Category: Bay Area

Questionable fashion choices

So. It’s expected to be about 90 degrees here today.

I know, I know. I hear my New Mexico peeps saying, “pish posh, 90 degrees is a walk in the park!” and you are right.

90 degrees in Albuquerque is a fine day for a walk/run/jog/picnic/bike ride/what have you.

90 degrees here is intolerable. Because of one thing…

Humidity.

See, the human body was made to be an evaporative cooling device. Just like a swamp cooler, really.

From the Wikipedia entry: “Evaporative cooling is a physical phenomenon in which evaporation of a liquid, typically into surrounding air, cools an object or a liquid in contact with it.”

Right. I sweat. The dry air evaporates it. I feel fresh as a daisy. A sweaty daisy, but a daisy, nonetheless.

In the Bay Area, due to this large body of water, the uh, you know, Bay, we have a bit of humidity. Not much, mind you. Not Georgia on a hot summer night or Singapore all year round. But enough.

Enough that my finely tuned machine, calibrated to the New Mexico climate, can’t properly obtain “fresh as a sweaty daisy” and I just obtain sweaty.

But that’s not the point of my discussion.

The point is…it’s due to be pretty hot today. “Pretty hot” is something of a rarity around here. We get maybe two weeks, when all totaled up each year, of “good lord it’s hot” days.

The rest of the time, the weather is temperate and mild.

Because of this, few homes and businesses have any sort of air conditioning. I know, right? I almost passed out when I first moved here. “You want to rent me an apartment WITHOUT air conditioning? Do you want me to *die*?!?!?”

So in order to stay cool, people go to their drawers and the back of their closets to withdraw their “warm weather” clothes.

Herein lies the problem. In New Mexico, it gets hot a lot. Everyone has at least ONE pair of serviceable shorts, usually two or more. Something that people wouldn’t be upset at being seen in public with you while you were wearing them.

Not so in the area where it doesn’t often get that hot.

Yes, the first “damn it’s hot” day of the year means seeing shorts that are a bit tight and frightfully short.

I don’t mean on a cute girl, I mean on the overweight middle aged dad-man whose legs haven’t seen the outside of pants legs in decades wearing the shorts he bought for Spring Break back in college, thirty years ago.

This morning I saw a woman walking down the street in a purple bathing suit with the elastic about shot, thus hardly supporting her ample upper parts. This was paired with some lycra bike shorts, scarcely concealing her ample lower parts. She also carried a pack of Kools and smoked profusely. But that’s a whole other blog post.

Unless you are actually ON a bike, I’d like not to see the bike shorts, please.

Look, not all of my stuff is great to look at, but I have the decency toward my fellow mankind to wear a pair of shorts that don’t crawl up my heiney as I walk. My skin is pale from too many days under office florescent lights, but I make an effort to keep cool and keep my dignity at the same time.

For the good of all mankind.

Stay cool out there, ya’ll.

Seriously old school

Technologically speaking, I seem to be regressing.

Been using my high end Canon camera with all the whizz bang features and fancy lenses for a while.

And then I go and buy some cheapie plastic cameras and start having fun with 35mm film again.

This weekend I went one step farther back to luddite-ville. I went to Cyanotype. Known to the real world as Sunlight Prints.

Billed as a toy for kids, I’m having a heck of a lot of fun. I bought a kit off a sale table at Barnes & Noble a while back and used up (and ruined most of) the paper. Then I bought a paper refill at a toy store and kept trying. My technique is improving.

The whole thing is a chemical process kicked off by ultraviolet light from the sun.

So you get this light blue piece of paper with the right stuff chemical on it, compose your arrangement of items (in the shade), expose to the sun, then rinse it off with water and voila!

This is the same stuff that original blueprints were made from.

I guess Cyanotype isn’t so out of style, though, because in one of the buildings where I work, they have a huge art installation of sunlight prints on slabs of wood showing a variety of ferns. It’s gorgeous! Maybe I should peddle my prints for a buck to the powers that be at work, eh? *grin*

Anyhow, here I am, rocking it 1842 style! With a little help from a blooming rose bush in my front yard and a sunny April Saturday afternoon.

(These scans don’t do the Prussian blue any sort of justice. Also, where you see a double image, that’s because the wind was blowing my compositions around….)

Opening Day

And so, the 2009 baseball season is underway.

The major leaguers started early in the week.

But that’s not where I’m at.

I’m talkin’ about one lowly Single A.

Yeah baby.

The San Jose Giants kicked off their 142 game season in the Pacific Coast League with their home opener last night.

It was, perhaps, one of the strangest baseball encounters I’ve ever experienced.

And I’ve seen some weird sh*t.

To start with, the weather was was, what the indelicate call “pissing rain”. The not quite raining, not quite not. Just…dribbling.

For my home-squirrels in the 505/575 who come from a place where, when it rains, it means it, this phenomenon may not make sense to you.

Imagine those misters they have at Hooters. Only as big as the sky, unrelenting, and without the desert dryness to evaporate that water.

Close enough.

So it was Hooters misting all night long…and cold…and not very baseball-y weather.

Pretty much, the not really capacity crowd thinned out over the course of the game, leaving only the die hards to carry it to the end.

Which would be both me and The Good Man.

We stepped under cover for the third and fourth innings to indulge in bbq-sauce-up-to-your-ears tasty ribs and came out of there recharged and ready.
When you’ve endured several hours of cold soaking rain, it does something to your brain.

So as most people left, and us weirdos starting losing our minds, it got really fun.

Best moment will take some backstory.

Every game, the San Jose announcer designates a player on the opposing team as the “beer batter”. If the San Jose pitcher strikes out that batter, then beer is half price for the next half inning.

Needless to say, people cheer pretty damn hard for a strikeout.

Usually, they end the beer batter promotion in the sixth inning.

So, round about the seventh inning last night…we, the looneys in the crowd decided to dub that same opposing batter the hot chocolate batter (it was freaking cold!). Cheering went up. Someone yelled, “C’mon, daddy needs marshmallows!”

That damn beer hot chocolate batter would NOT just take a swing. Poor sport.

And then, for some reason, in the eighth inning, the announcer played the usual beer batter song and dubbed the guy the ‘apple juice batter of the game, as sponsored by Martinelli’s’. I don’t know if that was a legit promotion, but then all of us started hollering for our apple juice.

As the beer batter stood at the plate, we screamed “aaaaaaaple juuuuuice!” Damnit if that guy just wouldn’t strike out for us! No, he kept foulin’ ’em off! So I yelled “I’ll share mine with you!” No, he wasn’t to be swayed. I even offered to *give* him my apple juice. Considering I was sitting in the third row behind the plate in a nearly empty stadium, I KNOW he heard my offer.

But no, instead of sipping my apple juice, b–tard hit a rope out to center.

A cold soaked to the bone crowd couldn’t even get an apple juice. That ain’t right.

But damn did we have fun!

And yes, the Albuquerque Dukes pennant is still painted on the wall at Muni Stadium and I touched it for luck, like usual! Worked too! We won 7-1!

Tonight, I think I’ll stick to the couch and a blanket and my feline (who I’ve finally forgiven) and baseball on the television.

But I may be prompted to yell “aaaaaaapple juuuuuuuice” at a hitter who needs to strike out. : shrug :

Liar, liar, pants on fire

I have this friend. One of my best friends, actually, who is this little tiny bit of nuthin’. 90lbs soaking wet. She’s the sort of golden retrieverish person that will get up in the morning and go to spin class before breakfast, take an intense yoga lesson at lunch, and then go wind surfing for dinner.

She fancies ten hours bike rides. Yeah. That kind of gal.

But recently, at age 43, she’s found herself (happily) pregnant for the first time, and is very superstitious about this baby, so is, in her words, taking it easy.

Over dinner a few weeks back, my friend told me about this place she has been going hiking. “Oh, it’s great. They have a paved walking path, and it only has a few rolling hills. It’s great! I’ve been walking it a few times a week!”

Well, hey! To me, her elephantine friend who has been hitting the treadmill with vigor lately, “a few rolling hills” didn’t sound so bad!

Sunday I set out for The Dish, the landmark walking path on the campus of Stanford University.

Ok, fabulous. I got a much coveted parking spot, strapped on my shoes and off I went. The Good Man was up in SF with friends, so I was alone in this 3.7 mile mission.

I stopped by the ranger’s shack and he gave me a map, talked me through the path and off I went. Just to get to the trail, you have to walk up a large hill. Neato.

And so I get to the top of that first hill. Once there, you have to choose if you want to go clockwise or counterclockwise.

I looked to my left (to go clockwise). There was another steep hill. I looked to the right (to go counterclockwise) and there was a gradual decline. Hmm. So I decided I wanted to take the big hill at the first part of the walk while I still had energy, so I turned to the left and started walking.

And began gasping, sweating, became good friends with my heart beating out of my chest. I had to stop and put hands on knees multiple times (an elderly hunched backed woman strolled past me) and my lungs burned. Oh how they burned.

This was not a rolling hill. Neither was the next one. Or the next. Or the next several, actually.

Ok, fair enough, it was a beautiful walk. I saw deer, many ground squirrels, and a red tail hawk.

I did manage to actually complete the walk. I scaled the last uphill before leaving and had worked myself into quite a sweaty, panting froth.

So, of course, I rewarded myself for a job well done by eating a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

Oh well. I’m less golden retriever and more couch hound.

____________________

Isn’t that a pretty flower? I took a photo of it while lying on the ground crying out for dear mercy and sweet mother oxygen.

Old problem in a new location

You know…it’s been a while.

A good long while. Since back in the I-40 and I-25 days.

Many years past.

Yes, today I had a moment of cellular memory.

We had an especially windy day in the Bay Area.

Sure, people talk about it being windy here, but they don’t know from wind. They don’t know about that gap between the Sandias and Manzanos channeling the wind, giving it force, and knocking you down in the parking lot.

They don’t know about tumbleweeds the size of a small house bouncing joyfully across the road with a velocity relatively equal to an overloaded Mack Truck coming out of the Glorieta Pass, air brakes screaming.

No, they don’t know.

But today came close.

As I drove home down 280 in the howling wind, my hands and arms moved without me. Took up the familiar position of about a 27 and a half degree angle turn on the steering wheel.

Turning into the wind in order to keep the car between the white lines.

And then…that moment when going under the overpass and wooop, for half a second you get a wind break and steer, steer, steer to keep from broadsiding the person next to you then you are out of the wind break and steer, steer, steer to keep from sliding off in the other direction.

My hands and arms didn’t need my brain to tell them what to do. They knew.

Honed and skilled by the unforgiving winds of the New Mexico desert. They knew.

The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind. (aw man! I can’t believe I *went there*!)