I briefly tried kiting OB today but the wind was a little too light for my 11. Heres a little clip that Paul took of me working the kite like crazy
clip here
Despite getting a little demoralized and smacked by the chop, I'm really excited to try to kite OB again; it's a beautiful beach with plenty of room to setup, launch and land. Paul got a chance to see all of the things that have to be done before getting out on the water: hopefully it didn't discourage him!
I had a great session today after work... perfect wind except for a few holes. This felt just about at the instinct sport 11's sweet spot.
I got the 6:20 AM flight out of Syracuse (Thank you for dropping me off Jon and Christa!!!) to ORD this morning. If you're wondering about the painful departure times, it's because we paid for these flights with mileage, and they were the only flights that we could get.
The flight from chicago to SFO, despite being cramped, was pretty nice because the skies were absolutely clear from the rockies westward, and I had my nose pressed to the window for almost the entire time
And as a Grande Finale, we flew right over the salt flats
spectacular.
After walking Christa beautiful and sweet cat Vivian (sp?)
(note to self: walking a cat is POINTLESS)
Bob took me for a tour of Albany. Their new train station is amazing compared to the dump that I remembered
And the down town area has a lot of impressive buildings. I thought the coolest was the department of education.
From there, we went though the SUNY albany campus and past Chloe, Christa and Stephanie's old house
before going back to Stephanie and Bobs place to check out the shower
We got some really cute things, and it all made Chloe pretty happy; I just love how she put on all of the bib and hat!
A few hours later we were on the road again back to Syracuse.
Saturday was the baby shower for me and Zoe. I was happy there were no "shower games" and though I have no idea what these games may entail, the sound of them was sufficiently ominous to make me feel I had dodged a bullet in avoiding them. Max and Bob came in at the tail end for food and photo ops. Overall it was very nice with lots of attention for me, cute little pink baby gifts, cards with interpretative drawings of the baby from Beth, and a cryptic card from my mom saying only "Rugs, rugs, rugs!"
We left that evening for Syracuse since Max had a 6am flight back to Oakland (using frequent flyer miles necessitates a certain amount of pain and poor travel times). The plan was to get up around 4:30am, drop him off at the airport, get breakfast, and then head back to Albany in time for the rug auction at noon. A fine plan if one doesn't consider the lack of sleep involved and the fact that driving back home in time for a rug auction loses some of it's appeal after virtually no sleep. Inspired by the fear of mom's ire if we missed the rug auction, Christa and I did manage to get back to Albany relatively on time (even though we started out going in the wrong direction on 480, as Christa is as directionally challenged as I am and does things "by feel." She did assure me she knew the way back to Albany, after all she had lived in Syracuse for 5 years while at the university and drove back and forth quite often. However knowing the way "by feel" means basically random selection of direction, and in this case the wrong direction).
We left from Albany and went to a small village called Chatham in upstate NY for the auction, aided by the ever handy GPS. By this time I was not terribly interested in the auction and after seeing the suggested retail values even less so (the most inexpensive rug was about $3,000, out of our price range.) We pulled up to the Chatham firehouse about 15 minutes before the auction was to begin. Mom went to register, shoved a pen in my hands and told me to go through the rugs quickly and mark the ones I liked. There were 6 piles of rugs arrayed around the room each consisting of about 30-40 rugs. Since the manual labor of completely exposing a rug was beyond my means, Christa and I flipped the corners of the rugs while I wrote down the ones I liked, all based on seeing approximately 2 square feet of a 100+ square foot rug. I was surpried to see that some were actually quite nice with the vibrant reds, greens, and blues I like. All the rugs mom bought at the auction previously were pastel colored and would have looked mournful in our cavernous apartment. I wanted color and these rugs certainly had color, but the prices still seemed to preclude purchase.
The auction began and I looked around the room and was surprised to see only about 10 people in the bidding audience. Mom whispered that some of them were dealers but it ended up that only 2 dealers were there and the rest were retirees looking for a $50 runner for their hallways. Basically the perfect situation for me. The dealers wouldn't be buying up 200 rugs, so there were plenty of bargains available. Mom told me in no uncertain terms that she would do the bidding for me and to just tell her which ones I liked and then be quiet. She is very very good at getting a bargain, mainly because she has no shame, grotesquely underbidding for things. In conjunction with the desperation of the auctioneer, I managed to buy 4 rugs for about $1,000 TOTAL.
I had never understood the people who claimed that they were "addicted" to shoppping. For me purchasing clothes or gadgets was tedious and the opposite of an adrenaline rush of any kind. But the rug auction changed all that. I wanted those rugs. Badly. And by those rugs I mean all the rugs. The auctioneer would laud the virtues of a "super silk" and a "300 thread count" and I would want it. Regardless of color or inherent beauty, the excitement of the bidding was addicitive. After about 45 mintutes my sister was more than ready to go and by that time I had bought 4 rugs even mom was looking a little worried. She reminded me that I would have to get these rugs back home to California somehow and that maybe 4 rugs was enough. I reluctantly agreed, all the while glancing back as we walked out to see if the perfect rug wouldn't be coming up next ....
Caught up in the excitement of the auction, logistics had taken a distantly backseat in my mind. We pulled around to the back entrance of the firehouse and a small El Salvadorian man tossed the rugs into out car (2 in the truck, two in the backseat). He didn't seem to have that much trouble, so getting home we were all unprepared for the sheer weight of these things. The three of us managed, barely, to get them inside the house. I wanted to examine my purchases as I had little idea what they actually looked like. Unfortunately the rugs were much too big for the available space in Mom's house so I couldn't actually unroll them. I was a bit nervous by this point and after getting a shipping quote from UPS was near panic. Over $800 to ship the rugs! Mom decided that I would take as many rugs possible back with me in the suitcases. She got the biggest ones she had and we managed to load the two smaller rugs that way. Sure I could barely lift either case and I had no room for my clothes, but at least two rugs would be making it to Cali.
Max, or Max's mom actually, saved the day. I told him the shipping issue in rather depressed tones. I pictures my precious rugs moldering away in my mom's basement, never to be unfurled. Well Gail called DHL, another shipping company and got a quote of $200 for shipping. I told mom about this and while sceptical, she called them as well. They asked various particulars such as box size and weight. We didn't actually know the size (we hadn't boxed them yet) or the weight (mom doesn't own a scale) so "estimated". The quite was for $150! When the man from DHL arrived he asked what our quote had been and what the specifications were. Mom told him what we had said for weight and size, he looked at her, smiled, and just winked. Damn she's good...
Stephanie picked us up in Syracuse today, and we headed to Chloes grandfathers house in Berne after lunch in Syracuse. The house sits on a large plot of land and after getting a few warning barks from his dog, Tyke II, we headed down
to a pond that he had built not very long after buying the property. The pond's temperature has been rising steadily unfortunately and as a result most of the Trout that he had stocked the pond with are now dead. I did see a few of them jump out of the water towards the middle of the lake though.
On the way down I found out that he had been on the team at general dynamics which designed the F16, which I thought was pretty cool. He also was on the F111 team. From the pond, we bushwhacked down to the stream
which had tons of perfect paving stones. I wish we had stones like that in the little bear creek!
After another session of bushwhacking in which i miraculously did not contract poison ivy,
we climbed the final hill back to the house
And talked for a while before heading to Syracuse to meet up with Christa and have dinner.
Jon (big jon) Chloe and I went for a walk at Green Lake
and then Wegmans (I think) for lunch before getting geared up to go to Jons (little) graduation.
Some of the talks were good, but I found it a little funny how some of the speakers seemed to be under the impression that graduating from high school magically turns you into an "adult": boy are they in for a surprise! I was also a little amused by the abundance of grammatical errors in the Principals talk. Doctor, heal thyself! Ten minutes into the graduation I peeked over the girls shoulder in front of us to see her texting "Ugh, Nottingham graduation" to someone. There was a spirited rendition of The Chicken. My favorite part was watching a crooked smile spread across the drummers ( A graduating Senior) face as she laid down a thumpin' beat. All in all it seemed pretty well put together, and it was fun to see all of the excited families in the audience go crazy when their kids walked across the stage.
After waiting for the congratulations to end, we headed to Alto Cinqo, a nearby mexican restaurant
After a late start, we headed to Wegmans with Jon for a late breakfast/early lunch. Chloe had told me about Wegmans before, and the delicious cookies and food that they have, but I was a little skeptical; it's a grocery store after all! However, after a few meals there and having wandered around the store, I'm definitely a convert: they have good food and excellent produce. The only strange thing was the lighting, which seemed to be on 50% power.
After a spirited game of Wii bowling and tennis, Jon, Amy, Chloe and I headed to the Syracuse baseball stadium to watch the Sky Chiefs play the Braves. I had never been to a minor league game before and really loved it; it was so much better than any Major League game I've ever been to. The size of the stadium and the higher error rate are a big improvement over huge megastadiums and perfect hitting and pitching.
Things were looking pretty good for the chiefs until the Braves hit a grand slam followed immediately by a home run. I wasn't too bothered however, since I was given an ample supply of peanuts and hotdogs.
We took a red-eye to ORD and then to Syracuse today. I was so tired that I actually managed to sleep for once.
Chloe and I headed up to Cisco Grove to try to get to Fordyce lake again. We had tried this on a previous trip, but kept running into closed private roads. This time however, we eventually found a road (rattlesnake road) off of Cisco Grove which led to Sterling lake and Fordyce lake. It's rutted in a few places but is a pleasant drive past a creek and boulder strewn landscape. There is even a decent looking camp site along the way. I had selected this area both because it was one of the places which looked like it might house some nice boulders but also because there were several lakes which looked similar to Salmon lake -- one of our favorites. We parked near the boy scout camp on the west side of the lake and started walking north on one of the trails
Sterling lake itself looks like a great place to bring a canoe
and we immediately stumbled on a beautiful boulder with a narrowing diagonal crack.
I threw myself at it quite a few times but was unable to crack the fingery sequence. After giving up, we headed to the small lakes northeast of Sterling, through meadows and snow banks
And found a huge log which reaches out into the lake
We headed west and found a few chossy boulders with very difficult topouts and then down to another lake just west and down the hill.
After a bracing swim, I was wading out of the water when Chloe let out a shriek; a three foot snake had fallen out of the bush she was holding on in order to get down to the water! Unfortunately, it fell onto the one rock which made my egress from the lake possible
This was an extremely unwelcome development since I am terrified of snakes, and the water was pretty cold. Chloe eventually shooed it away and I was able to get out of the water without having to fight the snake to the death.
It was getting late, and we still hadn't gotten to the area which had looked the most boulder rich by aerial photographs. Just getting to this lake had been a bit of a slog, so we decided to start heading back to the car. As it turned out, within five minutes of walking we found an excellent grouping of boulders with everything from knobby slabs
to proud aretes
to scared-just-looking-at-them highballs
Amazingly, despite being located on a hillside, two of the last three looked like they had nice flat landings!
We also found this absolute gem
with a leg shaking topout. I didn't relish the idea of falling on that pine tree, and we only had the little pad with us!
From here, it was a painful and exhausting bushwhack up the hill
to get to the trail back to the car. I saved GPS waypoints so hopefully I can figure out a better approach next time.
After more fun offroading in the subie
we had dinner at a pizza place in Truckee and then drove back to Berkeley
