An efficient 100 mile week

I rode 115 miles this week, mostly in three batches instead of evenly distributed across the whole week. 50 miles for the full tiburon loop, no ferry, and two 25 mile rides in the hills near Palo Alto. The one new ride for me was up Page Mill, where I should have planned in more time - I made it a few miles up into the hills before realizing that I had to turn around *right then* to catch the last bus back to SF. As it starts to get dark earlier this should be less of a problem as I will be less tempted to start a ride at 5, and will start riding at noon instead or something.

The third ride was just the portola valley loop on Friday afternoon, something I know I can do in 2.5 hours. I did the loop clockwise instead of counterclockwise and made significantly better time than before. I was able to comfortably get up to 33 mph on a downhill without freaking out, which was nice. At one point a Yukon pulls up alongside me, paces me for a while, then the passenger window rolls down and the guy asks for directions to the palo alto country club. :) he'd missed it at the last turn so I gave him directions. Otherwise three batches of riders passed me but I re-passed one on the uphill part of Sand Hill Road.

I had hoped to ride in marin today but my legs are still tired. I guess I'm supposed to pay attention to that. Maybe tomorrow

Was my last blog post really 1250 miles ago?

I guess it's been a while since I last posted. :) Between work and exercise, I havenn't have a lot of time for anything else. The weight-loss plan over the past few months has been basically "eat less beer/donuts/other-sugar and more vegetables, and ride my bike as much as possible", which is working pretty well, in the sense that I'm at least trading fat for muscle even if the scale isn't moving much.

My second-ever(*) long bike ride was in mid-May, for Bike to Work day: San Francisco to Mountain View. At that point my bike odometer had about 550 miles on it (got the bike in October, so that's ~70 miles per month or so, almost all commuting to the transit stop). To make a long story short, that was an incredibly tough 33 miles, where I didn't eat enough, didn't drink enough, got dehydrated, and my muscles were very unhappy with me 3 hours later when I got to the office; and this was my first real ride on the new clipless pedals, which it turned out had springs that were too tight, so my right knee was acting up all day afterwards.

(*) The first long ride, in the hills of Marin a month earlier, resulted in a crash at 35 mph in which I ended up in a ditch.

But it was really satisfying to have ridden that far, so I started doing more of it, mostly just with Andrew as it was clear I wasn't really fast enough to ride with other groups. We've explored lots of San Francisco, Marin County, and San Bruno. One of my favorite routes in Marin is Paradise Loop, which is about 40 miles with a little bit of hills. The bike odometer is now at 1250, which works out to about 60 miles per week since Bike To Work Day.

As I spent more time on the bike, what I realized is that I like riding up steep things better than riding back down them, and prefer both to riding in urban traffic with stoplights. Fortunately SF has no shortage of hills - the one I live on has blocks of >15% grade - so it was easy to just take the "short way" to wherever I was going instead of the longer, flatter way. So, a detour up Twin Peaks on the way from Noe Valley to Golden Gate Park, which is maybe a mile or so of 5% grade, with a great view at the top. And if you go out to Marin and ride around the headlands, the climb from the Golden Gate Bridge to Hawk Hill seems like a little less than 2 miles at 6% grade, with nice views the whole way up.

I've recently started exploring the area around Mountain View on my bike as well. Last Friday I rode up Old La Honda. Which is really why I'm blogging now, to brag about that. :) It's 3.3 miles averaging 7.2% grade (see Lucas's measurements, and it took me 43 minutes to get to the top, after which I needed a good long sit before riding back down. (I also learned a valuable lesson: Do not eat a clif bar immediately before starting the climb, or you will spend fifteen minutes in the middle of the ride wanting to throw up.) This is not a particularly fast time - several groups of color-coordinated bicyclists passed me, and according to the Western Wheelers classification my time is "group B", or one step above novice - but I want to emphasize that I am excited about having made it all the way to the top without throwing up at all.

Now that I have a little GPS gadget thingy I will try to blog more often with the routes I'm doing, assuming I can figure out how to upload its data.

This is Ella, who has recently discovered that petting is fun.

The sixth anniversary is... penguins?

So I'm at a 2/4 limit table at the Luxor, still a little steamed (and sleepy) from an early-morning tournament loss (who plays poker at 9 a.m.? Apparently I'm not the only one - hence the sleepy), when a giant penguin sneaks up behind me and goes "bap bap bap" (here you should imagine the penguin beak pecking at my shoulder). This is not a hallucination - Andrew has gotten me a life-size stuffed toy emperor penguin. Context: "life size" == "larger than the carry-on sizing bin for an airline" or "tall enough to see over a poker table". The penguin brought me good luck, though, and overall the poker play was profitable for both of us this time in Vegas. (We solved the "bigger than a carry-on" problem by sitting it on my lap in the plane, where it made an excellent pillow; it did take some explaining to get it through the security checkpoint.)

So now I have to think of something equally cool to get Andrew as an anniversary present. Suggestions from the peanut gallery are welcome, but it sounds like he wants another camera.

This was a fun trip to Vegas. We played poker in the Luxor, the Excalibur, and the Bellagio. We intended to play at the Rio and Mandalay, but they were only running no-limit at the time, so no go. Context switching from limit to no-limit is something I don't do quickly. All poker rooms we played in were nonsmoking (a welcome change from last time I was in town for gambling purposes) and had several tables running at once. All were near the casinos' sports books, so I watched an unusual amount of ESPN too. The Bellagio's poker room is very nice, but I'm not a big fan of the clientele it attracts - imagine the stereotypical young aggressive hoodie-wearing player who won't shut up about how stupid he thinks you are. Even if you're taking his money. That's just not fun. All the other card rooms seemed to have a nice mix of tourists, locals, and other assorted people who do not Take Seriously a game of low-limit poker.

We ate at Michael Mina's, which was seriously awesome. I didn't know beforehand that he was also the chef at Aqua, but the similarities are apparent. The tasting menu had this lobster pot pie thing, and tuna tartare, and the yummiest cod ever, and kobe-style beef with foie gras and lots of different sauces, and then loads of chocolate-themed desserts.. each dish seemed small, but I didn't need to eat for the whole next day because it was just that filling. I have also been instructed to try to replicate the chocolate chip cookies, which were quite something.

We saw Penn&Teller and the Beatles-themed Cirque du Soleil, which were both pretty cool. It's sort of hard to describe either one, though.

the kind of summer that involves gorillas hawaii two weddings idaho harry potter vegas

Wow, it's been a busy few months. I was gonna post, and then I was busy, and then I forgot, and then my friends started launching all of these new features, so I figured I have to post. So. Features! Woot! Add a poll to your blog.

In June I ran 7K in a gorilla suit for charity. OK, not exactly running the whole way, on account of the gorilla suit being freaking hot, but at least running some. There were a few hundred of us in Golden Gate Park, which was pretty cool. This convinced me that I was quite out of shape, so I've been running more since. I figured I was getting somewhere, and then I read in the paper about Haile Gebrselassie, who ran the New York half marathon in less than an hour (which is, like, 13 miles an hour, for a whole hour?) and I'm, like, happy when I sprint at 7 mph... I take solace in the idea that Mr. Gebrselassie probably can't code his way out of a paper bag.

Also in June we went to Bryan and Anishya's wedding in Hawaii. I'd never been to Hawaii, so it was really fun to go and do all the touristy things, including hanging out on Mount Haleakala. Hmm.. I see that this deck has no photos of the 35-pound tuna that Andrew caught. Well, there was a giant tuna, which he assures me put up a fight to confound three grown men. (Except, of course, for him.) We ate sashimi for quite some time afterwards.

After last year's "no boats" resolution, we decided to spend the fourth of July at a higher vantage point, so we rode up Twin Peaks to watch the fireworks. (This is the part where I am obligated to tell you that Andrew's bike weighs three times as much as mine, and thus it was a manly amount of work for him.) It was a little fogged in but the fireworks in Marin County went over the fog line so it was a pretty cool show.

Autumn and Steven also got married in July, in a very nice ceremony with tons of people we sort of knew from school. (I counted five generations of CS1 head TAs in attendance, including me.) I knew it was the right group when I walked up and heard a vibrant discussion of whether the chairs arranged on the deck had the right symmetry, with several measuring tapes proved out to pull it.

This year also marked my 10-year high school reunion, so we went back to Idaho for the celebration. It was pretty fun, all things considered. We went hiking in the Tetons with my parents and Amy, which was cool (photos to come). My mom held up pretty well despite the challenging route up the gravelly bits of the mountain. Times have sure changed in the years I've been gone: I discovered that Idaho Falls now has two of my three essential pillars of civilization: high speed internet and sushi(The third pillar is same-day delivery of the New York Times.) The sushi was quite enjoyable and well-presented. And before you think, "how am I going to get my non-sushi-eating relatives to go to the sushi restaurant?", know that this restaurant is also a bar and grill, with actual fully-cooked fishies. I got to see lots of old friends, and say "look! I have a cool job, live in a fun city and have no children!". Andrew politely made [the same tidbit of] conversation throughout the evening and was quite a gentleman. Oh, plus, the Simpsons movie was pretty awesome. Not as awesome as the final Harry Potter book, which I read while he went out hiking with the guys the weekend before we went to Idaho (one of whom (no names) brought his copy of the Harry Potter book with them hiking (err.. I should say my copy - due to impatience with the US Postal Service, I stuck around to wait for his late copy so he could go to the bookstore before the hike to purchase the copy as I had planned to do.)).

This we're going to Vegas to celebrate our six-year anniversary. Six years of anything is a long time, compared to my life span. I think that's the longest I've done anything. (The job is coming up on six years in a month or so.) Some of my high school friends have been married for more than 10 years now, so I guess it's not that long. Well, you find a good thing and stick to it.

In theory there should be lots of summer photos up on the flickr page, but Andrew has taken a teaching job at a charter school (starting... now... ok, 7 a.m. tomorrow) so there is less time to postprocess and post the photos. But they will be up eventually.

koninginnedag, hippie music festivals, and gorillas

The last month or so has been pretty busy. We took a spontaneous five-day trip to Amsterdam for Queensday, carrying only one full luggage case of photographic equipment with us. Which was good, because Amsterdam is crowded around Queensday. You can tell the tourists from the locals, because the tourists are wearing gigantic orange hats [insert picture of Andrew in hat here] and attempting to look Dutch, while the locals are wearing blue jeans and chilling in their boats going up and down the canals. The World Press Photo competition's exhibit was in town, which was awesome. No trip to Amsterdam is complete without a visit to the Rijksmuseum to sit in front of the Night Watch for a while, but sadly, a horde of loud French-speaking tourists with a tour guide prevented peaceful contemplation.

The flight back involved Orbitz "accidentally" cancelling half our flight reservations (orbitz sucks!), so we ended up in Charles deGaulle airport for five hours while waiting for the next flight back to the states (CDG sucks!), where I made the best of the situation by working on a design doc on my laptop (productivity! yay!), but at least we were upgraded to business class for the international leg of the flight (reclining seats and champagne! yay!), after which we spent three hours in Atlanta (sucking much less than CDG), and after getting through the security checkpoint my laptop would no longer boot (productivity lost! x-rays suck!), and finally arriving home nearly 24 hours after leaving Amsterdam. So. No more Orbitz for me.

In mid-May we went to Lightning in a Bottle, a hippie music festival near Santa Barbara. We carried the full package of photographic gear this time: light rigs, extra cameras, light meters, loads of film, the cute reflector gadgets, and cables that I swear do not go with this camera but are on hand Just In Case; all of it requiring that it carefully be repackaged each time the setup has to move another hundred yards to get better "flow". I've always thought of camping as something you do with just the gear that fits on your back, but apparently that's not the custom in California. :) "Camping" involved an air mattress. With an electric gadget to inflate it. And pillows. Actually, it's kinda nice to have pillows. The music was pretty sweet too, lots of electronic stuff. Here's the pictures.

Last weekend I drove the gorilla crew around San Francisco to take promotional photos for the fun run coming up on June 10. (Photo gear filled the car trunk, but required no actual carrying on my part.) This will be my first fun run, and while we will be wearing gorilla suits, at least it looks like it will be a cold morning in SF. It's not too late to register, if you're into that sort of thing. Anyway, last weekend, the gorilla organizers and associated hangers-on dressed up in gorilla suits and drove go-cars around the touristy part of SF, periodically unloading to take photos, shoot video, and hand out flyers, (photos of the gorillas in action) and I got to hone my skills at veering in and out of city traffic on a holiday weekend, with various people hanging out the car windows with videocameras. This escape from Alcatraz moment is my favorite.

The cat is now hinting loudly that he wants attention.

that whole don imus thing

So why is it that South Park is funny, but Don Imus isn't? I'm as willing as the next guy to laugh at jokes made about groups I identify with (which is to say, not if I'm cranky or it's not funny), so what's different here? My first reaction to the news report I read about his remark was "wow, that's a dumb thing to say in front of a hot mic, but whatever" but after I heard an audio clip of it, my perspective changed. Cause you know how sometimes when someone's telling a joke, there's an edge in their voice to show they're not really kidding? That's what the clip sounded like: a guy who thought that the women of the Rutgers team maybe didn't deserve the success they'd had that season, a guy savoring his own alliterative cleverness in causally dismissing their accomplishments. If he'd said something similar about a group of white male NBA players, it might have been funny. Or at least less ... serious.

I guess I'm willing to laugh at a offensive joke that's about my group as long as I think the room is laughing with me, not at me. Because if they're laughing at me, then it's pretty stupid of me to play along - it'll entrench the underlying stereotype. Which is why South Park is funny: the writers don't take anything seriously, and the offensiveness is equal-opportunity. If everybody's a target, nobody's a target, in some sense.

the benefits of being marginally in shape

I can't decide which was the coolest thing to happen since I last posted. This:


or figuring out how to link tight turns on a snowboard. (Which there are totally some pictures of somewhere, but not yet online.)

I spent five days skiing in a snowstorm in early February, which was awesome and not at all crowded. Especially on the days it was raining below 7000 feet, in which I discovered that my gear is not nearly as waterproof as its tags claim. A few sunny weeks later we were up at Sierra with Agi and Kelle, who snowboard, so I figured I'd rent a board and hopefully not fall on my butt too much. A definite upside to six months of yoga and belly dancing is increased core strength and balance, and returning to snowboarding was easier than I thought it would be. By the end of the day I was linking turns all the way down the hill, traversing without serious difficulty, and on the just-the-right-steepness parts actually doing the thing where you don't actually turn, but just sort of lean back and forth to bleed off speed. That must have a name.

Fast forward a few weeks weeks (past lots of cold weather, sorta meeting Hillary Clinton, finally getting a new bike, and belatedly getting gloves to wear while riding said bike in said cold weather), and we went to Cancun for Andrew's spring break. In my first 24 hours in Cancun, two different organizations tried to sell me timeshares and I fell into a gaping pothole and twisted my ankle; some cheap beer later, Andrew also tripped on a pothole. Fortunately, the week went uphill from there, as we visited seven archaeological sites in eight days. (And on Day Nine we rested - see above picture - because Andrew finally got tired of pretending his newly-sprained ankle didn't hurt.) Anyway, the whole week had super nice weather, lots of tacos, and I picked up at least a few dozen spanish words. The piles of rubble began to blur together at some point, but my favorite was Ek-Balam, where they actually let you climb up on the ruins. (Not so at Chichen Itza, which was packed full of tourists for the equinox.) The least impressive piles of rubble were the ones on the island of Cozumel. The guidebook is totally right: spend your time in Cozumel in the water with a snorkel mask on. If you must venture inland 12 miles to the ruins, rent a car instead of the crappiest bicycles you have ever seen, because it will be hot in the middle of the day and there will be completely unpaved chunks of "road" to clog up the "gear" on the "bicycle".

vacation photos

hoping for snow

The view of Tahoe from the top of Kirkwood was fantastic, despite the 30 mph winds blowing the last remaining particles of snow off the mountain and into my face. I had plenty of time to enjoy the view while trying to decide how to ski down that sheet of ice without falling on my butt.

Ice and -20 degree weather notwithstanding, it was a great three-day weekend. Extreme cold has a way of keeping other people off the mountain, so once you get bundled up in enough layers, there aren't any lift lines to get in the way. It hasn't snowed in a few weeks anywhere around here (although tonight it is raining in SF so I'm optimistic that it's snowing in Tahoe) so the snow wasn't great, but still skiiable (except for the aforementioned sheet of ice at the top). The wind tended to blow the snow into drifts among the trees, so the off-trail snow conditions were actually pretty good - well worth exploring the less-beaten path. We stayed at the resort instead of a motel in South Lake Tahoe, so no driving in the mornings (yay!) and having a room with a kitchen means you can cook your own food (double yay! salads and sandwiches instead of burgers and sausage). The masseuse at the resort will even do in-room massage!

If it is actually snowing now, next weekend should be even better.

[Special shout-out to my little sister who's just turned 21 - happy birthday, Amy!]

saying goodbye

Recently I've had to say goodbye to two entities I cared for very much.

The first, everybody knows about already. We are in the process of turning off Google Answers, my first Google project. The project itself is one of my proudest achievements: bringing together lots of really interesting people to generate high quality content about a broad range of topics. The reasons behind the closure are (as always) complicated, and confidential, but even though I haven't been actively working on it in a while, I had hoped something better would come of it. But sometimes you just can't make the right thing happen, even when it's your baby. So now we close the year-end books, put up a readonly copy of the site, finalize some AdSense details, and watch the last questions expire, until the dashboard finally says '... 0 unanswered questions.'

The second is Clyde. Clyde was our eight-year-old ferret, who had been diagnosed with insulinoma about a year ago. Eight is really old for a ferret, and this diagnosis would normally mean only a month or two to live, but he hung in there for a long time. He was active and in good spirits up until a day or so before his passing, and was still capable of getting into all kinds of mischief. He'd gotten very cuddly near the end and was happy to be held and fed treats. I know you're not supposed to have favorites, but he was my favorite of the ferrets. It wasn't unexpected, but it was still hard to say goodbye.

clyde

the giving of thanks (otherwise known as five days away from the computer)

It was still dark when I woke up the first time on Wednesday. It was the first vacation day I'd taken in months, coming on the heels of one of those two-day weeks that somehow feels like a full week all wrapped up in 48 hours (which is lame because my new project is awesome and it's a crisis on an old project taking all my time), so I awoke out of a fitful sleep of the recurring dream where I haven't finished all my freshman math credits and it's only a week until graduation and then there's a giant snake and then there's a pager going off in the distance... which is a sucky dream not because of the giant snake but because the only thing worse than being woken up by a real pager and not being able to go back to sleep is being woken up by a dream pager and not being able to go back to sleep. And then I remembered that this was the start of my vacation, and for the first time in a long time I went back to sleep in the darkness.

Wednesday officially began five hours later, with a trip to Napa. It's been a while since we'd last been, possibly since the infamous trip with Ishy. Agi and Ted and Andrew and I hit up a bunch of the wineries we always go to, and made a good-faith but ultimately fruitless attempt to find new wineries. (Bad car GPS. Bad.) It was a beautiful day and many photographs of sky were taken. I also rediscovered the white port at Praeger Port Works, which I distinctly remember not liking six months ago. It's very tasty now. After picking up shipments at some wine clubs whose memberships I keep sort of meaning to cancel, we ended up at one of those nice little hotels in Calistoga, playing poker with the pennies from the car, with several open bottles of wine (while watching poker on TV). Then it started raining so we went in the hot tub. That's when I dropped my phone in a puddle and it sort of fried itself. So if you tried to call me recently and it sounded like my phone answered itself while still in my pocket, that's because it's a cheap piece of crap and can't stand a good hot tubbing.

Thursday yielded spontaneous plans to have an old-fashioned Thanksgiving at home with family. Fortunately the grocery store was open in the afternoon, so I cooked the sort of Thanksgiving dinner one does with three hours' notice: honey-baked ham (no fuss, just glaze and chuck it in the oven), twice-baked potatoes (similar, but with a pot of boiling water), lots of veggies (slightly more attention during the what's-that-burning-on-the-stove phase), macaroni (microwaveable), and pies. Mandy made the pies, which were delicious.

Friday was a bright sunny day, so we went hiking in the San Bruno mountains, where it is foggy. Whoever wrote the hiking guidebook is a total wuss, though. "Moderate+ exertion" does not describe this meandering path with bunnies and wildflowers up the mountain. I mean, they get trucks up the mountain with radio gear. It's not that steep. Then we had some yummy fish at the new restaurant on Church at 29th (it used to be a greek place, and was something else before that; its current name escapes me) and ate a whole pint of ice cream and played bridge.

Saturday rained, which meant I needed new shoes. I love my Vans but after about 6-9 months I wear holes in the soles, which is OK up until the next time it rains, when I end up in the dark windy rain with no umbrella waiting for a bus. It's been an unseasonably dry November in SF so I'd been walking around in shoes with holes for several weeks without giving it a second thought. Downtown was packed with shoppers (disappointed by the lack of Wii, no doubt), and after acquiring new Vans (this time in camo green) we trekked over to Portola to see Fast Food Nation. I think I've seen more movies in the last week than in the entire several months before that. Happy Feet was by far the best of the bunch (but you know I can't say no to a tap-dancing penguin musical), and Casino Royale was actually pretty good (authentic poker and all), but Fast Food Nation was just sorta disappointing. I liked the book, but the movie was full of exposition. Lots of exposition. Not so much plot or characters doing interesting things or even showing the grossness of industrial meat packing. Lots of talking. Had to shake that one off by going to a bar in the Castro on the way home.

Sunday rained again, so we went to the museum and then played bridge. The De Young has this awesome exhibit by Ruth Asawa, a sculptor. Her stuff reminds me of this one toy I used to have as a kid, whose name I don't remember, but it was a bunch of concentric circle-like gears, and you could put them together and trace out the inner shape and make really intricate patterns on the paper. Her creations were like that, but with wire, in three dimensions, and several feet tall. They all have a characteristic of really intricate detail work, repeated over and over again to make a completely different shape, and the notes on the wall go on about how this is a "form within a form" or whatever, but all I could think was damn, how do you make a giant strand of wire look so nifty? Anyway, this exhibit is not to be missed.

And then it was Monday again, and I woke up while it was still dark.

how yuppie is that?

Found a nice wine bar in the mission yesterday. We were prowling around town looking for costumed people to photograph (Andrew says: "But it's for homework!") and stopped in for dinner. Parea Wine Bar and Cafe (at Valencia/19th) has yummy organic Mediterranean food and an interesting list of mostly European wines. So we're sitting in this wine bar, eating organic food and drinking french wine out of an enormous glass, and practicing bridge while conducting separate telephone conversations with other people. Sigh.. I think that's yuppie even by SF standards. To make up for it we went to the Zeitgeist afterwards and drank lots of beer. :)

Did I mention that Agi has gotten us into bridge? I played regularly in college for a while but not since then. Andrew's new to it, though, so that was an excuse to buy a book about bidding. He's really taking to it well and it's tons of fun. We're starting to get into the more complicated aspects of bidding, with occasional hilarious results. Turns out we know lots of couples now so we have started trying to get more of them to play, as a counterpart to the regular Thursday poker games.

loud music

Last week we ended up at The Independent twice. Once on Tuesday to see Poets and Pornstars (Gen's friend's band), and once on Friday to see Lyrics Born and Cut Chemist. I think my hearing is definitely taking a beating after exposure to the SF music scene. The Tuesday show was fun, but there weren't very many people there. The lead singer has the most adorable British accent, though.

The Friday show was awesome. I'd never seen Cut Chemist in person before, and was vaguely surprised that he turned out to be a scruffy white dude. He had two turntables set up, one for records and one hooked into a digital feed of music. He'd be scratching one part of the track while someone else worked the video screens and someone else played some other layers of the music. There were cameras set up so you could watch him working the turntables, although the frame rate on the cameras wasn't actually fast enough to keep up with him... At the end, he brought out a handicam, taped some people from the audience saying their names and stuff, and then wired it up to the digital turntable thingy and worked in both the audio and video to the next song. It's hard to describe how completely awesome this is, both on the appreciation-of-technical-difficulty level and the sounds-really-cool level. The place was packed and there was a great vibe.

the point of no return

I was assigned to go pick up meat from the store today for the barbecue. (No specific instructions about how many people were coming or what kind of meat, just "get meat".) So I figured I'd get out some on my bike first, and get to the store the long way around - by going down our hill to the east, looping north around the big hill, then approaching the hill from the west where it is a more gradual climb (the store is at the top, whereas our house is steeply down from it a few blocks). I've done a few different routes this way, but wanted to try something new today. I remembered Zach saying that he usually took 17th st to go east from Haight towards our neighborhood, so I thought I'd try that. (Wiser heads would remember that Zach thinks the hill on our street is "quite bikeable" if a little tough...) At the bottom - 17th and Valencia - the hill looked pretty tough, but I figured I was already sort of stuck in a neighborhood where most of the options "out" are "up". (Which is also not true. There's a bike path at Church/Market that hooks up with Fell.) Anyway, after about a third of the way up you can't see the top anymore because of the sharp grades and level intersections, so at each block I'd think I was almost done, then realize really not. Two thirds of the way up I thought I'd throw up. But at that point you really can't turn back. I made it all the way to the top without having to walk any of it. (The internet tells me that by 17th/Roosevelt it's a 17% grade) By the time I coasted into Haight Ashbury I'd earned an ice cream at the Ben&Jerry's.

The rest of the 10 mile loop I did is pretty nice, though - through Golden Gate Park to the Sunset, then back up Taraval (a reasonably gradual steady climb) where it meets up with Portola, and at Portola/Diamond Heights it's downhill to my house. The west half of the route was completely fogged in today, although the east half of the city was blue skies.

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Summer Recap

Zion National Park

Hiking in 108 degree weather, repelling down a canyon, smashing my hand and losing half a fingernail and finally finding the car at 1:30 in the morning can only mean one thing: another Kuliga Epic. Thanks Mike.

Vegas

Winning 3rd at Binions afternoon tournament, buying our way past the line at studio 54, riding around in an SUV limo giving rides to random people, Christophe flogging club security.

Lexi's Birthday Penguins

I couldn't have hoped for this day to go any better. Penguins have a whole lot of personality. The baby penguins were very curious and demanded your attention. Happy Birthday Lexi.

Hiking the Bay

Coastal trail in Point Reyes: 12 miles, Barnabes Peak: 5 miles, Berry Falls in Big Basin: 11 miles, Mount Burdell: 5 miles, East Peak of Tamalpais: 6 miles, Steep Ravine to Stinson beach: 4 miles and of course Twin Peaks many times over.

Billy and Mandy

In one week Billy found a job, they found an apartment, we helped moved them in and Billy started work. It was an incredible accomplishment. Welcome to the neighborhood.

New Blogger Beta

Check out the new Blogger Beta, stuffed full of tasty new features (sidebar widgets, graphical template editing, labels, and lots more). This is what I've been working on for the last year or so, and I'm proud of the job the team has done. The new infrastructure should be a lot more stable and extensible. Eventually you'll be able to migrate any existing blogs you have into the new system - we're trying to do this a little slowly to make sure stuff works.

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Dusk on the mission /

Dusk on the mission
a bicycle rattles by
says overthrow bush