1.20.2010

San Diego Finaly Gets Some Weather!!



For two days now, San Diego has NOT been 70 and sunny.  We have actually had a little rain and lots of wind. 


Our neighborhood, Ocean Beach, is a wide swath of beach community butting up on ocean and one side and topped by the San Diegito Estuary.  In the past 2 days our 'hood has been transformed by Mother Nature from a picture postcard beachy palm tree oasis into a windswept, soggy harmattan littered with blown-off palm branches and battered by super hight surf.


Our mediocre neighborhood paper has some good photos taken by folks in our neighborhood:  





Shown above is a pretty typical medium sized day at our pier down a few blocks from Far Flung Headquarters.  Take note of the cafe on the pier, and where the water is in relation to the pier down below the cafe.  





Here is the massive wind and storm swell driving over the TOP of the pier.  Take note of pier cafe here.





Ladies and gents, that is some high surf.  Far Flung Headquarters is sitting tight, a good third of a mile inland and maybe 20 vertical feet up from the beach.  We are enjoying the meteorological variety this is providing.  It sure is nice to have a break from the oppressive sunshine and get some gusty, crappy weather for once!



1.18.2010

Where? Right here.






























Right here.  There it is.  What, you may ask?  Who knows, but it is right here.

1.12.2010

Bye Bye Love! Bye Bye Happiness!



It is a major week for the Far Flung home team.  We experienced a major loss, a major good-bye.  IQ's truck, which he has had for longer than he and I have been together, was sold to some dude.



















 Said truck was a '93 Ford Ranger that had been IQ's somewhat vaguely trusty chariot for many an adventure.  Ian drove this truck all over the fine country of Texas, it went to Colorado and California and all the hot and dusty lands in between.

It was his work truck for caving and unexploded ordnance-hunting on Camp Bullis.  It was our adventure truck on camping and climbing trips.  It was our construction truck on many garden and hen-house project.






This good friend of a truck's slave cylinder for the clutch pooped out for the 4th or 5th time in 150,000 miles, and the costs outweighed the benefits of repair.













The departure of the truck is a not just the shedding of 3,000 pounds of non functioning machinery, it also portends of the death of possible selves, and possibly actual death of dudehood.  We are now a single compact car family, not a couple who have a truck (and an additional little hatchback).  The symbols of Ian's pre-Jessica days are dwindling, and that means it is all nagging and dentures from here on out.



Bye bye truck!  Bye bye love!  Bye bye carefree youth and days of no responsibility!  Bye bye joy, freedom, and all things good!  Hello loneliness!  Hello receding hairline and increasing waistline and decreasing interest in anything cool!










Truck, you were good to us.  Now we will just have to quit playing around, and buckle down and get boring grown-up jobs to which we will drive our little compact hatchback.   Maybe a job in a lab measuring things or counting things or something.  Oh wait. . .

What I Love Today

Death Metal Rooster

1.07.2010

One More Reason I am Proud of the ATX

One of my latest favourite bands, The Portland Cello Project, had a Hey Ya contest wherein they would play "Hey Ya" by Outkast in each city to which they toured, and the highest scoring town won.

Austin kicked New York's ass.  Of course it did.  (Lubbock beat Austin, but they could study up because they don't have Ocote Soul Sounds live shows, The Broken Spoke, and a hell of a lot of good bar-b-q to distract them.)

Check out the scores.  Chicago and DC, I am just embarrassed for you.

1.05.2010

Joshua Tree, Tetherball Truck, IQ Gets Eaten by a Saber Toothed Tiger




This weekend brought all sorts of wondrous happening.  IQ did some science, I did some yoga, and then we drove up to Joshua Tree to meet with KA and "climb".  I put "climb" in quotation marks, because I have probably climbed 4 pitches in the past 2 years, so what I did in Joshua Tree was far from climbing.  It was a lot closer to flailing around on the rope and skinning my knees, then telling IQ and KA to go do do some actual climbing together while I found a nice a sunny spot to do some more yoga and read a book.  It was a fantastic little 2-day trip.


This is a little baby Joshua Tree nestled near a yucca, or maybe it is a teddy-bear cactus.  Either way, it is not for hugging.  Do not hug sharp things.
IQ surveys the scene.


This is some of the rock at Josh.  It is a lovely, pretty slabby granite slope with a more vertical chunk on top.  The dark spot on the slab is not coyote poo, it is a pair of climbing shoes.  The little dark vertical thing on the top left of the vertical chunk is also not poo, it is Ian.
This is a view of some adjacent rocks.  The little dark spec on the top of the  tall rock, about a third of the way across the top from the left is a person.
On the drive back, IQ and I found some of the best roadside sculpture we have seen in a long time, arguably the best we have seen in CA.

We were really lucky it didn't break the skin.  Saber toothed tigers are FIERCE.
This was in a Veteran's Memorial traffic circle.  I know we owe a lot to our vets, but I honestly had no idea we could also thank our vets for keeping us safe from these ruthless Pleistocene threats.


Hands down, the most bizarre and striking thing on this trip was a sight we observed, stalked, and then caught on film during the drive back.  Look closely in the back of the red truck.  That is a tetherball pole, fully stocked with a tetherball.  They didn't even take the tetherball off the pole for highway transport.

For safety reasons, no one was playing tetherball at the time of transport.  Or, maybe nobody was playing because both players had already fallen out of the truck a few miles back.  Either way, nobody was winning.