Taster Spoon

It all goes back to Jerry Maguire, I'm sure

So I finally got around to watching the Tom Cruise video, thanks to Adina.  Check it out, then come back and watch this.

While you were sleeping

I was shutting off the alarm and feeling my way for the bathroom.

Team Sheeper, a schmancy multisport team based in Menlo Park, was hosting their annual Ultimate Run.  (Sheeper, as far as I can tell, has a tendency to organize ridiculously epic workouts - 300 mile bike rides, or whatever, for no particular reason.)

The Ultimate Run is an 18 mile run from the parking lot at the Woodside School, over to Wunderlich Park (which I never knew was there), all the way up, nearly to Skyline, 6 rolling miles over to King's Mountain Road and Huddart Park, and back down to the parking lot. 

It's crazy!  It's insane!  It just might be my only real opportunity to put some miles in before I fall way behind on my marathon training plan, which is on my schedule as needing to start sometime in these two weeks we're on holiday in Thailand.  Although I have little hopeful thoughts that we'll get out for a jog around town to get a local feel for the places we visit, I don't think it's realistic to plan on too many 2 hour runs.  It's hot, it's humid, in Bangkok it's crazy polluted...and more to the point, there's so much else to see and do!

A friend mentioned the Ultimate Run about two weeks ago.  At that time, my longest run since my 13 mile run in November was 9 miles.  Doubling it - and adding a mountain - seemed a little unwise.  So I immediately made myself do a 2 hour run (at the end of which I was really weary), and last weekend I did a shorter but way hillier run - the PG&E trail at Rancho San Antonio.  I also read somewhere that if you are in a pinch and need to dramatically increase your mileage without doing yourself too much damage, you can alternate running and walking (say, 8 minutes of running, then 1 minute of walking) and supposedly go up to 50% further.  So that was my plan, but I knew I'd have to  get there early.

Runners were starting the Ultimate Run in several waves according to projected speed, hoping to finish around the same time so they could all cook pancakes in the parking lot.   The first wave was set to go at 6:30. 

I picked up Rad, and we met some others in the parking lot, but didn't get going till about 6:50.  He and Tracy wore headlamps and led the way.  It was about 35 degrees.

I tried to be very purposeful about the walking breaks, taking them from the very beginning, because I know very well that no matter how great you feel at, say, mile 8, you can be real trouble just four miles later if you haven't paced yourself.  Rad's training so far has topped out at a half marathon last weekend, so he was amenable to my pace.

I was actually pretty beat by the time we got to the top of the hill - only 6 miles in.  The mountain top was pretty well clouded in, but there was one meadowy patch that allowed in a couple of beams of the rising sun - that was very satisfying.

But on we went into the cloud and (periodically) the rain.  Rad and I continued run-walking (or, as I prefer to put it, rokkin') the whole way.

Here are the lovely ladies of the second wave, who passed us near the top and made sure we made the correct turns.  We needed the help.

On the way back down, we were  passed by the final wave, of the very quickest runners. 

They are humoring me to make it appear they are struggling to keep up with me.

Victor is apparently sponsored by Polar.

Victor also gave us some directions on how to leave the park - to follow the signs for Phleger Estate. 

Little did we know that was a detour that took us about a mile out of our way - two, once we backtracked.  We were suspicious, and it got kind of Blair Witch - debating whether to continue on this questionable course or to just suck it up and go back the way we'd come.  Rad checked his GPS, but we were deep in a ravine and he had trouble finding a satellite.  Eventually we did turn back - but poor Victor was so certain he just kept going until he and Derek were practically to Skyline.

Anyway, Rad and I trudged towards the exit - his GPS said we had gone 19.6 miles - it was another two or three to the parking lot - when we saw a familiar blue car near the bathroom about a mile from the bottom of the trail.  We'd been gone so long Lorraine had worried about us and sneaked in the Service Entrance to the park.  We gratefully accepted a lift the rest of the way.

The rest of the way to...pancakes!  Bucks was jammed, so some fifteen of us ended up at Brian's Restaurant in Los Altos.  (Only about two of us belonged to Team Sheeper, so we didn't want to mooch their parking lot pancakes.)  Ace rolled out of bed in time to join us, and to participate in one of his favorite Sunday morning activities: playing with babies!

Bring me a rug!

My brother heads to Iraq today.  Wish him luck!

On a related note, I finally got my Sample Ballot for the presidential primary today.  (I just learned last week that if you move, you have to re-register.  You can't just change your address on file with the DMV.)  I'd also requested a vote-by-mail ballot, but that didn't come, so I mailed another request today.  I hope I get it before we leave on our trip.  We return the day after Super Tuesday.  Maybe I can phone the neighbors to pick it up and fill it out for me.  I would trust them for that.

Are you ready to cast your ballot?  How are you leaning?  I've been bouncing among candidates (for reasons I'm happy to expound upon offline), so I took the public radio test.

I rather expected to come out hot for Edwards (and have assumed he's "not electable" for the same reasons I would like him), but I was surprised to learn that I had the most in common with Obama's stated goals.  Then Clinton, then Edwards.  (Is it so obvious I live in California?) 

John McCain and Giuliani were tied as my top Republicans -  if for some reason I had to choose between them I think I'd have to vote on the basis of foreign policy knowledge and experience, diplomacy, and personal character (did anybody read the article on Giuliani in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago?  Yikes.)  I had 0.0 in common with Huckabee.  Except that apparently we both find Colbert amusing.   

A certain Republican I know believes that none of the Democrats are electable.  Discuss.

Here, it's only a 5 or 10 minute test, and afterwards you can compare your results with a variety of demographic slices.

Tell me where you're from and whom you landed on!

I can't help but feel the questions are extraordinarily general, so I'll poke around a little to see if there are any quizzes that have more detailed questions and answers - about the environment, agricultural policies, education and the relevance of the constitution.  I want more questions about background, diplomacy, and their views on the role of President (vis a vis other branches of government, the public and foreign leaders).  Before he dropped out, I was kind of a Joe Biden fan.  But the media ignored him, so that was that. 

I thought I'd look into running for some kind of city office around here.  Though I bet you have to be a homeowner.  In the mean time, I'm trying to sign up to be a neighborhood mediator.  That sounds engaging! 

Not in my Back Yard

Last night I attended the meeting of the Mountain View Parks and Recreation Commission. 

When I lived with my grandmother in Illinois after college, I was working for a publishing house, working closely with the National Gardening Association, a pretty much awesome bunch of people.  During that period, I got all into gardening and garden planning and growing veggies in my grandmother's back yard.  I think she wasn't too thrilled with my compost heap, but humored me in every aspect.  Ten years later, the tomato plants are long since history, but the Italian parsley runs riot where the compost heap used to be.

After that I lived in an apartment in New York, and we didn't even try.  I  guess there was some greenery in the shower, but the fern leaves kind of tickled when you shampooed.

So I was excited to come to California!  Zone 9??  Awesome!!

But since moving here I've tried growing all kinds of things in all kinds of pots on all kinds of balconies and front steps,  in my "yard" when I lived up on a mountain (that ended up being cloaked in fog 10 months of the year), in my entranceway and in our shady, disappointing back yard - it's really been an exercise in frustration and yearned-for sunlight and tillable earth.  I find it unbearable that anybody could live in this climate and be in a position to take advantage of it and not!

About a month ago, I saw a solution and tried to sign up for a Mountain View community garden spot.  I didn't try to sign up last year, partly because I wanted to see what our back yard could do; mostly because MV has two community gardens: one is reserved for Senior Citizens (grump grump, they get ALL the good stuff), and the other is far enough I'd have to drive there - it's four times as far as the farmer's market or even the Milk Pail - kind of defeats the purpose of being all green and stuff.

But this year, after the Great Zucchini Disappointment of 2007,  I checked again, and discovered that a new community garden was being planned just a couple of blocks from my house!  I immediately attempted to sign up, and learned that I'd be put on the waiting list.  How long could it BE, right?  So I sent my name in.

I never heard back, so I checked the web Sunday, to learn that there'd be a commission meeting regarding the proposed (not 'planned') site on Wednesday.  I decided to go, just to make sure I'd get a plot.  I still kind of assumed the garden was a given.  What's not to love??

Apparently, a lot, if you're one of the 95 neighboring homeowners who signed a petition opposing the garden.  The petition detailed a parade of horribles: logjam traffic and parking, noxious chemical pesticides leaking into back yards, power tools, plummeting property values, vagrants hovering for the purpose of snatching eggplants, and, make no mistake about it, the unsightliness of growing vegetables.

*Sigh.*

The meeting was to review the rationale for choosing the location, in a residential neighborhood (cf. the current garden, on the far side of the highway), and a revised garden design intended to address the petition's concerns.  The Mountain View budget had some $100,000 set aside for the project, which money would disappear and be directed to other purposes if it wasn't snatched for this project.

Public commentary was earnest and heated (one of the gardeners sitting behind me harrumphed every time a neighbor stated something he found preposterous; one of the neighbors seemed near tears).  The gist of the neighbors' complaint seemed to be, we're in a neighborhood of single family homes, we have our own backyards for growing vegetables, so the only people coming to this garden will be, almost by definition, not our neighbors, but people who don't have backyards.  (You know, the poor.)  Hence: abysmal upkeep, eyesore plots, loiterers, noise (presumably from the belligerant alcoholic gardeners carousing and swilling their paper bag covered 40s), using the gardens as a restroom (this was actually one of the stated fears), chain link fences and everything that goes with anybody who can't afford a $1.5 million dollar home-with-yard in Mountain View. 

The gardeners for their part went on about community and the organic-and-local movement and the pleasure of a tended garden and so forth, mainly making the case that there were policy reasons in favor, and hey, look at us, we're really nice people.

Oh yes, and I was dismayed to learn that the waiting list was 120 people long.  I did speak, but I hadn't yet had time to absorb all of the debate (I hadn't been expecting any, viewing the garden as an unmitigated good - indeed, as a potential homebuyer I would be drawn to a neighborhood with such a community asset, but these homeowners saw only negatives).  So my only remark was a question, had a study been done of how property values had changed for homes surrounding other community gardens?  I.e., was the fear well founded?  The community garden in Palo Alto is just lovely, and I envy that town for it, and had assumed that hippity dippity gems like that are luxuries that workaday cities like Mountain View are not interested in - and indeed a reason why PA costs so much more.  But these homeowners were so convinced, I wondered whose perception was right. 

But no one had done such a study.  (I also wondered, but did not ask, whether the earmarked $100,000 was meant to cover the cost of lawsuits/compensating homeowners whose property values did suffer, if they did.)

Long story short, the commission ended up voting against.  They all were in favor of the idea of a community garden, but were not persuaded that they had identified a good location (but had no viable alternatives, either).  One commissioner reasoned, ultimately, along the lines that having a community garden was probably "not reasonably foreseeable" by the homeowners when they bought their homes, and that he felt uncomfortable making a public land use decision that engendered such vehement opposition. 

Indeed, it's not the same as the inhabitants of a brand new sprawling subdivision complaining about the neighboring pig farmer whose operation pre-existed the conversion from farmland to tract housing.  However, I'm not sure that a homeowner should really be shocked that a city should take a patch of unused, unmaintained and weedy, city-owned land that has always been there (it's land that goes over the Hetch Hetchy water pipes, so there can never be permanent structures all along that corridor) and seek to convert it to a wholesome public purpose.  Moreover, I think the same economic forces that have promoted the dense housing that makes a community garden such a needed relief are the very same pressures that have caused their homes to increase in value exponentially in the last 30 years.  I'm talking $50,000 homes that are now worth $1 million.  They want the benefits of this booming economy and scarcity of land without the remedial measures that ought to come with it.

So we were all there for selfish purposes.  Me, because I wanted a plot!  (I was quickly disabused of this hope - if they were to go forward, the garden wouldn't be operational till next year; and there were 119 people on the wait list in front of me.) 

Ultimately, the gardeners attended and advocated because they stood to gain (a patch of land, nourishment of the body and betterment of the soul), but the neighbors attended because they stood to lose (their sense of privacy, I suppose - I'm not really convinced they stood to lose anything that was theirs to begin with; they felt a sense of ownership of the plots because they took for granted their being vacant, but I don't think it was a well-founded feeling).  And as we all know, loss aversion is a stronger drive than the pursuit of reward.

I came away from the meeting thinking that it was the right decision.  It was not for the commission to spit in the faces of all of those distressed neighbors (and invite a lawsuit, or 95).  And if the one commissioner was persuaded that the garden was not a foreseeable use of that city property, well, maybe the neighbors had the right to shoo the public away from that land and could win such a case in court.  But I don't think there's any question that their motivation was wholly selfish.  To throw their arms protectively over neglected land because, well, they already HAD backyards to grow food in, they shouldn't have to sit by and watch others have the same opportunity, well, I think it's a shameful attitude.  Anybody who owns a home with a backyard in Mountain View is rich by my measure.  And shame on those who are so privileged, who want to deny that pleasure - which may soon enough become a necessity - to others, when it isn't even theirs to begin with. 

Though I came away from the meeting shrugging (I wasn't going to get to garden in the foreseeable future anyway, no skin off my nose, who wants to be in a garden surrounded by resentful "neighbors" anyway), by the time I drove home I was mad, and sad, that what purports to be my community should be so shortsighted and pessimistic and, let's face it, unloving, that they could only see the downside of "allowing" the city to spread its wealth to all of its members.

Maybe Target could help.

Say Wat?

We just completed our travel plans for the end of this month - Ace and I are going to Thailand to celebrate the wedding of my friend from high school. 

I could not be more excited.  I'd be excited to see this friend anyway - I adore spending time with her.  She is the best conversationalist I've ever known.  Every sentence that comes out of her mouth is interesting.  (I've meant to pay better attention to how she does it but as you, dear reader, have already come to understand, I haven't exactly applied myself to the art.)  Also, her man (whom I've only met once several years ago) seems awesome in every way; certainly what she's said about him is dreamy, and I have great confidence in her ability to choose the best - I have no doubt he is just as friendly and captivating as she is.

But I'm also excited to see friends I haven't seen in YEARS, some, no doubt, since high school, and certainly a handful I last saw in 2001, when another high school friend got married in Bali.  Oh, the glamour of these foreign weddings! (Although, the foreign part isn't exactly arbitrary, they're not "destination weddings" in that sense - the bride for the Bali wedding is Hindu and spent many formative years in Indonesia, so, you know, Bali made sense as a sorta "home town," right?  And the bride this month would probably put her hometown as Tokyo - where they're also having a wedding - and the groom is Thai.  So, Bangkok makes sense too.)

But anyway, we're tacking on a couple of days in Bangkok beforehand, and then the whole wedding party is going to Phuket for several days afterwards, and then we're going to swing by Singapore to see my parents - they've moved into a new house since the last time I've been there. 

Ace has never been to any of these places, and I'm trying to figure out how best to allocate our time.  I spent a few weeks in Bangkok back in 2001, learning Thai massage at the Wat Po Medical School.  (I need to get those books out and practice on somebody.  Somebody?)

(That is where I was when 9/11 happened - I was staying with family friends watching a DVD of Chocolat one evening when my host rushed in and told me to switch to the television.  All the international news channels - BBC, CNN - were showing the same thing.  The first plane had hit.  Coming out of a movie mindset, I had a difficult time understanding what was happening, what was real.  It was about 9:30 at night, and I was glued to the TV for several hours.  The next day I contemplated taking the train home from Bangkok to Singapore, because I expected flying to be impossible.)

Anyway, so I have definite ideas about what things in that city are "must sees" for Ace, but there are so many new things I would like to experience as well.  I know we'll only be able to scratch the surface.  It's an overwhelming place.  If you've been there - tell me your top 3 must do's for Bangkok.  We only have a few days, so unfortunately multi-day jungle treks with leeches are out.  (Boooo.)

I worked in Phuket one summer when I was in college.  You'd think for all that time, I'd know the island like the back of my hand.  Problem is, I was a G.O. at Club Med and had zero free time.  In particular, it was Club Med.  And as any of you who've been to one of those all-inclusive places knows, it's very easy to forget where in the world you are.  It's about frolicking in the pool and snorkeling and playing tennis and watching the variety show and drinking at the bar - it's most definitely not about leaving the confines of the compound and experiencing the real country, the real people.  (Oh, maybe some adventuresome guests did go out for a day of shopping, but if you're truly interested in the locale, you're probably not staying at a Club Med.)  And anyway, like I said, I was a worker there anyway and had nearly no free time.  I was able to shift my schedule around one Sunday and take off a few hours to find a Catholic church in downtown Phuket - my new friendship with the tuktuk driver who got me there is one of my best memories of the place.

Long story short, I don't know anything about where we're going.  I picture it as not much to do besides sun and surf, but maybe that's enough, especially since I want to catch up with all these old friends!  Still, if you have any ideas, let me hear them.  I believe we're staying about the middle of the island, on the West coast.

And then, finally, Singapore.  Time there is short, just two days.  I had planned it even shorter, one day, because I felt like there's nothing to do there but shop, but started to realize that it's "boring" only after becoming familiar with the spirit and atmosphere of the place - hawker centers and Raffles hotel, its history as a multicultural trading center - Arab Street and Little India...and its natural, though cultivated, attractions - the Jurong Bird Park is spectacular, and I'm not that excited about birds.  Even the botanic garden paints a picture of the backdrop for this city, which is so easily taken for granted when you get swept up in the brightly lit malls and the gleaming business district.  So for all my professed boredom with the place, those two days are the most packed of any in my little mental schedule. 

I can't contain myself.  I haven't been this excited about a vacation in years.

Tasterspoon 0, Ikea 3

My list of 100 exceptions to my buy-no-new-things plan had three things knocked off last night.

I made it a week into 2008 without buying anything except food, and those were items from the farmer's market and the Milk Pail, too.  (*Pat-pat*, why yes, thank me very much!)  And despite a little fussing when we got unexpected presents from out-of-town visitors.  These are people who have excellent taste and run the Web site Satinbox, which is full of lovely things!  But I realized we could pick up, at the farmer's market, a few 'tastes of California,' should we see them again before they head home - bottled apricot sauce and sugared walnuts from Hollister or thereabouts, or yummy blackberry honey from just over the hill.  If we don't get a chance to meet up, we have delightful items to add to our own cupboard.

But last night I stumbled.  Ace had asked, very nicely, whether next year we couldn't have a tree that was more...I forget the word he used.  Festive?  My tree this year (and for the past couple of years) has been decorated kind of femininely.  It has navy blue ball ornaments, swags of pale pink fabric and a very very long string of pearls.  I think it's kind of elegant, but most people (brother/dad/Ace) complain that it's morbid.  The navy balls, they say, look black. 

I got the balls from Ikea, when they were on sale shortly after Christmas, when they were a 12-pack for fifty cents.  Therefore, though I knew this flew directly in the face of my "don't buy any more cheapie goods that you'll have to store or which will end up in the landfill," I went to Ikea to see whether I couldn't find some colorful cheapie after-Christmas ornaments to please Ace.

It was a dangerous proposition, me entering Ikea.  I never fail to buy a whole bunch of things I don't need there, things that would look great in SOMEbody's house, or my "someday" house, just not in my house just now.  I tore myself out of the lighting section, after spending ten minutes comparing various wall spotlights that would be just great over the bed for reading at night.  I reminded myself, firmly, that we were in a rental whose lease is up in a month and I did not need to be installing fixtures.

I walked around for a while with some adorable boxes for presents - I love their animal print boxes for wrapping presents, because you don't need to add paper, just stuff the inside with shreds from the home shredder.  And they were on sale, 8 boxes for $1.50.  But I put them back on the shelf, reasoning that if I can't buy presents this year, why should I hang onto boxes, however cute, however reusable?  (Though, I put my mom's presents in these boxes this year and I don't think I ever got them back.)

I was very close to leaving the store empty handed (unthinkable!) - I was even going to resist the $0.50 hot dog because I had promised to make dinner - when, just before passing through to the the furniture warehouse area I saw all these people rolling carts around with these 8 foot palm trees.  I found the display, and before I could stop myself, I had a cart of my own with three of them.

I don't know if these should really fall into my no-new-possessions category, because I intend to keep them alive, and even if they died they'd end up on the compost heap, not the landfill.    But I am forgetting about the front end: surely also they were transported from somewhere, and as long as they ARE alive I will need to house them, and move them if I move.  So they are definitely possessions.

I hope they're worth it.  They are my incentive for taking down the Christmas tree.  When we put the tree up Ace moved my big potted banana leaf type plant up to my bedroom, and it looks great there - that room badly needed greenery, and the high ceiling required something big.  But now we'll have an empty spot when we take the tree down, which my new palm is supposed to fill. 

And of course, once I rationalized one, it was easy to add two more - one for the office, one for the guest room!  How much more inviting is a home with plants!

Oh, shoot.  I have to buy three pots now, don't I?  3 pots, one bag of soil.  I'm down to 93 items.  This resolution is going to last until March, isn't it?      

Oh deer.

I know it's traditional decor, but the stuffed animals in the Tenaya Lodge creeped me out.  And I don't mean the giant stuffed bear pretending to decorate their tree (super cute!). 

High above the registration desks are deer heads.  And not just deer heads.  Deer heads with mufflers. 

It was something about the mufflers that bothered me, like, it's not disrespectful enough that we'll hang your HEAD on the wall, but we'll make your HEAD look cute and seasonal - look!  It's like you're staying warm!  Except that your DEAD, because it's your HEAD on the wall.

On the wall of one of the restaurants was an enormous black bearskin (with head) - and on the bear's head was an adorable little Santa hat.  Like, how cute that you're in the Christmas spirit, oh wait, you're DEAD. 

These taxidermied animals I don't think are new - I think the sign on the wall said that the bearskin was older than I am, but something about the little hat bugged me.   

Plagiarism in 2008!

Today I'm ripping off both words and ideas - the idea is Angela's, but at least the words are mine.

I'm in the middle of a bunch of work that threatens to (heck, I already know it will, I just haven't reached the acceptance stage of mourning yet) swallow up my weekend plan to frolic in that 10 feet of snow they're getting in Tahoe this weekend.  Sigh. 

I have a few extra holiday goodies saved up, I forget what.  I think a picture of me and a moose or something.  But as cop-outy as those recent photo album posts seem, I find them time intensive.  First you have to find your camera, then you have to find your camera cord...

I was also embarrassingly flattered to get tagged for a couple of memes back at the end of November - randomly, but whatever, I feel a duty to hold up my end.  (And yet I never forward chain mail, is that a contradiction?)  It's just that answering deep questions like "Fabric softener or dryer sheets?" can take some real introspection and consideration that I don't have the leftover brain power to accomplish just now.

So here is TasterSpoon's 2007 year in review, at least, as far as you can make it out from snipping the first sentence of the first post of each month!

January.  "Is this it?  Is winter over?"  Although this post starts out talking about the mild weather (which foreshadowed a very hot and dry year), January was all about our ridiculous search for the new home into which Ace and I would move...together.  (Ladies, avert your eyes!  Gentlemen, step right up to see the harlot and her live in man!)  We had started to talk about moving in together in September of 2006.  I planned to move in to his house with an awesome view and big open floor plan in November.  Then his landlord decided to give the place to his (long distance) girlfriend at some unnamed point, so we started looking, unsuccessfully, for a place.  Then, while Ace was home for Christmas, the landlord informed him that the girlfriend "needed" him to be out by the January 3 new moon.  Big New Years plans devolved in to a small cleaning-out-the-fridge party with close friends that has a soft spot in my holiday memories, thanks to the Champagne-in-a-can.  Ace crammed all of his stuff into a Public Storage Locker (I imagined as kind of a Silence of the Lambs scene) that he would visit every couple of nights and stoicly moved into my TV-free place that bored him to tears.  Anyway, it was then just a month of spending every spare minute to finally, joyously land on a place where he could get cable and walk around the block without fear of being sexually molested.

February.  "I'm way too busy to be posting anything this week, but this doesn't stop me from running around bestowing my little pearls in everybody else's Comments sections."  February was indeed a busy month.  There was a lot going on at work, Boots and KK and I were trying to train all hard core for the Baja 70.3 triathlon,  and then my grandmother died, which took me to Chicago for a week.  It was generally a grumpy month, and my posts all seem way more interested in what other people have going on in their lives - their blogs, their housing prices, their workout regimens - than in mine.

March. "So Ace comes home from his night with the boys to find me watching TV, wearing my work skirt and a warm, woolly sweater (because it was cold and we are frugal), a pair of tights and his cuddly sheepskin slippers."  We also started going to the Farmer's Market.  I was trying homemade remedies for springtime allergies, carrying my own bag to the market and buying organic broccoli.  I took the time to pay attention to fuzzy caterpillars.  Maybe this was the beginning of my hippie awakening.  We had a St. Patrick's Day party which included a showing of The Departed, using up our free TiVo/Amazon-on-demand trial - it worked pretty well, but took about a day to download.  Ace turned 30. 

April.  "Saturday I did the Cinderella Ride."  I started out the month by riding 100 miles on my bicycle, did some weekend-killing training runs, ran the Boston Marathon and went to a wedding in Kansas.  Started a compost heap.  It was a month without a lot of downtime. 

May.  "Yaaay, we're going to Wildflower this weekend!" The triathlon season started with a vengeance.  I cheered on Boots, KK, Ace and his brother Scooter at Wildflower. I'd been training since January, and was delighted to get into the athletic spirit.  I tried to become a health nut.  I biked to work.  I won my first ever duathlon at Auburn, qualifying for Worlds and Nationals.  Coming off of my Boston success, I felt like I'd arrived at my crowning year.  Ace was on a new tritahlon team, competed at Wildflower, did his Xterra-type TV show, and won at Auburn. 

June.  "This morning, as I was driving to work, minding my own business, about to merge onto 101 ("the" 101, for you Southern Californians), a green minivan wearing a stovepipe hat pulled into my lane in front of me. " Yeah, yeah, the streetview van.  June was all about going to work and having a good time with Boots at the doomed Baja race.  For just a weekend away, that trip sure packed in a lot of great memories. 

July.  "I'm working.  I suggest you do the same."  Ha!  We did Nationals in Oregon and the Vineman race in Sonoma.  Had a 4th of July party, saw the fireworks at Shoreline (aka Google Park).  I think I at least managed to put a picture album from the Oregon trip up. 

August.  "'Next, Handel's Royal Fireworks Music, to commemmorate the end of the War of Austrian Secession.  Glad that's over.'"  Surprisingly, this is an apt summary to the month.  Also over was my triathlon season and I was glad about it.  Training can become such an obsession that it's a real time suck, and is no fun when insecurity replaces love as the motivation.  Why spend all that time doing something that's not fun anymore??  So we did all kinds of OTHER things - the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a local block party and an SF street fair, renting a tandem for the day.  Ace had a few more races, and I was completely content to stand aside and cheer.  We also went to the symphony.  See?  Full circle.

September. "We're having weird skies this week."  It was a hot, dry summer.  And thus the wildfires started.  Ace and I spent a neat weekend in Pacific Grove so he could do his triathlon and we could celebrate my birthday.  We had dinner and a lovely evening with Rad and Victor, a couple of my favorite people in the world, whom I've only known for about a year.  We had a memorial tree planting for my grandmother in Chicago, because my brother was in Afghanistan in February.  Learned that he was headed for Iraq in January.  Great.  I tried to get into the Eat Local Challenge, and despite not doing such a good job at it, really came into my hippie own, irritating people to the right and left of me.

October.  "While you're waiting for pictures from this weekend...and last week...and last weekend...and the week before that...chew on this."  We were thinking about getting a dog, then promptly had the kind of month that makes getting a dog a terrible idea.  Spent a weekend in Tahoe for Ace's Xterra race in the snow; spent nearly a week in Richmond, VA, visiting Ace's family, visiting a good friend from California in her and her husband's new digs and deeply envying her life (hi Belle!), oh yeah and doing that Long Course Duathlon World Championship; and of course spent all those long nights at work that make the days away possible.  Halloween parties! 

November.  "A friend of ours had a cocktail party Saturday."  The holiday season hit the ground running and never quit.  Halloween bled into Thanksgiving with my brother, bled into mulling over New Years resolutions.  NaBloPoMo.  I did it.  Oh, I also squeezed in the Ironman 70.3 World Championship.  Jeez, I did a lot of cool races this year.  A good place to end my triathlon career, don't you think? 

December. "Ace had a great marathon yesterday. "  Starting off with a weekend of munchkins in bathrobes and Santa hats up in Sacramento where Ace qualified for Boston 2008, this was a very Christmassy December (some years I don't notice the holiday till it's upon me).       

Now, to get with my theme for this year (16 different dimensions of life or 43 things, or 5 angles or whatever my goals were - whatever, I've ended up going with the theme approach) - I need to quit the reminiscing and get on with 2008!

Goodbye from Tasterspoon 2007, and hello from Tasterspoon 2008.  Let's all have a totally blogworthy year!

 

Griswold Family Christmas Part III

Day after Christmas, we drove into Yosemite again, this time to see the valley.  It was much colder, and dark clouds threatened.   But we seized the opportunity to grab some pictures of El Capitan and Half Dome on the way there.

See me use my camera timer for the first time.

We parked at the Ahwahnee Hotel.  It's a spectacular place. 

Here is the great room of the Ahwahnee.   

I think it's so beautiful there.  They were all festive 18th Century style.

I don't know if you can tell, but in the middle of the room there are TWO pianos, and both were being played at once as we waited to meet up with my mom.

Everything was on a grand scale, especially the walk-in fireplaces.

My brother and dad and I did a little walk to Yosemite Falls.

On the walk back to the bus stop, we spied a bobcat.

That's about it.  We went for barbecue, came back, packed.  There was a 4 car pileup on the return, which put us at a standstill for more than an hour.