One Down, Many To Go

One of the most stressful things in our lives came to a head today. I haven't posted about this because it was private but I hinted at it in this post. Fortunately everything turned out O.K. We can let out our collective held breath and get on with our lives. On to the next stress inducer.

Thank you to everyone for their thoughts and prayers.

Please

Think Happy Thoughts

Book: Isaac Asimov's "The Gods Themselves"

When it comes to reading, I try to alternate non-fiction and fiction and it was time for fiction. I didn't have a long list of fiction to read so I pulled up a classic from 1972, Isaac Asimov's "The Gods Themselves".

The first non-Star Trek fiction that I read on my own was Asimov's Foundation Trilogy which was later expanded to several more books. I really liked Asimov and I read many of his books including some short stories such as this interesting one that I discovered just a few days ago. So, after reading and enjoying so much of his writing I figured I would read another of his award winning novels.

"The Gods Themselves" is divided into three sections. The first details the invention/discovery of the Electron Pump, a seemingly endless source of free energy. The Electron Pump works by shuttling matter between two parallel universes with the difference in natural laws between the universes supplying the magic of free energy. In this first section we follow Professor Lamont who is trying to prove that the Electron Pump will result in the Sun exploding.

The second section follows a triad in the parallel universe. Much time is taken fleshing out the very alien beings and how they interact in this parallel universe. It turns out that the aliens are the true inventors of the Electron Pump and they are using the energy even though they know that our Sun will be destroyed in the process. The aliens are interesting but in the end feel almost like an afterthought added to make the story more interesting. More time is taken explaining the alien race than explaining their relationship with the electron pump and the rest of the novel.

The third part returns you to our universe, the moon specifically, where we are introduced to another culture, the Lunerites - a society of immigrant humans and humans born on the Moon. A somewhat minor character from the first section is reintroduced and, with the help of a Moon Maiden, saves the universe.

I was a little disappointed. This story actually felt like three independent short stories and, while there was a common thread, never felt like a cohesive whole. There also seemed a shallowness to some of the character reactions that didn't feel true. Some of the reactions felt exaggerated. I just couldn't see real people acting this way.

As I read the book I wondered if all of Asimov was this way. Could it be that my expectations have been elevated by some of my recent reads? Am I more discriminating in what I read? Maybe. I am not a reader of the classics. I read predominately science fiction. I don't consider myself a sophisticated reader. Perhaps I'm learning the difference between good and bad writing. Then again, maybe Asimov wrote one book that didn't live up to my expectations.

It was an OK book with some interesting turns but in the end it just didn't do it for me. Move on, there's nothing to see here.

Smell My Finger ...

The Wife: Smell my fingernails. What do they smell like?

I take a deep breath, smelling her fingernails*.

The Wife: My Butt?!! HAHAHAHAHA!!!!

* They actually smelled like vanilla.

Movie: The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters

Saturday night, after a rather blah day, especially for the Wife, I went to blockbuster and rented "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters". I was a little unsure when I picked it up. It's a geeky documentary about video game geeks. I wasn't sure if the Wife would enjoy it or not. It was a little too ... me ... but it had gotten good reviews so I gave it a shot. What the heck, it was a free rental.

There are several different types of geeks in the wild. Computer Geeks, Star Trek Geeks, D&D Geeks, and Video Game Geeks just to name a few. This movie was about a sub-genre of the video game geek: the Classic Video Game Geek. For those who are sane and are not familiar with the video gaming, the classic video game is the old arcade style games such as Pac-Man, Centipede, Defender, and the centerpiece of the documentary, Donkey Kong.

The movie follows Steve Wiebe. While he was enjoying a good life, it was an average life and he did not excel at any particular thing. Then he set his sights on the Donkey Kong Record, a record set 25 years earlier by Billy Mitchell. All of the people in the documentary are characters. Wiebe, though he had his own problems, is the only one that seems normal to me. Wiebe's one issue is the desire to be good at something. All the others, gamers, 'referees', and record keepers, seem like they crawled into a cave in 1982 and never came out. A few of them were even from that gaming mecca of the world, Iowa. It turned out to be an interesting and very funny story of obsessions, politics, egos, and irrational rivalries. Mitchell came off pretty bad in the movie in my opinion. He was conceited, hypocritical, vindictive, and a little slimy. The Wife and I were rooting for Wiebe through out the movie and we both whooped when we found out that after the filming of the documentary Wiebe had beat Mitchell's record. Unfortunately, three months after Wiebe broke the record, Mitchell got it back.

I highly recommend this movie.

The best part of the movie for me was looking at the Wife and seeing a big smile on her face. The situation we are currently struggling with is not a cause for smiling and seeing her smile made me feel really warm and fuzzy. The movie seems to have broken her out of her funk and the smile continued into Sunday. I don't know if it's only a temporary reprieve or if it will last longer but that doesn't mean that I'm not grateful for the 90 minutes of distraction and the happiness that followed.

The Facial Hair Poll Results

Well, with a whopping eight votes, the facial hair poll is officially closed. Like the current democratic candidates, it was a close result. The extremes: Full Beard and Clean Shaven, both received 37% of the vote. The compromise, Goatee, received 25%. The lowly Mustache and Other categories received 0%. This pretty much gives me the option to choose my own Facial Hair style.

Drum roll please ... I have chosen to go Clean Shaven for a while. We'll see how long it lasts. In the past clean shaven has only lasted a month or two at the most.

I was going to post a picture of the pile of facial fur but it looked a little pathetic so no pictures.

P.S. Don't forget to Spring Forward today or you'll be late tomorrow!

Hiking Ventura County #47: Las Robles Trail - Part 2

Thursday's hike was the eastern half of the Los Robles Trail. I posted about the western half last month. I was not that impressed by the western half as it was very urban and the up-down roller coaster was grueling. The eastern half is a totally different hike. There's a lot of vertical up-down but it was not as difficult as the other half and the trail has a much more rural feel to it.

The hike starts on east Potrero Road and starts climbing up to the top of a ridge. The first two thirds of a mile take you past some nice homes before it turns west and away from the evidence of the urban. Near the top of the ridge I ran into my first quandary. Since I was dividing the Los Robles in half and I was now doing the second half, my trail description was backwards. When I reached the first intersection, a four way intersection, I had difficulty deciding how to determine the correct way to go. It turned out there were a couple ways to interpret the reversed directions. I decided to use the geocaches that I'd programmed for this hike to guide me. Not the best way to go since I didn't even know for sure if they were even on the right trail.

After making a few wrong turns and taking some questionable trails, I made it to the main Los Robles trail and started off in the right direction. The trail is a dirt road that passes through a rural area even though civilization was never really that far away. The surrounding hills blocked most of the traffic sounds. The only reminders were the power lines that criss-crosses the hills.

The last third of my hike was familiar territory. I'd been here last year when I did the Los Robles Loop. After going down a steep and kind of treacherous, trail I arrived at a picnic table that was going to be my turn around point. When I got there, without falling down I may add, I realized that I had not reached my desired 5 miles yet so I followed a spur trail that took me up a hill. This part of the trail turned out to be the best part of the hike. The trail was covered by a canopy of trees - very nice.

I turned around at the 5.02 mile point and headed back to the picnic table. On the way back down I noticed something that looked familiar. I stepped off the trail and there it was, a geocache. Looking through the log I saw that I had found this one when I did the Los Robles loop.

I sat down at the picnic table. Like the table on the Happy Camp hike, I was accompanied by a lost hat. I had lunch and rested up in preparation for climbing back up the steep trail.

I found a few more caches on the way back to the car. The caches took me on a different path which, some how, shortened my hike a wee bit. The total hike was 9.73 miles. There was about 584 feet of vertical - not much compared to some of the hikes I've done recently. The different path also took me to the wrong side of a creek forcing me to ford the swift moving cement lined creek bed. Fortunately my boots are waterproof and I managed to cross without slipping on the slimy algae covered concrete.

The hike was OK. Definitely better then the first half of this Los Robles trail. It turned out that the geocaches were the main feature of this hike - I found 14 geocaches in all. The caches got me on the right trail and kept me going in the right direction. They also took me to various vista points that gave me great views of the city of Thousand Oaks. Without the caches, the hike would have been just average. A few, very few, pictures can be found here.

Killer Of Creativity

I haven't been posting very regularly lately. The house has been a stressful place these past couple weeks. Some of the stress inducers have been mentioned in the last couple of posts but the most stressful issues cannot be blogged about. Some things are just too personal.

I try to get posts put together but, to tell the truth, stress is not very conducive to creativity. I've been drawing a major jagged edge blank lately and my mind just isn't there. I am still going to hike. I need the distraction. This should result in at least one other post this week but that may be it. Who knows.

Homer's Travels lingers in the background. The people who should be in my thoughts are there, front and center. I hope that everything will turn out well.

Mister, Can You Spare A Dime?

If you drive by our house you will not see the for sale sign. Why? We are applying for a home equity loan and you can't get one while our house is for sell. The silly thing is, once you've qualified and the loan is in place, there is nothing stopping you from putting your house back on the market. So, the house is off the market for about two weeks while the loan is being processed.

The loan will give us the funds we need to buy our Omaha house in April when we go back to job and house hunt. Who knows, if everything goes right we may have a home in Omaha by the beginning of May.

Now all we need to do is get our Oxnard home sold. Let's hope our buyer doesn't come looking while the house is off the market.

Leap Day Blues And The March To Weirdness

Friday was 29 February, Leap Day. By some strange coincidence the Wife's school had the day off due to some Religious Education Conference. We planned to make it a nice day and go out for lunch and do some errands. Well, it didn't quite turn out as we planned.

We woke up to a bleary overcast sky and we both woke up a little obsessed with the house. We had planned to sell our house here in California and use the proceeds to buy a house in Nebraska. We are also planning to go to Omaha in early April for some job interviews and to look at houses. There's the rub. Our current house has had so few interested parties that we are concerned that the house won't sell in time. Meanwhile a house the Wife has been really interested in went off the market. So now we think if we find a house in April we will have to make a bid immediately. So I became obsessed with figuring out where we were going to get the additional $50K we would need to buy a house without selling our current house first. The Wife was obsessed about getting the house that she wants. Our worries and anxieties fed off each other all day.

Fortunately for us all this worrying and fretting manifested itself by us both being blah and it never turned into the grumpies. We went around all day going "waaaa! ... waaaa waaaa!" It was pretty pathetic but we kept it civil.

The day wasn't all bad as we did get out and did some errands and we had a good lunch at Zoey's Cafe, a small restaurant tucked back in an alley off of main street. The place has a Mediterranean feel and is cozy and intimate. We ate out on the small balcony. I was actually surprised how much I liked the food. Very good and very satisfying.

So, what do I do after a blah day punctuated by periods of anxiety? I watch a 36 year old Russian Sci-Fi movie. We started watching "Solaris" at around 7:30. The Wife survived about 40 minutes before she'd had enough and went upstairs. I stuck it out and watched about 120 minutes of the 165 minute film. I couldn't take it. The acting was stiff. The reaction of the characters to absurd situations didn't make sense. There were stretches, several minutes long, where nothing happened. They say this movie has a cult following. After watching it for two hours I suspect it's a suicide cult. A perfect end to my waaa-waaa Leap Day.

Saturday started out very much like Friday. I was a little blah, though not as much as Friday, and it was still overcast. We'd decided a few days back that we needed to get back on the road so we'd decided to go to our fall-back destination: Cambria. We headed up the road and my blahs faded away as the clouds broke up and let the sun shine through.

We stopped at Harmony to look around there some more. We were there last year and we decided to stop one last time. There were more flowers in bloom and the place looked really nice. The chapel, that had been closed, appears to be reopening. They've refinished the doors and a room in the closed restaurant across from the chapel has been cleaned up so it could be used as a small reception hall. Very nice. The wife bought a vase at the pottery shop. I bought a T-Shirt. I added the best pictures to my Harmony Set on Flickr.

We drove into Cambria, parked the car, and started in on the stores. We hit two of the Wife's favorite places. She ended up buying some decorative Cannisters at one of the stores. I'm not sure I like them but they're ok. We followed the shopping with lunch at our customary restaurant, the Main Street Grill.

After lunch we headed up the short hill behind the town to visit Nitt Witt Ridge. We were met by Mike, the owner and tour guide of Nitt Witt Ridge. He is obviously excited about the place and is full of information. This led to a very interesting tour of Art Beal's masterpiece home. You start with a four minute video about the place - actually a video segment from the early 80's show Real People. Art Beal, also known as Der Tinkerpaw and Captain Nitt Witt, was quite a character. His creation is really hard to describe. The place was built over a 50 year period by Cambria's garbage collector and it appears that a lot of Cambria's garbage ended up in Art Beal's house. It's a mish-mash of competing styles and folk art. The place fell into disrepair after the death of Mr. Beal. Many neighbors wanted it torn down. Then it was declared a California Historical Landmark (#939). It's unfortunate that there is no state, county, or city funding to help restore and maintain the place. It is all done with tour fees and volunteer work. If you're going to be in the area, make a reservation to tour the place, it's worth it. Some pictures are here.

After Nitt Witt Ridge we hit a few more stores, including a funky new place called Dirty Laundry that sold some crazy novelties (The "J" will be getting a little surprise - props for her religion class).

We left town and crossed over to the 101 via CA-46, one of the most beautiful roads around. The road takes you over the green hills, through Ranches and Vineyards, offering sights of the ocean all the way south to Morro Bay. The views were spectacular on Saturday.

On the way south we stopped in San Luis Obispo. After the wackiness that was Nitt Witt Ridge, we wanted to stop at another quirky landmark - Bubblegum Alley. We'd used a computer in a Cambria internet cafe to get the address and we made our way into the very interesting downtown area in search for weirdness and boy, did we find it. The narrow alley is pretty gross. Both walls are completely covered in chewed bubblegum. Not much more to say about that except here are some pictures.

Our last stop on the way home was a scenic overlook that I've passed many times. There is an old abandoned bridge that I wanted to photograph. I finally got to do it. Here are some photos.

The day ended well. We were both tired but in good spirits. The only issue I had was a bad case of accelerator foot - I could hardly walk when I got home. Saturday was a perfect balance to the blahness we were stuck in on Friday. I'm sure I will worry about the house move a lot more between now and the end of summer but everything will be all right if I can find some weird place to go to every now and then.