crag, it was in the mid 90's and we almost died warming up on a "10" (according to the guide). After getting thoroughly cooked, we retreated to the south cave sector, where I flubbed the opening moves of the very fun "Realm of the Overhang" and then did "Flying High Again" on sight. Thunderclouds were rolling in during the last climb, so we walked back to the car and got swarmed by mosquitoes.

The rain started falling in sheets of huge drops just as we got back onto I80 and was deluging the freeway all the way to Alta. Along the way I discovered something very interesting: The leftmost lane (fast lane) is much, much, much smoother and quieter than the right lane! Why is that? My guess is that the road destroying semi trucks spend more time in the right lanes and basically thrash and crack them. When we got to Alta, we hacked our way down to the cabin that my parents and I had built. I was 11 or 12 when we built it, and it was a pretty significant undertaking despite its diminutive size. It took a summer of hauling sheetrock, timber, bolts, nails, rocks, cement bags, insulation, tar paper, shingles and a thousand other little bits to build. We didn't have any power tools, electricity or plumbing, either! Anyway, we haven't spent much time up there recently, and it has become the favored target of the local redneck mouth breathers. Unfortunately, they had broken in again and pried off both locking hasps to the door. Thankfully they had spared the windows this time. Chloe and I re-installed new hasps and locks as we were swarmed again by mosquitoes, and we hit the road, sweaty, dirty and dehydrated.

just another day of living in the Presidio

Cherry Picking!

We spent the morning picking cherries in Brentwood, near the sacramento delta today:






and then had lunch at Vic's

Container house

I saw an article in the SFgate today about shipping container based prefab houses, which I quickly forwarded around to my parents and Chloe. As usual, the custom designed ones are fantastic, but who can afford something like that? Maybe an investment banker, but certainly not two biochemistry Ph.Ds :) No, the prefab designs were the most interesting and one in particular really stood out: the Quik House. The floor plans are fantastic, and they really do look like a nice place to live. I found some other articles which indicate that a dozen of these things have already been ordered. Image stolen from the Quik House web site.

World Cup

I was never a soccer player. I had friends that were passionate about it in high school, but I could never really understand it. Part of it was that, having a Japanese father who never watched any sports on TV, I didn't understand the language of any spectator sports, much less an obscure third world one :). No, I was equally lost at a superbowl party as I was at a world series party, although I was somewhat more at home at the latter after years of Japanese-American little league. The soccer cluelessness stemmed from an early attempt at team sports in which my friend Keith-Mako and I were enlisted in a youth soccer league. Presaging a life of conformity, I was obsessed with shirts with numbers on them (my "number shirt phase" is the term my parents use) and was pretty excited about having a number shirt from an actual team that I actually played on! The reality of the soccer team was somewhat different however. It was endless boring drills in which the coach doted on his son, a Q-tip shaped headed big toothed giant to the exclusion of all the rest of us. With the exception of the occasional disdainful look at one of us, as we ran rubber legged past the soccer ball, there wasn't much "coaching" going on. Keith and I would fabricate various ploys to get pulled out of games, like pointing squint eyed at a microdot of blood that we were frantically squeezing out of our fingers after a fall ("collapse" might be a better word). "But I'm injured!". The one thing that kept me going was the promise of the number shirt. My number shirt. Unfortunately, our number shirt delivery was somewhat delayed, and Keith and I jealously looked at our friend Justin Holcher's new jersey which he proudly wore to school several times a week. To cries of "Luckyyyyyyyy!" we coveted the fabric with little holes for breathability, the gold v-neck collar, and the shimmery blue fabric. The coup de grace was that it was reversible for when you were the home or way team. When reversed it became gold with a blue collar. It was a perfect number shirt. This was going to be awesome, and we (maybe just I; I can't speak for Keith) would endure any amount of bodily injury for them. Our own jerseys arrived later in the season amid great fanfare. The coach brought a big cardboard box to the pitch, trailed by all of us jumping and shouting. After handing the number "1" jersey to his son, the rest of us dove in and pulled ours out. The excitement quickly dissipated. These were gold and ... Black? There were no perforations for high performance. Neither were they reversible in any meaningful way. And with the dream of the perfect number shirt of my very own shattered, so ended any enthusiasm I might have for soccer and the world cup.

Sick as a dog

I went kiteboarding on Wednesday, and somehow didn't see the signs warning that there were high levels of bacteria in the water from a sewage spill. On Thursday my chest started feeling tight, and by the evening I had a fever and headache. My this morning I was a complete wreck; I could barely move, my throat was killing me, I had a throbbing headache and a fever that just would not relent. I'm definitely going to spend the extra time researching water bacteria levels before jumping in next time. However, as far as I know, no one is testing viral levels (probably more technically difficult to do), which are also something to worry about.

Bay Area Traffic

This weekend, I finished some modifications to the Traffic analyzer I wrote. It now uses LWP and some ugly code to associate individual traffic time points with various weather parameters. Some examples are shown below for the commute between South San Francisco and Albany.

Temperature

pressure

humidity

kiteboarding

Today chloe and I had our jet ski assisted water lessons in the bay; we both had a great time and managed to get up on the board in both directions and even managed to get upwind a bit! Next wednesday we'll try to get in some more water time after work. Woohoo!