Category: California

Here’s Comes The Sun, doot n doot doot

Yesterday I had an appointment with the ol’ primary care doc, a follow up from my physical a month ago. Seems the kind doctor wanted to talk about my bloodwork.

Um, ok.

So she scrolls through the results of my blood work, tells me all looks pretty good except one thing.

Vitamin D.

The normal range is 30 to 100 thingamabobbers (I’m sure that’s the official medical term) and they like you to be about 50-60 thingamabobbers on a daily basis.

My score on this exam was 15 thingamabobbers. So yeah, I failed the test.

I knew that low vitamin D was a big deal, been reading about it more and more in the news, but I never figured this was a problem I’d have.

Well, doctor lady scared the crap out of me about my lack of thingamabobbers. Joint aches, insomnia, bad memory and osteoporosis are all side effects of low vitamin D.

Then the doctor lady looked at past blood work and noted that I’ve had a low thingamabobber count for two years.

This is where my 5’3″ doctor lady got mad. Real mad.

First she thought I’d been under her care and hadn’t taken her advice. She looked further and saw that I was under the care of another doctor in the same HMO when I got those other low readings.

That other doctor came along when my longtime primary care doctor retired. I never liked that new doc. I thought she was distracted and not very involved in my care. She was the doctor who told me to simply suck it up when I broke my little finger, and that was the final straw. I found a new doctor, the nice lady I have now.

“I cannot believe that other doctor didn’t do anything about this!” she ranted. There were some other under the breath mumblings and admonitions about “your bones are important!” and “you have osteoporosis in your family!”

Then she put me on a mega dose of vitamin D and ordered me to go outside more.

Me, the kid from the desert. The one who loves sunny days.

Also…the kid working twelve-hour days at work.

So you know, things change. Time to reacquaint myself with El Sol.

Hmm, it’s getting near lunchtime. Sorry boss, I need to go eat lunch outside today. Doctor’s orders!







Image found here.


Hey, Joe!

Been working some long days at the ol’ office this week, and it’s keeping me hopping.

Yesterday evening, I was asked to attend a corporate event in the place of my second level boss. He’s working even harder than I am right now, so I was happy to help him out.

This event was something of a schmoozy thing for a lot of corporate customers around the Bay Area.

Here’s where it gets interesting, this particular gathering was held at the San Francisco 49ers training facility down in Santa Clara.

Growing up in New Mexico with no professional sports teams affiliated with the state, we all adopted our teams from neighboring states. All the kids were either Denver or Dallas fans. Not so for me, I picked the 49ers early on as my team.

It was easy to be a 49ers fan back then. Joe Montana was the guy in charge and our chances of winning on any given Sunday were pretty darn good.

So yesterday I went to the training facility and walked out on the field and took my seat in the tent to sit through the corporate, work related stuff.

Blah blah this and blah blah that….and may we now introduce Jim Harbaugh, coach of the 49ers.

Well hey, that’s pretty cool. Harbaugh, fresh of Stanford’s win in the Orange Bowl, was just named head coach, so he’s got some media credibility.

Harbaugh did some motivational style speaking in the way only an old style football coach could. I mean heck, I was ready to hit the weight room and strap on the shoulder pads by the time he was done. Harrgggh!

But the finale of the night was the best. 49er helmets and footballs were given to a few attendees as prizes (I got a football) and then Joe Montana, Bay Area royalty, entered the room.

He gave a short talk about the company putting on the event, how great their product is, and then went to the back of the room for a meet and greet.

So, you know, here I am with my new friend Joe (he also signed my football).




Hmmmm, it’s a thinker

Often I’m asked why I made the very big and life changing decision to move from New Mexico to California.

Suffice to say it is a very complex story filled with much emotion and fraught with “can I really do this?” anxiety. If you and I are ever in the same town at the same time, let’s buy a pitcher of margaritas and cuss and discuss.

However, there are some ancillary reasons why I moved that are pretty easy to explain.

To wit.

Today, February 1, 2011, this is what it looks like in Albuquerque:



Photo from the front page of the ABQJournal online.




And today, February 1, 2011 this is what it looks like where I live now:



Photo from my iPhone, taken while I ate lunch outside



Yeah, I know, it’s a head scratcher, right?



With The Passage of Time

While toiling away at my desk job every day, I like to keep the day going by listening to the radio in the background.

Generally, I like to stream the oldies country station out of Albuquerque, channel 104.7. It is very comforting to hear familiar music mixed in with ads for local ABQ businesses. It’s also very perplexing for my coworkers, which is an added benefit.

This afternoon while crunching spreadsheets and lobbing emails over the wall, the circa 1969 song “Okie from Muskogee” came on the radio.

Now, as you know, I do love a Merle Haggard song.

For some reason today, instead of just mindlessly singing along, I listened in on the words.

It’s a pretty outdated song by many accounts, yet in some ways still feels relevant.

Take this, for example:

“We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy/
Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.”

Well, for one thing, long and shaggy hair is commonplace now. It’s actually mainstream.

For another, there’s not any hippies in SF these days. I don’t think the free-love folks from the sixties would even recognize the place anymore. Funny how scads of money tends to move the needle toward conservative, no matter where you are.

That said, that’s still my favorite line in the song. I sang it at the top of my lungs when I saw Merle in concert this summer. The absurdity of singing a line deriding San Francisco while being near San Francisco was just too delicious.

Then there’s this part that has always cracked me up:

“We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse/
And white lightnin’s still the biggest thrill of all.”

So he’s singing about how being a square is a good thing. About having good clean fun. About waving the flag and being upright and just.

Oh and he’s also singing about drinking an illegal alcohol substance.

Marijuana? No. Moonshine? Just fine.

Am I the only one who finds that just a little…oh I don’t know…ironic?

Plus, I can guarangoddamntee you that Mr. Haggard has sampled of the green stuff. More than once. More than once today.

Merle has said he wrote “Okie from Muskogee” as a protest to the Vietnam protestors. He found them a little hard to take after he’d been released from San Quentin.

Oh wait. So the flag waving good clean fun guy was in prison?

Five different times, actually. Doesn’t that seem…uh…also ironic?

Which makes me remember that the whole song, while conservative and flag waving and a bit chiding in tone is really, actually, all done tongue in cheek.

It’s a bit of a ruse, and a well-done ruse. A Grammy winning poke at society.

And that’s where the title of this post comes into play. With the passage of time, The Hag starts to look a little less like a musical outlaw and a lot more like a musical genius.

Plus he helped me get through a really rough day. Thanks Hag.




Photo Fun: Fish Eye lens

A couple years ago I invested in a few of those fun plastic Lomography cameras.

I own an Action Sampler multiple lens camera, a Colorsplash with gel films for the flash, and a camera with a built in fish eye lens.

Of the three, the fish eye has been my least favorite. With that big bubble lens skewing the view, it felt damn near impossible to take a good photo with the thing.

Better photographers than I understand the proportions of this extremely wide angle lens, but for me I felt like I was fighting with it.

So I gave up.

Recently, I was cleaning out my gear and I noticed that the fish eye camera had a roll of film loaded, and the counter showed 1. Turns out I hadn’t even used a single frame of the roll.

I tossed the camera in my bag for New Year’s Eve weekend. I knew we’d be staying near Sausalito and there’s plenty of photo opportunities up there.

Well, I forgot I had that fish eye in my bag until the day we were driving home when I had a flash of inspiration. As we drove over the bridge, I held the camera out the window and on the roof of the car, tilted it up slightly, and snapped away.

Sometimes serendipity is the best friend of the photographer.

Other than straightening the horizon, this photo is straight off the camera.

Suddenly I like that fish eye camera a whole lot more.



(click to see a larger size)