Big Sur and our Anniversary

Friday was our fifth anniversary and so we went to Big Sur to celebrate. Of course we didn't realize that everyone gets married in October and so Big Sur was experiencing its prime wedding season. We were thinking that we wouldn't have a problem finding a room or a campsite. We were wrong. Why is it that so many of my travel stories include that sentence?

On the way up we made the obligatory stop to check out the elephant seals (and ground squirrels that are there to check out the tourists) along the coast.

By the time the sun was setting on Saturday we had made our way completely through Big Sur and had found that there was nothing available. Every campsite was full and even the hotels that charge a minimum of $900/night were fully booked.

But we got lucky. Gary, at Big Sur Lodge, had taken a reservation 90 minutes before we showed up from a woman who did not provide a credit card to hold the room and promised to arrive within ten minutes of her call. Since she hadn't arrived by the time we got there, Gary called the Big Sur restaurants to see if she had stopped for a meal and, when he couldn't find her, he released her room to us. While we were filling out the paper work, three other groups arrived hoping for a room. We literally got the last spot in all of Big Sur and Gary called around to verify that for us and the other people who arrived later.

Big Sur Lodge isn't on the ocean but it is in one of the state parks with some lovely trails and a small waterfall. After spending a night in front of the fireplace we got up bright and early to try and beat the wedding guests to the trails. We largely succeeded.

On Sunday we drove up to Marina to visit a friend of Marius' and have lunch at English Ales, yeah, that's right, we had "lunch." English Ales is a microbrewery that has been around a little bit longer than we've been married that makes a wonderful and tasty variety of beer that you can find throughout California. We needed to try the sampler of course. It arrived in a set of little 4 oz. glass steins that I had to largely consume so that Marius could continue driving. I thought the sacrifice was rather big of me.

That night we were able to find a campsite and then hiked down to the beach just after dawn.

The weather was lovely although it was a bit overcast at times. Even with all of the people that were in the area, Big Sur is large enough that we were largely alone for most of the time. We just have to go back again when the wedding crowd doesn't make it impossible to get a shower.

political content may not be appropriate for all ages

I have to vent. I don't know how many of you were aware of this but the Bush appointed deputy commisioner at the FDA and then later Bush appointed commissioner of the FDA (now ex of both positions thank god) is on my sh*tlist and has been for many years.

His name is Lester Crawford. He is a man who wrote books suggesting that women suffering from PMS or menopause should help their medical situations by praying more. I have no problem if you feel that prayer helps you to improve your personal well being. I have serious problems with people telling women that they don't pray enough when they are suffering from a medical condition (except perhaps when they can't provide any other form of treatment). This is the man who was in charge of the continued fiasco concerning Plan B (morning after pill). For those that did not keep up with that issue: Plan B had been up for approval as an over the counter drug for years. Congress approved his appointment on the condition that a decision be made concerning the status of Plan B. Congress did not require that he approve it for sale as an over-the-counter drug despite the fact that the FDA's external review committee determined that it was the safest drug to be evaluated by the FDA in decades. Once he was appointed he claimed that they could not make a decision due to a law forbidding drugs to have two different statuses (stati?) since he wanted to make it available as an over-the-counter drug only to women who were not minors.

Oh and did you know that he is a veterinarian by training? Yes he also has a degree in pharmacology but still...

Shortly after he was appointed to head the FDA he resigned. There was much gossip about the reasons why. It would appear that we now know why.

Yup. On top of it all, the man is a bona fide crook. There is no evidence that he profited from his crime which makes him a stupid crook.




Fiber related content. I have just cast on the back of Durrow for the third time. Not once has it been the fault of the pattern. The first time I switched sizes half way through working it and had just finished it when I noticed this. The second time was today when I realized that my gauge had grown significantly since the first time I knit it. Fortunately it's a quick knit. Of course, by the time I finish the back, I could have been nearly done withe sweater if I had been paying attention.

My Yixing Teapots

Thuy asked me to put up photos of my pots. So here they are (minus one as it is very delicately carved on the outside and I have yet to take a photo of it that allows you to see the carving).

What is a yixing teapot? It's a pot made from clay found only in Yixing, China. It comes in different colors and different textures but the main characteristic for which tea drinkers seek it out is that the clay is very porous. Many claim that the clay acts as a sort of filter. I'm not sure about that but I do know that if you take a tea and drink it in a normal glazed cup and then pour the tea into a cup made from the clay, it does taste subtly different. People talk about old teapots having sorbed so much tea over the years that tea leaves are no longer needed to brew a pot of tea in them. Since most people suggest that antique pots be sterilized before use I have a hard time believing the story but it's a nice one.

They are traditionally used to brew oolong teas. Tea leaves are often oxidized or fermented when the are harvested. Green teas are not oxidized at all, while black teas are completely oxidized. Oolongs are any tea that falls between green and black teas. I tend to prefer those closer to black teas but there are many excellent oolongs that are very close to green.

First up is my sad broken pot. You can see the crack in the lid and the glue on the side of the dragon head. What you can't really make out from the picture is that the lid doesn't quite fit into its opening anymore. It used to fit perfectly to the point that it wouldn't fall out when you poured tea.







Below is the same pot from straight on. You could almost pretend that it isn't broken except for the poorly fitting lid and the funny looking eye on the left (the crack runs through the glaze of the eye).














Next is the now infamous pot from my mother (see earlier post about my move). Very cute but not very functional and machine made.














I didn't mention that my father also gave buying me a teapot a shot when he was in China on business. It was a complete surprise for me so I didn't have the chance to warn him that they tend to cost more than your average teapot. He suffered a rather severe case of sticker shock. Still, while this isn't a very well made pot, it is at least partially done by hand and it took a couple of years before I saw similar ones for sale in the United States. It does have a flaw in it that prevents it from being used but we won't tell my Dad that given all of the effort he went through to bring it to me.




















And the last one is my very first teapot. I had recently discovered single estate teas (and you can too) and oolongs when my local tea shop (which happens to be one of the finest in this country) had their annual yixing teapot fest. Since these are the pots in which you traditionally brew oolong I felt that I needed one. For an inexpensive pot, this is a remarkably well done locust and if Marius hadn't packed it full of wet leaves during one of our moves, I'd still be using it to brew tea (it grew mold by the time we unpacked it).

More information on toxins: produce

Since folks seemed to enjoy getting the link to the Skin Deep data base I wanted to quickly post a link to a new study the EWG did on the presence of pesticides in and on store bought produce.

The idea is to provide information on those items most likely (and least likely) to hurt you if you don't buy organic. My peaches and apples will all be organic from here on out or I won't eat them. 96% of all fruit tested had detectable pesticide residues AFTER WASHING!!!!

Yikes.

neighbors can be a bad word sometimes

Last week I was walking to the gym in our complex when I heard very young kittens screaming. They were wandering out of a neighbor's patio area (fenced off) and so I shouted to try and get the woman's attention inside. I figured they were hers.

Nope. Not hers. Their mother just showed up a few weeks before and gave birth to them. They were screaming because the woman hadn't seen their mother in a few days and so she figured that the thing had been killed. She made a big fuss about how she is always calling animal control and how every cat within a twenty mile radius comes to give birth on her patio. So I asked her if she was going to call animal control seeing as how the kittens were going to just continue screaming and she had made it very clear how annoying this was.

She responded with something along the lines of "I suppose I should," sighed and then vanished from the window. I called up again to ask if she was going to call. Her entire manor suggested that she hadn't vanished to go to the phone and make the call. The same woman came back and replied "no, she probably won't." As if she were talking about another person!

Pissed off, I picked them up and drove them to the animal shelter figuring that if they were killed there, at least they wouldn't die slowly and painfully.

What is it with some people? All she had to do was pick up the phone and someone would have come to get the animals that were annoying her so much.

So yesterday I'm walking in from my car and I see her standing next to her car with the hood up. She is clearly having car problems and is on the phone giving detailed directions to someone on how to call AAA for her. If it hadn't been for the welfare of the animals, I'd feel guilty that I was somehow enabling this odd behavior. WTF?

I can wear nail polish again!

Okay, I'm jumping the gun here because phthalates are just the tip of the iceberg, but it's progress. They haven't mentioned a word about removing toluene.

"Powered by EWG's Skin Deep database, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and thousands of concerned consumers like you pressured Orly International, OPI Products, and Sally Hansen to remove a toxic chemical from nail polish. The ingredient, dibutyl phthalate (DBP), has been linked to birth defects, is banned from use in cosmetics in Europe and is considered a reproductive toxin by the state of California."

If you haven't looked at the Skin Deep database, you should. You can look up any cosmetic or personal care product you use and find out to which toxins you are exposing yourself. Getting phthalates removed from nail polish is huge because it generally isn't identifiable in a list of ingredients and you have to contact the manufacturer to find out if one of the ingredients listed contains the toxin. They will often tell you that their products contain less than the legal amount but when you are using umpteen products that all contain toxins, you can imagine that there might be an issue.

Even many "organic" products contain preservatives that have been linked to breast cancer so it's best to be as informed as possible.

oh so L.A.

As I was uploading those photos, I had the news on in the background. Of course there is some high speed car chase going on just down the highway from us that they are filming live.

I think this is the second one I've seen since I moved down here less than a month ago and I almost never watch the evening news.

as promised -sorta

I don't have a photo of the silk sweater I made for my mother but I'm working on it. In the meantime...




























...my first branching out scarf is done! I have even bound off and woven in the ends although these photos are from just before that point. This is BFL that Thuy and I dyed with Smart and Final food coloring. I spun it up on a spindle and knit it as a single. The one I knit in Moco quiviut is also done but looks really dumb without being blocked. I had two skeins of the quiviut (one in navy and the other in a burgundy/wine hybrid color) and one skein was not enough to make a scarf even though I used the second skein for the garter stitch border. To lengthen it I added a bunch of garter stitch to both ends but that part seriously flares out while the lace section pulls in. I will block it to within an inch of its life and it should all even out... I hope!

Martha asked what had broken my cable. It was, of course, the cotton linen stitch afghan that will not end:















Sadly, when I spread it out to take the photos I discovered this:
















Yup. It pooled. I had three cakes of yarn that I got from a sale bin when we were in Cary, NC years ago. The first skein worked up nicely with only a little pooling. The second skein started out the same so I stopped worrying about pooling. Clearly this was a mistake. Normally I don't mind pooling colors in my space-dyed yarns. I just REALLY don't like regular pooling, which is what I have in this afghan now. If it had formed interesting patterns, I might feel differently but regular blobs really aren't very appealing.

So.

I will rip it out. And the afghan that will not end, will take that much longer to end so that I can alternate between skeins to break up the blobs. On top of all of this, it looks like I will run out before it is the size I want (2lbs of cotton only goes so far apparently). So now I'm on the hunt for a solid cotton to compliment this color-way. Given that it's basically a deadened rainbow (basic colors with a bit of black added to them), I have lots of options. Suggestions anyone?

Oh, and for the record, my replacement cables arrived yesterday from Denise. I'll let you know how they work out but I still love their customer service.

photos and films

I took the promised photos on Sunday but haven't had time to upload them and it's too late to do it tonight. We spent the evening watching the documentary "Why We Fight" which, while dated, is documentary about the industrial military complex as evinced by post-Vietnam wars in the U.S. (with an obvious focus on Iraq). None of the information was new (at this point although had we seen it when it came out we would have been more than a bit outraged -did you know that over one billion dollars of our defense budget between 2002 and 2003 was spent on domestic advertising?).

I'll upload the photos of my knitting projects tomorrow and everyone can see why I must rip out nearly half of the linen stitch afghan I've been working on for the past year (on and off). Sadly I haven't spread it out much in the past couple of months and so only noticed some really bad pooling when I took the photographs. So now it will be the project that takes me forever and a day to finish.

score one for procrastination!

So I still haven't broken out Marius' nice fancy dSLR camera to take photos of my knitting (but I will by the end of this upcoming weekend Martha!) . But I must share my small victory today.

In Santa Barbara we didn't have a very big apartment. In fact it was so small that my desk doubled as our dining room table. Well we're in a bigger place now and had bought a second hand table from a grad. student who was leaving town right before we moved. However, we have been lacking dining room chairs since we moved into our new place. Since our new table has gray metal legs, I've been wanting to find something like this:



















Now this chair is being sold at DWR for $370/chair. It was on some t.v. show and is insanely expensive now given what it is. Hunting around online however, I found these:

Which are nearly identical to the above chair. The biggest difference is that the front legs are round as opposed to squared off (and the chairs are bolted together as opposed to being all one molded piece). I agree that the first chair looks better, but how much better? Certainly not the $330 difference in price. That's right. The cheaper chairs are just $40 at kmart of all places (just FYI: our table does not look like the one in the photo).

So I procrastinated on going out and buying the chairs for weeks until last night. I drive out to the nearest store and find that they are sold out of the chairs. This is not because people saw the chairs on t.v. and realized how similar (but much cheaper) the ones at kmart are, but because they didn't sell and so were placed on clearance. At the store I'm at they can't even tell me what the new price is since they don't have any information on them now that they are all gone. I go home a bit discouraged because I assume that this will be the case at all local kmarts. They are still available online for the original price as a last resort (for a $35 shipping fee) but I decided to brave near rush-hour traffic today and try another kmart today. They HAD them! They not only had them in stock, they had almost 100 of them. And the best part is their clearance price is just $8/chair. Yup, I spent a total of $32 on these bad boys, less than what one chair would have cost me if I had bought them at their regular price.

So I have learned my lesson for the week. Procrastination pays.

I LOVE Denise needles

So I contacted them (last night!) about sending the broken cable for a replacement (and mentioned that it has happened once before -both time with heavy projects). I also asked if they had thought about reinforcing this part with a bit of metal (both breaks were at the exact same place) even though I realize that such a suggestion is a bit presumptuous. This was their response.

Hi Erin,

I'm so sorry to hear about a SECOND cord tip snapping!

One is unusual, but two is miserable. Occasionally, a kit that is exposed to extreme heat or cold somewhere during the course of its travels can exhibit this type of fragility. Another possibility is that the machine that forms the cord tips was not venting properly when your kit was being manufactured. This can allow air bubbles into the material and cause weak spots. Either way, we'll send you out a new set of cords right away.

Our manufacturer has made some hidden improvements to the tips over the past year, and he's also being extremely careful with the air/material mix as well as humidity in the material when he's making them, so these new ones should do just great on even very heavy projects. We have considered making the cord tips metal, or having the internal part be metal, and I'd like to see something like this happen, because though the breakage is normally very rare, it's still NO fun when it happens!! Thanks for your input on this.

We'll get the new cords right in the mail to you. The post has gone for today, but these will be in tomorrow's. Many apologies again, and please let us know if you ever have other questions or feedback. Happier knitting ahead!

All the best,
Emily McKeon

info@knitdenise.com
http://www.knitdenise.com
888-831-8042




How fabulous are they?!??? It makes me glad given how much I tell people to buy these things. Last night I was having a moment where I was worrying that I had given away many of my INOX and that I was now going to have to buy a new set for my heavy projects. Nope. I'm perfectly happy to believe them that these tips are stronger.

At least until one breaks on me. :)

My very first project

Once that last post went up I realized that my blog was sadly lacking in photos. So, since we haven't taken any new pictures (that I still have), I dug up a photo of the very first thing I ever made out of yarn. Of course it is crochet (how many people knew I learned that before knitting?) and it is Red H***t, but it was before I knew any better. Plus it went to a dear friend of mine who likes to machine wash things to death so I'd probably still use an acrylic yarn to make her a blanket today (just not that acrylic). She and her husband use it to cover and frightening chair they own from the late 60's/early 70's that is in no possible way ever going to be "retro."

Note: I think that yarn is excellent when used for dog blankets that will be seriously abused so I don't completely hate the stuff.

Denise needles breakage

Today I had a cable from my Denise needle set break. This is the second time this has happened to me. Both times, I was over half-way done with an afghan (so the project was getting heavy) when the black connector piece just snapped in half. I'm generally a huge fan of these needles but I'm beginning to wonder if anyone else has experienced this. Perhaps I need to keep my heavier projects on other needles from now on (even though I know the company will replace the cable asap and I own both of the super long cables that they make just for afghans).

Of course this happened at a knit group I was visiting in Santa Monica and anyone who heard the snap immediately started checking to see if they had a substitute needle that I could borrow. Fibery people are really wonderful sometimes. For all they knew I could have made off with their needle and never shown my face again (because you know that's just the sort of person I am).

an unpacking extravaganza

It's been an exciting Saturday night in the van der Brien household but I have finally reached a point in unpacking where the place just looks messy as opposed to unpacked. We are very excited about this as it means that the floors can finally be cleaned (Marius has been living here with the fortress of boxes for just over a month -yuck!). Even the patio is beginning to look like a place where one might choose to spend an hour with a glass of wine.

There will be photos eventually although not of the NYC trip as I had been promising several posts back. It seems that our point and shoot digital camera is the major fatality of the move and I hadn't downloaded the photos yet. urgh! Cameras can be replaced, the photos cannot -the lost shots also include the lovely cake Susie baked for me.

The other fatality was the lid of a semi-high-end commercial (an oxymoron right?) yixing teapot that M got me several years ago as a Valentine's Day present. He, being the sweetheart that he is, said I could get any other pot I wanted to replace it (sadly it cannot be replaced as only a few were ever made). Where upon I pulled up the website that is selling the teapots of one of the craftsmen of factory 1.

Now this may not sound like much but there are only two "factories" that are recognized as producing authentic yixing teapots (factory 1 is the "original" and the other one is supervised by someone who spent most of his career at factory 1). This is where the masters work. The lowest rung on the ladder is craftsman. The teapot by one of these lowly craftsmen that I lust after sells for $425. As dear as M is, he did say that he meant one of the less authentic teapots.

Wanna see it?

Here's another one by the same guy.

So you see, it could be worse...

note to readers: Please don't go and buy the first pot (I know you're all running around with $400 burning a hole in your pocket!). It has been for sale on this site since I started collecting and I live with the pipe dream that some day I might actually be able to buy it. Of course, then I'd probably break it in a move and lose what little sanity I have left.

A true collector would scoff at this as people in Taiwan have been known to sell their homes to buy a one of a kind pot by a dead master. This would be the little sanity I still have that I mentioned above. House=higher priority than pretty clay teapots. See -that must count for some form of sanity.

I'm still sad though as the one that broke was one of my nicest yixing pots. Murphy's Law I suppose. It couldn't have been the machine made pot my mother got from some museum catalog not knowing anything about them other than the fact that I have a small collection, the one that, if I really loved it, could be replaced with a simple internet search (and Mom, if you're reading this, I REALLY appreciate the fact that you even thought of getting me one at all). No... it has to be the one that NO ONE on the planet can get for me again unless by some odd twist of fate I run into one of the few other people who bought one when they were made.

Okay, so I'm having a little pity party for myself here when I have a nearly equally fine and unbroken pot still in my collection.

Oh yes, poor me.

-although I have to wonder what it is about me, teapots, and moving. My brown betty and another mass produced teapot broke in the move from Chicago to Santa Barbara. I suppose they're beginning to sound like a bad thing for me to collect. Odd.

our niece

Okay our house is still a mess. I'm not going to upload photos of anything even located in the place as it is just depressing how many boxes still need to be unpacked after two weeks.

So, in lieu of anything about our life, I bring you Liza, our niece (Marius' niece to be precise). How cute is she?

And Cossett (my bil's dog) is the reason we would really like a whippet one day. She is great with Liza as you can tell from the photo. We've really missed Liza's first few years since they are in Kansas but we got super cheap plane tickets for Thanksgiving so we'll get to see her then. I guess people don't fly to Kansas for the holiday -perhaps they all vacate the state. It should be interesting...

photo from Memphis trip

Some of you know that I had to go to Memphis early in August for a conference. At the opening evening they had an Elvis wandering about and taking photos with folks.

What you may not be able to tell from the photo is that the black on his chest is all hair. This must be the most hairy chest I have ever seen in my entire life (and most of you don't know how hairy my PhD advisor was/is). This leads me to share my moment of embarrassment with you all.

The Elvis walked up to me to shake my hand but I caught a glimpse of the chest first.

And I COULDN'T look away!!!!!

I swear it was just like when a guy stares at your chest without once looking up at your face when you're talking to him. I was shaking his hand and he was talking to me and I was still staring at his chest!

Except for the fact that it wasn't in the least bit sexual. It was just pure astonishment that a chest like that even exists in our world. Fortunately the folks around me explained that he clearly thought it was sexual and enjoyed my reaction. Go figure. It makes me wonder if guys and breasts are like that ever.

So the folks from left to right are: my friend Tony from grad school, the Elvis, my friend Sophie from UCSB and then me laughing my a** off. It's grainy because it's a scanned Polaroid. Gotta love it.

moving

Okay, I had no time to blog this weekend since we were moving the other half of our stuff and, yet again, we ran into problems.

We are moving less than 200 miles away and yet eight things have managed to go wrong during the move. Now if they had ruined the move or destroyed our belongings it would be sad and frustrating. Fortunately it somehow all managed to work out in spite of all of the bad stuff that kept happening which turns a poor me story into a great cocktail party story. It almost verges on being hysterically funny if you know me well enough to imagine my face as each new thing happened. Hint, I do not handle stress well.

Three weekends ago we rent a Uhaul van and schedule movers to help us unload the van when we get down to Claremont (Pomona area just east of Pasadena for those not familiar with the area).

We get to the Uhaul place just before 10am (when they are supposed to open) to find a sign on the door saying that they are experiencing a power outage and will open once ComEd has fixed it. The only problem being that the place had power as did the rest of the building. I called Uhaul in a panic and they couldn't get me another truck until 2 pm, way too late to meet the movers. The folks on the phone promise to try and find another truck. Meanwhile I am also desperately trying to reach this guy that we bought a sofa from and had made arrangements to see once we had the van to pick up the afore mentioned sofa. So we had no truck and I couldn't reach the guy with the sofa OR our movers to make sure that the delay wasn't ruining our chances of moving that day.

At around 11am, this guy shows up and opens the store. He tries to support his sign by claiming that the locks are electric and that he can't open them until the power comes on and uses his car key in the lock to show that it won't open (charming fellow clearly). Marius is really ticked off at this point and starts lambasting the fellow who tries to argue back -very badly I might add given that we've just seen him try to use his car key to open the door. Since none of the yelling was getting us our van, I interrupted to suggest that we would file an official complaint and start the paperwork so we can get the van. He claims that he can't print anything out due to the power outage and so begins to fill out paperwork by hand. By the time we leave the place, it is noon and, as we will later find out, we are missing a second copy of our rental contract.

We do manage to get the sofa and get the van loaded but the delay has put us smack in the middle of Saturday afternoon traffic and it takes us an extra hour to get down to Claremont where the movers have been waiting for us for hours at this point. They were very kind and did really wait in a fast food place near our new complex until we got there at 5:30pm (2.5 hours later than our contract with the movers stated). They didn't have the third person I had paid for but it turned out they could get everything into the apartment in plenty of time and we even had time left over to go and pick up a used refrigerator that we got off of Craig's List. We then drive to drop off the van. I'm sitting in the van trying to see all of the paperwork before locking up and depositing the key in the drop box when I hear what sounds like gun fire (it wasn't but I won't tell you what it was or you'll laugh at us). Marius suggests we get moving and we discover that we don't have the second copy of our contract to deposit with the key and there is a $50 fee if you don't deposit a copy of your contract with the key. We finally decide to drop our only copy of the rental agreement and figure we'll be completely over charged and will have no evidence to support our claim but hope it will be less than $50.

This was our first weekend in the place. Marius drove me back to Santa Barbara after we dropped off the van and life was good (once we had gotten the light bulbs that exploded upon our arrival replaced and put in a request for new keys since the first set we got didn't fit).

I drove back down the following Sunday for a new faculty orientation.

The orientation was fun and useful. The apartment was not. During the 48 hours I was there, the clothes washer flooded the closet and guest room that it was in (to the point of water seeping through the ceiling below), a stove burner wouldn't turn off and got stuck on high for several hours and we lost several more light bulbs, each one in sequence timed to a few hours after the previous one had been replaced by our lovely new maintenance man, Jorge. He really is nice and we should know given the time the poor man had to spend in our place.

It turns out that the stove has a faulty wire that was quickly fixed. The washer was a different story. Jorge checks the installation and there is nothing wrong with it. The official appliance repair guy comes and says that the pipe feeding water into the washer is cracked. Marius takes a closer look and realizes the "cracks" are actually rodent teeth marks. Oh yes. That's right, a mouse is eating our clothes washer. To make it even better, we think that we may have brought the mouse down with us when we moved as we had stored a few boxes in a shed that then developed a rodent problem. But we really have no idea about the mouse except that, of course, it is the one mouse that our cats have no interest in killing.

Move forward to this weekend. Uhaul has confirmed our van rental. I talk to a woman who tells me that the only truck available is in Oxnard (45 minutes down the highway) but that the office will open at 7am and we can pick it up at any time from then on. A few hours after this phone call, I get a second one from the Oxnard office confirming our pick-up for 2pm!!! When I pitch a fit (albeit a polite one) the guy tells me to call back in an hour to see if they are expecting more vans that might be available earlier. I do and am told that there should be one free around 10:30 or 11ish and that we should just call to confirm before we leave to pick it up.

I call the following morning and the woman on the phone has no clue that I was told this but manages to arrange for a van for us within 40 minutes. We show up, get the van and one block away I realize that they didn't confirm that they had put the utility cart we had rented into the van. I stop and open up the back to see. No cart. So I run back to the place and ask for one and just as I get it, Marius pulls up to make sure that I got the van and everything. This is a very good thing as it means I can just throw the cart into the back of his car and run back to the van before getting a ticket for parking in a no parking zone. We get back to Santa Barbara around 2pm. We had scheduled a mover to arrive a 2pm. The last time when we had used movers to help unload, they called us repeatedly to verify time, location and other fun details. We didn't hear once from the mover in Santa Barbara. We were beginning to think the guy wasn't going to show. We were right.

Fortunately we really only had half a van worth of stuff to take down so Marius managed it all without developing back problems to match my own. Moving is fun!

P.S. The mouse is now dead and the gun fire we thought we heard was a big fireworks display that was timed to only have one explosion at a time. We did eventually look up.

Susan G. Komen 3-day

Okay. I don't think blogs are a good way to fundraise but you never know, it's worked for some folks. A dear friend of mine is doing the Susan G. Komen 3-day walk in Chicago (for the third or fourth time -she'll correct me if she reads this) and has been having a hard time raising funds this year.

So if you feel like supporting a good cause (it's tax deductible) please support Jeanette in her efforts here. They will even spread out payments over a number of months if you use a credit card.

Thanks everyone!

Adventures in the front country

Given that I have yet to post photos that I've been promising, I'm going to use Thuy and her lovely shots from our hiking adventure this past Sunday. I'll try and post other photos this weekend when I'm down in Claremont with the fast connection and the computer with all of our photos.

Thuy and I decided to go on a short hike up to Inspiration Point. Thuy had tried to hike there earlier this summer but ended up on another trail and wanted to try again. In the morning, I surfed the web and found topo maps and felt relatively confident that we could find our way and Thuy said she knew where the trailhead was so we thought we were set. We were wrong.

The trailhead that Thuy was familiar with was for the Tunnel Trail (also goes up to Inspiration Point) which isn't the way that I saw on the maps (but didn't realize it at the time). The hike up was uneventful. It seems that the very little walking I had to do in Memphis last week helped my endurance quite a bit as well as my heat tolerance so I was feeling pretty good when we got to the top.

Then it was time to descend. When we started out we had mistakenly gone along an access road but were redirected by a woman and her dog. At the top we appeared to cross the same access road. Thuy, using deductive reasoning, determined the correct direction to go on the road (her reasoning was very sound, I'm not mocking her at all). Unfortunately the road quickly ended at a locked gate with a sign indicating that the owners of the land beyond the gate would not enjoy our company. We turned back and almost immediately found a sign for the Jesusita Trail with "cars" and an arrow drawn on for good measure. This trail ultimately skirted the private property which would normally be a good thing.














Not yet realizing that we had taken Tunnel Trail up to Inspiration Point, we figure we can take this as an alternative way down. After all, some helpful person had indicated that it was the way down to the cars...

So we walk down, and down and down. We're passed by some mountain bikers who must clearly be headed toward their cars so we don't worry. About the time the trail dumped us off on a private road with no indication of being near a public road, we began to worry. Thuy gets on her cell phone and calls Jaeson for navigation help. Given that we have no idea of where we are, he really couldn't help us. Now wishing that we had a GPS with us, we decided to continue down on the path where it picked up again a little way down the road. We did this for two reasons: 1. the mountain bikers went that way and 2. it is late enough that we don't have enough time to go back the way we came before the sun sets. I must admit that it was a much more scenic route that crossed the creek several times and was nicely shaded by dense trees the entire way. If we hadn't been so worried about the fact that we had only a couple of hours before sun down, it would have made for a very pretty walk.















Nearly an hour later we happen across a lone jogger who we stop and ask for directions. He very kindly indicates that we are a fifteen minute stroll from the road. The road being one that is about five miles from the road we parked on, but a road none the less. After one more nearly disastrous wrong turn at a fork in the trail, we come out at the San Roque water treatment facility and Thuy gets back on her phone to call the infamous Gina (a good friend of Thuy's whom I had never had the pleasure of meeting despite hearing a great deal about her). Gina basically drops whatever it is that she is doing and comes to pick us up and drive us back to my car. Gina is my hero. And like any good hero, she pulled up in a hot car and only laughed at us a little. Okay, she laughed quite a bit but certainly less than many others would have in a similar situation. While Gina is now my hero, I suspect I did not make an equally good first impression on her.

The lesson from all of this is that one should take the same trail down and one took up a mountain, particularly when everyone else you see on the trail is doing exactly that. We were very lucky that we didn't spend the night out in the woods. If we had taken one more wrong turn we would have been in bad shape. Granted, in SB front country, you can only walk so far while still being on the same side of the mountains. But, we could have spent the entire night walking parallel to a road and ended up who knows where. Least you think we were in mortal peril, there were occupied houses around the trail and if we were still lost come dusk, we could have braved the poison oak and left the trail to go ask for help from one of the local residents. However, it isn't very nice to think of that as your only option. It's much better to just know exactly where you are going instead of walking nearly six miles away from your car. We were lucky. Next time we will be smart so that we don' t need to be so lucky.

Yes I'm lame

I didn't post the photos and I probably won't get to it tonight because of the concert. Bad blogger, bad!