shannon_a | Entries tagged with hiking

After a heat wave early in the week that brought our temperature up to a ghastly 100 degrees (and which kept our bedroom frying for a few days straight), the marine layer descended suddenly, and by Saturday morning the high was set to be 60 degrees, it was entirely overcast, and I kept getting hit by moisture from the sky that one might call rain if it weren't so infrequent.

So, since I'm determined to make every remaining weekend count, I began to seek other places to go this Saturday.

Heading southward, to Hayward and Fremont, the temperature popped a couple of degrees, but not a lot. Darned marine layer.Fortunately I found warmer temperature the further I headed east on BART. Orinda was about the same as Berkeley, Lafayette was a few degrees warmer, and by the time I got Pleasant Hill I was seeing 73 instead of 60. So that's where I decided to go.

To be more precise, my destination was Briones Regional Park. I believe I'd been there three times before, once originating at the Reliez Valley Staging Area, once at the Lafayette Ridge Staging Area, and once at Panorama Drive. Oh, and I think I wandered over a corner of it when heading to Dave S's house in Pleasant Hill. What's amazing is that in those three trips, I've barely covered any of the same ground, except perhaps a quarter of a mile or so at Russell Peak. And that would largely be the case again this time, because it's a darned big park. (6,256 acres darned big, which is three times the size of my beloved Tilden Park, up above our house.)

This time I selected the Alhambra Creek Staging Area, which is up in the Northeast corner of the park. That means I rode in to Pleasant Hill BART (after having to single track from Walnut Creek, because BART is so often a mess nowadays), then took the western Canal Trail northwest until I broke for the hills, then followed Reliez Valley Road all the way around the park. There were several hundred feet of rise, but only a little bit of it was particularly steep. Most of the ride was pleasant, though occasionally the roads were too tight with cars, as happens over on that side of the hills.

And then I was at the Alhambra Creek Staging Area. Mind you, it was about 1.30 at this time, after a late morning, a BART ride, lunch at Wendy's, and a bike ride.

This time around I circled the north of the park: Orchard Trail, Pine Trail, Tonyon Canyon Trail, Briones Crest, Briones Road Trail, and then back along some of the same smaller trails to return to Alhambra Creek. (There was again just a quarter of a mile or so of repeat, this time along the Briones Road Trail.)

After some walks along scrub, the Tonyon Canyon Trail was the first really attractive walk, as I hiked near a creek, and then increasingly far above it. But it was the Briones Crest Trail, at about 1200 Feet, and toward the center of the park, that was the highlight. There were absolutely gorgeous views to the north there, looking down on Crockett, Martinez, beyond them the Carquinez Straights, and beyond that Vallejo and Benecia. All places I've biked to in the last few years, and great to see from this perspective. I was also really struck by how wide the waterway opened east of Martinez and Benecia. I felt like that was something I'd never seen before, and looking now I see that it's Grizzly Bay opening to the north. Those views definitely made the day.

On the way back, when I was about half-a-mile out from the Alhambra Creek Staging Area, I ran across a huge snake, four foot or so, lying across the trail. After I was momentarily frozen and shivering from waves of fear originating in the reptilian brain, I stopped and observed it for a while. Damned thing was moving really slowly, and looking pretty fat too. It was kind of green with diamond or hex patterns on it. I waited it out for a minute, but it wasn't going anywhere fast, and since it wasn't rattling at me (and didn't have a rattle that I saw), I finally walked behind it, and continued on my way.

Why'd it have to be snakes?

When I got back to the Alhambra Creek Staging Area, I looked at the little picture of snakes they had up on their signboard there, telling you not to murder them, and decided it was probably a happy gopher snake. The gopher was presumably less happy, which is a shame because they'd looked so cute when I saw many of them out by the Staging Area.

A nice hike despite the snake.

I decided to take the slightly longer route home by taking the Canal Trail down to a road that went to Walnut Creek BART. The idea was to avoid that single tracking between Pleasant Hill and Walnut Creek. But I don't learn: it was another crappy road, with too many cars going too fast, once I got past the area with bike lanes. And, my theory of avoiding the single tracking didn't help, because it just meant the whole BART system was a mess. When I got there, there should have been a train a minute or two earlier, but that clearly wasn't the case because the platform was jammed. And the next train was 13 minutes out.

While on the trains, I did my best to work on my D&D History book, specifically the "World of Greyhawk" folio article that's been open on my computer for ... honestly, months. I got everything re-edited, and got some work into the next section, which takes research, but that was it, and I didn't end up doing any more over the weekend.

Really, this probably isn't going to be a good year for my Designers & Dragons work. My free time is almost all going to preparing for the move, or keeping the household going, or putting together the little bit of blockchain writing I've got on the side.

Which means that it'll probably be 2020 before Designers & Dragons gets any real effort. Which is a darned shame. But by April 2020 the plan is to have more time for writing of this type, and that goal is in sight at this point. (There's just a house to pack and an ocean to cross first.)

Saturday (Bikes & Games). It's time for our (sometimes) semimonthly campaign board game, and it actually happens for the second time since my return from Hawaii. Our plan is to play the fourth box of T.I.M.E Stories and we do, succeeding our on our third run. It's an adventure with a unique twist at the end of the first run, which really pays out the game's time-travel genre (which is what I love most about the game), but the rest of the adventure is pretty pedestrian.

There's a catch to gaming: Mary has suggested that they have it down at their house in San Jose, and I've been saying for months that I'd be happy to journey down there, but that's actually quite a journey because the BART line that was supposed to reach Berryessa last year was never completed (and currently is scheduled no later than the day before our move to Hawaii.) Nonetheless, I'm still happy to go down there, because it lets me do some biking through San Jose on either side of the game.

The Ride South. I do, mind you, have to be out of the house by 10.15 for our 1.00 game. That's to get me out to BART by the 10.28 train, which drops me off at Warm Springs just before 11.30. This is my first trip to the Warm Springs station, though I'd gone by it while it was still under construction (and like its Berryessa brethren, already at least a year late) last time I biked down in San Jose. It's a nice station: very modern, very clean. And, it has the elevators in rational places, which makes hauling my bike around that much easier. The other advantage of Warm Springs is that it's about five miles closer to San Jose than the old Fremont station. Whereas I made a 40+ mile round trip when I journeyed to San Jose a few years ago (including lots of travel out of my way to see parks and greenways), this one ends up coming in somewhere under 30 miles, and that's a lot more doable (though I still end up tired: see being more out of biking shape than I used to be).

Google had told me an hour and four minutes to get to Donald and Mary's house. I didn't believe it, especially not with a plan to collect lunch on the way, and especially since I've got out of biking shape in the last few years. So, I allocated an hour and a half, which turns out to be almost exactly right.

The first three miles heading south are along Warm Springs Boulevard, which is just an ugly, big street of the type that you find in suburbs. But from there I sidestep over to the base of the foothills and ride the entire length of Park Victoria, from south Fremont, through Milpitas, to the edge of San Jose. This is a very pleasant suburban street at first, and even when it becomes busier toward downtown Milpitas, I still enjoy it, because it's very nostalgic.

You see, Milpitas is the first place I lived in San Jose, so I hit Calaveras and I immediately recognize the shopping center where there used to be an Alpha Beta. (It's a Chinese supermarket now.) And looking down Calaveras I have an almost subconscious understanding that the Big Yellow House used to be there — an all-you-can-eat restaurant where they weighed you before and afterward to see what you should be charged. This feeling of dreamingly biking through the past continues through Milpitas, and as I pass the shopping center where we used to sometimes go for Thrifty ice-cream cones (also something else now), I realize that catty-corner from that is the Togo's that my dad took us to growing up, and I detour to that shopping center, and unlike everything else, it's still there 30+ years later! So I get one of my favorites, the 24 (turkey and avocado), which goes in my bag for gaming.

Shortly after that I sidestep over to Capitol Expressway and go RIGHT by my sister's house (and my dad's house when I was growing up), but I don't stop because I'll be seeing them the next day. Then it's up the Peneticia Creek Trail, next to my dad's other residence when I was growing up, and out to Donald's and Mary's.

(And this is where the gaming occurs.)

One thing I note on the way in is how green and clean everything is. There's no trash randomly thrown on the ground, no piles of furniture dumped, no parks with overflowing trashcans, and no homeless parked on every single damned street corner.

There's certainly something to be said for the suburbs.

The Ride North. We complete our T.I.M.E Stories game before four o'clock, and even do a game of the Dresden Files Co-op afterward. But it's still only 4.30 or so when I leave, so I take a longer ride home that I was considering, where I head west for a bit, then head up the Coyote Creek Trail into Fremont.

It turns out the Coyote Creek Trail sucks, at least the part on the east side of the creek. That's because the first two blocks, which include a block of street and then the start of the trail, according to Google Maps, have been blocked off by the city of San Jose. The trail now apparently starts at the border of Milpitas on the other side of the ugly, busy Montegue Expressway (thankfully there are no nasty suburban roads like this up in the East Bay let alone in Hawaii). From there it's a gravel path, up on a rise, with trees off to the left, disguising any potential creek, and businesses off the right, about half of which are internet companies, which of course have fences all the way around. It's not a great ride, because of the gravel, but not horrible.

And then I hit the first underpass, which must have been under East Tasman Drive. This is a great feature of a few different river-side trails in San Jose, which duck you under the constantly busy roads rather than expecting you to cross them. But as I enter the shadow of the underpass, I feel like the road surface is looking weird and then suddenly squelch I'm biking through a few inches of thick, wet mud. I keep going as far as I can, and make it about two-thirds of the way through the underpass, but then the density of the mud finally slows me enough that I can't maintain either my balance or my forward momentum. So I put my foot down (SQUELCH), dismount, and start walking my bike. The mud isn't quite deep enough to go over the top of my shoes, but now that the wheels are going so slow, it's rolling up into my brakes and just coating EVERYTHING.

I spend the next hour or so trying to shake mud off my bike as I ride.

Past Calaveras (and another underpass, where there's fortunately a one-inch or so path through the mud, which I manage to navigate), the trail improves to a paved path. I know I've ridden this before (after coming off the west side of the gravel trail on a previous trip, I think). And then it's roads and I eventually find somewhere to eat and get back to Warm Springs BART.

And I'm tired. I think I've done 30 miles or so. After I get home, I'm not fully coherent again until Sunday.

Sunday (Visits). After spending much of Saturday down in the suburbs of Fremont, San Jose, and Milpitas, on Sunday the suburbs comes to us. My dad and Mary are on their annual visit to California, and so they come up and see us, along with my sister, Melody, and her husband, Jared. We have a good time talking with everyone. We kids exchange Christmas presents, because we didn't manage to even try to get together this year.

Figuring out lunch was a challenge because of Kimberly's ongoing foot problems, but we finally decide on Pasta Bene at the end of our street, and when we do I realize it's a pretty good option, because I know my dad is an Italian fan.

Monday (Bikes & Hikes). Though I did get some nice exercise out in the sun on Saturday, it was in service to gaming, so I'd saved my Memorial Day for a nice hike in the sun, the sort of all-day outing that I haven't really had since before our visit to Hawaii in April.

I often start my plans for a big adventure by scrolling around Google Maps, looking for green spaces that I haven't explored. This time around I was looking at maybe getting into Mount Diablo from the northwest, and I realized something startling:

Pleasant Hill (and southern Concord) has some nice canal trails that form a big "U". To the east, they turn north at the Lime Ridge Open Space. I've ridden out there many a time, and even explored Lime Ridge a bit. I'd always assumed that was the eastern edge of the valley that Pleasant Hill is in, and there were wildlands, ranches, and what now beyond. But looking at the map I saw, no, there was actual city out there, an extension of Concord running up on the higher plateau past the Ridge. Huh.

So I get up early, BART to Pleasant Hill, then ride around the Canal Trail to the Lime Ridge. Though Treat Blvd was the most direct route up to the higher plateau, I instead picked one that I had to bike further to: a little trail up through the park itself. It was less steep, which was the point, so actually bikeable (for me). And so I'm suddenly up in this southeast corner of Concord.

I've got a long path through this area planned. First I go through the Markham Regional Arboretum (which is a beautiful little park, except that the signs make me walk my bike), then I alternatively walk and ride my bike down a long greenway that cuts across several streets (with the narrowness of the trail being what forces me to walk when someone is coming the other direction), then I bike up into the Newhall Community Park (which is kind of ugly, filled with very tall, dry weeds, at least until you get to the lake in the eastern half).

After that I jot out to Clayton Road for lunch at an A&W, which seems like it should be a treat, as I don't know the last time I was at one, but all of their classic American meals are beef. Which I guess is pretty classic. Fortunately they've also got KFC entrees. And then I bike some ugly suburban streets (which are grossly busy like the ones down in the south bay, but which unlike them don't have bike lanes) until I get to the Mitchell Canyon Staging Area, which turns out to be entering Mount Diablo from the north, I've circled around so much!

I've already spent a lot of the day biking around, so I spend less than three hours in the park, but it's quite beautiful, and I really make the most of it. Starting from the 600 foot or so staging area, I hike straight up to Mitchell Rock, at about 1000 feet, and then to the "Twin Peaks" at 1600 feet. That's 1000 feet of ascent in something less than an hour and a half. I get great views all the way up, and really enjoy being out in the wilderness. (I could keep going to another peak, not far on at 2600 feet, but I use the rapidly approaching evening as an excuse to not try.)

I'm less sure about that 1000 feet of descent in a mile and a half or so, but it turns out to be not very steep, with the only problem being a few hundred yards of trail where some landslide has left scree all across the trail. I slip down onto my butt once, but fortunately don't slide on the scree off the edge or anything.

It's past 4 by the time I'm back to my bike. Fortunately the trip back to BART is all either downhill or level. Mind you, the level is more challenging than I'd like, because I'm pretty sore from biking up several hundred feet to get to Mt. Diablo, then hiking up another 1000 feet, and in fact doing more total climbing than that with ups and downs (my Fitbit records more like 2400 feet of ascent all combined). And it turns out that I'm sore for days afterward too.

And so that's another tiny bit of Mt. Diablo that I've explored. But even after three (four?) tripes to Shell Ridge, Diablo Foothills, and Mt. Diablo, I've just explored tiny corners of the park. It's so impressively, enormously big. I wish it were more convenient to get to! (We'll see if I manage maybe one more trip out there while we're in this state.)

BART is a really great resource to enable hiking, as it can get you to different places all over the Bay. And I certainly take advantage of it, but not as often as I should, particularly not in my last year by the Bay. Because it's so much easier to just walk to the hills from my house, and to walk from there ... as far as I can go.

But this Saturday was gray and gloomy and promising low '60s in Berkeley. So I looked around for nicer temperatures, and finally got a promise of 64 or 65 in Hayward, so after looking for big green spots on the map, I decided to head down there.

Exiting the BART station, I was immediately pleased by my decision, because it felt almost muggy. I also discovered that there was a Togo's nearby. Alas! That's my favorite sandwiches, but I already had Cheese & Stuff in my backpack. Too often I've ended up in Walnut Creek or Pleasant Hill and found sandwich pickin's to be slim, but apparently not so in Hayward. Note for the future.

I took my no-honestly-it-was-a-great sandwich out to Memorial Park and happily ate there, and then went to walk up the greenbelt trails that I'd specked out, which would take me some 5+ miles up the hill and back, along some linear parks. And found a big pair of cyclone fences jammed in front of the entryway with absolutely no signage explaining them. I tried to move the fences apart, but no go. I wondered briefly if I was looking at the wrong place, but then a troop of about 20 kids marched up, and a few parents looked around, very confused, and I decided I was not. They were trying to move the fences apart as a I left.

Now fortunately, the Hayward Greenbelts are split into three segments: one lower segment, and then two upper segments that together form a loop. So I figured maybe it was just the lower segment that was closed, and fortunately I'd brought my bike with me for this expedition, so up the hill I went.

Frickin' Hayward doesn't know how to build roads in the hills. In the Berkeley-Oakland area, where we're more properly skilled in such things, most of the hillside roads run along the contours of the hills, literally hillside, with some upward grade. Oh, it still gets too much for me from time to time, but there's a lot I can ride. Hayward instead seems to believe in building their roads like steps: mostly straight up, then mostly flat, then mostly straight up ... Yeah, I walked my bike from time to time, and even that was tiring.

After a bit of climbing, I found the turnoff for Campus Drive, which was to take me to where the three segments met, but the road was downhill, and by then I was in pure hills-survival mode, and there was no frickin' way I was going down a hill that I might have to go back up. So, using the utmost logic of my oxygen starved brain, I kept going up the hill instead. Eventually I made it to East Avenue Park, which was about halfway up one of the upper segments. And 'lo and behold, the greenbelt up there was accessible, as I had guessed.

I was able to hike the whole upper loop, and it was a very nice trail. It's all creekside, set in wooded areas with almost no civilization to be seen. I particularly loved the northernmost trail, which had little groves of picnic tables all over. I settled down in one, which was apparently some type of camp, right next to the creek, and did some reading and writing there. Very nice!

Down at the bottom of the trail, I verified that the whole lower segment was closed. There was an actual sign here! It claimed there were downed trees. Afterward I walked all the way up to the top of the trails, which turned out to be a very healthy hike!

And afterward it was back to the bike, and heading downhill to Hayward BART was a lot easier.

I spotted a few other things in the area that I was interested in seeing. There's an old (for the Bay Area) Japanese Garden with free admission. It also looks like it'd be nice to start out in the Don Castro Regional Recreation Area, and from there hike upward to the Five Canyons Park. (I considered going over to Five Canyons from the East Avenue Park, at about 4pm on Saturday, but discovered I'd have to drop down 700 feet then go up 700 feet! Nope!) Further south, the adjacent Garin and Dry Creek Pioneer Regional Parks are near South Hayward and Union City BARTS, respectively. I'd considered biking down to Garin if the greenbelts were a flop, but they were not.

So, stuff for the future. The near future, indeed.

My stress level is running high right now.

I've been mainly attributing that to two work-related issues.

The first is the resurgence of discussion about Zak S. in the roleplaying scene, due to the revelations about his (horrific!) abusive relationships. It's all to the good, since Zak's supporters are finally giving him the boot. But for me at least it's caused introspection. It's been cathartic, working through it all, mostly in entries here, and also in reading lots of discussions. But exhausting too.

The second is one that I can't talk about at the moment, but has to do with a problematic Skotos player. More on that momentarily.

But these guys are really just the tip of the iceberg. The straw(s) that broke the camels back. Because things have been stressful for a while.

It's been a year and a half since Kimberly went non-weight-bearing because of her broken foot that we discovered in October of 2017, right around when I went to Berlin. And that has been increasing my home workload for that whole time, because she can't do many of our shared chores any more, and she also needs help with tasks like getting her lunch most days.

And, it's been a half-year since her surgery this last Halloween, after which we learned that the doctor had botched the procedure. He'd told her that the worst that could happen if she elected for the surgery is that he might nick a nerve, and that would slowdown the recovery. But we now know that he cut at least a couple of nerves and left them embedded in the scar tissue. And he was a cold, terse prick when Kimberly told him this. This fact of this botched surgery has exacted a heavy toll on our household. Kimberly is understandably very upset that this doctor may have both crippled her and left her with crippling pain. It's been messing with her ability to manage on a daily basis; and, not even just due to concern for the future, not just due to the anger with the doctor (though I have a *lot* more of that than her), but also from the fact that she has constant pain and it often impacts her ability to function and sleep. And, I've also been impacted by this all emotionally, both personally and supportively.

And finally there's been the stress of the early year at Skotos. We had a big SmartCustody workshop that we did for cryptocurrency at the end of January and now we're gearing up for our semi-annual Rebooting the Web of Trust workshop, about a month later, right at the start of March. Oh, and it's in Spain, which means that things are going to get really hectic in about a week when the long air travel begins.

So, though those two problematic users have been weighing on me, in many ways they're pretty minor in the scope of things: in their interactions with me, and in their likely long-term effect on ... anything. But when you have a plateful of stress already, a few final ingredients can add a lot.

So, Saturday. I definitely wanted to get out of the house to be active and try and burn some of my stress away, but it was cold and raining. I was just about to go for a walk to get lunch ... when the sky cleared up. I looked at the RADAR maps and saw the biggest bit of storm had moved past us. Yay!

So instead of walking to lunch, it was more extensive biking. I had a meandering day down by the Bay. I explored Fourth Street (The taco place I was considering for lunch was jammed due to some three-little pigs public show, so I moved on). I biked the Aquatic Park (Occasional huge puddles). I got lunch in Emeryville. I biked out the Emeryville Marina, then walked along the rustic boardwalk back (An overprivileged white lady yelled at me for biking on a multiuse trail that allows biking; I assume she was from one of the super-rich condo complexes out in that area, and used to getting what she wanted, which she did not). I biked back along the Bay Trail to Berkeley (WINDY!!). And then I biked home. Overall, a nice day.

Biking helps keep the cold mostly away, though I felt it some in that really nasty wind I got on the Bay Trail leg of my trip.

Unfortunately, my stresslessness was immediately lost because Kimberly was upset when I got home (over something small, but that's because the big things are always weighing at the moment) and then I got a certified letter from the problematic Skotos player delivered to my HOME address (which I refused for good reasons, and that's all a whole other story that I hope to be able to write about in several months time). So my stress came right back, though Kimberly helped a bit by buying us Taco Bell for dinner.

And we found a new light TV show to start watching, which I've heard great things about in its later years: Person of Interest. It's relatively shallow in its first season, but we liked it enough to watch the first five episodes over the course of the extended holiday weekend.

On Sunday I didn't exactly do any stress reduction, but I did just hang out at home all day without worrying about rushing out and getting exercise or getting sundries or anything. (And I also did some filing work, toward my goal for moving forward in the preparations for our move to Hawaii.)

And Monday. Today I went out to Lafayette, biked up Happy Valley Road, then hiked up Panorama Road to get into Briones Regional Park. This was I think my third trip into the huge park. I entered up at the northwest corner, and circled down to a creek and back. This directly connected to my second trip when I'd walked the Lafayette Ridge Trail; my entrance today was right by Russell Peak, which is I think where I turned around last time.

I'd been planning to go all the way to the entrance right near Briones Reservoir, which would have been another 2 miles or so there and back. But it was muddy, oh sooooo muddy. One of the paths I was taking was pretty much a stream. Thankfully, I had my hiking shoes, but I still had mud spatter up to my knees. And that was all exhausting, both the walking through the mud and the being careful not to slide and land in the mud. So I turned back that mile early.

In looking at the maps I also thought, wow, it would be great to walk through the corner of Briones Regional Park, down along the Reservoir, then around the corner of San Pablo Reservoir, then back to the Orinda BART. That would definitely be an all-day affair though, since among other things I couldn't take my bike with me since I'd be starting and ending at different BART stations, and that would add a few miles getting to the park (and a few miles getting back from the Reservoir).

Maybe some nice summer day, when I'm more willing to get started early (as opposed to today, when I was like: I'm not rushing out when it's in the mid-40s!) and able to go later.

And I got home today, and despite a quick trip to CVS for Kimberly, managed to stay chill.

And hopefully that'll last into this week before my Spain trip.

With the constant rain of the last week, I decided to bike up the Lafayette-Moraga trail so that I could see the Moraga Falls about two-thirds of the way up that trail. They're very shy falls that only come out after extended and long rain. Otherwise, they tend to disappear almost as soon as the rain does.

And, the falls mission was successful. The falls were going as strongly as I've ever seen it. I'm not sure I'll see them again before we move, so that was terrific.

I had lunch at the picnic area just beyond. As I continued further, I was very disappointed to discover the last mile of the trail is STILL blocked due to a landslide at least two years ago. So I backtracked once again, as I have previously when I hit that non-marked, non-detoured trail. Then went out to the road. Well, it's not as bad as right afterward when the trail was blocked and also the bridge on the road just beneath it, which literally took you miles out of your way.

Circling around I did ride the last half-mile or so of the Trail, past the bridge, and that drops you right off at the Valle Vista Staging Area, the southernmost EBMUD hiking area. I've previously hiked a lot of the accessible EBMUD trails in that area, from St. Mary's College to the Laguna Rancho Park, and from the Laguna Rancho Park to the newly opened Carr Ranch. Since this is the next entrance to trails in that area, it felt like a nice complement, so I decided to brace the post-rain mud afterall.

After accidentally looping around the short Riche Loop trail, I decided to walk the King's Canyon Loop Trail, which is about six and a half miles. It was magnificent. Much of it runs along the San Leandro Reservoir. At the bottom it's kind of marshy swamp land, as a local river runs into the reservoir, which is pretty unlike other geography you find in the hills. There was also a near deafening chorus of frogs there. From there, you head up, and it's all very nicely wooded areas, but you regularly see the Reservoir off to the right.

I saw some people the first mile or two, but from there, the trail was all mine.

At the southernmost part of the trail, you get a beautiful view of Kings Canyon, which leads off to the Upper Reservoir. I enjoyed that for a while, before continuing on.

Out at the furthest edge of the loop, I came on one of the fire roads leading down to Laguna Rancho, which I could vaguely make out in the distance (or rather, I could make out some of the ostentatious houses near it, which I remembered from my last trip there). But from there I headed back. As usual, the EBMUD signage was horrible. I have no idea how I would have managed the loop without a hiking guide I found online, but with that I was able to pretty easily follow the paths as they went this way and that.

The hike back was the hardest because it went straight over a steep hill. There were some horses up near the top, though they looked sadly neglected. One came over and said "hi" to me for a while before he got bored and wandered off.

From there I dropped straight back down to the Valle Vista Staging Area. Which was good, because it was getting dark. There was one last car leaving the parking lot as I got there.

Great hike, overall. A very pretty area.

And my hiking shoes seem to be back in usable condition. I took them back to the shoe repair and they stretched the collars back a bit and softened them. Then because the shoes have always been a slight bit loose, I put some inserts in the back. And between those, I don't think I gave myself any new blisters from the walk (and certainly not the horrible abrasions from walking less than a mile that I'm still healing from after my first time out with the repaired shoes).

Mind you, I still had bandaids on the backs of my ankles, so that might have helped too, but that just means I need to drop some bandaids in my backpack.

(And I did have extra shoes that I carried the whole way around the loop, in case I had problems. But I think I'll be more trusting next time.)

Getting back from the Moraga area after dark is always a challenge. The last few times I did it, I took the Lafayette-Moraga Trail back, and that's always unpleasant because there are people walking in the pitch black that you have to avoid hitting.

This time, I took Moraga Way back to Orinda, and that's not pleasant either, because it's a fast, busy road with poor lighting. There is a bike lane the whole way, though at several places it gets uncomfortably narrow. I never exactly felt unsafe, but it was exhausting staying on high alert the whole time, so I don't think I'll do Moraga Way in the dark again.

Still, a good ride up and then down into Orinda.

One thing I'd still like to do in that area: the Rampage Peak hike which climbs all the way up to Antony Chabot Park from one of these EBMUD staging areas. (I'm not sure which; their maps are horrible.) The trick Is figuring out how to do that without ending up with a bike being the opposite side of the hill from where I end up. (Possibilities: a Lyft out to the trail head or a an early enough hike that I can round-trip, or maybe a Lyft down from Chabot back to the trail head.)

I have a long tradition of taking off the week from Christmas to New Year's. And, I try to keep myself busy.

Saturday (the 22nd). I headed out to Walnut Creek where I spent Christmas money on new jeans and a new flannel overshirt. (Exciting!) Then I biked the Iron Horse Trail from Walnut Creek to Pleasanton/Dublin. I always like getting out and about on my weekends, but it's a little harder in the winter when it's cold. So, bike rides are preferred then, and it's usually a little warmer that side of the hills because there's less overcast.

Sunday (the 23rd). We saw the Wizard of Oz.

Monday. Kimberly's foot is still recovering, so we weren't up for a BART ride down south, but Bob was kind enough to pick us up to attend this year's Wiedlin gatherings. Christmas Eve was as always a fun mix of family, games, and tasty food. The only downside was that the dogs have gone wild in the last year. For some reason, Joy got upset at us staying in the guest room at the end of the long west-east hall in the house, and so every time Kimberly or I stepped out its door, she started barking up a storm and got Hope involved too.

Tuesday. We began Christmas with a tasty breakfast, as usual. We waited longer than usual for Jason and Lisa, but that's because they have a new child. Kimberly and I met our first nephew, Julian. And he was mostly a lump, spending all his time nursing, sleeping, and having his nappies changed. But as Lisa said, he's in the potato stage. We had good Christmas presenting. I got great books, great games, a nice pull-over sweater, and other things. We played more games, had a good evening dinner, and then Rob was kind enough to drive us all the way back to Berkeley (at which point Kimberly and I had our own stockings and presents).

Wednesday. During the day I took my hiking shoes out to a shoe repair store, because I'd rubbed through the backs, unmasking the plastic pain devices under the fabric in the heel. But, the soles still have a lot of life, so repair was the answer. (Exciting!) Then, I went to the last night of Endgame board gaming.

Thursday. Definitely, my laziest day of the holiday. I lounged around the house reading and napping until dinner time, at which point I read a bit to Kimberly (we're still on Hawaii, but drawing near the end). Then, I had my friends over for a couple of games of Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Mummy's Mask.

Friday. We always see a movie around Christmas, and this year we chose Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse. We decided to see it down at Bay Street, and that caused problems because they've made the rather ill-considered decision to go over to reserved seats in their theatres. So (1) we couldn't properly reserve seats that would have accounted for Kimberly's scooter; (2) we had to reserve in advance and thus pay their $3.50 "convenience charge" to guarantee ourselves anything like good seats; and (3) we got to watch people call in the management to evict people from the seats they'd stolen as we were trying to watch previews. Good times. (Well, the previews sucked anyway: they were all either very religious or very kid-focused.) But the movie rocked. One of the best super-hero films I've ever seen. Not only did it have great and funny writing, not only did it to a great job with a whole host of Spider-men, but it also made excellent use of the animated form.

Saturday. For my last Saturday of the holiday, I came up with a great adventure: taking BART out to Pittsburg Central to explore Black Diamond Mines. The BART ride went one stop beyond the old Pittsburg Station, on the new "DMU" trains that have totally squandered the potential of BART in Eastern CoCoCo. You have to change trains at a special platform east of Pittsburg, and you hop into a teeny, lightweight car that feels like it's held together with paper clips and tinfoil. Despite claims that there would be space for bikes in the DMUs, neither one I got into had anywhere for bikes, so I had to stand there awkwardly, holding my bike for five minutes each way. From Pittsburg Center it was a five-mile bike ride to Contra Loma Reservoir, and from there I walked up into the Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve, where I did a several-mile loop. It was mostly empty and there were some nice vistas, and I got to explore one of the "mines", a 400-foot tunnel that failed to find coal. I went about 100 feet in before I got too spooked by the possibility of rattlesnakes hanging out. Overall, it was a nice day, though I was home late.

Sunday. We completed our trilogy of media when we saw Arcadia.

Monday. And I ended my holiday with a gaming day out in Eastern CoCoCo with two Erics. In recent years, I've done more biking and hiking during the holidays, but gaming may be something I'm missing in Kauai. So, we played Near and Far, Thunderstone, and Ghost Stories to end out the year. Then I came home on BART, feverishly finished my year-end RPG review and Kimberly and I drank some Martinelli's to mark our penultimate year in the Bay Area.

The last two weeks of news have been devastating. I thought that I could not be more disgusted by my country, than when that asshole Trump had us stop accepting Muslim immigrants. It went against everything our country stands for while pandering to the racists and xenophobes who don't deserve to call themselves Americans.

But then the Republicans in the Senate spent two weeks putting on a sham confirmation hearing, where they never cared about the fact that their nominee had been very credibly accused of being a rapist. (And an overprivileged rich white asshole who thinks that he deserves everything, including a seat on the Supreme Court.) We talked about it some at RWOT and I'd say I was on the verge of tears, but there was no verge about it. I wept not just for our country but the millions that the Republicans damaged in their faux confirmation by ripping open the wounds of every assault victim in the country.

Now, the Supreme Court is tainted by Kavanagh's illegitimacy and our legislature is tainted by 20 years of the Republicans manipulating and perverting it and our country is headed to a very, very dark place. We all hope and pray that we can limit the damage by overcoming the Republican's manipulated and gerrymandered House majorities this November and even more than we can somehow manage to take the Senate from them, to prevent Trump from putting even more monsters into the courts in the next two years.

But it's a dark time.

So, I was happy to hike on Saturday, to get far away from the news, to sweat away my concerns under the blazing sun east of the hills.

I went out to Las Trampas, which is quite a ways, requiring a BART ride and a bike ride.

It was a nice park, full of hills and canyons like a lot of the parks that side of the hills. But it was also quite bountiful with trees, something rarer over that way. The valleys and hillsides alike had a lot of cover, and they were that much more attractive for it.

I did a big hike from the northeast corner to the southwest-ish, via a couple of the highest peaks: Eagle Peak (1720 ft.) and Vail Peak (1787 ft.). I got all the way to the top of Eagle Peak and took some panoramics, but afterward was happy just to walk by Vail Peak, especially since there'd been a big downhill between the two.

The only problems with the hike came about near the picnic areas, which was my turnaround.

First up, I was walking up the Bollinger Creek Loop Trail and saw a huge mass of excitedly chattering people ahead of me. Totally blocking the trail and not getting out of my way. I could see a park guide was with them as I neared. A young woman begins chattering at me as I approach. She acts like it's Christmas Day or something, and she's just gotten an unexpected and thrilling present. Pointing at a log off the trail, past a railing, she says, "There's a RATTLESNAKE over there, and we keep hearing it and we can't see it." (I don't respond, "Thank god for that," but it definitely runs through my head.)

I get as far over to the other side of the trail as I can, putting all those meat shields between myself and the hidden rattlesnake and start pushing through the group, as I'm not stupid enough to stand around agog while a rattlesnake sits just a few feet away. We all start hearing a rattling sound, amplified by the hollowness of the log, and I think, "That's one pissed-off rattler." "There it is, there it is," says Christmas girl. And everyone else in the group is going "sssshhhh", "sssshhh", because the priority is apparently to hear the snake, not get the hell away. Someone needs to tell them that a rattlesnake can spring two or three times its length.

Not me, though. I'm suddenly confronting a kid who's just dumbly standing there and not moving out of my way at all. I physically push past him and he finally notices he's in the way and apologizes. Apparently hes' hypnotized by the rattle. Then I'm past the rattlesnake fodder. As I keep walking toward the picnic grounds, I'm waiting to see if one of them is going to coming running up behind me, shrieking, with an angry rattlesnake attached to his face.

(It never happens.)

The second problem is lower key but more annoying. There's a sign at the picnic area saying there's no water available until they finish repairs. Great. I take my last small swig of water, which had been carefully timed for this leg of the trip, and walk almost two hours back without any more water. At least the day's cooled down.

Overall, it's a nice hike, and sure enough it keeps me busy so that I don't even think to look until the late afternoon to see that indeed, we've confirmed a rapist to a seat on the Supreme Court.

Go us.

I'm now getting up at 6am, which will be 9am Toronto time. Still, not early enough, but within striking distance. I'll get up at 5am on Tuesday, and have a pretty leisurely meander out to my 10am flight, then I'll have to immediately jump back one more hour, to 4am or so (California time), as the Rebooting the Web of Trust seminar will be starting at 8am each day (Toronto time). Sounds doable.

One of the joys of getting up so early is that I get to see Berkeley in an early morning light that I never see, and if it's a Saturday when I have time to go out, and I can have a really full day. So yesterday I was up at 6am, while it was still dark out. By the time I left the house at 6.30, it was gray, though the sun hadn't risen yet.

My general goal was Redwood Regional Park, which is a fair ways away from our house. Rather than going up through Strawberry Canyon into the hills immediately behind our house (which swings me a fair ways north before I head back south), I decided instead to make the ascension up through the canyon containing the Caldecott Tunnel (whose name I still do not know), under the theory that it would get me there quicker.

I was playing it by ear as I headed toward the hills, but I eventually decided to head for the Claremont Hotel, as I vaguely recalled a trail from the employee's parking lot that led up to the Claremont Hills. Sure enough! That's the Evergreen Path. From there, I wandered quiet streets fronted by beautiful, multi-million-dollar homes, most of which were also gated to truly keep the undesirables out. As I walked southward on the hill, I came to a steep, worn stone stairway going up, and after a bit of walking in more rarified airs, I found another steep but better upkept stairway going down. They're both marked but unnamed on Google Maps. I'd never walked either before.

It had been surprisingly foggy throughout the walk, especially in the Hills, and that only increased as I walked up past the Highlands Country Club. (If you are picturing a snooty, overprivileged area, that's the Claremont Hills, and really most of the hills in Berkeley and Oakland.) I eventually got up to Spy Glass Hill, a road that's marked as private (privileged, as I said), but whose only posted restriction is against parking, so I gamely walked across it. On the other side, I was on Hiller Drive, which leads down to the Gateway Exhibit Emergency Preparedness Center (a raised wooden platform with nice views remembering the Berkeley Hills Fire, which back in 1991 actually destroyed most of the area I'd just walked through). From there it was across 24, and into my first of many parks of the day.

The North Oakland Regional Sports Center lies at the bottom of a largely undeveloped area of park (also destroyed in the 1991 firestorm). I hit it at 8am. While walking down Hiller Drive, I could barely see 10 feet ahead of me, an amount of fog that I love but rarely see around our house. But it very abruptly cleared as I hit the Sports Center. It'd been sunny and warm within 10 or 15 minutes, a shocking change.

The "Sports Center" area is largely open with light tree cover; it takes you pretty quickly up a few hundred feet. Although not super attractive, it's a shortcut that keeps you off of Tunnel Road. At the top (which I'd bet is going to get blocked off someday, because it's so semi-official, and there was indeed some threatening construction near the top), I re-merged with Skyline Boulevard and walked that a mile to Sibley, the next park. It's a pity there's no direct connector from the Sports area to Sibley, as there's a lot of open space up there, but that's pretty typical for Oakland's attention to its parks. Once I hit Sibley, though, it was parks for miles and miles, everything connecting until I left Dimond, many hours later.

Oh, and I rediscovered the fog while walking Skyline. It was all clearly visible below me, carpeting the entirety of the East Bay and the bay itself. Mount Tam was visible, more an island than ever, and maybe a few peaks in San Francisco, but for the most part the wide sweep of land and water now visible below me was invisible beneath the fog.

Anywho, Sibley, which I hit at 9am. I didn't take the most attractive route through that park, instead going along the main paved path until I got to the side-path that heads south. That took me into Huckleberry, which is a gorgeous and unique reserve, full of tight paths and ferns. It's largely set in a valley, so when you go from Sibley to Huckleberry, you drop down into that valley and then go back up, which is gorgeous both ways.

There's a connector trail from Sibley to Redwood Regional Park, with a bench right there at a crossroads. Almost four hours after I'd set out, I sat down there and had a few pieces of chocolate to tide me over, as I have before.

I got into the northeast corner of Redwood Regional Park about 10.30am. That was my next big decision point. I have long dreamed of walking to Castro Valley and Google told me it was 12 miles and about four and a half hours to the Castro Valley BART. I seriously considered it, but ultimately decided that I didn't want to strain myself that much three days before a big trip. There was also the option of catching a bus at the Chabot Space & Science Center down to Fruitvale BART, which is what I'd done before when I took a longer route up to Redwood Regional. But ultimately I decided that I could walk longer than that, that I wanted to cut down, down, down the hill and see where it took me. That led me to decide not to dawdle too long in Redwood Regional, which is too bad because it's a beautiful park. But I just hiked around the West Ridge Trail.

I could have avoided Roberts entirely, but there's a beautiful open area there called the Redwood Bowl, and I wanted to stop there for lunch. I made it by about 11.30 and had my sandwich and chips, which I'd been thinking about all morning. Definitely one of the prettiest parts of Roberts. (The rest looks mainly like Redwood Regional Park, which it directly adjoins.)

From there it was across Skyline Blvd (again) and into Joaquin Miller Park, which I've grown increasingly fond of over recent visits. It's heavily wooded with numerous redwoods, and the bottom of it is a vertical climb down along Sausal Creek. I took a path down that I've grown pretty familiar with, stopped at the "Meadow" to have some more candy and write for a while (and rest!), then headed down through the rest of the park. I know I was writing from sometime before 1pm to sometime after 1pm, and after that I lost track of time.

Next up was Dimond Canyon, which almost directly adjoins Joaquin Miller. (You walk through a tunnel under 13, then walk along a residential street for a bit.) I'd never walked the canyon before, and in fact have been long intimidated by a sign that claims the trail is block at Leimert Bridge. But I looked at the maps carefully and saw that there were two paths going under the Bridge and one going up to the Bridge, and I figured at least one of them would be OK. (I was exactly right.)

The surviving Dimond Canyon trail actually runs along the upper south side of the Canyon, meaning that you're up in the heights. I enjoyed being able to look down into the valley and onto the golf club on the other side (yet, more privilege up in the hills) and across Forest Blvd at various things that I've biked by, while going up that big hill. A side path drops down to Sausal Creek itself, in advance of Leimert Bridge. It was free and unblocked, so I happily took that down. However, at its southmost extent, it was clearly blocked by a few fallen trees, and looking past it, I saw that the path has become almost non-existent, so that's another park that Oakland has let fall into total disrepair. And, it's a crying shame because this is the parkland thoroughfare to Dimond Park proper, and a major way to get up and down the hills in that area without using a car. The cynical part in me wonders if home owners in Oakmore (up at the top of Dimond Canyon) were happy (or even participatory) in that trail getting blocked, to keep plebeians from lower in the hills from having easy access to their hillside properties.

No matter, I had my own route planned for there. I backtracked and took the third (and only remaining) trail up to Leimert Bridge. The fact that there are no trails beyond that, to get back down to the creek, just underlined the segregation. Meanwhile I headed back north along Trestle Glen Road, a long road that winds down from Oakmore to Lake Merritt, through an attractive neighborhood that's one of my favorite rides toward the Oakland Hills. (It's a lot longer when walking.)

And by then I was almost done. There was a stop at Trader Joe's (to get some dinner and some supplies for the trip to Toronto), then a walk around Lake Merritt (and I'm always shocked by how beautiful it is). Then it was over to BART and home ...

Total walk was just short of 50,000 steps and just more than 21 miles, and I was out from about 6.30am to 5pm. By my count the walk out to Castro Valley would have just been 3-4 miles more than what I did, but my feet were aching by the end of my walk, so it's good I didn't do the longer one.

Labor Day weekend!

Getting to the Point. On Saturday, I biked up to Point Richmond, mainly because that was the direction of the closest cheap-o shoe store nowadays. But Point Richmond was a great destination in that area because I love the beach out at Ferry Point and the Knox-Miller Shoreline and the hills above them. (I partook of both the hills and the shoreline over the course of the day and did indeed find some shoes in Richmond on the way home.)

He Likes It! Hey, Bikey! Much to my surprise, as I turned onto the western half of the Richmond Greenway (after the regular annoying trip through downtown Richmond, because over a decade later, Richmond still hasn't connected the two halves of the path), I found the Greenway jammed with people. They've created a couple of BMX courses of hills curves and such right next to the Greenway there, and Saturday was its grand opening. It was great seeing kids and adults alike flying through the course, sometimes literally. I stopped for a while and watched, then did the same thing on the way back. I kept expecting to see TJ Lavin. It's lovely to see that western half of the Greenway increasingly used by the community, and it was surprising to see the whole Greenway clean, though that was probably a one-time-only grand-opening thing.

The Quest for the Perfect Chicken Sandwich. For lunch on Saturday I chose a place called Great American Hamburger in Point Richmond, which looked like an old-school hamburger joint. I idly hoped that it might be comparable to our dearly-departed Oscar's ... and I was pleasantly surprised. Oh, it was too small and crowded. (Next time the chicken sandwich goes with me to the park.) And, their fries were totally mediocre. But their chicken sandwich was almost perfect, by Oscar's standards. It was cut just a tiny bit too thick, which made little bits of it too dry, but for the most part it was delicious, and the condiments were a combination of lettuce, tomato, big cuts of onion, and watery mayo that tasted like it came straight from Oscar's. I was in heaven, savoring every bite. I'll definitely be returning.

A Trip to the Middle East. My dad and Mary are in the Bay Area for their annual visit, so on Sunday we got to see them, along with Melody and Jared of course. It was a nice afternoon, and we walked up to La Med for a late lunch. (My dad said they have no similar middle-eastern restaurants on the island which will soon be our problem too.) As usual, it was great seeing everyone.

Foxfoxfox. And then today after lunch with K., I hiked all the way up to the top of the hills behind our house, with the intent of getting some exercise, some (overly cool) sunshine, and some work done on my ongoing Designers & Dragons updates for the German edition. While I was up working on the bench just over the ridgeline, looking down into the Siesta Valley, a grey fox wandered by! I think he hadn't noticed me because I was working quietly, but when he did see me he was more interested than anything. He walked a bit, then watched, then walked a bit more, and stared at me for quite a while as he stood just above the drop that would take him out of sight. I took some pictures, and he only fled when I talked to him. Cute fox! I've never seen one in the wild before.

And tomorrow it's back to work, but the best thing about a three-day weekend is that you start the workweek and it's already Tuesday!

If you don't like the climate in the Bay Area, just go 10 miles. Oh, that's not true for the big picture stuff, but you can definitely vary your temperature 10 or 20 degrees with a bit of travel. If it's too hot, I go west, to the Bayside or to San Francisco, and if it's too cold I go over the hills east. So this last Saturday was forecast as 63 degrees or so in Berkeley, with winds running at 15 mph or so by afternoon. That translated to me as "crappy summer weather" to I went east, taking BART to Lafayette. (Ironically, Kimberly went west the same day, but she was planning to sit in a theatre.)

I was heading to the Briones Regional Park, which is enormous, and which has a panhandle that runs out to the northeast corner of Lafayette. I've been to the park before, in fact spent a long day circling the northern two-thirds or so of the park, but a walk along the south of the park was totally new.

The walk was pretty much along the ridgeline the whole time, overlooking Lafayette to the south. It was mostly dry brush and open hillsides, so not the most beautiful hike, especially since Lafayette mostly looked like a big forested blob. My goal was Russell Peak. My theory was that if I got there I'd find somewhere to sit down for a bit, to enjoy a bit of chocolate and a bit of reading or writing. Sure enough, when I got near the Peak, a scraggly little trail diverged from the main trail, and when I walked up that I found a picnic table sitting at the peak. (The path was so scraggly and small that I really wonder how it got there.) Sadly, it was getting late, so I only stayed 20 minutes or so, not really getting my day's writing in.

For the walk back, I choose a slightly different path that dropped me behind the ridgeline. It dropped quite quickly, which was a little problematic because I'd forgotten my hiking shoes. I only slipped once. Then it was in forested areas, like the parts of Briones that I'd liked more. So, it was a very pleasant walk back. The last mile was on a road, but it was a quite little country road, so even that was pleasant.

It was great seeing a bit more of Briones. I clearly need to go back again before we move. But it won't be this coming weekend, because that's supposed to be a HOT one. Westward HO! (Unless I just decide to bake in the hills above our house.)

It's been eight months since Kimberly mostly stopped walking, so it's a bit of a joy that on today, Berkeley's sixth* Sunday Streets, we were able to walk the length of the open streets to North Berkeley and back. She's not better yet, but she's now able to walk extended distances in her boot, and her Doctor has actively encouraged her to do so.

No Sunday Streets has ever been as good as that first one, back in 2012, but they made a good decision pulling it back to the summer, off of the Fall days, when at least one of the Sunday Streets was rained out. And, even though the Sunday Streets are largely commercial now, this time there were enough organizations and activities to keep us entertained.

We saw cute cats from the Berkeley Humane Society, including some siblings of the exact sort Kimberly was looking for a few years ago (but nowadays we are NOT looking to adopt more cats before we have to move them). We learned about Walk Oakland Bike Oakland, a local organization that I'd somehow missed, even though I'm signed up with most of the local biking societies. It looks like they have lots of cool events, and if I can I'm going to join them for a Quarry Walk before gaming next Saturday. We saw kids play the stacking cups games with giant cups and watched many people bowl balls through giant miniature-golf like hazards. And we avoided annoying political people. There were a shocking number of open streets blocks that were entirely empty, and I have to wonder about what looks like a really haphazard organization of Sunday Streets, but overall it was good to see it and great to walk it.

As we have most years since the fascist local restaurants talked the city into outlawing good street food on Sunday Streets, we paused for lunch halfway through at Saul's. As I told Kimberly, it's my yearly latke.

* If you're wondering why there were six Sunday Streets in seven years, it's because the 2017 Sunday Streets was cancelled due to the devastating Napa Fires and the fact that our air was a sludgy mass of carcinogens that year.

It's actually been a good seven days of walking. On Monday, which was Memorial Day, I walked up into the Berkeley Hills, then ended up walking down in North Berkeley, which I haven't done in years. It was fun skipping through North Berkeley parks as I made my way down the hillside. That was also my first day alone since before Hawaii, so that was nice. Then Saturday I went out to Joaquin Miller Park, another of my favorites in the area, but one that's a bit harder to get to, since it's in the hills, south of Montclair and thus requires biking to get to.

One thing that those two hiking days had it common: it was *)(#@$#ing hot. Both days were forecast to be about 75, but it got up to 85 on Monday, then 90 on Saturday. On Monday I just rearranged my route to stay under shade (which is how I ended up in North Berkeley, because the more shaded parts of southern Tilden are toward the North Berkeley side of the park). On Saturday I ended up having an extremely challenging ride up to Joaquin Miller, since biking in hills in the heart is real work, and I made it harder by my taking a "shortcut" that was much hillier. Fortunately, Joaquin Miller is a very shady park, though the climb into it gave me some trouble after the exhausting climb up to it.

Overall, a nice week, and I feel like I'm fully acclimated back to the Bay Area after our 9 days on the islands.

My Fitbit exceed 100k steps for the week thanks to all those days of walking, but I'll surely be back to the 70k that I work at for most weeks as life returns to normalcy in this first week of June.

K. and I were up at 8am this morning, which is entirely unknown on weekends, to meet with our cat sitter. We passed off keys, reminded her where all the food was, and warned her that we'd be toppling our cat tree over, to keep Callisto off it while we were gone. (Callisto seems to be doing much better, but we didn't want her getting back up on the tree just when we leave.)

Then, I decided to take advantage of our dawn appointment by getting up into the hills as early as possible. I even had a Cheese & Stuff sandwich waiting in the refrigerator.

(I have a dream of someday walking to Castro Valley along the ridge line, if I can get going early enough and walk long enough on a nice summer day, but that day was not today.)

I caught the 9.15 bus from downtown, and I was the only one aboard. That didn't stop the bus driver from ignoring me, though. After I pulled the cord for the Lake Anza stop, she whizzed right by it, and I had to yell for her to stop. She did, the whole time mumbling on and on about how she hadn't heard and something and something and something.

I walked back through a ditch to eventually get to the paths into the park.

My first destination was Inspiration Point, where I had lunch around 10am. Early, but it was the last picnic table I knew of, and I was getting hungry.

I was surprised to meet H., one of my board gaming friends up there. He was getting together with a group of 20 or 30 friends to hike. Fun.

(I sometimes miss not ever having anyone to hike with, but a group of 20 or 30 would be pure hell.)

The goal of the day was to close the gap in San Pablo Reservoir: that meant hiking the middle of Old San Pablo Trail, which I'd never walked. That could be accomplished by walking down Inspiration Trail from Inspiration Point, then walking along the Old San Pablo Trail in the Reservoir, then back up the Eagle's Nest Trail, which would land me just over the border from Tilden in Wildcat Canyon.

I'd walked Inspiration Trail before, and I was very disappointed by its state this time. It was badly overgrown, to the point where I was often walking on a narrow rut of about 6-12 inches, brushing against tall grass on either side. Sometimes, I could just see little patches of ground. In an area that has rattlesnakes and Lyme-bearing ticks, that is extremely subpar. I had to stay hypervigilant the whole time, but I never saw a snake on the trail and if there were ticks they were hopefully deterred by my long pants.

About two-thirds of the way down, I looked forward to seeing the secret cow watering hole. The hole was there, but no cows. I quickly connected that up with the lack of cowpies on the semi-existent trail, and realized that was probably one of the causes of the overgrowth.

Down at the Reservoir, things were much better. Oh, I had to walk the road instead of the trail at first, because that first bit of the Old San Pablo Trail was even more overgrown. This, by the by, was all unshocking because EBMUD, who controls all these trails, either hates hikers or has no sense of responsibility toward them or both. But pretty soon the Old San Pablo Trail becomes an old abandoned road, and I was able to cut back up to it, and it was pretty delightful to walk, as it was largely tree-covered and it was a nice, wide, broken asphalt trail. (And it turns out it's labeled as a bike route too; I'll have to take that next time I decide to ride around the hills to Orinda, as San Pablo Dam Road isn't that great for biking.)

There is one other path in the middle of the Reservoir: the Lakeside Trail. At first I ignored it, because of the horrible state of the other EBMUD trails. But the third or so time I saw an entrance, I decided to try it. The entry way was encouraging, because it was dirt. Then when I turned onto the Lakeside Trail proper, I saw it had been recently mowed. Great, I thought! Then it dropped me straight into a swamp. A black and yellow snake swarmed past just behind me as I stood looking at the green, algae-filled inlet. (I've seen a few of them up in the hills; I'm pretty sure it's an Alameda Striped Racer.) I cautiously made my way across, found the ground solid, jumped a scummy creek, and then got back onto more stable ground. The next time I saw an entrance from the Old San Pablo Trail, I exited.

I also discovered that there are nice picnic tables and docks all throughout the middle of San Pablo Reservoir. The first ones I saw were quite humorous as a few of them were literally in the reservoir. I stopped there and wrote for a while (though not at one of the submerged tables!). The third or fourth set of tables I saw was at the huge Eagle's Nest Picnic Area, which had a playground and tables and DRINKING FOUNTAINS. Having discovered new water, I sat down there for a while too and did more writing.

Overall, I thought the center of San Pablo Reservoir was quite nice. Other than the swamp. And the bis of overgrown trail. I'll have to return.

I was a bit leery about the path back up Eagle's Nest, giving how poorly maintained the Inspiration Trail was, but it was quite different. Inspiration Trail was along big open, grassy hillsides, while Eagle's Nest was more of an arboreal trail. Whereas Inspiration Trail was a largely overgrown trail with teeny patches of dirt path, Eagle's Nest was primarily a dirt trail, with some overgrown patches. Still, some of the patches were big enough to hide snakes, but I now had a new strategy: I blasted Hamilton, which I was pretty sure I could do without annoying anyone, as the EBMUD trails are pretty empty, and sure enough I met no one until I got up to Wildcat Canyon, by which time I'd turned my music off. I must have annoyed the snakes too, because once more I saw none.

The walk back along the Nimitz Way to Laurel Road then out to the bus stop was entirely normative.

It was the same bus driver, seven hours later, but this time she stopped when I pulled the cord.

This Saturday I was determined to go out for a hike up to Tilden, something I hadn't done in six weeks, since I ended up stranded on South Park Drive in immense pain from my kidney stone starting to move, back in February. But spring is here, the temperatures are warming, and ...

The kidney stone pain hadn't disappeared entirely, but it'd considerably lessened and by midweek I'd passed seven different fragments: a few that were just motes and one that was 3-4mmx1-2 mm. So, I was feeling like I was ready.

Friday discouraged me a bit, because it was another painful uncomfortable day, leading to the passing of a mere mote. But I was undeterred. There would be a return to normalcy.

So Saturday I had a beautiful, beautiful hike. It was a little chilly in the earlier day, but I was baking by the early afternoon. I took a tough, steep climb up the Stonewall-Panoramic Trail and from there walked the East-West Trail that runs along Panoramic Ridge. Then it was over to the Bay Area Ridge Trail, on the other side of Grizzly Peak Blvd.

I don't think that I wrote about it on the day that succumbed to kidney stone pain up in Tilden, but it turns out that EBMUD has finally opened up the Ridge Trail where two different UCB fire trails hit Grizzly Peak Blvd, between Tilden and Claremont. For years you either had to jump a gate or else put your life at risk by walking a quarter-mile along Grizzly Peak. But maybe they finally have someone in EBMUD who doesn't hate hikers. (And maybe others complained about that particular gate, as I did a few years ago.)

Anywho, then it was into Tilden along the upper ridge, and eventually down to Lake Anza and the bus there.

No pain the whole trip. Though my legs did get very tired even though it's just a ~9 mile trip or so. Obviously my six weeks of lowered activity have taken a toll.

That was my third trip up into the hills in the last week, with the others being shorter turns up around Clark Kerr. One of the reasons is that climbing hills seems to help move my kidney stones. I really don't think it's just superstition, because I had all of my early pain after either climbing or taking BART. And then I passed the previous largest chunk on Monday, after an after-work hike.

Sure enough, this afternoon I passed another stone. At 4-5mmx2mm it's not just the largest I've seen, but something that was a pretty large chunk of the original stone. I'm now pretty sure I've passed at least half of it, and it's equally possible that the large stone was the last piece.

(Overall, the big pieces have been getting bigger over time, and there's really not room for an even bigger one. Also, adding up the volumes of what I know I've passed gives me something in the 51%-100% range, depending on how *thick* the original stone was and also how much pure dust was produced.)

Total fragment count to date: 10.

Pain was this latest, large fragment: almost none.

Did you know there are different, distinctive types of kidney stone pain that you can learn to distinguish when you've passed almost a dozen fragments?

(Warning, may be icky.)

At this time I feel like I can differentiate:

Pain when the stone is high in the ureter
Pain when it's approaching the bladder
Discomfort when it's floating around the bladder
Pain when it settles to the bottom of the bladder

They vary from constant, unending pain (that's the first) to lightning bolts of sudden, sharp distress (that's the last).

And I'm hoping to be putting that knowledge into the past now or very soon.

Beyond the kidney stone passing and the beautiful hiking, it was also a very productive weekend:

I planned two easy D&D histories for this weekend, because I knew it was a busy week, but I did get them both written (up on the hill yesterday), and one edited.
I wrote a 2,000-word technical page for a blockchain company that I agreed to do a little freelance technical work for. That'd been weighing on me due to the health issues and general busyness.
I fully did our taxes, though I'll wait two weeks to pay them.
I finished up my Mechanics & Meeples for Monday, detailing games from the last three months.

I actually hadn't expected to do all of that this weekend. I'd just flagged tracking down all of my tax forms and had decided to delay Mechanics & Meeples for a week, so it's great having all of that done (and it leaves me relaxed as I head into the actual work week and hopefully into next weekend, though it looks like rain may deter more hiking then).

It's been a few weeks now that we've been having wonderfully spring-like weather. Warm-ish weather, clear skies. Some of my friends have been hating the wrongness of it, but my impending departure from the area has helped me to get beyond the weather fear-mongering of the media and to disconnect my feelings of self-being with that of the Bay Area environment. So I've been basking in it instead.

In Which Christmas Ends. For spring to begin, Christmas must end, and it did, just barely. Last Saturday, K. and I got together with my sister Melody and her husband Jared. We never manage to do Christmas with them at Christmas time because they're out of town and I'm busy going out and about. But we finally connected up. We had good talk and a great lunch out of Chevy's. It's one of the furthest trips that we've been able to make since K. discovered her broken foot. On the way back we were sitting in horrible bumper-to-bumper traffic in Emeryville, watching a Baskin n' Robbins taunting us from the nearby strip mall. Eventually, after not passing it for long moments, we pulled in and had bonus ice cream to end the day. It's always great getting together with them. Maybe we'll be able to spend a bit more time with them next year, when BART extends to just pass their house.

In Which I Enjoy A Beautiful Hike. So last Sunday I hiked up to Tilden, making it all the way out to Jewel Lake. It was a gorgeous hike in very nice weather that was warm and pleasant.

In Which My Mood Improves. Mid-last week I realized that I was feeling quite good. In a good mood and generally happy. I've long known that the dark, cold, and gray winter months get me down, here in the Bay Area. But I'd never seen quite as sharp of a reversal as this, where a couple of weeks of spring weather in winter notably changed my outlook.

In Which I Conquer Briones Reservoir. Yesterday my gaming got cancelled. We've actually had a rough time lately, only managing one session since September, and that with only three of us, which I usually pass on. So that happened again on Saturday (for understandable reasons). As is usually the case, I got out in the sun instead, and rather delightfully so thanks to that nice weather.

I've been seeing Briones Reservoir a lot lately, from Kennedy and Tilden, so I planned to head out there. This was my second trip, following a cold hike through a small portion of it in December the year before last. My plan this time was to bike out to the corner of San Pablo Reservoir; rather than exhausting myself biking up to Briones, I was going to hike it instead along a short little 1 mile connector trail, then I'd hike the west and north third of the reservoir, out to the Hampton Staging Area, and back. Because I'd previously learned that the Reservoir was too big to hike in a day.

Surprise! I made it to the Hampton Trail around 1pm, after about two hours of hiking, and I decided it was silly to walk back my path, for two-thirds of the Reservoir total, but going over the same ground twice, when I could just go a little further, be at the halfway point, and then complete the whole Reservoir, so I did. The only catch was that the EBMUD maps (unshockingly) measure one of their mileages wrong. They mark the south side as 3 miles and it's 4. Which I should have guessed because when I walked part of the Reservoir 14 months ago, I couldn't make it that whole leg in the time I had allotted.

Total trip was a mile to the Reservoir, then 4 + 5.4 + 4 + .3 around (unless EMBUD also shorted other distances), then a mile back for a total hike of about 16 miles. Also a bit more than 250 flights of stair in elevation change, as there was lots of up and down. I was out walking about 6.5 hours, from 11am to 5.30pm, without much in the way of stopping, as there are only 3.5 benches on the whole loop, and those were all in the last few miles.

I was tired by the end, and I was a bit sore today, but neither horribly so.

The hike is beautiful and has very distinct characters on the Reservoir's different sides. The west side is not beautiful, as it's along a road and is the business side of the reservoir with all kinds of measuring stuff and buildings and some construction. The north side rises up into the hills along the Oursan Ridge and has great views in all directions, even to San Pablo Bay at one point; it reminded me of the hills above the nearby Lafayette Reservoir. The east side runs the closest to the water and struck me as similar to Chabot Lake. The south side, which is what I'd walked before, has heavy tree cover and as noted the only benches.

I think I liked the north the best.

There are never many people on the EBMUD trails, as they do their best to discourage usage. But I saw around a dozen people over the 6.5 hours. The most notable occurred along the east shore. First there was an older couple, then there was a jogging British lady, then there was jacket man. Jacket man had lost his jacket somewhere on the trail and was searching for it. I was about 6 miles into my walk around the reservoir and told him I hadn't seen it. He continued on past me. 3.5 miles on, I saw his jacket, hanging across from the sign-in board at the next staging area. It was exactly where I'd been thinking I would have put it if I'd found it on the trail. Some miles further on, the British lady jogged by me a second time. Then, when I was close to my exit, I saw the older couple again, clearly going a little bit faster than me (but not a lot). I hoped to see jacket man next, but I never did. Hopefully he turned back instead, and found his jacket.

My previous best hiking day, since getting my Fitbit, was 40,000 steps, one memorable day in New York when I walked from Brooklyn to the garment district in Manhattan (and then a few other places too). I've never been able to equal that, as when I hike out here I start too late, end too early, and usually find places to write along the way. Well, there was no writing on Saturday because I needed to keep going to make it all the way around the Reservoir. Much to my delight, I hit my 40k mark again, for the second time, and then even managed 45k before I made it home.

Yay for a beautiful and strenuous day of walking in Contra Costa County.

January has mostly slipped away. For me it's been routine. (Not so much for the wife.) I've back to work. I've been hiking on Saturdays, but nothing new and exciting. We managed to get our first Saturday game in since September, with a Microscope session to kick off our this year's Clockwork Campaign. I've been gaming on Wednesdys and Thursdays. I've mostly homebodied on Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays because it's cold outside and K. has a broken foot. We ventured out one Sunday to get yogurt and write on campus, but found that Yogurtland went out of business in October.

And so life goes on.

But today I came up with a slightly more exciting day out that wasn't just a walk to Tilden or Orinda. I went up to San Pablo to have a delicious shrimp lunch at Popeyes, then I biked through San Pablo (and El Sobrante) and down San Pablo Dam Road to the San Pablo Reservoir.

Lots of San Pablo going on.

There was more excitement than I expected in El Sobrante. That's because protesters were out blowing whistles and holding signs that said, "No Richmond Methadone Clinics in El Sobrante." When I saw them as I biked through I said, "Yay!" And that made people perk up and smile. But those smiles didn't know what to do with themselves when I started chanting "Heroin Users Die! Heroin Users Die! No Sympathy for the Sick! Heroin Users Die!"

Which is pretty much what they were saying too, but were too cowardly to admit.

Now, I could understand if people didn't want a methadone clinic in their residential area. I wouldn't either. But this is a methadone clinic going into an ugly cement block building next to another cement block building across an overly-large, over-busy, overly-fast street from an endless row of dying strip malls. It's practically the definition of where a methadone clinic should go.

But what really pissed me off was the coded racism of the protest. They weren't just protesting a methadone clinic, they were explicitly protesting a *Richmond* methadone clinic. That's a city that is majority black and hispanic. And if there was any doubt about the coded racism, the blinding white pallor of the protestors made it obvious. El Sobrante is 60% white; the protest was about 96%.

I lost my cool by the time I hit the third or fourth group of protestors and one called out to me specifically. I told her, "F*** your lack of compassion."

El Sobrante is Trump's America.

Funny story: Richmond is a really weirdly shaped city. It totally encloses the town of San Pablo with a strip of land to the east that's just one or two hundred feet wide that runs from the Hilltop Mall area in the north to the Alvarado Park area in the south. The planned methadone clinic is in that strip of land, not in San Pablo (to the west), not in El Sobrante (to the east), but IN RICHMOND. In other words, they're keeping their dirty Richmond methadone clinic IN RICHMOND.

I parked my bike at the Eagle's Nest Trail between the San Pablo Reservoir and Tilden.

I walked into the Reservoir area, then northward. Theoretically I was following Old San Pablo Dam Trail but it disappeared as soon as I got into the Reservoir area. This is typical for EBMUD. Still, I walked what might or might not have been a proper trail right along the wasterside. It was a beautiful trail with trees all along and the Reservoir to my right.

I walked a bit more than a mile to get to the entrance to Kennedy Grove. I've been there a few times, but just at their picnic tables and greens. I did sit at a table for a while and write. But then I decided to explore a bit more of the park. It's not very large, but it does have several miles of trail. I did a big loop around the southernmost trails, about 3 miles total. It was more trail with lots of nice trees. It climbed a few hundred feet up a hill and gave me awesome views of the Reservoir and other lands that side of the hills.

I was amused that two different people on the trail asked me if I knew how much further the top was. I usually don't get that on the trails. But maybe Kennedy Grove attracts less experienced hikers.

Then it was back through the Reservoir to my bike then up to Orinda then back home via BART.

Plans for another hike: get up to Inspiration Point, take the the Inspiration Trail down to the Reservoir, walk north at the Reservoir to the Eagle's Nest Trail, then hike back up that. And that'll complete my trails at the Reservoir, since I'd previously gone south from Inspiration Point to Orinda and have now gone north from Eagle's Nest Trail to Kennedy Grove.

I have 649 days left on my EBMUD Trail pass.

(May Trump have fewer days left in his presidency.)

I was happy to do so much biking. I haven't been doing much of that lately, but in the last few days I've been overcome by the thoughts of open roads, of community floating by on either side (sadly, including racist protestors) and trails that go on forever. The trip from San Pablo to Orinda is definitely hard work at times. My Fitbit tells me that I got into the cardio zone for 65% of my ride from San Pablo to the Reservoir, then 75% of my ride from the Reservoir to Orinda. Good stuff! And tiring!

I guess I have two years to maximize my biking shape, because there just won't be as much biking exercise in Hawaii.

Wednesday: Hiking. I biked out to St. Mary's College. It's a well-located campus, in the crook of East Bay hills, and otherwise as nice as you could expect with unimaginative Mission-style architecture. The Old Moraga Ranch Trail runs up behind it. This was a challenging trail to plan because various maps of it disagree as to where it is. It was also a challenging trail to walk, because it has considerable up and down and up and down. I walked it from St. Mary's out to Rancho Laguna Park and back. Nice walk, pretty views, but not a trail that really goes anywhere. I was totally exhausted afterward!

Thursday: Pathfinding. We had our second all-day Pathfinder: Skull & Shackles game. I really enjoy this game, and these all-day games ensure that we can finish up Skull & Shackles before I leave for Hawaii. Three more adventures were successfully conquered!

Friday: Lazing. What does my day of lazing look like? After a lazy morning and lazy lunch, I went out to grab some packages at the UPS store (comics & games & stuff for Kimberly), then I biked up the hill to Clark Kerr, where I hiked up the hill a little more and found a bench to sit on. I read a while (The Fifth Season) and wrote some (a D&D history, of which I wrote one almost every day this holiday, only missing today). Afterward I biked out to Dark Carnival, and used a gift certificate to buy a book (Winter Tide: The Innsmouth Legacy) and was pleasantly surprised to recall what great stock Dark Carnival has. Then it was out to groceries and home, after which Kimberly and I went out to get dinner at King Dong.

Saturday: ZooLighting. Another lazing day, but around dark, Kimberly and I took a Lyft up to the Oakland Zoo. Somehow, neither of us have ever been there, despite decades of living in the Bay Area. They have a holiday festival of lights, with lots of Christmas lights wrapped around everything and animals made out of light and Christmas songs and a (mediocre) laser show. My favorite part of the trip was a gondala ride far above Oakland up into the darkness, with lights all around, both the far-away city and the nearby Zoolights. Pretty cool! We had another dinner out afterward.

Sunday: Orléansing. Some of my friends wanted a Pathfinder day and some wanted a long-game day, so I ended up hosting both (and all thanks to Kimberly who was willing to humor us). We started out with a shared luncheon, which was Eric L's suggestion, in part so that Kimberly could enjoy some tasty food. Then we played Orléans: Invasion! and lost (as usual) and then we played again and won (for my first time ever!). Woo! Good game! And I've added it to my list of played-games in my co-op design book now that it's exceeded five plays.

And that was the rest of my year-end holiday.

T-2 years until Hawaii.

On Saturday I returned to Joaquin Miller Park near Montclair, which I visited for the first time earlier this year.

I was astounded to find it much smaller than I thought. Last time I was there it felt like it took the whole day to get from the base of the park in Montclair up to its top and then back. Admittedly, I did some writing while up there that day, per usual, but I can't imagine it was too much. This time I discovered I could make it from the base to the picnic tables up near the top in 45 minutes, and about the same time back down. Weird!

It continues to be a beautiful park. I love all the watercourses and I love the heavy forestation. I did continue to see signs of the City of Oakland's neglect though — not just in the bathrooms (closed up, with portapotties nearby) and not just in the slowly dying picnic tables, but also in the fact that they have some extremely narrow trails open to bikes. If anyone was paying attention, they'd forbid it like they do on a few other trails, because it was crazy. There was one where I had to literally dodge off the trail several times as bike raced down it, despite it being just a few feet wide.

I was really pleased that it was still so early when I got to the top of the park, so I continued onward to the parks even further up in the hills. I walked the length of Roberts Park and then walked back along the west ridge of Redwood Regional Park. They're beautiful too, and Redwood Regional has some vistas of the sort you don't see in the lower parks.

(I had lunch at Lake Temescal on my way up to Montclair, so it was a day of four parks.)

On Sunday, Kimberly and I went out to the holiday Telegraph Street Fair. I walked, she scooted. It was terrific to get out and do something, as she's been mostly housebound in her free time since she discovered that she'd broken her foot. However, the Street Fair shopping was mainly for her.

And, she discovered quite a few necklaces and earrings that she liked. She got a few of them as early Christmas presents.

The only downside of the day happened at our last booth, which had a lot of Navajo-made jewelry from their lands in the southwest. As Kimberly is looking over their pieces, an older guy walks by me and say something like, "Don't buy from them, they're n****rs."

I have a temper. Or maybe I used to have a temper. I rarely lose it any more. But I blew sky-high immediately. He just keeps walking on likes it's the most natural thing in the world, and I scream after him something like, "We don't want your racism here in Berkeley." He looks back at me, confused, and I say something like, "Yeah. You. We don't like your racism." (Maybe there was some profanity too; I don't really remember.)

And then I calm down and I have to explain to everyone what he said. The Navajo woman thanks me for "protecting" her, and I don't really like that white knight label. I try to explain that it's more a societal issue, that I think someone like that racist needs to know his views aren't acceptable. That he'll get called out in public for them.

Kimberly bought a piece of jewelry. I later asked if that all made her more likely to buy, and she said, "Yes." So, screw you, old racist.

Friday Night: Mauvais Genou. Hurt my knee. D'oh! Let a cat sit on it in an uncomfortable position. Lucy is made of lead. Then after I biked to Safeway and back, I discovered it was painful when I went went up the stairs. So I gave it ice and ibuprofen over the course of the weekend.

Saturday Morning: Acheter des Carrelage. Five years ago an incompetent builder remodeled our bathroom. When we asked if he could do it, he said that bathrooms were his bread and butter. He electrified our tub and installed our tiles such that they were leaking within a few years. Leaky bread and electrified butter.

So we've got a handyman who's going to redo it. We spent Saturday morning shopping for new tiles, up north of Gilman. We came up with one that's a little darker than we like, but otherwise OK. A little pricy, but for only 100 square foot of tile that doesn't make a big difference. Apparently rectangular, brick-like tiles are the newest fad, and we settled on one, but now I'm worried whether our handyman is going to be comfortable laying those in, which I have to assume is more complex, because you don't just create a square grid. If not, it's back to the stupid tile store.

(Also stupid: the city of Berkeley. Our local streets have had two-hour parking limits for non-residents for the last 20+ years, and it's been a constant thorn in my side whenever I have people over, and it's going to be a problem for our handyman starting tomorrow. I was hoping to get some daily visitor parking permits for him on Friday. Except the Customer Service Center where you do so is only open four days a week nowadays. Which isn't particularly good service. So I'll try Monday morning before work, as a bit of just-in-time getting stuff done, of the sort I hate.)

Saturday Evening: Ich Färbe Haare. Kimberly tried to re-dye her hair while I was in Cambridge, and just hurt her foot more. So she asked me to help now and we scheduled that for Saturday night. Oy! hair dye is pernicious stuff. Afterward, I felt like I spent forever getting it off of everything (other than her head). But I was successful. Then we wrapped her head in saran wrap and duct tape, so that she could leave the dye in overnight. We had blue duct tape, so she said it made her look like Marge Simpson.

She washed her hair out first thing Sunday morning, and I volunteered to clean the bathtub afterward, so that she wouldn't hurt her toe. I found blue on all the walls of shower stall, some of it in arterial sprays. It looked like she'd killed a whole tribe of smurfs.

The blue came out looking very nice.

Sunday: Klettere Jeden Berg Hoch. And on Sunday I rested. By going hiking.

The first step is always finding lunch I can bring up into the hills. This is more challenging on Sundays, but I opted for Ike's Overpriced Sandwiches, forgetting that they'd gone on my naughty list. The problem is that they've joined the list of bad San Francisco based businesses who began engaging in surcharge shenanigans when they were told to pay people a living wage (not that it's LIVABLE yet in the Bay Area). So Ike's has an "optional" surcharge to fund it, which of course isn't optional because they automatically charge it, and if you say otherwise workers might spit in your sandwich. But, it's false advertising because they list incorrect prices, and it's a passive-aggressive slap at minimum wage laws that invites customers to be at odds with the workers. I need to find a different sandwich place in downtown, because screw Ike. But today I had a very delicious if morally reprehensible cream cheese sandwich with an orange glaze.

I lunched near Jewel Lake, which I love, and then I did a hike out into Wildcat Canyon, which I love, up the hillside along the Conlon Trail, which I don't think I've ever hiked before, then across the Nimitz Way, and back down in Tilden. It was a terrific hike that warded away the cold of fall (winter is coming) and there were beautiful views due to the bit of rain we got last night. (The canyon was still quite wet, but the hillsides quite dry.)

Overall, a great day of hiking.

I didn't get enough R&R and downtime this weekend, but we definitely got things accomplished. Onward. There's still much to be done for Skotos, RPGnet, and Blockstream before year's end.

It's been almost a month since I got back from Berlin. If the lack of journal entries isn't a clue, I was tired when I got back. I've been doing well at work, in large part because I've had a very busy schedule that is just now lightening up. But in my after hours I've been mostly laid back. I wrote a few Mechanics & Meeples last week, and I've been slowly muddling around with TSR product histories, but mostly I've been reading.

And on weekends, getting out.

Thursday, Christopher brought me a newspaper article on Carr Valley, a 600-acre former cattle raunch southeast of Moraga that was purchased by EBMUD last year. It officially opened to the public on November 11th (or at least to EBMUD's extremely limited definition of the public), and Christopher thought that I'd enjoy seeing a natural area that was still almost virgin. He was totally right.

The Carr Valley is right in the middle of a bunch of other EBMUD lands, pretty much filling in a big gap. As such, it's a bit challenging to get to. It takes about an hour to get to the Valley along EBMUD's secret trails, leaving from Rancho Laguna Park. You walk the Rocky Ridge Trail east, alongside a nice creek, then up a relatively steep ridgeline, then you drop down to the canyon on the other side. Across another creek there's now a new path that leads into Carr Valley.

To a large extent, I've seen lands just like Carr Valley before. Part of it is (another) nice creekside trail, part of it is hillside, and part it runs along the ridge at the back of the valley. But, I always enjoy getting to explore somewhere new, and so even if the terrains were familar, the experience wasn't. And there were quite a few exhilarating views, of the beautiful valley, of the hills surrounding it, and of the lands eastward.

The wide paths were clean and well-cut, though oddly enough they were the greenest areas in the valley. Much of the brush is still brown up there, since we're just on the edge of our rainy season, but the paths often had a light covering of grass. In fact, when you saw the trails from afar, they were green pathways, snaking up and down the hillsides.

I was surprised to not see much wildlife. I thought that with the land being so untouched, animals would be everywhere, but perhaps they were more afraid of humanity for that same reason. I did see one squirrel, who looked pretty shocked to see a human in his domain, and dozens of cows, a common feature in EBMUD lands.

And there were almost no peoples. I saw two heading back up the trail when I went in. It was between 1 and 2 o'clock at the time, I thought how much smarter they were than I, because I knew I'd be fighting the sun to get back out of the park by dusk. But then when I saw a couple heading into the Valley at 3.45 or so, just when I emerged, I thought better of myself. (There's no way they weren't walking those trails out in the dark, unless they turned right around; as was I saw the sun set twice on my way back out, once before I climbed out of that canyon outside the valley, and once afterward.)

Overall, a few pleasant experience. (Thanks, Chris!) I've been meaning to explore more of the EBMUD South paths, and this gave me an excuse. (Last Christmas vacation, I'd planned a walk on an adjoining path, beginning at St. Mary's College, but I decided it was too cold.) I've got two years left on my EBMUD permit, though I think I long ago got my $30 worth out of it.

With that said, it was a challenging trip. I left the house at 10am, which is the earliest I can go and get a sandwich at Cheese 'n Stuff. I got back at 6.15, an hour after dark. That's because to get there I had to bike to Rockridge BART, take BART to Lafayette, ride the Lafayette-Moraga trail to almost the end, and then bike southeast a ways beyond that. (Obviously, the return was the reverse.)

I was out and active the whole time, with just the exceptions of waiting for BART, sitting on BART, and having my lunch. I totaled 36,000 steps and 323 flights of stairs on my Fitbit, both outstanding numbers (though that includes some of the biking).

When I was biking up the Lafayette-Moraga trail, I was a bit worried if I could still do that sort of hill. (It's not super steep, but there's a lot of it.) Last time I was out there, I barely noticed the hills, but the last two years I've been doing less biking, and almost no hill biking, preferring hiking instead.

But, the biking turned out to be OK, with me only getting a little tuckered at a very steep bit just before the top of the hill.

The one problem with the Lafayette-Moraga trail is that it's still partially closed.

I'd actually seen that the last mile of it was bloccked off on my visit to Moraga 11 months ago, but I thought: there's no way it's still closed.

Ha!

And after almost a year (maybe more), the East Bay Regional Park District still hasn't offered any reasonable detour for their one and only major thoroughfare down to Moraga. They dump you out into a neighborhood with no notice, and there's no way out of the neighborhood (unless you backtrack). I spent 15 or 20 minutes riding down dead-end streets before I finally hopped back on the Lafayette-Moraga trail and rode back to the previous street.

The ride home was great. Almost all downhill. The downhill on the Lafayette-Moraga trail heading toward Lafayette BART is especially fun. It was a little darker than I like, but on the other hand the path was much more empty of people as a result.

Saturday morning I was up at 6am, nearly on East Coast time, other than a bit of insomnia before following asleep the night before. I made it out of the house at 6.30 for the day's hike ... but was back within 10 minutes to take my morning pills. Whoops! So I was out of the house before 7am.

The plan was a hike up Panoramic Hill, across the fire trails above Strawberry Canyon, then to some bus stop in or around Tilden Park. And, it was a beautiful hike. The mornings have been warm, so I had my jacket off by the time I got to the Hill. It was slightly cool, slightly damo, and just overall wonderful weather for hiking. I was delighted by the emptiness of the trails, which largely held until 9am or so. Then I started seeing people out with their dogs. I was also delighted by over a half-dozen rabbits, hopping along the trails (and quick to vacate when I came by). I just about never see rabbits up there, so seeing half-a-dozen on the same day was astounding. I finally got out my camera to take a picture of the next, but there were no more. (That was about when the dog walkers started appearing, and the owner of one very happily bounding dog indeed told me that his pup has spotted a rabbit.)

I eventually landed at the bus stop at the top of the stutter ridge above TIlden, at the corner of Wild Cat & Grizzly Peak. I made it to downtown by noon, even after two stops during the hike, one to read a bit of my copy of <i>The Old Guard</I>, and one to eat lunch. It made me think that I should sacrifice a couple of hours of sleep some Saturday morning, to do another 7am hike, but this time keep going until the late hour or exhaustion stops me! I could make it further than I ever have before! (And set myself a new Fitbit record, as I managed 32,000 steps on Saturday with just my 7am-noon hike.)

Anywho, the hike was enjoyable and restful, exactly what I needed before a plane trip, and what will be three days of busy work, from Tuesday to Thursday.

Later in the day, I finished up any number of chores around the house, some for myself, some for K., who is supposed to be staying off of her foot so that she doesn't dislocate a toe before her ligament heals. Then after dinner I got to packing.

I was just finishing up and getting ready to wind down for bed when I got a call from C., saying that the AirBnB he'd rented for us for Sunday night was short the sofa bed that was to be mine, having substituted a psychiatrist's couch instead(!). WTF!!

So here I am, on the edge of going to bed before a 5am flight, and I don't have a room for the next night, nor have I ever sent up an AirBnB account. Yeah, my relaxation is blown away and I'm now super-stressed. Joy. Cue 60 or 70 minutes of frustrating work, trying to setup an AirBnB account, going through multiple device to take a picture of my ID clear enough for AirBnB to read, and finding a barely-acceptable BnB among all of the various subpar options that have a bed available the next night. By now I'm 30 or 40 minutes past my bed time and way too wound up. So I stay up another 20 minutes before deciding to give bed a try. I'm *still* too wound up, but at least the insomnia isn't as bad as the previous evening. I'm asleep within 1 hour instead of within 2.

I'm running a little slow in the morning, and I'm only actually ready to go right when I wanted to head out the door. And that's when I call Uber (because good 'ole third-world BART doesn't run early Sunday morning). It takes agonizingly long minutes before anyone accepts my request, and when someone does he's on the Bay Bridge, listed as 19 minutes out. (He makes it in more like 13.) Still, plenty of time. I try to arrange my airline trips with enough time for a couple of problems.

Problem #2 is the huge line at bag check-in at JetBlue, despite the fact that most of the international terminal is empty. But that only takes 5 or 10 minutes.

Problem #3 is just a TSA attitude problem. I tell them I'm opting out of the naked-xray machine, as everyone should to kill this invasive, unnecessary, and poorly performing machine, but which no one else does. The jerk TSA agent is clearly pretty pissed at this, which is something I've never seen before. He spitefully tells me. "I don't know how long it'll be. It could be 5 minutes, it could be 30 minutes." Whatever, you TSA dick. It's 1 or 2 minutes, as usual.

Surrounded by sickies, as usual, on the plane. The guy over in the window seat is coughing and sneezing and snuffling from the moment
I sit down. The woman next to me, in the center seat, starts sniffling continuously after her meal. As usual, I think it'll be a miracle if I'm not sick in two days time. Which would be just as the RWOT conference is start. I continuously use hand-sanitizer that I've wastefully packaged in a quart bag to satisfy another of TSA's ridiculous and useless, fear-mongering procedures. The second I'm off the plane, I will step into a bathroom to wash even more thoroughly. Because airplane cabins are little petri dishes of recirculated disease.

But on the flight, JetBlue's legroom and wifi continue to rock. They're at the top of my list of airlines to fly because they're adding amenities rather than removing them or charging for them, like the rest of the misbegotten industry.

We circle Logan airport in Boston for twenty minutes because of a crew "painting lines on the runway". 3.30pm in the afternoon seems like a sort of bad time to do that.

JetBlue's ever-intriguing "map channel" soon shows us entirely flipped around on our flight path, as if we were heading right back to San Francisco. Soon after our plane icon begins to spin, as if it were careening wildly out of control.

(Fortunately, we were running early before this waste of time.)

Upon landing, the public transit proved to be a little more challenging than expected. The plan looked easy enough: take the Silver Line to the Red Line.

Except the Silver "Line" is apparently just a bit of branding. It's a bus, and it's a bus that was so crowded that I had to yell and cajole to get people to back up enough to get me and my suitcase in. Then I had to do the same to help some other people get in. Then it turns out that they're not running the Red Line under the Charles River during weekends, so it was off the train, up the stairs, onto one of the line of waiting buses, through the streets of Boston via grossly inefficient directions, then eventually to a stop two stops up the line, and back down the stairs and onto the train.

I got in to the AirBnB about 6pm.

I had grave concerns about my B&B room, but it looks fine. A bit of floor space, a couch, a pretty spacious bathroom. Oh, it's got fresh air problems and a stair outside right next to the bed and a bit of a musty smell in the bathroom, but it gets at least a B-.

After settling I went and wandered a bit, theoretically looking for dinner, but that was an excuse.

I wandered through MIT and was pretty surprised to find it right in the middle of the city, with major roads cutting through it.

I got back down to the Charles River and found it very attractive. I crossed it on a well-lit bridge full of students going to and fro. The sun had set by now and toward the end of the bridge I saw quite a few people with cell phones out, pointed toward the reddish sky. I looked at them as I passed and saw: photo software; photo software; photo software, hunting a Pokemon.

After a bit more wandering I ended up near Fenway Stadium, found some dinner, then circled back.

Man, the roads in Boston are invasive. Huge, gaping scars cutting through the city. I had to take quite a bit of effort to get around some of them!

It was entirely dark by now, and I was a bit leery of some of the neighborhoods which seemed big and urban, but everywhere there were students with cell phones out, totally oblivious to the world around them. So, not as muggy as Berkeley, I figured.

Eventually I made it back home, a bit footsore.

Tomorrow is my free day before the design workshop begins.