Shannon's Very Annoying Week

Monday. Contractor tells us that we don't need a special valve to go with the "trim" we got for our new shower. Emergency trip to Emeryville required that evening.

Tuesday. Contractor tells us new deeper tub is too wide for our bathroom. Fortunately, we figure out that we really don't need all that wall next to it. Pulling out some of us it gives us 1" we need (but sounds of sledgehammers again fill the house).

Wednesday. Train of events that leads to death of US Ambassador in Libya makes me despair in humanity, because it's full of evil people doing evil things at every point. Meanwhile, on a smaller scale, cat has vomited in my keyboard overnight, requiring emergency trip to northwest Berkeley for replacement (of keyboard, not cat). Cat is not evil, despite vomiting. I skip board gaming, and instead make (non-emergency) trip to north Oakland to return anger-inducing Dance with Dragons. George R.R. Martin is now officially evil.

Thursday. Day goes well enough, other than play of game at review night that will not end. A couple of hours in, we call it.

Friday. Power problem at colo (not fault of colo, who was very solicitous in seeing if we needed anything) takes down all of Skotos. Emergency trip to Emeryville required. Power problems resolved after a bit of logic is applied, but one of machines has been damaged by blip. I swap out disk and leave RAID array rebuilding. Fortunately, it finishes on its own, and I can hit a ^D from home to bring it the rest of the way up.

Tomorrow, I'm planning to go out for lunch (though I've been eating too much crap all week, which will lead to kummerspeck). Then I'm going to go up to Lake Temescal, and probably hang out for a few hours. I'm going to bring Jon Peterson's Playing at the World and a notebook, with the idea being to see if it has any good datapoints for Designers & Dragons. And thus I'll hopefully get to relax in a beautiful environment AND work at the same time.

A Restful Day

Found my lunch plans a little askew today because the Wendy's I was planning to eat at, up on Broadway, was partially dissassembled!!! Renovation?

After alternate eating, I went up to Temescal and read RPG history and took notes for an hour or so. I got lots done and it was restful, as planned. I would have probably read longer, but it was really bright and sunny, so I was getting hot and thirsty.

Then I decided to head up to the North Oakland Regional Sports Center, which is tantalizingly just above Temescal and which has been calling me for months. Turns out, it's pretty close, and though the ride is uphill all the way, it wasn't terrible. 

Although called a "Sports Center", the sports-y crap is all right at the entrance, and then there's a fire trail that goes up and into a fairly large wilderness area. I rode my bike up when I could, sometimes walking because I was tired or because the path was so steep that I was afraid I was going to flip my bike over. 

I found one branch in the trail, and I took the righthand path which would eventually loop me back into the park rather than up and out of it. (I must admit, it was the branch that looked less steep) At the highest point of that trail there's some sort of big water tank, and I was surprised to see that every direction from there was down. My altometer said I was at 900-1000 feet or so, which as high as I've ever made it into those hills on my own power.

I continued on past that and the trail finally ended at a magnificent outlook, which showed the whole Bay in a vast panorama. I just stood there and look for long minutes. It was totally beautiful. 

Hard ride and walk up that trail, but I'll do it again for that view (though I'll investigate that other path first).

Biked only about 13 miles total, but that included an ascent of 800 feet.