A visit from the cousin (and parents) was followed by a visit to the White House for the Easter Egg Roll. It was a madhouse and the first brutally hot sunshine of the year, but still kind of nice to check out Chateau Obama.
And OMG Justin Bieber was so cool.
Thanks to one particular faithful reader for encouraging me to continue to update this blog. This post’s for you!
We arrived back home today from a week out in California: Alex and Wendy’s wedding, followed by a few days with friends in Tahoe and then a sweet road trip–just me and my honey–down sweet sweet route 395 on the east side of the Sierra Nevada. It was awesome, if brief: a few hot springs stops followed by a visit to Death Valley. I put some photos up online.
Also, I don’t know what kind of BALCO concoction Mike and Jamie fed our tomatoes but we came back to some seriously ass-kicking tomatoes — dozens of flowers, a few tiny tomatoes, and lots of good cucumber plants starting to creep. We took down the wilting pea plants and fed them to the worms (who were running out of food and crawling on the side of the bin in the hunt for new fuel) after having a nice serving of them (the peas) for dinner. Hooray for a better crop (still not great–it gets too hot too quickly) this year than the last two! The dwarf pea variety that I ordered this year seemed to do better than the older variety. Also, next year we may grow them more for the edible shoots than the peas themselves (sorry, wrigglers!).
I arrived back from Hawaii on Tuesday and promptly came down with a cold. Ah, to be in the climate where you can sleep out under the stars there every night and walk around shirtless. I wouldn’t want it all the time, but to slurp it down for a week is just right.
Anyways, the Big Island served up the usual smorgasbord of adventure: hiking on volcanic craters and hardened lava flows, snorkeling with the turtles, getting thrashed about by waves, jumping off 40 foot cliffs into shark-infested waters, etc… If you think I’m joking about that last part, just check out the pictures. Off the edge of the cliff, we saw a large school of fish that was getting harassed by a large slender fish with black tips at the edges of its fins — Katie, the marine biologist who was with us, said it was probably a black-tip reef shark. Not dangerous to humans, so they say. Matty and others had a few whale sightings too, but I didn’t see any. Joanne and Francis put us up like kings again — they have an amazingly simple and beautiful place on the dry (south-west) side of the Big Island. Also, we got to hang out with Masulis’ Carleton friend Anna Laube (whom I didn’t know at school) who is making music as a singer-songwriter in SF right now. Her music is pretty sweet. Check out her website.
After the Big Island, it was off to Waimanalo on Oahu for Kaimana. I hadn’t played men’s ultimate in since I played at this tournament 3 years ago, I don’t think. And boy was it ever fun. Even got me thinking about training a bit and trying to play some men’s ultimate this summer/fall. Voltron was one of the three best teams there, but we managed to lose a close game in Semis. The only time the other team had the lead was when they won the game at hard cap, 12-11. That part sucked. I played solid (only 3 turnovers all weekend) and stepped it up in Semis a bit — getting a nice D in the sky on Hollywood and putting a sweet toss to “The Kid” in the back corner of our endzone after not throwing much upfield all weekend. Anyways, it felt real good to be a contributor on such a solid team. Some photos, taken by Matteo, are up online too. Best food of the weekend (why didn’t I take a picture?) was poke (pronounced poh-KAY), raw tuna with fresh onions and scallions marinated in soy sauce. Mmm hmm.
Back at home, things at school are heating up, as my school-wide oral exams are probably going to be scheduled in early April sometime. Writing the paper for that is going to eat up a lot of time. Also, it’s time to start planting seeds indoors. And Johanna did some sweet painting of the kitchen window while I was gone, so it’s almost time to install the bar. We’re supposed to be picking up bar stools (craigslist) this weekend. Vespa’s set-up is nearly complete. A new 500GB hard drive is on the way as a back-up disk to use in conjuntion with Time Machine, the new backup software that comes with Macs these days. More on the install process later.
In a last-minute decision, Kroody and I biked most of the way to Thanksgiving dinner in Pittsburgh. After realizing that we weren’t going to be able to bike all the way there from Baltimore, we scrambled on Friday (the 16th) to find the best way to get ourselves a good head start. Johanna (generously) offered to drive us up to Frederick or Harper’s Ferry, but we wanted to get a little further on. Amtrak goes to Cumberland (a perfect starting point) but we couldn’t take our bikes on the train because it’s too small a station and they don’t have access to the baggage car there. We ended up renting a car (“Drive for climate“, Kroody kept mumbling) and driving a small (gulp) SUV one-way out to Cumberland where we dropped it off at Wayne’s Citgo, loaded up the ponies and rode out along the Allegheny Passage rail-to-trail path headed uphill.
Two days, two cold nights, 150 miles and one flask of moonshine later, we rolled into Pittsburgh up to Kip and Aaron’s front door. It was a sweet trip. It snowed when we were at 2300 feet. It was 55 on the last day. On Monday, we got up at 4:30AM, were on the trail by 5, had a few hours of night biking punctuated only by the loud trains huffing and puffing along the other side of the Youghiogheny River with their bright front lights backlighting leafless trees and shining eerily off the early morning misty water.
Check out the photos from the trip.
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