Comfort food

Made an old favorite of mine last night: polenta (heavy on the parmesan) and poached eggs with fresh nutmeg and steamed chard. oh yeah.

(terrible photo)

Hook us up!!

Chloe and I entered a contest to win an uber-dream vacation at Conde Nast. It involves uploading images and descriptions, as well as roping friends and family to register and give our photos five stars (we will of course reciprocate if you upload photos too!). Here are our images:

Riomaggiore
Vathi
Les Ecrins
I dont know who this "chloez" character is, but she sure left a nice comment!

english dialects

I watch a lot of British TV and comedy, and often wonder where various accents come from. There was one accent that I heard which I was always curious about: a kind of long drawl frequently involving the word "Like": "laaaahk". I found a cool site with mp3s of various dialects here. It seems like its closest to a Northwest accent.

!

Whatchu talkin bout willis?

Mr Mom part two

I admit it: I was pretty worried about taking a month off to take care of little ZZN. It wasn't for professional reasons but simply because I didn't think I would be able to keep up with her (particularly if she rejected the bottle!). Now, almost two weeks in, I frequently find myself looking towards March 1 with sadness -- I won't have all day to go on walks and talk to the baby anymore!

Yesterday we went to the SFMOMA with the parents for her first visit to the museum.

We visited the permanent collection and a photo installation, but the highlight for her seemed to be the Olafur Eliasson exhibit. It wasn't terribly compelling to me, but she loved the colors of the One Way Colour Tunnel and the 360° room for all colours. As usual, what she liked most of all was the trail of "Oh my god did you see that cute baby!" that she leaves in her wake and random passerbys making googley eyes, jumping up and down and smiling at her.

Earlier, I ran into an old friend of mine randomly in the cafe. He was in town to cover the Game Developers Conference

I also developed a high tech remote baby feeding system: A thermos full of hot water and one of those ubiquitous brushed stainless steel mugs. I put the chilled baby bottle from the cooler into the mug and filled it with hot water, thus warming the contents to non baby tantrum inducing temperatures. I tipped the deck by bringing real milk instead of formula of course. Here she is enjoying a field heated bottle:

The Backpack

After getting bad back and shoulder pains from the now not so little baby in our Baby Bjorn,



we did a little research on baby backpacks and headed down to REI. We plopped the baby into several packs, including the Kelty Pathfinder, the new version of the pathfinder, and the Deuter packs. She seemed most comfortable in the Pathfinder, immediately starting to slobber and gum the front of the baby cockpit. I've been using it for a few days now, and LOVE it. It adjusts quickly to different torso lengths too, so we both get to play baby sherpa!

Day three of Mr. Mom

It's now been three days of taking care of little ZZN and I'm starting to get into the rhythm of things. The major accomplishment was getting her to take the bottle -- we bought several Adiri bottles, which she really seems to like. That was actually my biggest concern, so I am *very* relieved about it. We went for a long walk up in redwood regional park today (madrone trail to starflower, to ridge) which was really beautiful. Its only 10-15 minutes away, so I have a feeling we'll be going there a lot. I need to find something better than the baby bjorn though! My shoulders are aching.

Driving Home

We had a largely uneventful drive back to the Bay Area. It took us 6:40 door to door, so fairly quick. One piece of advice: make sure you have enough gas to *not* stop at Lee Vining


$4.19 for premium! We stopped at a promising looking Basque restaurant in Carson Valley, but they weren't serving lunch until 11:30... bah.


Lesson learned:
+The hot tubs around Mammoth rock
+Keough sucks
+The Vagabond Inn is awful
+Motel 6 rocks .. and El Rancho, Comfort Inn look decent as well
+Whiskey creek 5-6pm half price food in the Saloon is good

Hot springs

After last nights disappointing experience with Keough, we did a little internet research on our fabulous working free wifi connection (yes, it really works!), and decided to go to the tubs near Benton Crossing. The drive is only 30 minutes, but because there is still three feet of snow at that higher elevation, we had to walk the last 1000 feet or so to the tub. It turned out to be beautiful: panoramic views of the Sierra and White mountains, hot water and no shady characters. We took turns taking dips and taking care of the angry little baby.




After tubbing, we tried to get up to the Buttermilks. We made it most of the way, and actually were only around 100 feet from the Peabody boulders, but I didn't want to risk getting stuck. Unfortunately, there really wasn't any room to turn around, so I did a little donut on the slushy snow, pointed the subie back down the road and fled.

More unfortunate still, I must have hit a pothole or rock on the way out, because I started getting a strange and troubling sound out of the front left wheel well. It almost sounded like we were dragging something metallic. After a few fruitless minutes of trying to figure out what vital car-part we were now dragging, we called AAA.

The towing service showed up 20 minutes later and the driver was able to quickly diagnose the car: a bent heat brake heat shield which was rubbing against the rotor. Fortunately, as far as things that can be damaged by rocks, this is pretty minor. He gave it a whack with a hammer and the noise went away. Just to be sure, I headed to the local service shop. The mechanic got the subie up on the lift and double checked all the shields, confirming that the front left shield had been bent slightly inwards. I was pretty surprised to see how much plastic there is under there. Maybe its time for an aftermarket aluminum skid plate. I probably need one that protects the rear diff though. It was now three o'clock, so we had a few more hours for bouldering... off to the Happy Boulders again!


When we were done, we took a few minutes to take in the glory of the Eastern Sierra at dusk

A new hotel, Eureka Dunes, Keough

A cold wind blows through
our Vagabond motel room
Google? page not found

-- a motel haiku


After another night of incredibly annoying HVAC noisiness, Chloe and I had both had enough. As soon as I got up, I started calling around to other hotels and we settled on the Motel 6 right across the street. The manager must have thought we were a little strange when we demanded to turn on and listen to their heater before accepting the room.


After transferring all of our stuff (mostly baby stuff, actually -- I had somehow only brought one pair of pants for the whole trip) to the motel 6, we set off for the Eureka dunes. We had passed the dunes a while ago one our way to bishop from Death Valley, but it was dark and we were both too tired to camp. The lady at the BLM told us that Eureka was only 45 minutes away, but then corrected herself and said that it was only 45 minutes with her boyfriend driving. "We'll see about that!" I thought to myself. The drive turns out to be around 63 miles from the edge of town to the dunes parking, including some dirt roads, so unless her boyfriend is Colin McRae I'm calling bullshit. That would mean an average speed of more than 80 mph. I would say that its do-able, but requires a fast car with good brakes, or a complete disregard for ones own life. In any event, we arrived at Eureka Dunes 45 minutes (okay, more like an hour) after leaving Bishop.


We Baby-Bjorned up Zoe and headed up some of the smaller dunes on the North side (Google maps link here )
Here Zoe and I are, assessing the situation

We had initially planned on hiking to a higher dune with Zoe, but the sand turned out to be too soft for that. Instead, we took turns guarding Zoe from vultures and walked up by ourselves

and ran down (which is SO much fun!)

Zoe was starting to get a little irritable, so we got our dune jumping in while we could


after I built a makeshift baby tent out of our jackets and my tripod:

You can't see her face in this shot, but she is not at all impressed by my ingenuity. She seemed to enjoy being up there well enough though:


I took a few film and digital shots, before baby entered DEFCON 3 and Chloe started bringing her back to the car




On the way down we got buzzed by an F-18 (probably from China Lake or Nellis)




Flying a $40 million jet low through the desert must be a pretty good job.

Here we are in front of the dunes, and with our footsteps leading up one of the lesser dunes:



From the dunes, we headed back to Bishop, got some sandwiches at Schatt's and headed to the Sad boulders for some steep chossy action:



That last one is a beautiful line, but pretty painful on the fingers. I got to the second to last move, but kept falling off. Next time.

I had heard and seen pictures of the hot springs around Bishop since the first time I came here (around 2002 I think) but had never really had the motivation to go check them out. After a few days of bouldering however, Chloe and I were both ready to find them. There is one right near town called Keough Hot Springs, which is an actual spa with a pool, refreshments etc. I'll leave it to Chloe to describe this, since she went in for a recon mission while I stayed out in the car with ZZN. Suffice it to say that we were unimpressed. There is also the runoff from the hot springs, which I had sometimes heard described as being "scary". After a little hunting, we found the spring, but one look at its denizens convinced us to go somewhere else. A brown 1970 Econoline Van "Serial Killer Special Edition" was parked in front of the springs, with the tailgate open. Inside was a floor to ceiling stack of plastic milk crates of undetermined contents, and a dog was circling the van barking at invisible intruders. Shangri-laaaaaaa! Needless to say, the bathtub in the Motel room was looking pretty good.

Petroglyphs, Happy Boulders

The hotel, despite being fairly inexpensive, leaves a lot of things to be desired. For some reason, there are *no* unoccupied electrical outlets, except the two in the bathroom. This meant unplugging a light to charge the phones or the powerbook (one at a time of course). The HVAC unit had been misinstalled, so a cold draft whistled through the room. Similar gaps in the front door allowed for a nice crosswind, which I was only able to restrict by cramming our giant crash pad up against the door. I also stuffed tissues around the sides of the HVAC unit, and discovered that someone else had had the same problem -- there was an ancient washcloth wedged into the left side of the unit. Legionaires disease, anyone? The HVAC unit itself looked like it had been rescued from the third world and would loudly turn on and off as it approached the temperature set point. It was about as loud as a hairdryer, and made it hard to fall or stay asleep. I should mention that this is actually supposed to be one of the better hotels in Bishop, but was a lot worse than the dives we've been to on previous trips. The final offense was unforgivable though. Icy cold wind? fine. No power outlets? hmmm. Jet engine heater turning on and off every five minutes? Not ideal. "Free Internet Wireless" working a maximum of 80% of the time? No.


ANYWAY, in order to balance the various interests (baby, climbing, preserving skin, baby and baby) we have decided upon a schedule which involves slow morning starts followed by sightseeing and climbing in the afternoon. This gives the baby a chance to eat and befoul as many outfits as she likes, and gives the bouldering areas a chance to warm up so she doesn't turn into a babysickle.

I had seen pictures of the native american petroglyphs in many different places, but had always been to busy climbing to check them out. We started the day with a visit to the excellent Bureau of Land Management office in Bishop, where they gave us directions and descriptions of the various petroglyph sites. It was still pretty cold when we got to the first site, so we limited Zoe's time outside. We were pretty surprised when she started glowing, levitating and summoning the wind:




Here are a few more shots of the petroglyphs



After stopping by the room and town for gas (the window wipers were frozen!)



we headed out to the Happy Boulders. The normally easy non-hike felt... painful with the baby and baby accessories. We hit the Girlfriend Boulder

Savannah, and a few other boulders, but the word of the day was "shutdown". We finished up on the sixty foot woman traverse:

beautiful pockets for miles (or sixty feet i guess). As I was getting the pad ready, someones Husky came out of nowhere, and before I could do anything had stuffed his snout into Zoes face. I didnt see tongue, but it looked like the dog might have licked Zoe. Zoe's response was a sour little pucker, followed by wincing and head shaking.

Here we are back at the parking area with Mt. Tom behind us

The big drive

Today (Our original plan had been to leave on Saturday, but snowstorms and cold temperatures convinced us otherwise!) we drove to Bishop after a late and hectic start. Most of the preparation time was put into figuring out how to get two very important pieces of equipment into our Adventure Subie: the big crash pad, without which we would break our ankles, and the baby swing, without which we would die. Eventually we settled on attaching the pad to the roof.

There was a little snow on the road in South Lake, where we saw this sign while waiting at a light:


The color of the lake was incredible, so we stopped for pictures, bathroom and zoe feeding.

From South Lake, we crossed the mountains over to 395, passing the field of McMansions on the eastern slope (who ARE these people?). It was a beautiful time to be driving on one of my favorite roads in the world, so we stopped a few times for pictures.


Just south of the turnoff to Bodie, I noticed a CHP cruiser heading North. The officer in the cruiser took one look at me (knee deep in the snow with a tripod) pulled a U-turn and parked behind our car. The officer got out of the car and started walking towards me. At this point I was getting a little nervous -- It felt a little like those initial few seconds on the policecarcam before some hapless guy/gal gets Tazered. As I was thinking of a line more memorable than "Hey bro, don't Taze me!" for posterity, the officer was getting closer. I asked whether maybe I wasn't supposed to park on the shoulder but it turned out that he just wanted to see what I was taking pictures of (below).

I talked to him for a while, and he lamented not having his own camera in his car with him. It turned out that his "beat" is 395 from Bridgeport to the state line, and my first reaction was jealosy at driving such a great road all day long. Upon further reflection though, I'm guessing dealing with dirtbags and meth addicts every day might distract you from the views. Anyway, it was nice having a conversation with a cop which did NOT end up with me in handcuffs getting Mirandized for once (just kidding, Mom!).

We continued south past Mammoth, and Bishop was finally on the mileage signs -- just 20 more miles! After a long day of driving, I was perhaps going a little faster than I should have when I ended up behind a big white SUV. It was dark by now, and I was in no mood for someone doing exactly the speed limit in the passing lane, so I flashed my headlights and waited. After a little while, I decided that I would pass on the right, and I *might* have been exceeding the speed limit, and I *might* have come in a little close when I moved back over to the left lane. I sped off to get some distance between myself and the SUV, but was annoyed to see the SUV putting the hammer down. It was with great chagrin, one mile later that I saw blue and red lights flashing from ... an unmarked CHP SUV behind me! Now I'm no expert, but I was pretty sure that the CHP frown upon that kind of behavior. The cop turned out to be really nice, and for some unfathomable reason declined to give me a ticket! Not getting a ticket wasn't even on my radar (har har); I mean if I were that cop *I* would have given me a ticket and did a little dance while writing it out. Anyway, I spent all of my CHP lives on that one. Twenty minutes later, we finally arrived in Bishop.

Upon unpacking, we discovered one flaw in our "crash pad on the roof" approach: our crash pad was soaked and filthy!




In all, it took us eight hours total, which isn't too bad considering the conditions.

We had dinner at Las Palmas, where Zoe covetously eyed our Coronas.

You're going have to wait 21 more years for that, little one! Actually, just forget about alcohol entirely. and boys.