Happy 2012 everybody!

On this, the near eve of our nation's independence, I would like to wish my readers* a happy new year. Hip hip! Let's all take a minute to toast to posting more in 2012 than in 2011. And really, despite the late start, it isn't a huge number to beat.

Having read through my old posts this morning, I realized that I never had all that much to write about, so I should probably stop worrying about that part. Plus I do have at least some stuff to write about. Stay tuned... And happy Independence/New Year's/Martin Luther King Day!

* there's gotta be like 2 of you left, right?

Jet Setting

Tomorrow night, I leave for what will be the start of my 7th round trip to the East Coast this year.

Holy. Crap.

This was for 3 weddings, 2 bridal showers, 1 funeral, and finally, Christmas. And I'm not even counting Kenya in that because that was technically crossing the Atlantic, and was tacked onto the beginning of one of the wedding trips, so there were no extra continental crossings there. Unless you count Africa, which I probably should, but 8 trips to the East Coast (of two different continents) is just too overwhelming. Anyway. It's been a busy year.

To say that I am travel-weary would be an understatement. I will have spent nearly 10 weeks in not-my-bed over the course of the year. And over 50 hours on airplanes. I guess that dude played by George Clooney in that movie from a year ago would scoff at such statistics, but right now it feels like a lot. And it definitely feels like it should have earned me more frequent flyer miles than it did—I still don't have enough for another trip back East, after all of that.

And yet, somehow, in the middle of all of this, I feel like I'm finally growing some roots in the damp clay soils of California. There are finally things that I will be sad to miss happening in the Bay Area this weekend.

And there are just as many people back East who I am so, so excited to see again. I continue to call it home. I just have many homes now, painfully far away from each other. But, on the bright side, I'm always excited to go back to every one of them.

I can't, I have roller derby.

So a week after getting married, I went over to Oakland, put on some roller skates

[Interlude: holy cow, I just saw a blimp! What crazy thing is my job doing today that there is a blimp over it?]

Anyway... I strapped on some roller skates—the kind you skated in when you were a kid, with 4 wheels in a square, but these didn't have Barbie on them—and tried out for the B.ay A.rea D.erby Girls flat-track roller derby league.

Yes, this is a thing that exists. Across the country, women (and men) are spreading plastic surfaces out in warehouses and other cheaply-rentable places, taping off an oval track, and skating around and around and hitting each other. It's an actual sport with actual rules. There's some showmanship, but nothing is staged. Unless you go to that one 'no-rules' banked track league in northern New Jersey, which is more like pro wrestling.

Anyhoo, I made tryouts!

What followed was three months of probation, where I went to as many practices as possible, trying to get drafted onto a team. I learned skating, hitting, strategy... A little bit of everything. Probably the most fun were the once-a-week scrimmages that gave me more game experience over those three months than I saw in two years of varsity college hockey (scrimmage time included).

To me, derby is all the awesome of varsity sports, minus all of the drama of high school and college, with some extra showmanship thrown in. What could possibly be more fun for an ex-hockey player/ex-dancer?

I quickly formed an addiction and am already wondering where I'll get my fix when I go home for the holidays, where the local leagues aren't practicing between Christmas and New Year's (Slackers! I'm looking at you, Gotham!) Well, not to worry (unless you're my husband or someone else who wants to see me at all in the new year), the new season starts on January 15th!

The Air Up There

Near Lenana Peak, Mt Kenya, July 2011

To be just a little kick-ass on our honeymoon, and earn all the lazing around on the beach we planned on doing later, A and I decided to start off the trip by hiking up all 4,985 meters (16,355 ft) of Mt. Kenya¹. And because we're stubborn like that, we, unlike every other white person we saw on the mountain, decided to actually carry our own packs. We felt pretty badass about that part, at least after we realized how few people do it.

The trip started by the side of the road outside of Chogoria, where the bus from Nairobi had dropped us off. Motorcycle taxi drivers rushed over, hoping to take us into town, but we opted to be met by our guide in a car². Still a little dazed from having landed in Nairobi at 1:30 that morning, I followed A's lead into a local hotel (food joint) where we had the typical upcountry meal: ugali, a corn paste made into a fairly solid chunk; some sort of cooked meat; and sukuma wiki, or sauteed collard greens.

After stocking up on some vegetables for dinner that night, we got in the 4-wheel drive to get up to the park gate. The driver was clearly experienced, and expertly got us through many muddy ditches, even helping out another stuck car along the way. We reached the park gate, where we would stay in a banda (bare-bones hut) that night, by mid afternoon.

View of the mountain from Meru Mt Kenya Lodge, at the trailhead.

And then things started to get interesting. We quickly realized that we'd forgotten a number of items we'd probably need for the trip, like enough cash to pay the park fees, the fuel tank for our camping stove, and warm gloves. But our guide saved the day on all accounts, and we managed to beg and borrow our way into at least the bare necessities for the trek.

We awoke on day 1 of the trip at about 3,000 meters, after a night broken up only by the sound of water buffalo horns scraping against the walls of the banda. After a bit of breakfast, we packed up and started what would be a 17k day. We headed up a red dirt path through the lush green fields, filled up on filtered stream water, and enjoyed the sun. Slowly, the lush greenery gave way to rockier, dustier terrain. The trees dwindled and then disappeared altogether, replaced by Giant Groundel, which basically looks like an alpine palm tree.

The tent, a giant groundsel, the outhouse, and me.

After a long day, we finally made it to Mintos Campsite, where our guide had a hut but we had to pitch a tent. We were on a slight hill, near a few tarns (alpine lakes fed by glaciers), and 4200 meters into the sky. Breathing was becoming difficult, but it was ok as long as you took it slow. Of course, when I did small things like go over to the tarns to pump water or jump out of the tent in the middle of the night to pee, I forgot all this, and would take a good couple minutes on my return to catch my breath again.

The next day, we awoke to a frozen tent. We'd been warm enough, but the condensation from our breath on the rain fly had become sheets of ice. We had a short day ahead, so we let the tent thaw and dry while we leisurely cooked up some oatmeal. The Austrians camping next to us, who, like most of the other Europeans we saw, had not only porters but a chef, had pancakes and hot chocolate. I'm not sure I'd feel like I was camping if I had pancakes for breakfast.

Eventually, the tent thawed—or we gave up on it, I can't quite remember—and we packed up and made our way onward and upward. We scrapped our back-up plan of hiking to another mid-mountain hut³ in favor of our original plan of sleeping at the hut just next to Lenanas Peak, and up we went. After some very steep (and therefore very slow) climbing, we reached the snow line. Snow! On the Equator! SNOW! Ok, yeah, so snow line. Moving on.

By this point, I'd learned to count my steps per breath. On the steepest parts, I was down to one. Step-inhale-exhale. Step-inhale-exhale. Thinking so consciously about it helped make it bearable, and pass the time. It felt downright leisurely when we got to shallower terrain and I could spread it to 2 breaths per 3 steps. We made it to Austrian Hut by lunch time. A was feeling a bit of a chest cold, so we made some Ramen for lunch and took a nap. In the afternoon, we made it over to check out the glacier. Glacier! On the Equator! GLACIER!

The next morning, we got up at 4:30⁴, bundled up as best we could, and climbed the icy rocks to Lananas Peak. There was no air. It was frigid. And we got there early, meaning we had to sit around waiting in the frigid vacuum for the sun to come up. What's interesting, though, at that altitude, is that my body had so little oxygen that it had to concentrate all of its blood in the muscles I was using to get up the mountain, so my hands and feet went numb on the way up; however, once we were up and I was resting, my body had the chance to rush warm blood back into my extremities and I started to warm up a bit. Usually isn't it the moving around that warms you up? Anyway, we managed to get one shot of ourselves at the top of the mountain, in the dark, before the camera froze.

You'll just have to trust me that those blurry smudges are us at the top of a mountain.

We started our descent soon after the sun came up, as it was still freezing. We collected our packs at Austrian Hut and went down the other side of the mountain. The hike down began with a steep descent down a hillside of frozen fine gravel. It was soft enough that it felt like descending through sand, almost. We finally reached the valley and made our way over to MacKinder's Hut in time for breakfast (seriously, it was 9am and we were already halfway back down the mountain). Meanwhile, some rock hyraxes tried to have their own breakfast, courtesy of our backpacks. I'd have been more annoyed if they hadn't been just so darn cute!

After breakfast, we walked. And walked and walked. We went back up for some reason (seriously?), climbed around some rocks, and then hit... The Vertical Bog. It was more like a diagonal marsh, but who's counting? I proceeded downward with "The Neverending Story" playing in my head the whole way⁵. We eventually made it through (turns out an hour and a half of slogging down a marsh gets old, even with an awesome soundtrack), and were back under the tree line. More red dirt paths, then 9k of road later, we passed some herd animals and were at the gate!

Tired, but accomplished, we ate meat with our hands again and passed out by 9pm.

<sub>1: Actually Mt. Kenya is 5,199 meters (17,057 ft) at its tallest point. But the two tallest peaks require hella mountaineering gear and experience, so we, like most people, hiked up the third-tallest peak armed only with our boots and hiking poles.

2: Had we known the guide was just going to hire a taxi to come pick us up, we'd have gone for the motorcycles. I guess I'll just have to wait for my next trip to Kenya to enjoy that particular adventure.

3: What with our lack of preparedness, we'd planned to go to a lower hut on the second night, where it would be warmer. This would have involved waking up at 2am the following day to hike up to the peak in time for sunrise, which for some reason is what everyone does. Looking back, it was certainly majestic to watch the sun rise from the top, but it would have been plenty impressive to see the mid-morning view.

4: WAY better than 2am (see previous footnote).

5: ARTAX!</sub>

I've been linked!

Well, doyle went and linked my blog, so I guess I'd better actually post something.

We moved! We live in the Mission in San Francisco now, where there are not enough back yards for us to have one, alas. But there are more coffee shops and taquerias than we know what to do with, so I guess it's a trade-off =D

So in addition to nobody's-watching-so-I-can-look-like-a-crazy-person dance parties in my living room, I've also been doing some serious ass-kicking at the gym. Last fall I started Crossfit, which basically uses gymnastics and weightlifting moves to train for the zombie apocalypse. We run around and jump on boxes and do pull-ups¹ and push-ups and handstands and throw heavy weights around.

I guess the thing I really like about it is that it reminds me of playing college sports, but without the sexism. Back in college, despite being on a women's team, there were the subtle hints that we weren't as good as the boys (they ate at steakhouses on road trips while we had Denny's; they never passed to us in off-season pick-up games...). At Crossfit, the coaches expect everyone to go hard, we all encourage each other, and nobody's threatened by a woman who can bench press her bodyweight (unless they're competing against each other, of course).

And at the end of the day, I feel like I can kick a little more ass than I could yesterday. I walk a little taller. The soreness in my abs and legs reminds me of how hard I'm working.

They're doing a massive worldwide online competition now, and I threw my hat in. So far, not a week has gone by where I wasn't at least a little lacking in a skill. I made it through the last round by the skin of my teeth, as 20% of the competitors dropped out. But it's pushed me to improve on my skills--double unders, clean and jerk, kipping pull-ups--more than I would have otherwise. And by next year's competition I'll see just how much better I can do.

^{1. Erm... some of us try to do pull-ups. But I'm getting really close! With kipping at least.}

Dance Party!

Work has been crazy this week.* I haven't made it to the gym at all, and have instead been spending 12-hour days at the office trying to get shit done. I did accomplish much shit-doing, but I also managed to start going a bit stir crazy. And so, when I got home tonight, I pumped up my guilty-pleasure-pop mix on Grooveshark and jammed out in the (YELLOW) living room.**

At first I was all careful like I was in dance class, doing very balletic (but still energetic!) moves and trying my very rusty hand at on-the-spot choreography. And then something very odd indeed happened. I stopped caring about being good. Rather, I just shook and wiggled and bounced my way into endorphin-rush-induced frenzy.

At risk of sounding like a native, it was Hella fun. I recommend.

And now, back to work...


* In all fairness, this week is 2 days long because tomorrow we leave for our ski trip offsite. But in all fairness in the other direction, we all have a hard deadline tomorrow at 10am.

** Toxic was mysteriously missing. Luckily there's enough Lady Gaga to make up for the MIA Britney.

The Damp Season

We're renaming the seasons in California. Not as in 'another referendum that will probably cost more than voters are willing to pay for and we'll go deeper into debt' renaming the seasons, just A and I have decided that the spring-summer-winter-fall quad-chotomy is imprecise in describing what the climate does here. It's a desert that gets wet in the darker months, or something like that. We only have two seasons. In April, it stops raining and the Sun shines brighter, becoming oppressively bright and dry by July/August or so. Then around October or November, the rain comes back, and the mild weather somehow chills you to the bone.

And so, I present, The Bright Season and The Damp Season.

Today marked the beginning of the damp season, with the first real rainy day since June (yeah, last damp season stuck around way too long). The tomatoes were probably the only thing really happy about it. The leaves are falling off the trees, despite not having to worry about snow coming and callously ripping them off or anything. By December, it will be gray and dark, the deciduous trees will look dead, leafless in the middle of fields of green, healthy grass.

There is still, as of today at least, that quite autumnal feeling that things are getting darker and cooler and we're working our way toward the winter solstice. I finally find myself in the mood to wear sweaters and scarves and hoodies with thumb holes. Actually, I had to wear hoodies all summer too, as evenings are always long-sleeve weather. But now they feel extra cozy. And I can put on introspective music like Arcade Fire and curl up inside without feeling like I should be out playing in the sun. Squashes and pomegranates and apples fill the shelves of the organic section of the supermarket, with the ever-enticing "California" label on them, indicating some amount of locality to my produce.

And the holidays, with a much-anticipated trip back East, wade ever closer. Despite the chill-you-to-the-bone 50°F, the Boston winter will still be a kick in the pants. But I'll be happy in my winter coat and my parents' justifiably heated house (we can never quite convince ourselves that it's cold enough outside to put on the heat here) and the candles and twinkles and other trappings of keeping ourselves happy despite the 10 or fewer hours of daylight.

And time hurries on.

These Are Not the Goats You Are Looking For: Henleyville Race Report

Editor's note: I'm going to use a bunch of terms that none of you know. As such, there is a glossary at the bottom of the post.

So I did my first road bicycle race today. 3 18-mile laps through flat, flat, flaaaat Central Valley California. But really I should start this story earlier, like last Friday (cue Fight Club-style cut-back to the real start of the story).

One of my fellow SF2G'ers is also a racer on a fancy team that wears lots of blue polka dots. She's way fast and pretty obsessed with racing. Also, her team is recruiting. (How could they possibly need to do this when they have the best-looking kits in the area? No I'm serious, they're rad.) Her latest scheme in getting me to join was to introduce me to a teammate who lives in the East Bay and likes to ride around with people. So on Saturday we had a blind riding-buddy date (awww.)

And then in the emails we were exchanging to plan this date, she mentions that this race coming up would be a great one to try as a first race, and oh by the way she could give me a ride. Also it's flat. Ok, I was in.

After doing our pre-ride on Saturday, I rushed home, showered, packed some stuff, went back out to run errands, and then finally made it uuuup the hill to her house to meet her and the other woman to drive out to the Corning, CA Econo-tel so that we could be in Henleyville at ass-crack-of-morning AM Sunday.

After some sandwiches in the only non-McDonald's place in the "town," we called it a night at 9pm. Woooo Saturday night!

Ok, so. Bright and early. Or rather, so early it wasn't even bright, we got up, packed our stuff back onto the car, and headed to Starbucks. Some of Corning's Finest were having their morning coffee there as well and asked if there was some bike race because they'd been seeing spandex all morning. Us: "Yes, the Henleyville road race." Police: "Henleyville isn't even a town." Ummmm.... We passed many olive and almond trees. And goats! One of the women in the car commented that we shouldn't get distracted by the goats--women's races tend to slow down to look at the goats. These goats were close to the start/finish line; an especially bad place to slow down.

Flash forward to the race. I had my awesome Battle 4 Brooklyn jersey on (up yours team kits!) and was in a group of about 15 total Cat 4 women. "Stay at the front; stay on a wheel," everyone had told me. And "don't pull!"

So I did! For the first 15 miles or so, I stayed 2-3 riders back, close enough to the front that I was with the more consistent riders, but far enough back I was able to avoid pulling. We went up the "hill" and back down; handled all the turns just fine; things were hunky-dory.

And boring. OMG, riding along a mostly flat 18-mile loop, staring at the ass of some logo-addled bike shorts, is pretty friggin boring. This part of the race is just to work your legs a bit so that by the third lap they can separate the men from the boys. But the first lap is easy for everyone, especially averaging 18mph, especially when the view is of the same rider for 5 miles.

So, I made things interesting. For me at least. I was having trouble staying in the pack, kept getting bumped off to the side. And I'd seen the goats! Clearly the first lap was near over. So I sped up and got in front of everyone. It wasn't an attack, per se, as I wasn't really going any faster, but I figured that even if I wasn't supposed to pull, it was good etiquette and I might as well step up for a bit.

We turned, and turned again, and I was still in front. The start/finish line (end of the first of three laps) was not approaching. Uh-oh, those were not the goats I was looking for. I fiiiinally made it back into the pack right around when we passed the goats I was looking for. The women I knew gave me some "good job!"s for pulling, but I knew that loosely translated to "you're gonna be done soon, n00b." But I was ok with that. My goal was to stay in it through the first lap, and--hey there goes the start/finish line! I'd made it! So I continued to stay in.

Then things took a turn. I ended up at the back. Everyone around and in front of me was squirrely. But I was still with the pack! I tried moving around, getting on wheels up ahead, but the gaps were tight and I was getting tired and less aggressive. And the feed hill was coming up--I had to get to the right lane to get a refill!

Uh-oh. On the way up the hill, toward the feed, the front started speeding up. I was stuck at the back, and also tired. Or just too slow. I got dropped. As I grabbed my shiny new (used... but hopefully cleaned) water bottle, the feeders yelled "You can still catch them!" I thought I just maybe could, as I had been descending faster than the group all day. I went fast, with nobody to draft off of. And they went faster. The group, and the two women ahead of me who'd started to fall back from the group, all continued to shrink until they were dots on the horizon. And then they were gone. I'd been dropped. I kept going hard, but there was no way.

And then, my savior! A fellow rider caught up to me and yelled "get on my wheel!" So I did (well, once she'd passed enough that I wouldn't have crashed into her). And she pulled me slower than I'd been going. This is actually still ok strategy, as it takes a lot less energy. I sat on the wheel for a while, and then went up for another pull. I kept pulling and pulling, until a van came along side me and yelled "There's another rider about 200m back, going the same pace as you!" So I had dropped her, oops. So I time trialed. I just rode, as fast as I knew I could keep up, until the finish. And this time I was done. No way I was time trialing another 18 miles with no hope of catching the group. Also I wasn't sure if I was supposed to stop, having been dropped. But then once I'd put the bike back by the car and went back to the start to watch the finishes, there went that other woman cruising on around a third time.

But I had completed my goal! I stayed in for a lap. I did get a "you pulled too hard and too long too early" from one of the women I'd met, but I knew that already. And it had made things more interesting for me. And now I've raced road.

Glossary
Cat: short for Category. 1 is the best, 4 is the... least best. To move to a better category ("cat up"), one must win some races and earn upgrade points.

Feed (hill): The feed is the area where you get to show how awesome it is to race bikes by littering and stealing! You throw your water bottle off to the side of the road somewhere, and then someone hands you a new one, full of water. The $35 has to pay for something I guess. They eventually find your water bottle on the side of the road and bring it back to you. Mine came back with a different color top, but I'm not gonna complain about that too much. The feed in this race was on a hill, aptly called the "feed hill." I'm betting that they're actually often on (up)hills so that speeds are slower.

Kit: the silly padded shorts and lycra jerseys worn by cyclists on teams. They have lots of logos on them and are very matchy.

On a wheel: The position in which you're behind another rider but close enough to be in their slipstream, taking advantage of full drafting action!

Pull: To lead the group. You do all the work while everyone else drafts off of you. Typically, everyone takes a few turns pulling, but as it was my first race and there was no way I was going to win anyway, I may as well have stayed in for as long as I could by avoiding pulling everyone else.

SF2G: Group of people, whom some would call insane, brought together by their love of meeting at 6:30am and riding 40+ miles to get to their jobs in Silicon Valley. Also enjoy drinking beer, but not usually during the ride.

Squirrelly: Mark of a n00b. When cycling in a group, and especially in a race, one is supposed to "hold their line," or continue in a straight line and not swerve, and ideally to hold about the same speed so that it is easy to draft behind them at close range. Being squirrelly is the opposite of that. It's not fun to ride next to and behind squirrelly riders.

Time trial: A race done solely by time. Starts are staggered and riders aren't allowed to draft. Bikes with crazy handlebars that you can rest your forearms on, and those super-aero helmets, are for time trials. Such things are not safe for road races, which are (ideally) ridden in groups.

AAToC

Not to be confused with the Amgen Tour of California—which just today rode from San Francisco to Santa Cruz—the A (me) and A (boyfriend) Tour of California took place this past weekend, and took us from San Francisco to Santa Cruz... and back!¹

So early Saturday morning, A and I packed a few clothes and tools, an extra tire, and two extra tubes into our panniers, grabbed our fancy phones and wallets, donned our spandex, merino, and other fancy technical fabrics, and set out on our first tour on our two-weeks-old (to us! it's an '89 Santana) tandem bike. As we don't have a drag brake yet, we packed light and did a credit card tour, meaning we ate out and slept at a B&B instead of packing camping equipment and food.

Braving unseasonably chilly air, lack of sleep, and a mild hangover from a fancy dinner and show the night before, our intrepid travelers had eggs and coffee and hopped on the BART, as there's no other way to get a bike across the bay. From there, they used their fancy phone to rethink their route, as the BART map showed that the Colma stop clearly let off way closer to the coast than the South San Francisco stop they'd planned to go to.

So, at Daly City, we exited the train, only to realize as the doors closed that we'd left one stop too early. Oh well, this was close enough. We started out on John Daly Boulevard² and rode up to Skyline Drive, then to Skyline Blvd (the smaller residential road paralleling Skyline Drive until it veers off down a hill toward the ocean). We made the usual snarky comments about the houses all looking the same. The scene was made even more surreal by the crazy fog. Hello, San Francisco suburbs.

After some more riding through random residentia, we arrived back on Rte 1.³ On our way back down the first big hill, the rear of the bike started feeling a bit wobbly. We pulled into a turnout and discovered that the rear tire had pretty much disintegrated, probably due to not having been changed since 1989. There are some great pictures of this, all on A's computer. So I took some pictures while A changed the tire, and we were off again toward the (hopefully) sunny beaches of Santa Cruz.

It was a bit of a slog. We still felt less than awesome from the previous night's wine, and the fog had yet to lift. At least getting back down to about sea level, the fog became clouds and no longer interfered with our view of the road 30 feet ahead of us, but it just wasn't quite the California Coastal ride we'd imagined. We stopped and had Clif bars. We stopped and had some more Clif bars. We realized we wouldn't make it to Santa Cruz in time for lunch. We had some more Clif bars, figured we'd have to make it to Davenport before we found any lunch places anyway, and continued.

And then, the sun came out! All was not lost. We redoubled our efforts, thus doubling our speed, and figured we'd be in Santa Cruz in no time. But we also figured we had time to stop at the barn advertising pies and coffee. How could we not? And once we were full of not only Clif bar but strawberry and rhubarb pastries and fresh coffee, and our way was full of sunlight and blue sky, we decided that we could make it to Santa Cruz before the next meal.

We pulled into Santa Cruz around 2. After a nostalgic tour of A's college memories, we stopped at a bar/coffee shop for a beer. As students studied all around us, we chatted with a dude passing by who at 65 had taken up the piano, and now, at 85, was wandering around listening to recordings of his music. I'd never have guessed before he told us. And who knows, maybe it was all made up.

After the well-earned beer, we headed over to the boardwalk to do something A had never done as a college student: ride the roller coaster! America's 6th-oldest coaster, at 85 years, it was as smooth as rides one-tenth its age (and smoother than that one at Six Flags New England, that if it's called the Mind Eraser like I think I remember it, must be so named for its jiggling-your-brain-cells-to-mush capabilities). Not all that big, even compared to Phoenix or Cyclone, but a good ride nonetheless.

Finally, we went to A's favorite old taqueria and had the requisite Super Burritos. They were huge, and pretty damn hella.

Full to overflowing with burrito, we continued away from town and up toward campus. We could hear the drum circles in the distance as we toured the school that more closely resembles a woodsy summer camp than the brick-and-stone-and-one-main-quad New England schools I'm used to.

The sun had started making its way down toward setting as we began our final climb, which it turns out is a descent this ear in the OToC, but is nonetheless an intense hill. And as with any hill, when we reached the top (or at least our turnoff), we got to go back down.

From the back of the bike, the road was blocked by the pilot. It was like that scene in Star Wars with the hoverbikes in the woods. At least, until A pulled over. We could smell the brakes, and discovered the rims were hot to the touch.

A: We should probably stop a minute and let the rims cool do—
tire: psssssssssss

The tube was old anyway. Just as well we switch it out for a new one.

A: [changes tube and begins reinflating]
me: Do you hear that?
tire: pssssssssssss
us: shit.

Ok, we'll check for glass and put some electrical tape over the rim strip on the wheel. Maybe we melted the rim strip a bit.

A: [changes tube and begins reinflating]
me: [patches other tube]
tire: psssssssssss
us: shit.

Four patches and many curses later, we were out of light, tubes, and patience. We flagged down a passing van, owned by the wife of the co-inventor of some Specialized part, and big enough to fit the bike in (phew!) and got a ride to the B&B.

The two restaurants in town weren't all that exciting, so we went to the grocery store and stepped up to the deli counter.

us: Two 'treehugger' sandwiches please⁴ =D
counter lady: We're out of hummus, so I can't make you that.
us: Oh that's fine, just put on some mozzarella.
cl: Out of that too. You'll have to choose a meat sandwich.
us: Well what about some other cheese?
cl: You see, the hummus is supposed to take the place of the meat. Without that, the sandwich is no good.
us: What if we told you we ate pork for lunch?
cl: [satisfied that she wasn't about to help some vegetarians] Two pepper jack treehuggers, comin' right up!

And so our heroes settled down to a dinner of sandwiches and free B&B beer as they further investigated the tenaciously flatting wheel, eventually determining they needed to take it back to Santa Cruz to a bike shop in the morning. But that's a story for another day.

1. Ok, the other Tour of California is an 8-stage race, each day involving about 100 miles and 10,000 feet of climbing, and they do it way faster. But we had panniers and had to fix our own flats. But I'll get to that later.

2. Street? Avenue? You all live on the other side of the country and don't really care. It's a way to get to Skyline Drive.

3. As did the OToC, just this morning! (Other Tour of California)

4. The lunch burritos were so huge that despite the 2,000 feet of climbing we'd done since eating them, we still didn't want anything heavy for dinner.

Garden, round 2

So our initial garden has all but failed. All those little seedlings never became much more than the first pair of true leaves. We planted them, but most got eaten by slugs. The basils (the 4 that made it to the planting stage) refuse to grow and refuse to die.

Exception! The garlics, sent as a housewarming (gardenwarming?) gift by KPd, are doing fabulously. If you come visit, we can eat lots of garlic.

So anyway, we gave up and bought starter plants from OSH. Imagine it as something of a 30-times-the-cost head start. So now we have some baby lettuces, tomatoes, peppers, and pole beans. Oh, and a strawberry I got from work.

We've gotten more aggressive about slugs. There are eggshells and little mini-cups of beer all over the place. It looks like we didn't quite get the idea of compost and recycling. But something else must be eating everything too, and if they're not lured by beer and afraid of eggshells and coffee grounds, then we have no idea what to do.

The pole beans have already lost 3 of 5 new plants.

This at least is helping to cement our plans to move to SF when the lease is up. And if nothing else, we'll be swimming in garlic by harvest time.

Update!

We planted some plants!

This one holds garlic cloves and lettuce and spinach seeds:


Over here are some kales (if they haven't been completely eaten by snails by now), pole peas (poles to be installed later) and probably another clove or two of garlic.


In the back will be squash (one per 3 feet! We'll mix something else over there too), tomatoes and peppers, and probably some more garlic. In the front are more spinach and lettuce.


All the cardboard is a permaculture technique called 'lasagna gardening.' It's dirt (somewhat aerated, already in the garden), then compost, then cardboard, and finally mulch. The cardboard blocks the light so weeds don't invade. We had some tenacious weeds poke through our aging cardboard, so we uprooted them before planting. We kept one in a cup of water, just to see what happens. Then we made our own holes in the cardboard to plant our seeds and cloves and beans and seedlings. The garlics are already growing! So if nothing else, we'll at least have plenty of that this summer.

And here's a sunset, just for good measure:

The water is the SF bay. The Golden Gate bridge is off to the left, for reference. That's about a mile from our house.

Cottage

You've all been waiting for pictures of our new place, and I was finally home on a sunny day to take some!


Kitchen. Observe awesome 40s-era stove. It likes to set off the smoke detector.


Other side of the kitchen, featuring 50s-era ugly-in-an-awesome-way table and chairs.


Bathroom. Or at least the shower curtain part.


Storage closet. Check out all that storage action!


Living room.


Office, aka the other half of the living room.


Drilling air holes in the compost bin.

Somehow I forgot to get good ones of the yard. I guess you'll all just have to come visit and see it =D

California knows how to garden

So it turns out we pretty much kicked ass at finding a place and getting settled. We've already signed a lease, moved in, and furnished our cottage. It's this little in-law cottage next to the house the landlords live in. A far cry from show-up-on-trash-day, underpaid "supers" who don't actually know how to fix anything. An even farther cry from having to make seven phone calls to get the simplest thing fixed. The whole apartment hunt made me realize just how crazy NYC is when it comes to renting.

The cottage has a bedroom, kitchen, and living room, plus a pretty huge storage closet. The kitchen has this amazing 40's-era gas stove that is gorgeous. The living room will also be the study and Guest Room (hint hint). It already has a futon! We managed to take the U-Haul to a Good Will after moving our own stuff and got a whole bunch of great furniture. Even the kitchen table + chairs that looked way too brown in the store are way better now that they're not surrounded by all the other brown.

More importantly (and more new and shiny for anyone coming from NYC), we have a BACK YARD! This is what attracted us to the East Bay rather than the more familiar urban environment of the city.* We share the back yard with our landlords, but they are entirely amenable to us growing vegetables and chickens in it. It even has a hot tub. We've already taken advantage of the hot tub and probably will again when I finish this post. Seeing as it's always hot, we figure it's more efficient to jump in there and warm up than to turn on the heat in the cottage.

I haven't taken pictures yet, but I have the plan we made this afternoon for the garden:



We're not sure where the chickens will go yet, but this plan is only for half the yard anyway.

* 'the city' means San Francisco here. Weird!

Leavin' on a... train.

As you must already know (unless you're a robot here to post spam in my comments), my boyfriend and I recently moved to California. As you may not know, we took the train all the way from Boston (well, two trains). Following are some of the more memorable parts of the trip.

Getting carded
Along the first leg, we stopped in Albany so that the train coming from NYC could get tacked onto the back of our Boston-originating train. We decided to use the hour and a half or so to stretch our legs and find a sandwich. This, of course, began at the bar. The bartender, not recognizing us as one of his regulars, immediately carded us. Makes sense—college town (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute). The surprising part was when my 28-year-old boyfriend was asked for a second ID, to match his bearded self. As soon as we explained that we were in on the train with time to kill, the bartender lightened up considerably. Then he and his regular customer watched hunting shows. Rock on, upstate NY.

Getting proselytized
After changing trains in Chicago (featuring a 4-hour layover that afforded us the time to have brunch with friends and wander around the city) and getting settled in our sleeper room (oooh bunk beds), we checked out the lounge car. With comfy seats facing huge windows, this is the place to spend the trip. We'd also brought some cards and poker chips (well, rolls of coins) and booze hoping to make friends. The first person we meet is, of course, Creepy Christian Dude. We're not that into talking about Jesus, and CCD wasn't that into talking about anything else, but we managed to play an awkward game of cards for a couple hours as the sun set over the snowy midwestern flats.

Getting contact-high
Included in the price of our sleeper car ticket were three meals a day in the diner car. The food was, for the most part, way better than airplane food. They even had made-to-order steak on the menu. But the diner car booths were made for 4, so at each meal we made some new friends. There were the typical Berkeley rich liberals, the Southern Republican father and probably-gay-but-maybe-hasn't-admitted-it-to-himself son, the annoyingly douchey Concordians... And then there was another father-son pair. The father was a pot grower from North of SF; the son, as far as I could tell, was just a little embarrassed by his father. It took a while to put it together—for a while I just thought the father was batshit crazy—but as soon as he mentioned that the only way to do these train trips was to make yourself a giant pot brownie, it all made sense.

Getting bored
Nope, didn't happen. The scenery was gorgeous. Everything was timed so that we went through the mountains during the day. We had too many books, it turned out, because staring out the windows occupied a surprising number of hours.

Getting home
We arrived in Emeryville, California, after four days and three nights on the two trains. We retrieved our damp, collapsed checked baggage (grr) and fortunately fit all of them in one taxi to our interim apartment. And so now I live in The Golden State (wait, really, Wikipedia? That's the state's nickname? Seems kinda corny). But that's best left for another post.

Spam

I deleted a post. I didn't want to, but I couldn't find a way to get rid of the spam comments on it. I will fix this once I work for Google (if I remember)... and by fix, I mean file a bug so that somebody else fixes it, most likely.

Merry Christmas! I'll see you all in California, and post more from there I promise.

Day 28

I just realized that the yoga has made me far more in tune with my body over the past four weeks. This holds especially true for my diet. I feel completely different--and better--when I eat lettuce and fish before class (and I'm talking 3 or so hours before) than when I eat a mozzarella, tomato, and basil sandwich. More and more, my body craves lean proteins and leafy greens. I haven't reached the point of not wanting the simple carbs at all, but they don't satisfy me the way they used to.

I was also just noticing today that my back feels strong. Really strong. Solid. It's a pretty great feeling.

I'm not sure how much I'll do the yoga past day 30. Part of me imagines 3-4 times per week. It would be really good for me. But then another part keeps thinking about all the other things I want to do more--rock climbing, maybe some dancing, maybe even see if I can learn to enjoy running. I do hope to keep this new appreciation for healthy eating. I just wish salad greens weren't on their way out of season in this area.

Halfway! Also, climate change

This evening I attended my 16th class of 30, so I'm a bit more than halfway. Apparently it's normal that I'm sweating way more than I used to: my body is getting better at cooling itself off. I think today I also was still digesting lunch, creating more heat inside my body. I just wish it didn't make me slide around on the rug so much.

So there's been a lot of talk about the Global Warming/Global Cooling section of the Super Freakonomics. Most recently, Jon Stewart completely botched an interview with him. Thanks, bsom, for pointing this out first.

A summary: Super Freakonomics takes the fact of global warming--that the Earth is getting warmer. It doesn't question that this is due to human actions, like burning coal for power. But what the book does then is propose that rather than cutting carbon emissions, we could--and even should--just do things like make clouds to block the sun and thus cool down the earth. He then implies that this will get us over the hump until we figure out some other cool science-y way to fix the climate! Cool! (No pun intended.)

Levitt's first mistake is to jump to the most talked-about conclusion of the majority of climatologists: the world is getting warmer due to carbon output. He doesn't question this. But this focus on the single fact of global warming, with no regard for the other pieces of out of control carbon and methane emissions, is a wholly irresponsible way to approach the problem.

Imagine global warming as the Earth's fever in response to the disease of human industry digging up all of its stored carbon and spewing it back into the atmosphere. Now, if a person has a fever, two things are true: something is causing the fever (the fever does not cause itself), and the fever is probably not the entire problem.

In the case of the Earth, the warming atmosphere is not the only problem. The increased carbon levels are causing a whole host of problems. Scary, awful problems. For one, the ocean is absorbing some of this carbon from the atmosphere. This is causing the oceans to go acidic. Acidic oceans eat away at exo- and endo-skeletons of fish. Lobster shells will get softer, eventually becoming useless. The same will happen to tuna skeletons. With enough carbon in the oceans, we'll have nothing left but jellyfish. For another, once the atmospheric carbon levels reach a certain point (I think it's carbon, and not temperature), trees will start being carbon-positive instead of carbon-negative, and no longer be helpful.

So Levitt is looking at one specific problem, and essentially treating that one symptom. Going back to my metaphor, it's like having tuberculosis and treating it with cough syrup. It's not just Steven Levitt, and now Jon Stewart, who don't get it. Many, many people would love to—and many, many do—believe that technology will save us. Well, some technologies can help, but those include things like fluorescent lights and wind turbines that will help us reduce our emissions.

When it comes to the Earth, it's possible that we will have to turn to massive geo-engineering projects to cope. But we still need to cut down on the root problem—greenhouse gas emissions—if we're ever going to survive this with any semblance of the life we know now. And most people, and even more corporations (percentage-wise at least), won't do it unless forced.

Day 5-13

As Doyle pointed out, it's been a while since an update.

I just finished my lucky-number-13th class, and first back in the studio in NY where I go. Yesterday and the day before were up in Boston area studios, including one that my old yoga, and before that dance, teacher came to with me.

Last week I was weary. Just really worn out. But I think I've gotten over it, and yesterday's class was especially good. It was also with an especially experienced, respected teacher. And I was right in front so I got lots of helpful comments and corrections. After a really rough 6:30am class on Thursday, it was nice to have such a rewarding class on Saturday.

Day 2, 3, 4

So I've been doing fine with the yoga, but not with the blogging about it. No worries, y'all would be bored with daily "today I got a really deep camel" or whatever. The second class was a bit tougher, but part of that was mental because I knew I had swim class afterward. Day three was great--I thought I'd be tired, because my legs were feeling weary after two days in a row plus painting plus swimming, but then it was great. I balanced better than most days and felt really good. Yesterday, day 4, I both sweat way more than usual--there was literally a puddle on my mat; I was worried I would drown during the posture that involves putting your face flat down on the mat--and I also had to pee a lot. Could I have drunk too much water? Doubtful, but oh man it was hard work.

About to head off to Day 5. Already looking forward to eating dinner afterward =)

Day 1

First class! 9am this morning. I'm always a bit stiffer for the morning classes. Maybe that'll get better after 30 days in a row--probably majority morning classes no less. I'll see how the long-term goes as it becomes long. For now, I'm just getting used to planning my days around the classes, and vice versa.