Yankees on the Verge of History

And not the good kind, either. Here we are almost to September and the Yankees are in 3rd place in the AL East, 10 games behind the Rays, and 6 behind the Red Sox after pulling one out in the 9th against their rivals today. So assuming the wild card comes from the AL East, even if the Yankees go 21-8 the rest of the way, the Red Sox would only have to play .500 to stay ahead. They are also 5.5 games behind the Twins in the wild-card hunt. So if the Twins/White Sox played .500 ball the rest of the way, the Yankees would basically have to go 20-9 to get ahead of that AL Central team. Neither of these scenarios will be at all easy, as the Stankees have 2 series left against each of the Rays and Red Sox, along with a series against the Angels and White Sox. And all this has to happen with a rotation that includes Sidney Ponson, Darrell Rasner, and Carl Pavano.

Yeah, I agree - it ain't gonna happen.

And it will mark the first time since 1993 (not counting the '94 strike year) that the Yankees weren't in the playoffs. Wow. Can't wait.

Back to School

Hey everyone, guess what today was for Kate?



Now I'd better go make sure she's doing her homework...

3rd Annual Commentate Pesto-fest

Usually it is Kate who blogs about food-related topics, but since this activity (and the subsequent results) is one of my favorites I'll take the reins for this post about our 3rd year of temporarily transforming our kitchen into a pesto factory. The idea is we both really like homemade pesto - it's way better than the stuff you can get in a jar, but is expensive to get such a large quantity of basil and time consuming to make it fresh when you want it. So, during the summer when basil is in season we go down to the farmers market and stock up on super-cheap basil - $1 per large bunch (we got 5 total). The rest of the directions are as follows:

• pick and wash recently purchased huge piles of basil (Thai or regular works, having the Olympics to watch helps this activity, as does a salad spinner)
• peel a few heads of garlic
• grate a big ol' block of Parmesan
  
• toast a bag of walnuts (or pine nuts) in a dry pan
• throw everything in a food processor with oil and salt

So after it's all made, we pack it into ice cube trays, muffin tins, anything else you have that will make nice portion-sized hunks that can be kept frozen. It helps to cover them with saran so the basil doesn't oxidize and turn dark green, but that doesn't matter a whole lot. Below are the results! Yummmm... It also makes for some interesting reactions from your friends when they are over and go to get a couple ice cubes from the freezer.


Naturally you should save some of the fresh stuff to eat soon, which we did with a nice picnic at an outdoor free concert we went to last weekend - the Waybacks at Los Altos' Hidden Villa.

Here's Kate enjoying some of our delicious masterpiece on the lawn,

Here's our view of the band playing a tune from our seats on the lawn (they will be at HSB 8 too!),

and the overall gorgeous setting of the Hidden Villa as the sun set over the Santa Cruz mountains.


Summer living is good here in California, hope the same is true for wherever you are!

Changing it up

I think the news is pretty much already out there, but in case any of y'all don't know, I am starting school next week to get my certification to teach high school Physics. I'm REALLY excited about it, but also apprehensive about going back to school and not working full-time, not to mention the somewhat scary prospect of actually teaching. I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get into the program - two sets of California standardized tests, a technology exam, a government exam, fingerprinting, obtaining a "certificate of clearance", two sets of sealed transcripts, three letters of recommendation, an essay, and 45 hours of classroom observation (which I haven't quite finished). Anyway, it looks like I'm in, which is a relief. Time to hit the books!

Kerri Walsh wins gold, fails math

I will admit that I have enjoyed watching Olympic Beach Volleyball over the past week, which here in the US means watching Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Treanor most of the time. And I will admit that they both seem pretty likable. But I guess neither Walsh or the ad people behind this 24 Hour Fitness ad spent much time reviewing the script before putting it on the air.

You can watch the video of the commercial at the link, but the gist of it is a bunch of guys are shown embarrassing themselves on the court and then after a particularly harsh spike the ball rolls up to Kerri's feet and she says "Best seven out of twelve?"

I mean, doesn't she spend nearly every waking hour playing a sport that's fundamentally designed around the principle of winning "best X out of Y"? You may have seen this reported over at FJM already but I thought it was worth copying due to the surprising dumbness of it. But anyways, they sure are good at beach volleyball, eh?

Public Service Announcement

Throughout this amazingly persistent and itchy bout of poison oak I have learned a few valuable lessons. I thought I would share them in case anyone ever gets it themselves.

1) The absolute BEST way to get rid of the itch is to take a flaming hot shower - as hot as you can tolerate. You'll itch like mad while you're in there (your skin is releasing all the histamines it has stored up), but once you get out, nothing will itch for 8 hours. No gucky cream or anything required. It is a miracle.

2) Mangoes, cashews, and kiwis contain minute amounts of the same chemical in poison oak. So if you cut and eat them while you're hypersensitive (as in the case of the delicious mango-kiwi fruit salad I ate on Sunday), you can get a secondary contact reaction to any skin that touches them, including your lips. This is not fun, and should be avoided at all costs.

And if you're in the market for some free mangoes and kiwis, drop me an e-mail.

Catch up

Just a quick post to let y'all know what we've been up to recently. Our camera is currently giving us an ominous "memory card error" no matter which memory card we put in it, so no photos this time (and perhaps for a little while until we get it fixed or get a new one).

We've been doing lots of "socializing" with our wonderful friends around here - feels like the old college days where someone would e-mail out "Who wants to grab dinner tonight" and some number of people (10-20) would show up to eat. Friday, we had a group over for the Olympics opening ceremony (which was AWESOME).

On Saturday I played a soccer game in the morning and then we hung out and watched more Olympics and played some board games with some folks in the afternoon.

On Sunday, six of us ventured into the city for brunch and some city-activities. The other four went to see the Dale Chihuly exhibit at the De Young (Tom and I didn't get tickets in time and it sold out). So we wandered Golden Gate Park around until we heard some swing music wafting from a bridge nearby. Turns out it was "Lindy in the Park", a weekly get-together of swing dancers in the bay area! Neither of us had really done any serious dancing since college, but it was fun to get out there and dance to some lively music in the great outdoors. As a totally random aside, I ran into a swing dancer I had known (and danced in Jump Start) with at Dartmouth, Mihai. I had no idea he was living out here - he's teaching "blues dance" full time now. I danced a song with him and basically embarrassed myself - I've forgotten a LOT since those old glory days in college. After the other folks got out of their exhibit, we went to the Dahlia Garden in the park, which is one of my favorite places. On the way home, we went and had pizza and beers and a little Frank's Zoo in our old Foster City hangout (and hookah bar), Waterfront Pizza.

This week has been pretty standard so far - Monday cooking dinner together and romping in the park with 'Jo, Tuesday geeky game group (now with Bailey!), Wednesday soccer game, Thursday gathering with the friends at Cara's house for more Olympics watching and eating of grilled food, today, who knows. Tomorrow we're playing a Kickball game with some of Tom's friends from work. And probably drinking some mojitos. Hopefully one of them has a functioning camera - it seems like there might be some good kickball photo ops.

Later, gators.

What we're all about

Found a website today that can take a block of text (ie the text in this blog) and make an image that contains the most commonly used words in that text. It sizes the words proportionally to how many times they appear in the text: big words appear a lot, and little words appear a little.

Anyway, I entered the text from the commentators and was interested to see that the results... weren't very interesting. "Tom", "Kate", "Banjo" and "Game" (both the sport and board variety) make unsurprising and prominent appearances, but the majority of the rest of the words are relatively hum-drum and not overly descriptive of our lives. "People", "home", "little", "day", "new", "first", "think", and "back" seem to be popular, as well as "fun", "family", "going", "nice", and "can". And that was AFTER I eliminated many of the most "common English words".

Hooo weeee! Breaking blog news: Tom and Kate think it is a new fun day, but first can we go back to our little home with our nice family-people? Does that really sound like us?

Anyway, click on the image above if you'd like to see the commentators in graphical form...

Itch Itch

So, I made a bad decision last week. As a little background, I was doing some geological mapping at a former mercury mine down in San Jose. I had been to the site before, and knew that there was poison oak all over, so I brought a tyvek suit with me as protection. Anyway, I was working in a portion of the site that was a little less infested than the rest of the site, and as the sun began to rise higher and I started getting hotter and hotter, wearing a non-breathing long-sleeved tyvek started looking less and less appealing. So I didn't wear it. And now I've got poison oak.

There isn't really a point to this post except that I've already done about as much complaining to my friends up here as I can justify so I'm reaching out to a new audience for sympathy. I ITCH!!

The weekend of many diversions

Last weekend we went car camping at Stumpy Meadows Reservoir with some friends of ours (Dustin, Adam R, Taylor, Andrew, Adam L, Mikey, Erin, Jeremiah). It was an action-packed two days which included the following events and diversions (note that holes in the historic record may have been filled with photos pilfered from various web sources).

Jennie Reed Watch

Hey, remember Jennie Reed?

Well, while we're on the Olympics theme, she has arrived in Beijing and apparently is in fact wearing the Darth Vader mask she told me about on the plane back from Frankfurt in April, and is featured prominently in the photo accompanying this article from the NYTimes. Anyways, don't forget to root for Ms. Reed!

Olympic Architecture

With the buzz about the Beijing Olympics ramping up this week, I wouldn't be surprised if you have already seen this, but the NYTimes has a well-done interactive feature about city's Olympic venues and new architecture. In particular, I found the description and explanation of the oft-photographed Aquatics Center (or water cube) and the National Stadium (or bird's nest) interesting to read and learn about, but the whole thing is pretty cool. Did you realize that the bubble pattern on the exterior of the Aquatics center building is, in fact, not random? Click on the image above or here for the link.

Emigrant Wilderness Banjopacking (with Auntie!)

Before we get too far behind in our blog posting, we must write about the visit that my aunt paid us 2 weekends ago to take a backpacking trip with us - we had a grand time, well 3 out of the 4 of us did, that is. Auntie (as we all fondly call her) flew out from Florida (she's the one that looks exactly like my mom) for what was supposed to be her first big alpine backpacking experience, along a nice-looking loop route I picked out (see below).

Anyways, to make a long story not quite as long, the trail we had picked was one that was heavily used by horses and pack mules, which made it excessively dusty and sandy. Futhermore, the first day involved about 2,000' of vertical, most of which was up a rocky, rugged trail with big steps. For those of us with human-sized legs and a nose more than 4 inches off the ground, this was merely an inconvenience, but for little Banjo it turned out to be just about as much as he could handle.

Auntie and Kate hiking into the Emigrant alongside Relief Reservoir

Anyways, he got pretty exhausted after our first day and wasn't really in the mood to do much hiking after that, so we set up a base camp in a really beautiful area (Saucer Meadow) near the junction of two mountain streams, our campsite partway up a granite slope on a ledge overlooking the valley and volcanic ridge across from us. Instead of doing our intended loop, Auntie and I did a day hike up the canyon to Brown Bear Pass, where we had some great views SE into Yosemite and the craggy peaks beyond the Emigrant Lakes. So we had a nice lunch there and headed back to our campsite to join Kate and Banjo for some luxurious swimming in one of the more scenic hidden swimming holes I've seen in a long time. Here I am working up the courage to take the plunge. Yes, we all swam, and boy was it refreshing!


After swimming we had a delicious dinner of cous-cous, salami, cheese, onion, and dried mushrooms. The dried mushrooms and extra-peppery salami made it quite amazing - I would even make this meal again at home! Here's Kate putting on the final touches.


That evening smoke from the Telegraph Fire south of us (which had just started that morning) came in pretty thick and made us wonder what was burning and how close it was. Fortunately by morning the air around us had cleared up fine, but here's what it looked like from our campsite Saturday evening, as opposed to the night before the fire:


Well, the next day Banjo was still hurting, his muscles just all but mush from jumping over 14,000 boulders to follow us up the trail on the first day. So we thought it best to hike out instead of either a) trying to drag him further into the backcountry, or c) spending another night at our same camp. He was able to walk on the flat parts, but the poor little guy just didn't have it in him to get himself over any big obstacles or down steep sections. So, we carried him. Yep, we carried our 18 pound dog seven miles back out to the trailhead. How was such a bizarre feat accomplished, you may ask? Well, Kate started out with a makeshift Banjo-sling made out of the detachable hip-pack from her backpack.


Later on I took over and we just stuffed the puppa in the top of my pack, his head poking out like, as Auntie observed, a bobblehead turtle.

I think at this point even he realized the ridiculousness of the situation and decided to stick his tongue out at us in retaliation for this indignity (although he didn't really seem to mind getting a free ride too much). Eventually, after passing a couple bemused hikers or horseback riders who, upon seeing Banjo sticking out of my pack would say something like, "Hey, you're the first person we've seen today carrying their dog!" or "Can I have a ride too?" we reached the trailhead and treated ourselves to some cold beverages from the Kennedy Meadows general store. What we did see of the Emigrant Wilderness sure was beautiful, especially the stark contrast between smoothed over granite domelands and adjacent sharp volcanic ridges. The extreme dustiness due to stock overuse on the early part of the trail up to Relief Reservoir was frustrating, but beyond that it got a lot better. Unfortunately by that point our little dog was done in.

Auntie and Banjo - one of whom was a MUCH stronger hiker this trip than the other...

Since we had some extra time, we decided to go up the road to Sonora Pass, which we had failed to reach due to snow and a closed road on our earlier infamous boot-losing trip this spring. Kate volunteered to hang out at the very scenic trailhead while Auntie and I hiked North from the road up to a volcanic outcrop. In just a couple miles we saw some interesting features, including this meadow of leafy flowering plants (among other wildflowers) that looked like a garden:

And also this cool tunnel that had been eroded into the rock ridge we hiked up next to. We basically scrambled up to the right of the hoodoo-looking spires in the first picture up to a ridge, and saw this natural hole in the rock wall partway up.


We climbed up to it and as soon as we stepped into the tunnel the wind almost blew us over it was so strong! I had to hold onto my hat, and it even blew the camera off the rock I had set it on just seconds after it took this picture. Phew! Good thing we're not 10 lbs lighter or we probably would have been blown into Nevada.

So that's that - a quick rundown of a great hiking trip with a great Aunt (and a great dog, yes, we still love him). We hope to go back sometime. Thanks for coming out to go camping with us Auntie!