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Berkeley Daze
Dec. 4th, 2024 08:40 amWe've been in Berkeley for two days now. Two out of four. I'm ready to head back to my island paradise, but we still have a few things to do and a few people to see.
And of course we've had stuff to do every day.
EXPLORING THE GREENWAY. There's a little Greenway right behind our AirB&B. Just a few blocks long. It runs between the very important landmarks of a kid's playground (on our side) and the DMV (two blocks down). I biked it here and there when I lived in Berkeley (it seemed longer then!), but it was nice to get to walk it for once, which I did on Monday morning. Just a few short blocks of pleasantly Californian trail (meaning that it had plenty of leaves that were autumning). There used to be a homeless encampment at the far side of it, which was there every time I biked through, and that seems to be gone now. I'd heard Mayor Arreguin had dropped homlessness by 45% in Berkeley these last few years, which is a Christmas Miracle after he spent the first six years or whatever screwing up the city with purist progressive beliefs, which meant that great projects got sidelined because they weren't good enough. Anyway, I wonder if the same is going on in Oakland and so it's a general trend and not Arreguin actually doing anything.
LAPPING THE LAKE. Later in the day on Monday I headed out to Lafayette to visit with C&M. It's become an annual tradition: we walk the Lafayette Reservoir, which is a pleasant little ~3 mile walk that reveals some more open (less treed) California landscapes, then we go have lunch somewhere. C & I inevitably talk just a little bit of business, but not much, so as not to leave out M. So we did that and we also talked some TV shows and some politics along the way. A pleasant little excursion! Though I talk with C. every week for Blockchain Commons, it's always good to get some face time.
GLORIOUS GAMING. And the same was true for my Monday evening. One of the joys of being in an Air B&B is theoretically having room to invite friends over. And sure enough this Air B&B has a very little table (which I knew), but it even has a leaf to extend it (which I did not know). So that was sufficient to have just a couple of people over to game. So we had an in-person Wednesday night reunion: just myself, S. and EL. We'd have loved to see EV, but he's up in Sacramento at the moment, and there was no way he was coming down here on a week night. (Aligning a Thanksgiving trip to get time with friends not during the week is challenging, and something I'll have to work on when we do it again presumably in two years). We ended up playing two games, _Calico_ and _Rise of Augustus_. Ironically, _Calico_ just appeared on BoardGameArena, so it was a game we didn't need to be in person to play, but EL appreciated the in-person teach (and I think I've gotten better at teaching it, after figuring out what the tension points in the game's teach are, when I was down in San Martin). _Rise of Augustus_ also exists on BGA, but only in a different form called _Via Magica_, and _Rise of Augustus_ is better in just about every way (better theming, more opportunities to increase your number of meeples and so play a less random game, better balance on super powers). So, that was nice to play.
THE B&B. Two days in, the air B&B has held up to our original expectations, which is to say it's the nicest and perhaps also most comfortable Air B&B I've been in. Could the higher-priced ones (at least at their regular price; this one was discounted when I rented) actually be better and not just bigger? Maybe, but I wouldn't count on it. In any case, everything is very modern, but that also has its drawbacks. For example, it took us a full day to get the heating system something like what we wanted, by adjusting both temperature and fan settings, and even now it's just slightly on the chill side ... except when it gets too hot at night. And the bathrooms have super fancy lights that go on whenever you enter. Which was great until the night before last when Kimberly got up in the night, walked _by_ the door to our master bathroom, and the light came on, waking & blinding me. Then I of course had the flipside while showering today: I was apparently too still, and the lights when off while I was in the shower. Anyway, very nice B&B. We're lounging around today because it's a pretty quiet day for both Kimberly & me, and it's totally comfortable. (But if I had to list a top win it might be the great overhead lighting in every room. Too many Air B&Bs I've been in have just been a dull twilight at night as a single table lamp fails to light a room.)
HAWAIIAN HOURS. I've been keeping Hawaiian hours since we got here, which is to say I've been waking up between 6.30-7.30 and going to bed before 11. Yesterday, I discovered that doesn't sync well with Berkeley hours. I was up, showered, and ready to go not long after 8, but I wanted to grab a sandwich for a hike up into the hills. I didn't want another Safeway sandwich, since I had one for dinner on Monday, and anyway I knew from past experience that it's a major fight to get someone to serve you at the sandwich counter at the Safeway if it's earlier than 11 or so. But Ike's Overpriced Sandwiches next door didn't open until 10.30. So I hung out at the Air B&B and did some reading and writing and then headed out to get to Ike's a few minutes after it opened. I was their first customer. Still overpriced. Still tasty. (I had a sandwich with delicious halal chicken and a few other goodies.)
THE HIKE. Big, big hike yesterday. I'm fairly certain it's the biggest hike I've done since November 2, 2019, a few months before we left. Since we're in Rockridge, I knew we were right under Lake Temescal, one of my favorite destinations when we lived here. I used to bike up there in the evening with a book or my computer. I did a lot of work on _Designers & Dragons_ and the DnDClassics histories up there. I remember finishing reading _A Dance with Dragons_ up there too, primarily because I realized I couldn't throw it across the room afterward because I was outside (and it was a library book beside).
Anyway, I decided to walk up there, with my theory being I could then walk into the North Oakland Regional Sports Center that's above it and use that to get up into Sibley, which is a ridgeline park, and then walk the ridgeline until I hit Berkeley, when I'd come down the fire trails in Strawberry Canyon to the campus. I've done all those individual bits before, but not necessarily in that order (as I was starting a few miles south of where our house in Berkeley was).
And so it went. I had lunch in Temescal, and moved on pretty quickly afterward because it was *cold* sitting out at the park. The paths up through the Sports Center took the most effort, and it took me two tries to find the correct path up to Sibley. Oh, and I got attacked by a coyote! Well, almost. He was hiding in the underbrush and burst out at me as I went by. But he obvious saw I was much larger than the prey he was expecting, so he nope-noped back into the brush when he was only halfway out. Then just half-a-mile on from that I ran into something even more dangerous: an overprivileged hill dweller with almost a dozen wild dogs, all off-leash. Several of them started aggressively barking at me and one kept aggressively advancing on me as the owner (walker probably) tried to bribe them back to her side with treats. After a very wary minute or two trying to get past them and not get assaulted I realized I really should warn her about the coyote but couldn't because she wouldn't have been able to hear me over the thunderous barking and there was no way I was getting closer to her again. Hopefully the super aggressive dog kept the smaller ones safe.
As soon as I went over the ridge, just before Sibley, the temperature felt like it dropped by 10 degrees, and so my overshirt went on again. Sibley was great, but then I faced a major challenge when I hit the connector trail between Sibley and Tilden: the trail was marked closed! This was my only way to get where I was going (well, except _maybe_ a road that went almost all the way down to Orinda and back). So I decided I had to chance it. Worst case, I backtracked and asked an unhappy Uber driver to pick me up in the middle of nowhere. It turned out that part of the trail had collapsed, I suspect during the torrential rains that the Bay Area got just before we came out. Fortunately, the collapse was just four or six feet across and there was still maybe three-foot width of trail and it looked like it was on solid stone. If I were living here, I'd avoid that trail until it was fixed, but it was OK going over it once when i really needed to get from point a to point b. When I got to the far side of that connector trail, there was another closed sign, but this one had been moved to the side of the trail so as not to impede traffic on it.
One of the neat things about the hike was that it was through a lot of places, such as Sibley and the North Oakland Regional Sports Center and even the closed connector trail, that I hadn't expected to ever see again. But when i had a full day free, the sky(line) was the limit. The fire trails that I took down to Berkeley were more familiar, and I've even been on them a few times since we left.
It turned out to be a LONG hike, longer than I expected, but I didn't usually go both up and down like that when I planned a hiking day when I lived here. If I was going up into the hills for that long of a hike I usually planned to take a bus back down: there were two bus lines I walked to up there: one in Tilden (which was pretty close) and one at the Chabot Observatory (which was pretty far). But this time my plan was basically to use the hill trails to transit from Oakland to Berkeley, the _long_ way. I did about 1200 feet of rise from our Air B&B to Sibley. There was more up and down later, but that was most of it. I hit almost 17 miles for the day, the vast majority of which was on that hike. I was *exhausted*. As I said, it was the longest I've walked since we moved, but even back in the day, 17 miles would have been a major outing. (The badges system on FitBit says I've hit 35,000 steps 14 times in the 10 years or I've had a FitBit, which was what I did yesterday, but I was close to 40,000 steps, which I've only hit 5 times.)
MATCHBOX MAGIC FLUTE. The reason I was transiting to Berkeley was that Kimberly and I had tickets for a play that evening: Mary Zimmerman's Matchbox Magic Flute at the Berkeley Rep. We'd seen two of Zimmerman's plays many years previous, her Metamorphoses and her Arabian Nights, and they were both terrific. This was more of the same.
I actually hadn't known what to expect, and thus was somewhat surprised that it was fully operatic (or opera-lite as Berkeleyside described it). And in some ways that made it marvelous. Oh, I could have done without 80% of the lines being sung in operatic tones, as that made it hard to understand at times. But getting this viewport into another word of storytelling was amazing. It was a Hero's journeys amidst fantasy realms, sure, but additions like the fool (papageno) and a storyline that totally undercut traditional views of who might be good and evil were terrific. And the constant Mozart concert and all the singing were fun, even if the latter obscured the words at times.
Zimmerman also did a marvelous job as writer and director, upping the humor and even modernizing it (there was even one non-overt Trump dig, about "storming the capital ... I mean castle" and how that character might become attorney general as a result). And the staging, oh my gosh, it was beautiful. Over the top colors, iconic outfits, even a red-lit airvent that poofed up the Queen of Night's skirts and gave them a red hue.
Overall, a terrific experience. Papageno's bird calls were still running through my head when I was getting ready for bed last night.
(And today, I rest! Total plans = Wendy's for lunch, Wicked for desert, then Millennium for dinner.)
And of course we've had stuff to do every day.
EXPLORING THE GREENWAY. There's a little Greenway right behind our AirB&B. Just a few blocks long. It runs between the very important landmarks of a kid's playground (on our side) and the DMV (two blocks down). I biked it here and there when I lived in Berkeley (it seemed longer then!), but it was nice to get to walk it for once, which I did on Monday morning. Just a few short blocks of pleasantly Californian trail (meaning that it had plenty of leaves that were autumning). There used to be a homeless encampment at the far side of it, which was there every time I biked through, and that seems to be gone now. I'd heard Mayor Arreguin had dropped homlessness by 45% in Berkeley these last few years, which is a Christmas Miracle after he spent the first six years or whatever screwing up the city with purist progressive beliefs, which meant that great projects got sidelined because they weren't good enough. Anyway, I wonder if the same is going on in Oakland and so it's a general trend and not Arreguin actually doing anything.
LAPPING THE LAKE. Later in the day on Monday I headed out to Lafayette to visit with C&M. It's become an annual tradition: we walk the Lafayette Reservoir, which is a pleasant little ~3 mile walk that reveals some more open (less treed) California landscapes, then we go have lunch somewhere. C & I inevitably talk just a little bit of business, but not much, so as not to leave out M. So we did that and we also talked some TV shows and some politics along the way. A pleasant little excursion! Though I talk with C. every week for Blockchain Commons, it's always good to get some face time.
GLORIOUS GAMING. And the same was true for my Monday evening. One of the joys of being in an Air B&B is theoretically having room to invite friends over. And sure enough this Air B&B has a very little table (which I knew), but it even has a leaf to extend it (which I did not know). So that was sufficient to have just a couple of people over to game. So we had an in-person Wednesday night reunion: just myself, S. and EL. We'd have loved to see EV, but he's up in Sacramento at the moment, and there was no way he was coming down here on a week night. (Aligning a Thanksgiving trip to get time with friends not during the week is challenging, and something I'll have to work on when we do it again presumably in two years). We ended up playing two games, _Calico_ and _Rise of Augustus_. Ironically, _Calico_ just appeared on BoardGameArena, so it was a game we didn't need to be in person to play, but EL appreciated the in-person teach (and I think I've gotten better at teaching it, after figuring out what the tension points in the game's teach are, when I was down in San Martin). _Rise of Augustus_ also exists on BGA, but only in a different form called _Via Magica_, and _Rise of Augustus_ is better in just about every way (better theming, more opportunities to increase your number of meeples and so play a less random game, better balance on super powers). So, that was nice to play.
THE B&B. Two days in, the air B&B has held up to our original expectations, which is to say it's the nicest and perhaps also most comfortable Air B&B I've been in. Could the higher-priced ones (at least at their regular price; this one was discounted when I rented) actually be better and not just bigger? Maybe, but I wouldn't count on it. In any case, everything is very modern, but that also has its drawbacks. For example, it took us a full day to get the heating system something like what we wanted, by adjusting both temperature and fan settings, and even now it's just slightly on the chill side ... except when it gets too hot at night. And the bathrooms have super fancy lights that go on whenever you enter. Which was great until the night before last when Kimberly got up in the night, walked _by_ the door to our master bathroom, and the light came on, waking & blinding me. Then I of course had the flipside while showering today: I was apparently too still, and the lights when off while I was in the shower. Anyway, very nice B&B. We're lounging around today because it's a pretty quiet day for both Kimberly & me, and it's totally comfortable. (But if I had to list a top win it might be the great overhead lighting in every room. Too many Air B&Bs I've been in have just been a dull twilight at night as a single table lamp fails to light a room.)
HAWAIIAN HOURS. I've been keeping Hawaiian hours since we got here, which is to say I've been waking up between 6.30-7.30 and going to bed before 11. Yesterday, I discovered that doesn't sync well with Berkeley hours. I was up, showered, and ready to go not long after 8, but I wanted to grab a sandwich for a hike up into the hills. I didn't want another Safeway sandwich, since I had one for dinner on Monday, and anyway I knew from past experience that it's a major fight to get someone to serve you at the sandwich counter at the Safeway if it's earlier than 11 or so. But Ike's Overpriced Sandwiches next door didn't open until 10.30. So I hung out at the Air B&B and did some reading and writing and then headed out to get to Ike's a few minutes after it opened. I was their first customer. Still overpriced. Still tasty. (I had a sandwich with delicious halal chicken and a few other goodies.)
THE HIKE. Big, big hike yesterday. I'm fairly certain it's the biggest hike I've done since November 2, 2019, a few months before we left. Since we're in Rockridge, I knew we were right under Lake Temescal, one of my favorite destinations when we lived here. I used to bike up there in the evening with a book or my computer. I did a lot of work on _Designers & Dragons_ and the DnDClassics histories up there. I remember finishing reading _A Dance with Dragons_ up there too, primarily because I realized I couldn't throw it across the room afterward because I was outside (and it was a library book beside).
Anyway, I decided to walk up there, with my theory being I could then walk into the North Oakland Regional Sports Center that's above it and use that to get up into Sibley, which is a ridgeline park, and then walk the ridgeline until I hit Berkeley, when I'd come down the fire trails in Strawberry Canyon to the campus. I've done all those individual bits before, but not necessarily in that order (as I was starting a few miles south of where our house in Berkeley was).
And so it went. I had lunch in Temescal, and moved on pretty quickly afterward because it was *cold* sitting out at the park. The paths up through the Sports Center took the most effort, and it took me two tries to find the correct path up to Sibley. Oh, and I got attacked by a coyote! Well, almost. He was hiding in the underbrush and burst out at me as I went by. But he obvious saw I was much larger than the prey he was expecting, so he nope-noped back into the brush when he was only halfway out. Then just half-a-mile on from that I ran into something even more dangerous: an overprivileged hill dweller with almost a dozen wild dogs, all off-leash. Several of them started aggressively barking at me and one kept aggressively advancing on me as the owner (walker probably) tried to bribe them back to her side with treats. After a very wary minute or two trying to get past them and not get assaulted I realized I really should warn her about the coyote but couldn't because she wouldn't have been able to hear me over the thunderous barking and there was no way I was getting closer to her again. Hopefully the super aggressive dog kept the smaller ones safe.
As soon as I went over the ridge, just before Sibley, the temperature felt like it dropped by 10 degrees, and so my overshirt went on again. Sibley was great, but then I faced a major challenge when I hit the connector trail between Sibley and Tilden: the trail was marked closed! This was my only way to get where I was going (well, except _maybe_ a road that went almost all the way down to Orinda and back). So I decided I had to chance it. Worst case, I backtracked and asked an unhappy Uber driver to pick me up in the middle of nowhere. It turned out that part of the trail had collapsed, I suspect during the torrential rains that the Bay Area got just before we came out. Fortunately, the collapse was just four or six feet across and there was still maybe three-foot width of trail and it looked like it was on solid stone. If I were living here, I'd avoid that trail until it was fixed, but it was OK going over it once when i really needed to get from point a to point b. When I got to the far side of that connector trail, there was another closed sign, but this one had been moved to the side of the trail so as not to impede traffic on it.
One of the neat things about the hike was that it was through a lot of places, such as Sibley and the North Oakland Regional Sports Center and even the closed connector trail, that I hadn't expected to ever see again. But when i had a full day free, the sky(line) was the limit. The fire trails that I took down to Berkeley were more familiar, and I've even been on them a few times since we left.
It turned out to be a LONG hike, longer than I expected, but I didn't usually go both up and down like that when I planned a hiking day when I lived here. If I was going up into the hills for that long of a hike I usually planned to take a bus back down: there were two bus lines I walked to up there: one in Tilden (which was pretty close) and one at the Chabot Observatory (which was pretty far). But this time my plan was basically to use the hill trails to transit from Oakland to Berkeley, the _long_ way. I did about 1200 feet of rise from our Air B&B to Sibley. There was more up and down later, but that was most of it. I hit almost 17 miles for the day, the vast majority of which was on that hike. I was *exhausted*. As I said, it was the longest I've walked since we moved, but even back in the day, 17 miles would have been a major outing. (The badges system on FitBit says I've hit 35,000 steps 14 times in the 10 years or I've had a FitBit, which was what I did yesterday, but I was close to 40,000 steps, which I've only hit 5 times.)
MATCHBOX MAGIC FLUTE. The reason I was transiting to Berkeley was that Kimberly and I had tickets for a play that evening: Mary Zimmerman's Matchbox Magic Flute at the Berkeley Rep. We'd seen two of Zimmerman's plays many years previous, her Metamorphoses and her Arabian Nights, and they were both terrific. This was more of the same.
I actually hadn't known what to expect, and thus was somewhat surprised that it was fully operatic (or opera-lite as Berkeleyside described it). And in some ways that made it marvelous. Oh, I could have done without 80% of the lines being sung in operatic tones, as that made it hard to understand at times. But getting this viewport into another word of storytelling was amazing. It was a Hero's journeys amidst fantasy realms, sure, but additions like the fool (papageno) and a storyline that totally undercut traditional views of who might be good and evil were terrific. And the constant Mozart concert and all the singing were fun, even if the latter obscured the words at times.
Zimmerman also did a marvelous job as writer and director, upping the humor and even modernizing it (there was even one non-overt Trump dig, about "storming the capital ... I mean castle" and how that character might become attorney general as a result). And the staging, oh my gosh, it was beautiful. Over the top colors, iconic outfits, even a red-lit airvent that poofed up the Queen of Night's skirts and gave them a red hue.
Overall, a terrific experience. Papageno's bird calls were still running through my head when I was getting ready for bed last night.
(And today, I rest! Total plans = Wendy's for lunch, Wicked for desert, then Millennium for dinner.)