Cheese and Yellow Wine in the Jura

We spent 2 full days in the Jura, about an hour drive north of Geneva (in decent weather conditions...I think Rich discussed our ill-fated trip through the Alps in an earlier post). The first day we hiked in the vineyards around Arbois, center of production of the tasty and slightly bizarre yellow wine. That was the day of the cheese debacle. The next day we hiked around the Herrisson waterfalls, then I went for a walk around the village we were staying in, Montigny-Sur-L'Ain, while Rich slept off the cheese. Pictures below:

1. Rich sitting in the middle of a traffic circle in Arbois

2. Arbois seen from the vineyards above the town

3. Rich by the waterfalls

4. The cows near our village. They all creepily stopped what they were doing to watch me walk by.

5. Christelle and Pascale, the proprietress and proprietor of Au Douillet Gourmet, the B&B where we stayed.

A wine-soaked tour of Burgundy April 22-26

We left Paris Wednesday morning and took the train to Beaune, stopping off in Dijon for lunch. With the help of a hand-drawn map in "Long Ago in France", we located what we think was MFK Fisher's house for part of her time living in Dijon.

We got to Beaune in the late afternoon, and spent the next three full days bike touring in the area. We did a figure-8 route in the red wine area between Beaune and Dijon, including the "Route des Grands Crus". Because the land that is planted with vineyards in this area is actually fairly narrow (about 1 km wide), part of our ride was through canola and wheat fields. The tour company was called "Detours in France" and we were quite happy with them. The person there that arranged everything for us was actually a Canadian expat who had married a local.

Our trip included a private tour of the Hotel-Dieu, which was quite amazing. The Hotel-Dieu is a public hospital that was built in the 1400s by Nicholas Rolin and his wife Gigonde de Salon. Rolin felt that he needed to do something big to atone for his many sins. The hospital was in use until the 1970s, and its operation (as well as that of the modern hospital) was and continues to be funded by the wine grown on the prime terroir that Rolin endowed to the hospital.

Rich has already blogged extensively about our experiences with the heavy food and delicious reds and whites, so I'll just post some of the pictures here:

(1)me in front of MFK Fisher's house in Dijon
(2)Rich in a field of canola on Day 1 of our ride
(3) me at a low-key degustasion in Nuits St. Georges on the morning of Day 2
(4) a vineyard with a wine village behind on Day 3. This picture give a sense of how the vines were just budding when were were there.
(5) the courtyard of the Hotel-Dieu. The glazed tile roof is common on important buildings throughout Burgundy. This was the only really rainy day of our trip.

Backblogging our trip - Paris April 19-21

We promised to update the blog with pictures once we got a chance. We'll be posting the full set of pictures on our website once we're done editing them.

At the start of our trip we spent 3 days in Paris. We mostly spent the time running around to museums and biking around town using Velib, the "free" bike system. There's a good article about in in the New York Times here. Favorite museums were the Musee de Moyenne Age, which has a fantastic collection of illuminated manuscripts and unicorn tapestries, and of course the Musee d'Orsay for an impressionism overload. Also, I think that Rich has already blogged about the enormous set of eight Monet waterlillies paintings at the Orangerie.

We had a nice dinner at Au Trou Gascon our last night in Paris. It featured cuisine from the Southwest of France. This is where we began our tragic love affair with Armagnac. I also ate Foi Gras for the first time. It was alright, but certainly not good enough to justify the animal welfare issues - for me anyway.

Here's some pictures: (1) me riding a Velib bike near the Bastille in a protected bike lane; (2) a gargoyle contemplating Paris, including the Pompedieu center; (3) Notre Dame Cathedral - this gives a good sense of a sunny day in Paris in the spring; (4) the spiral stairs leading up to the top of the Arc de Triomphe.

In Bruges

... and it's like a f*cking fairy tale.

(At least the food and drink of) France, in a nutshell

Sorry it's been so long since we posted any kind of update. For a tiny bit we had the excuse of not having any Internet connectivity, but that was only for 3 days, and nearly a week ago. We've just been busy enough that it's been hard to find the time to blog, even with carrying our own mini laptop around.

I'm writing this a bit more than 2 weeks into our 3 week vacation, sitting in the train station in Avignon (in Provence), waiting for a train to Brussels, and then on to Bruges. (Hopefully I won't repeat too much of anything Lorien already said. I can't get the wifi in the train station to work, so I can't first read through the previous blog posting.) I'm looking forward to our mini break in Belgium, although I am concerned that a few days outside of France will interrupt the progress that I've made in picking up French (albeit still with snippets where bits of Spanish continue to come forth from me without me even realizing it).

This might have been more coherent if I had been blogging as we were going along, so I apologize in advance if this ends up coming out as a disorganized stream of consciousness. We were pondering at the other extreme what it would be like to Twitter as we went along, but silly little 140 or character less postings that may have seemed amusing to us at the time (like "Sur le pont d'Avignon") might lose sense out of context.

As I believe Lorien already mentioned, our time in Paris was fun, full of plenty of croissants, pleasant weather, bicycling around with Velib, a decent amount of museum hopping, and a fair degree of success at fighting jetlag. I'm a bit of sucker for Impressionist painting and really enjoyed our visit to Musee d'Orsay. We had made a brief visit during our whirlwind pair of Paris stopovers in transit to and from the Middle East back in Fall 2007, but this time we had the opportunity to come back at a much more relaxed pace. We also downloaded a few free audioguides in mp3 from the Rick Steves website, and while we didn't simply 100% follow that tour, it was a useful way of putting the work in context and learning a bit that wouldn't have been obvious just on our own. We had earlier viewed a small portion of the vast amount of art that the Louvre has to offer, also accompanied by a free Rick Steves audioguide. As the Louvre ends where Orsay begins, this bit of museum hopping was in rough chronological order. Too bad we didn't have the time to continue the journey into more modern works -- but I guess that leaves something for next time. Further along the Impressionist theme, we also stopped by the Orangerie museum, which (as well as having other works), has two large elliptical rooms built especially for displaying a series of huge Monet water lillies paintings. But wait, there's more... on our final swing through Paris later this week we plan a day trip out to Giverny, where Monet lived, to see the gardens that inspired many of his paintings, as well as to see a Monet exhibition that just opened up this week.

... on the train now, just finished up with a bit of lunch. Words of wisdom -- don't try to make a salad on a train. Ok, maybe that should be obvious, but the salad was just part of what was leftover from a Saturday evening picnic, and wasn't originally intended for the train. I guess we concentrated on polishing off the bottle of wine at that picnic more than getting to all of our planned courses. It only ended up being a minor catastrophe as a mobile lunch. But still tasty.

Sitting here now watching the French countryside go by. This is just so much more pleasant than flying. Why can't there be decent inter city rail service in the US? Or decent pubic transit? (NYC excluded, that is.) But I digress.

After Paris, we took a train to Dijon, then a local to Beaune, and spent three days bicycling in Burgundy. This was self guided bicycle touring -- the idea is that your hotels (and some of your meals) are prearranged, and the tour company takes your luggage from one city to the next. You're given a map, and a suggested route, and suggestions for stops, but you're basically on your own to get to your destination, at whatever pace you want to set. It was really the perfect arrangement for us, especially in an area in which we were initially totally unfamiliar, and trying to do everything completely on our own may have been a bit daunting.

I think the most fascinating part of our visit to Burgundy for me was discovering its wines. Back when I had grandiose plans for blogging on a more continuous basis, I was going to call the corresponding posting, Like the whites, love the reds. Back when I first started to drink wine in college (I won't count shots of Manishewitz or the like from Bar Mitzvahs), I pretty much stuck to whites. I'm not sure if that's because that's mostly what there is in the Finger Lakes (upstate NY) region, because a drinkable bottle of white is often cheaper than a drinkable bottle of red, because I hadn't developed enough of a palette for wine yet, or maybe some combination of all of these. But somewhere along the way (and I really don't consciously remember this happening), the situation completely reversed itself. Back home, with the exception of sweet white wines that we pair with Thai and other Asian foods, we basically stick to red wines. My general opinion of California white wines has been that they're usually just not that flavorful, not that interesting, and if they're Chardonnay, they probably taste mostly like oak.

So what a wonderful surprise to discover in Burgundy (and this I guess actually started with a glass of Chablis in Paris) that there are all of these wonderful white wines, full of flavor, and distinct from each other. But as I hinted above, what really captured me was the red wines. I feel like I'm on the verge of sounding like some snobby wine geek any time I try to describe wine verbally, but some of the wines were just truly amazing, with kind of an earthiness and muskiness and full of subtlety -- very different from the full bodied red wines we typically drink in California. Even this light wine that we got for a picnic (which at 6.50 euros, about $8 or $9, is the best value wine I've ever had) was so full of character. I typically think of a light wine as being fruity, but this still had a bunch of complexity; it was just somehow very easy drinking that made it perfect for a stop while biking.

Another aspect that's different -- we're used to thinking about a wine primarily in terms of what type of grape it is. But in Burgundy, it's pretty much all the same grapes -- Pinot Noir for red, Chardonnay for white. And the land is divided into ridiculously small geographic regions (like hundreds of them in a few square kilometers around a town), and the conventional wisdom is that it's the land (the terroir, if we want to get precise in our terminology) that the gives the wine its distinct characteristics.

I wish we could bring more of it home, although there are various logistical difficulties involved. I've been a little bit on a quest to get a full bottle of this one particular wine that we had a half bottle of at dinner one night (I think it's the best red wine I've ever had), but unfortunately I'm somewhat resigned by now to the extreme likelihood that that's just not going to happen.

Ok, I've clearly rambled on way too long about Burgundian wine. Biking in the countryside was quite nice too. We didn't just spend our entire time drinking. Although we demonstrated that drinking and cycling don't have to be mutually exclusive, especially when the terrain is relatively flat.

Following Burgundy, we rented a car and drove up into the Jura, an area nearby and at a slightly lower elevation than the French Alps. We didn't have too much planned there in the way of activities -- saw the countryside a bit (being able to cover more of an area by car), we went hiking a bit, stopped by the town of Arbois for a bit. For our lodging, we were staying on the property of a couple (Crystelle and Pascal) who run a dairy farm in a very small village and rent out some rooms to tourists. Crystelle doesn't speak any English, and although she claims that Pascal does in theory, I'm pretty sure that the only English words we heard him speak during our entire time there were "Yes we can!" Lorien is managing to impress people with her relative competence in French, and I'm managing to pick things up at a decent rate. Some of it may be coming back from the one year of French I had in 6th grade. I'm not sure how much knowing some Spanish helps or hurts. On one hand, there are lots of similarities, although I think going from French to Spanish (like Lorien did when we were in Mexico a few years back) is easier than the other way around. But on the other hand, I keep at times confusing Spanish and French and end up coming out with a sentence that's a bit of a mixture of the two. But people still generally get the gist of what I'm trying to say, even if I can't always understand the response that I get (thankfully I have Lorien to try to assist in that case.)

More new wine discoveries in the Jura, a type of aged white wine known as Vin Jaune ("yellow wine"). Rich and full of flavor and aroma, andunlike any other white wine I've ever had.

But with so much talk about wine, I've neglected to mention the food. It's been a little bit mixed. I'd say on average it's been good, with some of it being very, very good, and I don't think we've had anything that was really bad. Some of it (esp. in touristy areas in Paris) is a bit overpriced, but we've also had some very good food at fairly decent prices. Not too much of it has truly wowed me (although some of it has) -- I wonder if being around so much good food in the Bay area we've just gotten a bit spoiled, or I had too high expectations, or am I just starting to sound like a food snob now... My biggest issue with the food up until this point in the narration is just that in Burgundy andthe Jura it tended to be so heavy and so much meat. I can't understand how people in those areas don't get fat. It's wonderful as special occasion food, but eating it day after day was starting to get to be a bit much. And forget about the myth that French portions are supposed to be small... I think our one salvation was that every day from our arrival through Burgundy we were bicycling at least some, and then in the Jura we were walking and hiking a bit. But I finally got done in by the cheese. In Arbois we had a lunch that included fondue. Little did we know that for dinner that night (there was no choice in the menu on the dairy farm) the main course was fondue. And then, of course, following the main course is the cheese course (would you like cheese with your cheese?). That one day was a bit too much for me, and it took another full day for me to really recover.

Which brings us to Provence. After the Jura we drove down south. Since we hadn't really made it up into the Alps, we decided to take a somewhat indirect route that first headed east a bit along the border with Switzerland, hoping to get a view of Mount Blanc. That didn't really work out so well, since we ended up driving into a snowstorm, which although was somewhat pretty in and of itself, somewhat destroyed the possibility of any panoramic vistas. And, it also illustrated the risk of driving into the mountains without a weather forecast, since we didn't have internet access in the Jura. (And I was mildly worried about how well our rental car would handle in the snow.) But we made it out of the storm without too much trouble, and by the end of the day we were in the warmth (almost heat) and sunshine of Provence.

We spent 4 full days (5 nights) in Provence. We stayed in St. Remy de Provence (a small city a little south of Avigon) and used it as a basis to explore the area. We saw various Roman ruins, midaeval cathedrals, pink flamingos (real ones), charming villages, wandered around a bit with no particular purpose, and had some wonderful food (and more good wine) in an area where they seem to recognize that food also consists of fresh fruits and vegetables and isn't limited to meat and cheese and potatoes. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, and like I said above, we did have some very good food before Provence. But Provence felt more like the kind of food that we can eat every day. Perhaps it's also because it's more familiar. The food is more similar to what we're used to eating, the red wines I think were more similar to Caliornia reds (although the crisp white wines were yet another new treat), and even the somewhat Mediteranean climate where we stayed (which was a bit inland from the sea) was somewhat similar to home, although it gets both quite a bit colder in the winter and quite a bit hotter in the summer in Provence.

I worry that reading over what I fear has become way too verbose of a monologue will have little to say that isn't related to food or drink. Not all of our time has been occupied with that. Although admittedly it is a major focus of ours, and we did plan things that way. Perhaps I'll fill in other non gastronomic details later in other postings. And there's more room for that when captioning pictures. (Full sets of pictures will be online following our trip. I'm not sure whether we'll get around to posting any highlights in this blog.) But Lorien is nearing the end of her book and perhaps I should take the opportunity to end this posting and switch from writing to reading now that I've chronologically caught up with the present. We've got numerous books with us, but I don't think I've yet gotten past the preface of one. Guidebooks, phrasebooks, and either our French dictionary or French grammar book don't really count.

So all in all we've been having a wonderful time. Keeping fairly busy, although I think we've been keeping things to a reasonable pace so that we're still having plenty of time to just relax and enjoy our vacation (the focus on food and wine clearly is helping with that). In general the people have been extremely friendly, and in general the weather has been quite nice. Other than a bit in Paris, and a bit over the May 1 holiday weekend we have experienced very few crowds and almost no other North Americans. It's definitely not yet peak tourist season -- I think we've picked a very good time to visit.

So it's on to Belgium for a few days, with an accompanying temporary switch from wine to beer. And further exploration of chocolate. :)

Today I ate snails

...and I liked them! And if you've known me since the days when I was a fussy eater you'll know that was a big deal.

Anyway, we're having a lovely time. We're doing a lot of eating and drinking and bicycling to burn it off. My French is quickly improving, and Rich's is no longer nonexistant. Everyone has also been very nice to
us - there aren't a whole lot of other North American tourists here right now.

This will be a pretty bare bones description with no pictures because its been a packed few days and I'm having trouble typing on Rich's XO keyboard. We spent our first three days in Paris. We got in on Sunday at
the crack of dawn and were intent on staying up until after sunset, which is 8:45 pm here. While, we were sucessful, our souls didn't really start catching up until some time Tuesday. Since this is Rich's
first time here, we focused on catching him up on the must-sees such as the Notre Dame tower, the Louvre and Musee d'Orsay. We had made a reservation at a fancy restaurant that specializes in cuisine from
Gascony, since that's a region we won't be visiting this trip. I'm glad we waited until Tuesday since that was the first day we could have enjoyed it. We also biked around Paris via Velib, the "free" municipal
bike system that we'd been looking forward to. I'm sure Rich will have more to say about that later.

Yesterday we took the train to Beaune via Dijon where we had lunch. This is in the Burgundy region. We're currently on a self-guided bike tour based in Beaune. We rode 45km today to Nuit-St-Georges where we'll be
staying tomorrow as well. Today's ride was through fields of blooming canola and tiny villages. Tomorrow's ride takes us up to Gevrey Chambertin and the Cotes-de-Nuits vineyards. We're fuelling ourselves
with wine, cheese and coffee, and large quantities of meat in rich, winey sauces. If the French eat small portions, I haven't seen them yet.

Anyway, in sum, we're having a good time and we'll post more later.

And we're off again...

It's way too late and I need to get to bed b/c we leave early tomorrow morning for France and Belgium.

I'm posting this because I've been lax in captioning and summarizing and putting up a link to our Yosemite pictures. We went on the first weekend of Spring. Spent Saturday cross country skiing. Saturday night it snowed. About a foot and a half up at the elevation we were staying, but a few inches even made their way down into Yosemite Valley -- where I had never been, always fearing the crowds. Sunday was gorgeous -- we spent the time just driving around from place to place, doing small hikes around waterfalls, and taking pictures.

I will do a better job one of these days in the hopefully not too distant future, but for now the pictures are up (and somewhat edited) at http://richandlorien.org/pictures/2009-03-Yosemite/index.html. (No link from the main page yet.) There's a bunch that we like, but our favorite is http://richandlorien.org/pictures/2009-03-Yosemite/html-large/dscn4998.html.

Au revoir, tomorrow in Paris.

Happy Passover

We upheld tradition and had a very small seder tonite, for the second night of Passover. Lorien and myself, plus we invited one other person over (Leah). We tried to keep it somewhat low key, unlike the massive Penthouse seder from a few years back.

But we did get a bit adventurous on the food. The majority of the dishes were experiments, trying things for the first time -- from the lamb shank (if you need one for the seder plate, why not try serving it as the main course?) to the homemade matzo (Lorien is overjoyed that she now knows what her grandmother served with chicken soup), to the horseradish. I suppose I've made the charoseth before, but even that I experimented with a bit. And I'm intrigued that the American version isn't the last word in charoseth -- I didn't have the chance to try other variants, but maybe next time...

It felt a bit wasteful to print out entire haggadahs for what was a fairly abbreviated seder, so we went all high tech and just each used a laptop to read from a pdf.

Papa's Pics

Here are some of the people pictures from my parents visit. Here's my mother and me (in a tree) at Live Oak Park in Berkeley. Next is Rich and I with wine-stained teeth in a wildflower-filled vineyard in Dry Creek Valley, Sonoma. Then Rich, me and Mummy at the eastern tip of point Reyes. Then finally, my mother and father (in a rare photographic appearance) at the top of Mt. Diablo near Walnut Creek. Oh yeah, and Dirk the cat being photogenic.

Fonos in Frisco

Actually, they were, but now they're wandering the desert states. And no one really calls it "Frisco" but otherwise it doesn't work as an alliteration.

Nevertheless, my parents were here and now they're continuing their vacation in the great desert national parks. While they were here, we hung out in Berkeley, and explored the paths in the hills, went to Sonoma wine country, went tidepooling in Marin, hiking in Point Reyes and driving to the top of Mt. Diablo near Walnut Creek. The weather was, ahem, changeable, but that's the tradeoff for early spring when things are green, the wildflowers are going crazy in Sonoma, and there are elephant seal pups on the beach at Point Reyes.

I generally consider it futile to take pictures when my father's around, so I don't have any to post yet. When they get back to Toronto, my father promised to send some pics for me to post, so stay tuned...

Checkin from the mothership

Still at Phish, still having fun. Last night's show was good as well.

We had time to kill during the day and wandered around Virginia Beach a bit. Nice that it's warm here, just a few days ago I think it was below freezing.

I decided not to bother trying to find a Sunday night ticket, and I'm leaving soon for the airport on my original flight. Jeff and Jared are heading to tonite's show, which is the last of the run.

On the road again

Immediately after my last post, I came down with a pretty nasty cold or flu or something, which I'm just finally almost but not quite entirely recovered from. And now I once again find myself on the road again...

Back in August 2004, I endured a pretty miserable experience at what was supposed to be Phish's last shows (following the torrential rain and mud soaked fields that caused too long of a backup of cars, we were part of the 10s of thousands that abandoned our cars to walk to the show). Oh yeah, and they were pretty mediocre shows. And at the time I said that Phish better not pull some lame oh we're getting back together a few years down the road, and that I certainly wouldn't be flying cross country for them.

Fast forward to March 2009, and here I am, in Hampton, VA, last night was the first set of a three night run. (I'm just going to Fri and Sat b/c we have 2 tickets for each of 3 nights, but 3 people to split them between. Although I could probably find a Sunday xtra if I really wanted to stay another day.) I may have been a little bitter before, but I think I've forgiven them -- it was a pretty damn good show last night.

And it amazes me how much technology has progressed -- no more tape trees and waiting for the mail... Courtesy of the band, we have already downloaded 256k mp3s of last night's show (copied to 2 laptops and an iphone already) and are listening to it right now on the computer I'm typing on.

Yes, I realize that most of you out there probably think I'm crazy.

- Rich

I'm back

As Lorien mentioned, I was in Barcelona and Rome for work, for about a week and a half total. I had hoped to blog from the road. But the trip ended up involving a lot more work than I had imagined, and I wanted to make the most of my precious little spare time, as well as get away from my laptop for a bit.

I'm still a bit tired and jet lagged (just got in last night), so I'll keep it brief for now. Here are a couple of pics. The first is of me in Barcelona atop some Gaudi apartment building, with the Sagrada Familia (crazy Gaudi church still under construction after more than 100 years) in the background. The second is a view of St. Peter's Square and St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City at twilight.

More pictures will be coming in the near future.

Scattered to the four winds...

It's been a while, so I thought I'd update. Right now I'm in Toronto visiting my parents, and Rich is in Barcelona for work, and will be in Rome next week.

The picture was taken by my father of me and my mother yesterday in front of the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario). I hadn't been there since I was a teenager, and I've always thought of it as a second-rate collection, but I was really impressed by how they've updated it. If you're among our Toronto readership, I particularly recommend visiting the Holman Hunt exhibit (there until May) and the permanent contemporary collection on the 5th floor.

Rich will hopefully be providing some photos from his current trip some time in the not to distant future. He told me that today he was at Sagrada Familia, the Gaudi Cathedral in Barcelona.

Meanwhile, it's been pouring in the Bay Area, which is always a mixed blessing. I hope the cats are okay (they're being looked after by our next-door neighbor) and that the basement is not a swimming pool.

In Memorium, Legolas the Cat - 1996 to 2009

My parent's beloved cat Lego died yesterday after being ill for several months. Although it was too short, Lego lived a full life and truly achieved the pinnacle of pampered cat-ness. I'm certain that he's in kitty heaven now, taking naps and making trouble. He will be missed.

Happy New Year!

I thought I'd post before the year rollover gets too far in the past. Happy new year to our readership, and may your 2009 be sweet and joyful. We're planning on traveling more this year, compared to 2008, with trips back east and to Europe on the agenda.

Rich and I spent the new year at Bodega Bay, a small town on the coast a little north of SF, with a group of friends from our 2005 Burning Man camp, Winking Lotus. We rented a couple of houses overlooking the ocean. The first picture is the group setting of on a walk down to the beach on New Years morning. We also did a sunset hike around Bodega Head, which is where the next two were taken. More photos can be found at http://richandlorien.org/pictures/2009-01-Bodega-Bay/

Ho ho ho (part 2 of n)

Once again, we participated in SantaCon (aka Santarchy), on December 14, 2008.

Lorien and Rich reprised their same roles as last year. Unlike last year (but like all other years), SantaCon was entirely in SF this year. But it has grown big enough that it started out as three separate contingents. We opted for the "classic" route starting at Fisherman's Wharf. All three contingents eventually united with each other.

It was kind of cold at times, but thankfully for the most part dry. Personal highlights included the Hasidic Santa klezmer band, Santa dancing to a recording of Adam Sandler's Hannukkah Song in front of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and Santa politely rampaging through the Westfield Mall.

For more pictures, go to our web site.

Turkey Days...

A flock of six wild turkeys has made itself at home near my office building since earlier in the fall. They mostly mill around the parking lot, road, and front door of the building, eating the landscapers’ primroses. They’re not in the least bit scared of humans or cars. In my opinion, they’re really taking their chances given the time of year, the state of the economy, and the relative dearth of vegetarians in Walnut Creek.

Thanksgiving

We had a fun Thanksgiving visiting Florida. We stayed with Dave and Carol around Ft. Lauderdale -- Carol is expecting in March but managed to find the energy to host Thanksgiving dinner. Ben and Sara drove up from Miami with baby Chloe, and Elaine and Bill came down from New York.

While we were in the vicinity of warm waters, we managed to get our advanced scuba certification. We had originally gotten certified on our first visit to Thailand, in 2003. The motivation to do something a bit more came from our visit last fall to Israel and Egypt. At the most well known site in the vicinity of where we went diving in Egypt (the Blue Hole), local dive shops would only take divers with advanced certification.

Other than having to do some reading and excercies in advance, the certification basically consisted of 5 dives over 2 days, each highlighting one aspect in particular (wreck dive, deep dive, night dive, navigation, peak performance buoyancy). It was fun, the weather was good, and the visibility was very good. Although most of the rest of the people on the diving boats seemed to be locals who didn't feel the weather was as warm and balmy as we did. A bunch of them had gloves and hoods (we just wore full wetsuits), and felt the need to put on wool caps at the surface.

Last weekend we hosted our annual holiday beer tasting cocktail hour on Friday, and Lorien's company holiday party was on Saturday. And this coming weekend is SantaCon.

Ditto

Yeah, it's pretty incredible. Crowds of people spontaneously gathering in the street, and it's political, but it's not a protest. It's a party. It's even enough for me to overcome my cynicism for a day and be excited, be hopeful, be proud to be an American.

Election night special

Tonight I have seen people of all ages and colors dancing in the streets of Oakland and Berkeley. I have seen cynical Oakland hipsters in a bar crying because of the words of a politician on TV. I've seen a gathering of about a thousand Berkeley students singing the Star Spangled Banner and chanting USA! USA! on Telegraph Avenue.

What did you all see today?

[posted by Lorien]

Are we there yet?

I'll be the first to admit that I don't actually particularly like Obama that much. He's very charismatic, and a good speaker, but he's still a product of the two party duopoly, and I don't really expect things to fundamentally change if he is elected president. He's not really a progressive, and I don't expect him to swiftly end the US occupation in Iraq, stop US imperialism, turn back the assault on the US constitution and civil liberties, provide for universal health care with a single payer system, reign in the military industrial complex, eliminate the concept of corporate personhood, end the "War on [some] Drugs", reinstitute a reasonable definition of what is patentable, roll back copyright to a reasonable length, close Guantanamo, end the Cuban embargo, etc. etc. etc., these are just a few of the things that come to my mind off the top of my head in what is probably the first political ranting I've done in this space (which Lorien will probably be annoyed at me for). And frankly, I think this country is way too conservative for any true progressive to ever be elected president, and I do realize that there is a limit to how much one person can possibly do in that office with even the best of intentions. (Although I'm shocked by how successful George Bush has been in using the power of that office to do so much harm.)

Nevertheless, what a relief it would be to have someone in the White House who doesn't make me cringe with every word that comes out of his mouth. Someone who's actually intelligent and articulate. Someone who doesn't make me feel that I have to be embarrassed or apologetic every time I'm out of this country.

And the sense of hopefulness around here is encouraging, even if I feel it is somewhat misguided. (I was going to say delusional, but that's a bit too harsh.) I can't imagine anyone having been motivated enough to paint a picture of John Kerry on the side of their house (the picture here is from our neighborhood). And I even was able to overcome my cynicism enough to suggest that we do a set of Obama-themed pumpkins for Halloween. I then discovered that we weren't the only ones. (I'll let you know if one of our pictures gets posted there.)

So hopefully things will be just a bit brighter on the morning of November 5. We really could use at least a bit of a counter balance to the past 8 years. And if not, well, maybe we'll have to really start seriously thinking about heading a bit further north.

And I really hope that California Prop 8 fails. It would be really sad to have friends of ours have their marriage taken away from them because of other peoples' prejudices.

New moon trip to Yosemite (or, Yo Semite, shanah tovah!)

I know I said I was going to do catchup with all of our summer activities, but I'm still excited about our backpacking trip to Yosemite last weekend. We took Friday off and spent 3 days in the back country. Rich and I have always been somewhat reluctant to go to Yosemite because of the crowds, so we reserved our permit 6 months ago. However, we learned when we went to pick up the permit Friday morning that we would have had no problem getting one on the spot. We saw fewer people on the trail than we ever have on a backpacking trip, except for one rainy weekend in Lassen a few years back. We even went more than 24 hours without seeing a single other soul, which was definitely not what we expected.

We hiked north out of Tuolumne Meadows, about 8000 feet near the east end of the park. The trail was a semi-loop, and the way out was about 7.5 miles. We camped at the middle of the three Young Lakes (elev. 10,000 ft) at the base of Ragged Peak.

On day 2 we left our camp and hiked off-trail up to the top of an 11,000 foot ridge. We had meant to go up to a 12,000 foot peak (White Mountain) but I was getting light-headed at that elevation and didn't want to fall off the mountain.

On day 3 we headed back, finishing the loop (another 7 miles) with some spectacular views of the Cathedral range. On our hike home, we could see a storm gathering in the distance, as you can see by going to our full album here.

Overall, the weather was gorgeous - warm but not hot in the day and not too cold at night. We chose that particular weekend because of the new moon, and both nights we lay out in our sleeping bags looking at amazing stars. In the day and especially in the afternoon the fall light and the changing colors made everything golden.

And of course, this was that last new moon of the year, leading to Rosh Hashanah. Happy new year, Yo Semites! (as a Tshirt at the new Contemporary Jewish Museum in SF proclaims)

My poor dice...

So I've got this pair of fake leopard fur, fuzzy dice that hang from the handlebars on my commuting bike, wrapped over my ding ding bell. Like the ones people used to hang from the rear view mirror or their car -- does anyone still do that?

They're kind of pointless, and kind of silly, but I've grown quite fond of them. I've had them on my bike for a number of years now -- I think I got them sometime around 2002 or 2003 from a housemate that got them along with a bunch of stuff that a friend of his/her's (it's complicated) was discarding when cleaning our her closet (along with other fake animal print items, if I recall correctly). I've gotten a disproportionate number of complements over the years for such an inconsequential bicycle adornment. Lots of people have admired them, and one even offered (practically begged) to purchase them (I declined).

Which brings me to this evening. I'm leaving work, walking to my bike in the parking garage of my office. As I'm getting on my bike, I notice there's one die on my bike. Yup, just one. The two dice should be connected by a short piece of yarn, but its mate is nowhere in sight.

I'm not sure why this is troubling me so. It's just a stupid pair of dice. But somehow I've gotten sentimentally attached to them. Perhaps this is just a sign that it's time to move on, and put something else that's fun worthy on my bike. (Riding along with a single fuzzy die doesn't appeal to me much.) Or that I shouldn't get so attached to things.

Hopefully Lorien is right in her assessment that the yarn just wore through. I can't imagine that someone would have actually cut it, unless perhaps the building management is passive aggressively trying to get back at me for the various verbal altercations I've had with them over the years. And there are far more valuable things that I leave on my bike worth stealing than a synthetic, cube shaped, game oriented, faux animal covered, piece of fluff.

And maybe I'll just happen to spot them on the street tomorrow morning if I take the exact same route. Okay, maybe not.

Summer 2008 Catchup - Seattle

We've been bad about posting, mostly because it's been a very busy summer. We'll try to catch up, starting with our trip at the end of July to visit Chip and Karen in Seattle. We spent a weekend up there, which was great - I hadn't been to Seattle in 8 years and had forgotten how much I like it there. These are both pictures from Chip's camera - we may post some of our own once we get them off the camera.

On the Saturday, we drove to the eastern Cascades and climbed Iron Peak, a tough but worthwhile hike. Here's Rich juggling rocks at the peak with Chip and Karen's dog Sydney looking on.

On Sunday, Chip took us sailing. There was decent wind and we got to see the area from the water. The second picture is Karen, Rich and I on the boat.

By the way, I'd like to make a shout out to the Silkies, who just welcomed baby Salem into the world. Congratulations!