I just got four more of my improperly made French fillings (okay done by a Finnish dentist, to be fair) replaced. Lots of novacaine, drooling on myself and a sore jaw as usual. Hopefully these will last more than a few years; apparently there were big cavities and bits of my silver amalgam fillings that were left under the fillings. At least I can look forward to a weekend up in the mountains finally!
We went up to Napa with my parents to check out the amazing studio and house that our friends the Shepps have built -- very cool. From there, we went to Cindy's Backstreet Kitchen which was really excellent. I'm updating this a week later, so I can't remember what we ate exactly, but everything was excellent and the dining rooms are bright and sunny... perfect.
Heres kenji in the restaurant
Yesterday we burned most of the maples that we had cut down this spring
and used the burn barrel and coals to cook potatoes and steak
We drove back to the bay area this morning, just in time to see the Queen Mary 2 steam under the bridge
This website was brought to my attention today and it really blew me away. Many of the bigger ships are now equipped with a tracking system known as AIS which integrates a special packet radio protocol with a GPS. Someone used a ground based receiver in Berkeley and some computer savvy to put together the above linked page which agives you a real-time and time-lapsed view of boats in the SF bay.
Yesterday began like many other winter weekends this year with an early start. We were heading up to Lake Van Norden to scope out another snowkiting venue. We got to the south side of the lake around 9:45 or so, but quickly realized that lake van Norden road was a little too snowy to drive far enough to the east to reach the meadows. There was no wind either, but I was content to at least scope out where we could park and how to walk to the meadows, so we drove around to the other side along Lake Mary road. It was here that I ignored the warning signs of not seeing very many (ok, zero) tire tracks, and rallied our subie up and over a largish snowy berm. I drove over the concrete track crossing and almost immediately sank into the snow on the far side of the tracks. This was the first time I had gotten the subie stuck, and I was determined to dig her out rather than face the ignominy of another Tow truck rescue. Does this look familiar?!
After about an hour and a half of digging, cursing and burning of clutch, a trainspotter dude showed up and immediately called Union Pacific and was more or less in constant contact with them for the rest of the ordeal. We were far enough away from the tracks that we *probably* wouldn't get hit by a train, but the prospect of our car getting turned into a carnitas of shredded metal and upholstry added to the urgency and stress of the situation.
He told us to pile rocks from the tracks under the wheels, and helped push.. neither of which really helped. After breaking our borrowed shovel, he also admonished me for wearing cotton pants and a sweater because "cotton kills". I guess he didn't notice the PILES of polypro/windstopper/mountain hardwear shells and wool underwear in the back seat (and the blue skies!). Soon after, a guy from sugarbowl showed up in his diesel Kubota 4x4. To make a long story short, no one was willing to pull us out from the tracks because they were very sensibly worried about a train showing up, exploding their truck and then dragging our chained subaru into sacramento. The same problem applied to all of the towing services that subaru roadside assistance could find. In the end, for a small fee ($150), Sugarbowl agreed to drive a Snowcat up the Royal Gorge trail and pull us out. It was decided upon that pulling from the side of the track was the safest option, and it worked like a charm.
The trainspotting dude didn't want us to cross the westbound track until he heard back from Union Pacific, so I chatted with the Snowcat driver for a while. It really is amazing what kind of terrain they can drive those things on. He happened to be one of those rock crawler guys and had done an infamous "road" between Fordyce lake and the Eagle lakes in his rig. He apparently carries a trailer with a welding setup in it for repairs on the go! I took the opportunity to ask him about those new Toyotas I've been seeing around : the FJ cruiser. Despite being pretty firmly in the anti-SUV camp, the FJ intrigues me because they ran them (or something like them) in this years Baja 1000, they are pretty inexpensive, and they seem to be actually for off-road use, rather than rolling over smaller cars. I think it's a testament to their utility that this guy seemed pretty impressed with them, and dismissed most other SUVs as "cars".
Chloe and I also had a chance to check out the impressively large hole I had gotten us into
After waiting for a while, we got the go ahead from the trainspotter and I turned onto the sent-from-heaven snowless rail crossing and rallied down the other side.
After thanking everyone profusely, we hightailed it out of there, cruising up the icy hill which I had worried about on the drive in.
Lessons learned:
1)The subie cannot go everywhere
2)The subie cannot go everywhere
3)The snowbanks on the sides of train tracks are made of very soft snow.
4)Cars are heavy and sink into soft snow
5)The subie cannot go everywhere
So I am suitably chastened and will certainly back off a lot earlier next time (especially near train tracks!).
We got back to the cabin around three-ish, set up the soaking tub, and burned some of the brush that we had cut down last spring and summer in the burn barrel
Unfortunately, most of the water in the cabin was frozen solid
as was the olive oil
even the water we set out overnight froze!
After another soak in 100 degree water this morning, we headed back to berkeley.
We had read about "the best breakfast in town" in the Rockfax Staying in Bishop Guide, and on it's recommendation spent twenty minutes wandering around bishop looking for a breakfast place which is apparently not even in business anymore. No matter though, as we went to Schat's Bäkkêrÿ for some asiago bread, fritters, and various other baked goods. I've avoided Schat's for a while because of the gratuituous use of an umlaut over the "Y" as well as the additional "k", despite all the gushing about fantastic breads that I've read. I grew up in Berkeley -- home of Acme bread -- and lived in france for almost four years, so I just assumed that all the praise was relative to other offerings in america and that I would be underwhelmed. To my surprise though, their sourdough was excellent, as was everything else I tried. Interestingly, the original Schat was apparently taught how to make his signature product -- Sheepherders bread -- by Basque shepherds in the early 1900's.
Back at the hotel, we packed up and took a few minutes to watch birds peck at detritus that had blown onto the frozen swimming pool
nothin like a good detritus peck.
We drove back up 395, cursing the lack of snow along the way (there was wind, too!) and stopped to take pictures of Topaz lake.
We also saw some (presumably drunk) fishermen crash their boat into the ice encrusted shore of the lake.
After crossing into the Sierra on route 88, we stopped at what I later discovered was near one of the major snowkiting areas in the Tahoe area: Hope Valley. We were actually at the small cross country area at the intersection of 88 and 89 called Sorensens rather than Hope Valley itself. Despite the weak winds, I managed to move about twenty feet under wind power
but only after a LOT of patience and effort by Chloe -- THANK YOU CHLOE!!! There was so little wind that the kite would drop out of the sky and I wouldn't be able to launch without her!
From Sorensons, it was finally time to go back to berkeley. I can't wait to go back!
We got a late start this morning and went to the hotel lobby to grab some continental breakfast. I didn't know it then, but the muffin I ate would cause me all kinds of gastroenterological distress for the rest of the day. At this point however, I was happily munching away on a poppyseed muffin and a bowl of dry cheerios (I'm lactose intolerant, but only in the morning for some reason). The woman working at the front desk was barely able to peek her head over the front desk, and struck me as a little batty when I first saw her. This suspicion was confirmed by the ten minute stream of consciousness monologue that she delivered in response to another hotel patron asking where he could find a good garage in town. It was a meandering tale that began promisingly with the statement that most garages would be closed today, but then went on to a discussion of roadworthy tires, pneumatic lifts and the lives of the local garageman. Strangely undeterred by this monlogue, the man asked a second question. I would have stopped after the first personally, but I guess maybe he was still trying to figure out if there was an answer somewhere in the first stream of consciousness. The second answer, about how good the cell phone coverage was north of town, was mercifully only half as long but had even less content. I think her answer boiled down to: "it depends on what kind of phone you have". Chloe and I were smirking at eachother and doing our best not to break out laughing during the entire episode.
From the hotel, we set off to the Buttermilk boulders and warmed up on the mantley V2 on the solid grain boulder, then the Prow and birthday direct. However, I wasn't able to do birthday direct because of general weakness and my shoulder not cooperating. From the birthday boulders, we headed up to "The loaf" and ground away our skin on "Dough Boy", which was excellent. The top out is pretty scary however, and my hands got so sweaty I had chloe throw our chalkpot up to me. From the loaf, we walked down to the ranger rock and got spanked on the v3 and v4 (almost sent the latter) and then ate lunch on top of the loaf while we watched some famous climbers warm up on the V3, 4 and 5.
We decided that our skin wouldn't last much longer on the rough granite, so we headed back down to the volcanic tablelands and found a nook in the east rim of the canyon that I hadn't been to before. I did "Sacre Coeur", a few problems in the hall of mirrors,
and "Baroque". Chloe also got baroque (before me!!! arrrrgh) and we both floundered on the thin face problem at the end of the hall of mirrors.
We moved down to try Mr Happy but got spanked.
After a quick look around from the canyon rim
we headed down to Black Magic -- a tall problem which I did first try:
and then onto Azeed , and then Weekender. Weekender was an even bigger adventure than Black Magic. The moves are pretty easy, but all of a sudden you find yourself high off the deck on somewhat suspect overhanging rock. Chloe wasn't happy that I topped this one out, and I think it marks the end of highballing for a while.
We were the last ones down from the Happy boulders and watched the last remnants of light fade over the Sierra
and then grabbed pizza at The upper crust which in combination with a mammoth pale ale, was the perfect end to our day.
After checking the weather forecast, and ensuring that there was no snow in the forecast (in order to avoid a Road trip like this) , we headed out on I80 for the eastern Sierra. The skies were blue and the air was quite cold, and the drive down 395 was beautiful, as usual. We stopped near mammoth to try out my Ozone Frenzy kite and snowkiting in general for the first time. There wasn't very much wind to play with, but after a lot of effort by Chloe, we managed to get the kite up in the air and I trudged about a foot under the power of the wind. The rest of the time was spent on my ass or knees.
It was really frustrating to see the miles and miles of perfect snowkiting terrain -- treeless rolling hills as far as the eye could see -- with not a patch of snow on them. Oh well. there wasn't very much wind anyway.
From Mammoth, we headed down to Bishop and the Happy boulders, where we climbed a few things on the Savannah boulder, and got shut down on some west rim pocket problems. We headed to the hotel around twenty minutes after the sun went behind the Sierra and it started getting cold. We had dinner at our favorite mexican place in town, headed back to the hotel and fell asleep early.
looks like that article about using monkey training techniques on your husband is back at the top of the NYtimes most emailed list.
My father is Japanese, from a prominent merchant family in Aomori. His father came from a Samurai family in a period in Japanese history when the status of Samurai had faded, and had married into my dad's mothers family and took her name. My dad, much to my frustration has held the values of the merchant class in higher esteem than those of the warrior class. As a result, he tended to downplay the fact that half of his genetics were of the decapitating/Toshiro Mifune type. Anyone who spends enough time with him knows where his brains wiring really comes from though. As a youngster, especially in the ninja-obsessed eighties, I would have been much happier to be able to tell my friends that I came from a Samurai family of course, but it was hard to get my dad to play along. I think for the most part his father also downplayed it in favor of integrating into his new family and moving on. Also, although my grandfather came from a Samurai family, he personally was never a Samurai. Indeed, before marrying my grandmother, he had been a servant in my grandmothers household from a fairly young age. As a result, my dad didn't hear very much in the way of Samurai stories, but he would from time to time see "Toshiro" boiling to the surface.
After watching Hara Kiri together a few nights ago, he remembered one of those stories. In the movie, a young samurai sells his blades and replaces them with bamboo: an unthinkable offense. The blade was the soul of the samurai, so selling it was well... not looked upon favorably. Anyway, when my dad was a kid, he and his brother would go to samurai movies and would sometimes re-enact scenes from the movie. One day, after watching one of these movies, they returned home and started play fighting in the guest room: my dad with a ruler, and my uncle with a *real sword*. You'll be surprised to hear that things didn't go as planned; my uncle lost control of thekatana and chopped a deep gash into the arch of his foot, which immediately erupted into a fountain of blood. The blood started spraying over the tatami, and my terrified dad ran to get his father. This is where things got even worse. My grandfather, upon seeing what had happened, started beating my uncle, yelling at him for unsheathing a sword in the house. My uncle rolled away from the assault of my grandfather, spraying blood like a garden hose that has slipped out of your hands. My dad was horrified of course, not just because his brother was losing blood AND getting punished by his dad, but because he saw a side of his father that he rarely if ever saw.
As I mentioned, despite his protestations, I can clearly see that in him as well, although I'm sure to a much lesser extent. No comment on whether any of that made it into my personality.
Chloe and I have been getting caught up with 24 (the TV series). I only
really liked the first season, and even that one was so full of
ludicrous situations, gratuitous interpersonal problems, nonsense
"computer speak" and inexplicably dumb behavior that my fast forward
button got a lot of action. But hey, its no worse than most Hollywood
movies, and it's on TV/Netflix. The season that we are watching right now (Season 4), however seems to be a departure from the already pretty pro-government-propaganda heavy earlier seasons. Season 4 has the Counter Terrorism Unit confronted by the by now usual "quandaries" of how much force to use when extracting information from witnesses. After the second questioning, most of the dramatic tension is lost though, because everyone always ends up getting injected,tazered or brutalized anyway. It always made me vaguely uncomfortable that the storyline frequently makes you *want* CTU to use any means necessary. Those moments weren't very frequent in older episodes, and more disturbingly, this season introduced the
remarkable subplot in which the terrorist, who has run out of options,
calls "Amnesty Worldwide" who dispatch a sleazy BMW driving lawyer toCTU
who prevents the use of torture to interrogate of the suspect. This
causes valuable time to be lost in the pursuit of the crazy nuclear
terrorist. Hmmm.
Today was sadly our last day on Maui. We had an 11:30 flight and a week of accumulated things to clean up in the hotel room, so we got an early start. After unscrewing the fins from our board and rolling up the kites, we packed and then repacked all the other junk. After stopping at Safeway and the gas station, we returned the rental car and were sucked backed to reality by the typically efficient airport staff. After waiting in line and finally getting to the head of the line, the counter lady informed us that we needed to go back to the agricultural x-ray scanner, and then come back to the end of the line. Of course, there were no signs anywhere, and everyone else had to do the same thing! ATA had overbooked on this flight (as had been the case for our other flight), so they were offering $300 vouchers for volunteers, which we signed up for. It still meant checking in and going to the gate, however. Along the way, the brilliant TSA people refused to hand check my film, and we ran into *another* x-ray machine, this time an outgoing agricultural check... which meant that Chloe and I had to eat most of the apple-bananas and ice cream" bananas we had bought yesterday at the swap meet. I felt slightly ill after eating three bananas. We pressed on, not knowing whether we wanted another night on Maui and free ticket vouchers, or to go back home. In the end, because of a clerical snafu on the part of ATA, we got onto the originally scheduled flight.
This was the first time we had used a package deal (hotel+flight+car) and I think I would probably do it again, especially since seasoned hawaiigoers tell me that the flight+hotel can sometimes be cheaper than just the flight!
As we took off westward, we looked down and saw the wakes of kiteboarders on kite and canoe beach below. Dave was probably down there, but I couldn't pick out his kite.
We had read about the Maui swap meet in our lonely planet guide so we headed out around 7:45 to go check it out and meet up with Sandy. Although a lot of the things on sale were the typical made-in-china-commodity-vacation-items, there were some nice shirts there, some beautiful but expensive hand made wood bowls, and a huge selection of organic fruit and nuts.
There was also an excellent food stand where we bought teriyaki chicken/ garlic noodle bowls and bento for later on in the day. We also picked up a book for the plane (Moneyball by Michael lewis for $6), some cool fish-shaped drawer handles,
some organic macadamia nuts and bananas. Chloe had by this time become obsessed by a variety of banana known as an "apple-banana" which has hints if apple in it. However, it seems like you need to find them when they are quite ripe, or they just taste like somewhat bitter normal bananas. There were several stands at the swap meet with ripe apple bananas, as well as another varierty which we hadn't seen before called an "ice cream banana" which had notes of vanilla and just the slightest wispy hint of banana (I'm practicing for a new career writing tasting notes for esoteric banana varietals). We ran into Sandy, who was buying t-shirts and steadily moving down and crossing names off her gift list.
From the swap meet, we headed out to Kite Beach again, where the wind was light and I rigged my 12 meter switchblade. It was fine in the zone near the beach ("the inside"), but within ten minutes I was way overpowered on the outside and came back in to rig chloe's 8 meter GK sonic. With the sonic and my new (used) underground FLX I had one of my best kiting days ever, in two one hour sessions.
I got a little air (mostly off of waves, but some on turns near shore), stayed upwind effortlessly, and more importantly managed to ride some waves in. It seems to take very careful control of your speed, but the sensation is pretty amazing. At some point I'm going to have to buy a directional surfboard style board. The problems that I had riding the waves were that for the big ones the wave would push me forward, slacken my lines and occasioanlly dump the kite... and I would all of a sudden be in the midst of a set of shoulder height waves and whitewash and get a pounding. Anyway, it was bliss (the riding, not the washing machine of the whitewash!), which was only slightly spoiled by my getting too greedy later on in the day and trying to launch in light winds. This led to getting dragged alon the beach, dumping chloes kite into a huge bush (sorry Chloe!!) and getting heckled by an overweight local who doesn't even seem to kiteboard. Chloe took a short lesson with a mini-kite on short lines and felt a lot better by the end. Dave had previously gotten his 11 m Yarga re-fitted with a fifth line bar, and had gone out on the water but was a little too lit on his 11 (most people were on 9 m kites) and ended up down the beach with tangled lines. Here he is walking back up the beach:
I could feel his pain after having my kite fall out of the sky on my last session near shore and having to detangle a huge birds nest of lines earlier.
When the wind was dead near shore and after a few more attempts to launch, we called it a day and headed back to Kihei to clean up. Dave and Sandy had invited us over to share some teriyaki ribs that they were grilling, so we headed over there after washing as much of the by now usual waterproof sunscreen/sand mixture off as we could. The ribs were great but we were sad to say goodbye to Dave, Sandy and Dylan. Hopefully they will visit us out in CA.
We decided to drive around west Maui today, heading up through Wailuku and the small road that takes you through Kahakuloa to Honokohau.
Along the way we passed through some stunning scenery and I took a few film shots which will hopefully turn out okay. We stopped at the famous "Julia's banana bread" -- a wooden cabana perched over terraced Taro fields, bought some coconut candy and banana bread, and continued north.
Someone had told us that today would be the day for big waves, so we hiked down the cliffs to watch the sets roll in and crash onto the rocks below.
As soon as the road becomes two lanes again, the drive becomes pretty uninteresting. The northwest of the island had been turned into a southern california in the middle of the Pacific, complete with suburban condo sprawl and acres of gold courses impinging into the forest. Things seem to get interesting again as you get to Lahaina, which although touristy has some lovely old streets and a huge Banyan tree (the biggest in the US supposedly) in a square right on the ocean.
From Lahaina, we headed right for Kite beach again, but shortly after arriving there exploded one of the struts on chloes kite, so after some curmudgeonry on my part we headed back to the hotel and decided to take a last walk out to out beloved "Secret Beach" off the Hoapili trail near La Perouse bay. It was already 3:20 by the time we got to the trail head, so we walked quickly over the crunchy lava and got to the beach in 40 minutes. In contrast to last time, when it felt like we were in Death Valley, a huge storm cloud had moved over us and drenched us in a warm rain this time. On a whim, I decided to try to grab a coconut from the coconut tree near the beach (it really IS an oasis!), which took a fair bit of twisting and nudging to get loose. We had tried throwing rocks at it, but after seeing how well connected they are to the tree, I think I can say the would have been there for a few weeks throwin little chincks of lava at it with no progress. Anyway, I got the coconut down, which we sat on an old coral head on the beach and whacked with a lava chunk until a section of the husk had been removed, and then used a small pointy lava rock to break a drinking hole in the innner shell.
The coconut milk was excellent, as was the white rind.
What more could you ask for -- coconuts on a secluded beach in 80 degree weather in the middle of winter. After swimming for a while, I took some photos (many of which with the #$%# lenscap on)
and we headed back along the hoapili trail.
Later that night, we ate at "Da Kitchen" and Chloe dropped off the kite to be repaired by a local named Karen.
