Category Archives: Up to Stuff

June 17, 2011 · 11:32 am

I’m a real girl

After Aunt Mary’s funeral, we got an early morning flight on Friday and when we landed in SFO, I went right into work for the day.  Then we had a weekend to get settled and packed.  Monday morning, we flew to Kaua’i!

I had been so excited for this vacation for so long.  Partially because it was VACATION.  Period.  And because it was going to Hawai’i and it would be green and pretty and perfect.  It’s with some shame that I admit that I was quite terrified that my aunt’s pending demise was going to interfere with my vacation plans.  But it all worked out well enough in that respect.

And it was incredible.  The view from our little cottage was just beautiful.
 We grilled fish at home some days.  We ate fish tacos from roadside stands.  We loafed around and read books (I completed 4!) while I ate lots and lots of macadamia nuts.  Shave ice was sampled.  We saw a sea turtle right off shore, pretty close up.  We took a helicopter tour of the island, we rode bicycles down the road alongside a canyon, David surfed, we went for runs, we kayaked, we hiked, we tried stand up paddling, we swam in the ocean, we swam in waterfall pools, we drank POG with rum, and tried fantastic poke from a hole in the wall.

I suppose I could go on and I could provide all sorts of details, but there are two bits in particular that feel as though they’re really worth remembering to me, beyond the fact that the trip as a whole was wonderful.

1.  I existed, in front of other people who were not David, in just bikini bottoms.  No shorts.  No sarong.  Just the white expanse of my wobbly white thighs and hips for all the world to see.  Generally, I try to keep these bits to myself, but here I was just feeling so happy and comfortable and ok with myself, that I just let it go.  After kayaking up a river with a tour group, I didn’t want to put shorts back on over my wet bikini bottom, so I just didn’t and I went on the hike with my ass out.  Lest you think things have gotten too crazy, never fear – I did have a shirt on.  So no wobbly tummy and wobbly legs at the same time.
There is no photographic evidence of this.  You will have to take my word for it.

2.  I completed a really challenging hike that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do.  All the guidebooks listed the hike to Hanakapi’ai Falls as strenuous.  Not for beginners.  But that if you were up for the 8 mile round trip challenge, it was well worth it.  This picture doesn’t do it justice, but here it is: 

It took us 7 hours to get there and back, with a bit of a break in the middle to eat lunch and try to swim in the pool, which was frigid.  The hike was, as promised, very hard.  A lot of up hill.  Loads of down hill, which I think may actually be worse than up.  Parts were muddy.  There was some climbing and scrambling and having to use my hands to get up or down on the path.  Once, I was hanging from a tree branch trying to get down, realizing that I wouldn’t be able to pull myself back up, but that I couldn’t get a good footing, and that I was possibly going to die.  David managed to hoist me onto the ground, though, so I didn’t.  It was definitely not just a walk in the woods.  But I DID it.  And that’s when I realized that I am a real girl.  I can do stuff.  I don’t have to be afraid to try things because I’m too out of shape.  I am not just a worthless, fat, blah of nothing.  I so rarely feel proud of my accomplishments… calling them “accomplishments” even feels a bit silly.  But I was very proud of this.

All told, we spent 8 days in Kaua’i.  It felt like so much time when we first got there, but it all passed quickly enough.  And regular old ordinary life sure was fast to come hunkering back down again, once we were home.  Even though the dreamy, blissful quality of being on vacation is now long gone, I think I’ve still got some of that amazed-at-my-own-self feeling lingering on.

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April 12, 2011 · 3:15 pm

Maisie Dobbs

I’m going to blame Cloud Atlas, the novel of much buzz and fanfare by David Mitchell.  Once I got over the hump of struggling to get into it – to read more than a page or two at a time, I found that it was a really good book.  Really good. But the journey up and over that hump was a rough one.  I almost didn’t make it.  And I never give up on a book, no matter how bad, boring or bucolic.  Whatever.  Alliteration.  It’s where it’s at.

After finishing Cloud Atlas, which was around November of last year, I took a book reading vacation.  Which is weird.  Because I would usually devour a novel a week.  On this book reading vacation, I did read myself some YA, because let’s face it.  I couldn’t truly go cold turkey.  And reading material intended for someone half my age (or, erm…. crap.  A third of my age) totally counts as reading.

I finished that Sweet Valley Confidential piece of garbage in about a day.  It was bad.  And not bad like “oh come on, you knew it was going to be bad,” but bad like Francine Pascal had a conversation with herself that went like this:

– Why will these vapid little tween girls not desist in sending me their pitiful fan letters?
– What has become of me?  I know the word “tween.”
– After all these years, they still love Jessica and Elizabeth!
– The fools.
– Fools who have paid me millions for churning out saccharine trash.
– Perhaps if I were to wipe my ass and call it a novel, they would buy that.
– That is a brilliant idea!

But I read it.  No book left behind.

And today, I finished my first adult novel (at least I’m pretty sure it’s for grown-ups… kinda.  It is sort of Nancy Drew-esque.  Please don’t burst my bubble.) in months and months.

Yay!

Also, it was really good!

And!

It was the first in a series of eight, which means that I can just go chomping through these for a while.

So, Maisie Dodds.  She’s this World War I era British girl who goes to work as a maid.  Her employers pick up on her extra cleverness and sponsor her education.  Cambridge is interrupted by the war and Maisie goes off to France as a nurse.  Afterward, she starts her own business as a private investigator, and this book is the story of her first mystery solved.

Sometimes she wears a cloche.  And she has a pearl tipped hat pin.  And a nurse’s watch.  And from what I can tell, her nurse’s outfit was just like the one that one of my paper dolls had when I was five.

It is entirely possible that I fell enamored of the style and sentiment of the era more than the actual story telling, but I was engaged in the story and the character.  Although she is a little stuffy and not so quirky, but she’s awfully smart and sensible and always knows just what to say.

Even though it wasn’t a challenging read, I’m still feeling pretty chuffed* to have finished a whole grown-up book that perhaps I will do it again**!

*See what I did there?  I used a cute little British word, just like a Maisie Dobbs character would.

**For my next act, I will be reading the 2nd Maisie Dobbs book.

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April 6, 2011 · 12:31 pm

tilt shift

Like the entire universe, I’m fascinated by tilt shift photography.

The first time I encountered it was in a friend’s photo stream on Flickr:

photo by kaiser pelagic

Neato, right?

And then I started seeing it everywhere!

Like this: 

and this:

So of course, I want to make cute miniature photos, too!  How can I get me on that bandwagon?!

I could buy myself a nice new lens.  For $1,400.00.

Or I could jerry rig a hand made lens.  But that smacks of effort.

But you knew that prohibitive cost and effort wouldn’t keep me down, right?  Right.

Because there’s an app for that.

Straight out of the iPhone

Edited with the Tilt Shift application

I had tried using this application a couple of times before, but always with the wrong sorts of pictures, and not very interesting results.  It just won’t work right when the images are of something relatively close.  Apparently, high up views looking down on a scene are good ones to work with.

And now wondering if there’s roof access to the building here…

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March 30, 2011 · 2:16 pm

“Jessica, who becomes engaged to Todd, is desperate for her twin’s forgiveness. But Elizabeth never wants to see her, or Todd, ever again.”

The interwebs told me something incredible today.

There is a new Sweet Valley book out.  With grown-up 28 year old Jessica and Elizabeth.

The reviews all say that it is terrible.  That we could forgive it for being insipid trash, but can’t excuse it for being poorly thought out and riddled with errors (both of grammar and of consistency in the story line).

But I don’t care.  I pledged an allegiance to those books that goes deep.

I half way imploded waiting to download this book onto my iphone and am now trying to snort a few words at time, like the crack cocaine that it is.

In the short bit that I’ve read, I learned that Elizabeth cried after every orgasm when she was sleeping with some dude.  And, ahh…  Now I feel a little weird.  The Elizabeth that I knew didn’t have…. um.  Orgasms.  She had the library.

I will proceed with caution.

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March 10, 2011 · 4:23 pm

Here’s what happened

I’m coming up on my 4 year anniversary at my current job, so I made a book that shows the progression of my photography from when I started.

It’s hard to be objective about my own photos, but I think you can see where I started trying things, where I did a little learning and then a little testing of my own.

I still mess up a lot.  I still kinda don’t know what I’m doing.  But I am amazed at how much I think my photography has changed.

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March 8, 2011 · 2:05 pm

a conversation

Chad:  Do you think you could try to do this?  (he demonstrates)

Me:  No.

Chad:  Ok.  I don’t want to pressure you.

Me:  Cool.

Chad:  How about just a little?

Me:  <grumble>

Chad:  Point your nose down!
Do it again!
More!
Toe edge!

Me:  OOF.  <kersplat and tumble onto the ground>

Chad:  You have to listen to me!

Me:  <grumble>  roughly translates to “I hate you.”

 

Margaret Edith takes a snowboarding lesson.

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February 25, 2011 · 12:57 pm

I have found it!*

Much like I imagine a mother must have this awareness of the whereabouts of her brood at all times, I am constantly attune to the next long weekend or holiday in the calendar.

There are 65 consecutive work days before Memorial Day.

But President’s Day was just 4 days ago, and herein lies a little tale.

Way back in November, due to my intense anticipation for long weekends, I booked rooms at a bed and breakfast in Eureka for President’s Day weekend.  Eureka is about 5 hour’s drive north of here, on the coast, in Humboldt county.  I’ve never been that far north, so yay!  Adventure!  And bed and breakfast?  Please serve me up a slice of Victorian quirky quaintness any old time!

We were gung ho about leaving early on Saturday so that we’d be able to stop at the Humboldt Redwoods State Park on the way.  We packed on Friday night.  I did laundry so that we wouldn’t have to deal with that when we came back.  We were rip raring to go.  Long weekend!  Weekend getaway!  Long weekend!

And then we were off.

See the little snow capped mountains?

The drive took us through wine country.
iTunes were set to shuffle.

We stopped and slogged about with some redwoods.  We jumped down and stood inside the cavern of one and scuttled through the center of another fallen trunk that had a hollowed out middle.

And then we got to Eureka.  It wasn’t quite what I had in mind.  More bail bond establishments than I had anticipated.

The bed and breakfast was definitely cute and Victorian from the outside, but really more like a hotel on the inside.   The staff seemed to be comprised of community college students, who were plenty nice but not the sort of service professionals you expect for two hundred bucks a night.  Same for the restaurant in the hotel that we went to that night… it was fine, but they definitely had some delusions of grandeur.

We went for a run the next day on a path through an old growth forest reserve, which may have been the best run I’ve ever had.  The air was moist and cool and fresh.  Like a rain forest.  The path ran parallel to a little river and we often passed pretty little waterfalls.  There were little wooden bridges.  At one point, I told David that I felt like an Indian chasing after a deer in the woods** it was just that good.

I didn’t take pictures on the path, but on the drive back we did drive over a covered bridge:  Also, cows live here.

(My attempt at tilt shift application)

We wandered around Eureka.  One of the main points of interest, apparently, is this big green mansion, which you can’t go inside because it houses a secret society of warlocks.

We found The Lost Coast Brewery.  It was excellent.  There were beers.

 

Ten mini-beers

And later, nachos.

On Monday (which should have been a work day, but was part of a Long Weekend!  Weekend Getaway! instead) we got back in the car to head back home.  The drive back definitely seemed longer, but we had a nice little visit at a small cheese factory and later, a great lunch at a funny little gem of a place in a little teeny town.

And then, back home again.  I probably wouldn’t encourage a mini-break of your own in Eureka, but it wouldn’t be a half bad place to pit stop on the way farther north.  And I’ve still never been to Portland, so you never know…

*Eureka translates to “I have found it!”  Also, California’s state motto is “Eureka (I have found it.)”  Which means that the motto is basically saying the same thing twice. 

**I may regret this sentiment now, as David used this idea to try and motivate me while running the two miles of heinous.

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February 6, 2011 · 7:14 pm

Up close and personal

David got me a lens for my camera that I had been drooling over for ages for Christmas.  It’s a 100 mm macro lens, which means that I’d be able to focus in on things much closer than I had been on my 50 mm lens.

But, its aperture doesn’t go as low (or as high?) so I don’t get as much light and haven’t had much success farting around with the new toy indoors, where it’s too dark.

So I’ve been a royal poop head and haven’t used it all much so far.  Which is great, because I’m an awesome person to give presents to.

Which is all preface to say that a month and a half later, I spent some time and tried out the new lens yesterday!

It was a really great day for some picture taking.  For just about anything, really.  It’s been crazy warm here in the Bay Area.  Like 75 degrees.  In February.  And yes, it’s California and all, but the weather is not usually that blissful here.  We still get crappo gloom and drizzle in the winter.  We just don’t get this:

My parents' house in New Jersey last week

But miraculously, unusually, wonderfully… instead, we’re having this:

So we had a gorgeous afternoon walking about two miles away to the next neighborhood over where we wandered around and stopped for libation.  And I got in a little quality time with my new lens.

I learned that I can take this picture of the handsome guy sitting across from me:
And this picture of the dude in the tuxedo t-shirt sitting about twenty feet away:
I think it’s a pretty good lens to have and I’m looking forward to getting my bearings with it.  And yesterday was a really good day for some bearings.  And for sauntering around with a nice fellow on a really nice sunny day.

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November 17, 2010 · 4:07 pm

why i’m reading a novel I know nothing about

Last night, I was running a bit early to meet a friend for dinner, so stopped by the local Pegasus bookstore to look around.  I did some nice looking and then decided that if they had this pretty little Penguin version of The Secret Garden, I would buy it:(Also, why on earth can I only locate this book to buy from Anthropologie and not from Amazon or Penguin?)

I asked the bookstore guy if they happened to have the special pretty Penguin books and he said that they had some of them and showed me a spot where they could be.  Then he asked which one I wanted, so we went looking in the young adult section.  And then he went looking up information in his computer and to see when it was coming out and generally went to a lot of trouble to see what he could see about this book.

In retrospect, I can now see that the trouble was that this isn’t actually a book, but a bit of decorative fluff from Anthropologie.

But after all the trouble he went to, I figured that I ought to buy some book and sauntered over to the new fiction releases.

There weren’t any titles that I knew I was jonesing to have, so I was basing my selection on the color of the spine, because, well…
I’m likely to read the book no matter what and when I’m finished, a colored-spine book can add to my rainbow ordered book collection.
So I picked out some book with a nice red spine and took it up to the counter.

And then the very helpful bookstore guy tells me that they have copies of this book from the UK print edition and they’re half as much.  “I’ll get one for you!”

The UK edition has a black spine.

I could say “Actually, I’d like to buy this same book for twice as much money, please!”

But that would be crazy, right?  So I say nothing, and buy the black-spined version.

Consequently, I’m now reading a novel that I knew nothing about, hadn’t even read the blurb on the back of, and has a black spine.

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September 23, 2010 · 3:25 pm

Depression Era Color

I love this collection of color images from around the country pre-Pearl Harbor.

The dark blur of people on the sidewalks is so neat.  And I’m a sucker for old-timey cars.

Another old timey car!  And the Golden Gate bridge!

How great is this?  The kids stand out so much against the monochrome blah of their home.  I love their bare footedness.  And the sweetness of the group huddled together.

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