Sunday Sailing

This Sunday I participated in OCSC's sign up and sail for the first time.  Justin had expressed interest in sailing so I invited him along as well.  We didn't know any of the other people we would be sailing with but I gotta say we couldn't have been luckier.  Our group was rad.  We set out on Catalina 36 named Villhanna (or something like that).  

We spent the morning tacking out towards the Golden Gate

And then cut back around Angel Island where we stopped for a little picnic. 

Angel Island.

I didn't know any of that. ^

Picnic!

We were bombarded by birds, gulls, geese, pigeons and crows.  They all looked good enough to eat.

You can't even tell that I just got out of the bathroom, huh?

This is as close as you are going to get to a celebrity crotch shot from me.

Justin holding on for dear life.  Oh god!

Drew Maneuvering like a pro.

Our beautiful city.

Enjoying each others company and conversation.  

Justin playing shark bait.

Rail meat.

Drew at the helm.

Justin took the helm and sailed us back to the Berkeley marina.

Oasis

Man does this bring me back.  Back to when I had to be savvy and make friends with everyone so that I could get into the bar/club when I was still 19 and sans id.  Back to when older girls were my thing.  Back to when all I wanted to do was dance alone.  Back to when school was only two days a week and there was something going on every night.  Back to when I knew, really knew how to flirt with out expectations.  Back to when the Oasis was a house music playground.  Way back when.  

LHDC

I live at the crux of the Lower Haight and the Divisidero Corridor.  San francisco is too small.  We can't keep renaming sections of neighborhoods, hence NOPA does not exist.  LHDC.  

Purisima Creek Redwoods

I was anticipating a late departure with a group of droopy eyed, hungover you know whats.  To my surprise everyone was in bed relatively early on Friday night, catching their ZZZ's for the morning trek.  

We met at Steve H's place around 9:30 a.m. on Sat.  Justin K, Dempsey, Steve H, and I headed down to Moss Beach to meet up with Ricardo for some fun in the unusually warm January sun.  We started the day off wandering the famous tide pools just down the beach from Ricks house.  I got Dempsey and Justin to stick their fingers in one of these guys.  It feels pretty funny.

After about an hour of tide pooling we decided to drive to the Purisima Creek trail head.  This pink is actually the exact trail that we followed on the map.  It ended up being a 9 mile hike.  It took us a few hours but that's because we stopped quite a few times to enjoy our surroundings.  We saw many birds of prey, butterfly's, rabbits, lizards, nutes, banana slugs and man were the lady bugs out in full force.   The boys were kind of loud, like four tall boys loud, so I decided to hang back just out of earshot.  I'd let them walk ahead and I'd stand real still.  Soon the birds would be chirping again, rabbits would be scurrying, and the butterfly's would be circling my head.  It was nice to be out there, in the silence, with myself.  

The thing I noticed the most while out there away from the boys was the contrast.  I was so strong, so apparent.  I had no idea I had so many things that needed venting.  I remember being out there and I could actually feel, and this is going to sound really corny to say but there's really no other way to describe it, I could feel the event horizon of where my jarbled up thoughts and stress ended and where everything else started.  It's like if you have an injury that you neglect.  Instead of getting better it gets worse and soon other things start to go wrong as well because your body is trying to over compensate.  I felt like I was finally aware of that injury and that being out there could help heal it.  That things would start coming together and soon my jarble wouldn't be so loud.  

Call me a hippie and I will elbow you in the face....seriously.
To further denounce the hippie within I'll tell you a little something about the meal we ate when we got back to Ricks place.  We did a quick stop at a market and picked up about 6 lbs of meat.  We got a bunch of spicy Italian sausages and bratwurst, 3 lbs of ground beef,  a wedge of blue cheese, onions, tomato and lettuce.  Man, I was on veggie detail cutting and slicing and dicing up the toppings as well as caramelizing the onion.  Dempsey was busy seasoning the beef and shaping patties stuffed with blue cheese, justin was making us all tea, Rick was manning the grill.  Man, when it all came together, oh man, it was the best burger I've had in a long time.  We each had a 1/2 lb burger stuffed with cheese, topped with sweet onions and hot sauce and mustard and lettuce and tomato.  So good.  And those sausages on the side.  Oh.  We all sat around the fire, our faces dripping with juice, our hands greasy to the max, the floor speckled with sauce.  We were silent, except for a short chuckle or grunt or snort when our eyes would meet and agree on just how blissful this food was.  Again,  A.Mazing.

Monday Night Fun

Last night was great.  I trained hard, well, kinda hard.  To reward myself I rode with Justin to Cafe Du Nord to try to catch tickets to the already sold out Matt & Kim show.  We got in line not expecting much but hoping for everything.  Our hope payed off as we picked off the last two tickets available.  Once inside and down stairs we made our way to the bar (for water) and bumped into Danny G.  After pounding a pitcher of water we wandered over to the pool table and met up with the rest of the crew, Cat P. and Kelsey R and a few others.  The show was A.Mazing.  At the beginning folks were just kinda dancing and there were these three bros who were the only rowdy ones.  A few songs in Danny G. turns to Cat P. and says, "We're going to start a mosh pit."  Kelsey R. and Danny G. head for the center and soon enough the crowd starts doing a little slamming.  Eventually everyone got so into it that people were crowd surfing, jumping, tossing their arms, , throwing water, bouncing, laughing, hugging and just plain ass hard dancing together.  It was supper fun.  Most dancey show I've been to in a while.  Thanks Matt & Kim.  

Monday Run

Happy Superbowl??  Yeah, yeah, whatever.  You can take you football game and....  

I say happy eat-and-drink-all-the-cheap-deep fried-artery clogging-greasy-finger licking- delicious food-and-beer-you-can-get-your-hands-on day!  So, with this sentiment in mind I'll tell you a little about the things I ate yesterday.  

Breakfast started off with a bowl of cheesy doritos and a couple giant cookies.  

Lunch was soon to follow with a few pieces of popeye's chicken, biscuits and cajun fries. 

Snacks were, well, more popeye's, cheese and bread, chips and bean dip/nacho dip, quiche, empenadas, and more popeye's.  

Dinner was a tube of pringles and more cookies.

Needless to say I woke up this morning feeling less than tip top so I decided it would be a good day to try to keep up with my lunchtime run.  The image above is my route.  It was a brisk run.  I wore my short swim trunks.  I know that they are a bit too small but I like that.  It reminds me not to give a damn about what other people think.  Now I'm back at the office finishing up my lunch with some salt and pepper cashews and a chicken salad.

Tribus de L'OMO / Hans Silvester

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In this stunning collection of photographs, Silvester (Ethiopia: Peoples of the Omo Valley) celebrates the unique art of the Surma and Mursi tribes of the Omo Valley, on the borders of Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan. These nomadic people have no architecture or crafts with which to express their innate artistic sense. Instead, they use their bodies as canvases, painting their skin with pigments made from powdered volcanic rock and adorning themselves with materials obtained from the world around them—such as flowers, leaves, grasses, shells and animal horns. The adolescents of the tribes are especially adept at this art, and Silvester's superb photographs show many youths who, imbued with an exquisite sense of color and form, have painted their beautiful bodies with colorful dots, stripes and circles, and encased themselves in elaborate arrangements of vegetation and found objects. This art is endlessly inventive, magical and, above all, fun. In his brief text, Sylvester worries that as civilization encroaches on this largely unexplored region, these people will lose their delightful tradition.

Check it...

Hans Silvester

My afternoon run

I'm headed out to Aquatic Park.  This afternoons run will be followed by a delicious lunch of 1/2 of a steak and a green bean salad.  I am so looking forward to lunch....mmmmm.

Oh, I guess I should tell you about the clause I've added onto my no-drinking-for-the-month-of-January-New-Years-deal.  Before the holidays my weight was pretty steady around 190-194lbs.  Since then I have yet to drop under the 200lb mark.  So I made a deal with myself that I can't have a drink until I get down and stay below 194lbs for a week.  Wish me luck.

Oh, since we are talking about deals I might as well mention the deal I made with one Mr. Ryan Dempsey.  He's my best friend, but his presence has been lacking.  You see, though he lives only about 10 blocks away, he works weekends as a bartender in the East Bay.  Losing out on your best mate week after week for months on end has started taking it's toll on me.  So the other night, Dempsey and I made a deal; he must find work in the city of San Francisco by July the 4th or I get to punch him square in the face.  When the time comes I suppose I'll offer to wear a glove and give him a shot of his drink of choice before and after.  That's it.  

SF Stuck in a Rut

A great article from StreetsBlog about urban planning and the development, or lack there of, our streets/bike plan/transit first policies/etc....

Old Salt

That's it.  I have decided.  I want to be able to charter and captain a boat by my 27th birthday (20.5.2009).  In June of 2008 I went through Basic Keelboat I & II with OCSC.  They are a great school, ranked very high.  One of the things I really liked about them was, well, there were many things I really like about them.  For one, they limit four people per boat.  That's 1 teacher for every 3 students.  Second is that they guarantee that you will get certified.  This means that if you don't pass upon completion of the coarse then they will continue to offer you free training sessions until you do pass or until you feel comfortable performing all of the skill sets.  

This is about a $900 dollar undertaking.  Fortunately I've quite drinking (for a short while longer) and have limited myself to $120 a week.  I should have enough saved up for a rainy day to make this expense more than manageable.  So, I'll see you out on the water.