Death to mice!!!

While I was in Cali Vivian would occasionally tell me during the last couple of months that she’d seen a mouse, how horribly disgusting it was, and how she’s just going to bed so she won’t have to see them any more… *Cough* *cough* When her brother was visiting they laid mouse traps and caught one. Then she saw another, and her sister was visiting at that time so they laid more mouse traps, and caught another! Then I got home and she’d seen yet another!

Well, I laid mouse traps and baited 3 of them several times, and the stupid traps are worthless. The mice can eat that cheese right off the trap without springing it. Though I didn’t seem capable of re-baiting the trap without smashing my thumb… It happened several times… So we called the professional mouse hunter/killers – TERMINIX!

They put bait out, and “glue boards” and a bunch of other stuff in and around the house for 28 different pests! WOW! Anyway, the glue boards are going to just reduce Vivian to a nervous wreck if they work – it’s like fly-paper for mice… SQUEEK SQUEEK! (Translation: “HELP! I’m stuck on this friggin’ glue board and I can’t get loose!!!”). In reality it’s nothing more than a four inch wide piece of heavy paper that’s folded up into a triangular shape and placed next to the wall where mice have been seen walking… If you catch one, you’re just supposed to throw it in the trash with the mouse still stuck on it. Ewww…

I sure hope the mice die. I’ve seen “evidence” of them in the most unlikely of places and I don’t think Vivian realizes the extent of the extended mouse family that’s living with us. Oh, and I’m downloading the latest version of Red Hat Linux this morning too.

Ok…. I didn’t write much about my drive from California to Oklahoma, and not a LOT happened, but I gotta mention a few things.

First of all, I started missing the golden hills of California before I’d left the state. I was driving south on I-5 into the Mojave area when I realized those hills will not be in my sight again for a potentially long time… The desert of Southern Cali is not ugly, but it’s nowhere near the beauty of Northern Cali…

I got to Flagstaff on Day 1. I thought I’d get to Barstow, CA, as it was almost a 9 hour drive according to my map… I not only reached it but had it in my rear-view mirror by 12:30 pm Cali time. I decided as I got further along that I’d try for Flagstaff and had no problems reaching it. It got dark about 45 minutes before I reached town, so my speed slowed considerably, but I made it!!! My GOD was it cold up there! Plus a storm started building up behind me and moving my direction – and I didn’t want to get caught in it so I left way early the next morning… There were a few drizzles and a few flurries in Arizona, a few more drizzles and some hard rain behind me in New Mexico (see pic), and quite a bit of rain just as I was getting to Tulsa.

The second day I did Flagstaff to Amarillo, TX. It’s about a 10 hour drive, and I got a good start that morning so I took a 1 hour side trip to Acoma Pueblo to buy pottery for the little lady along the way. It’s a desolate drive from Flagstaff to Amarillo – long and hard miles on I-40 going due East. Arizona is nice though, and so is New Mexico, but flat North Texas sucks rocks.

I got a flat tire about thirty miles west of Amarillo… This wasn’t good but I knew the “donut” spare would get me into town… I’d been wondering about that vibration in my car… I first noticed it I think someplace in New Mexico. The vibration got worse and worse until it got unbearable, and then – PSSSSSS and it became a “flap flap flap” of rubber against the car. Soooo, I pulled over, and started pulling EVERYTHING out of the trunk and stacking in on the shoulder of the highway to get to the spare tire. It was ugly. It was also then when I realized I had a spare and a jack, but NO LUG WRENCH!!! I had a crescent wrench but it wasn’t going to do the job…

I walked around the car a couple of times trying to think of what to do. After about 5 minutes an old hippy with 2 Mexicans in his car pulled up behind me, got out, and helped me change the tire. The hippy said, “These guys broke down further up the road so I’m helping them get a new battery when we came across you…” I was dumbfounded. I thanked them over and over, and gave the guy $10 for gas to help out.

Anyway, after the tire change I drove with the flashers and watched my rear-view mirror more than what was in front of me. It took a while to make Amarillo, but once I was there I stopped at Sears in the Westgate Mall. They helped me out big time too because all the mechanics who normally work on tires had already gone home, but another guy said he’d do it for me. Whew. I was back on the road and pulling into the Big Texan hotel by dark.

Then I went and had a beer or two with my steak dinner. I was feeling a bit better. To top off the day the three singing cowboys came by and played a couple of Webb Pierce tunes for me. That definitely made me feel better. I was right happy after that! I went back to the hotel room and went to bed a little later and I even slept in the next morning. Oh, and it was also at the Big Texan that I learned a big earthquake had hit central Cali like the day after I drove through there!

After the final leg of the trip I got back to Tulsa at about 1:45 CST. Woah! What a wierd trip…

Now that I’m back in Tulsa I thought I’d try smoking a turkey in my smoker. I watched and tech supported Chip when necessary (never) with the Thanksgiving turkey in California, but this was my first one. It turned out really good – very juicy and yummy. In fact Vivian’s mom has a turkey in her fridge that she wanted me to put in the smoker too! Heh. I made a deal to get some of the white meat when it was done… Smooooooooth.

Be sure to check some of the pics from my drive home. I didn’t take many, but I got some good ones from the car.

I got back into Oklahoma yesterday afternoon. It was a long three days on the road, but I finally made it. I initially planned on four days, but I’m glad I did it in three because there were storms on my tail from Flagstaff to Tulsa. I’d get way ahead, then check into a hotel for the night and by morning it was back on my rear-end. As I got into Tulsa it started raining on me for real, but gave me enough time to unload the car before it really opened up. Here’s a video of the storm after my arrival for all my friends back in Cali. I don’t think they ever understood clearly what a “storm” is really all about. The vid is just a clip of a good thunder-clap and 15 seconds of increasingly hard rain. Good stuff. It was Oklahoma welcoming me home.

I’ll write more later, but for now I have Christmas chores to do.

My friend Chip came down for the day on Friday and we went for a hike in the South Bay this time. My boss at AOL had told me about a nice place SW of Palo Alto in the Monte Bello Open Space Preserve. It sounded like a good place, so we drove through twisting, winding, narrow roads to get there – about 5 miles worth of them.

Once we arrived, it was pretty cold and windy at the top of the hill where we parked. If we took the trail my boss suggested we would walk into the wind on a simple trail that just meandered around with little visual variation in the landscape or weather… If we took the trail across the street we’d be in The Trancos Open Space Preserve and even though it was shorter in length there was way more variation. We chose The Trancos, and off we went. There are maps folded up and in a box by the bulletin board at the trail head so we grabbed a couple of those and off we went.

We mainly just did ordinary hiking through terrain that was not too difficult, and then we actually decided to read a few of the words on the map/pamphlet and we’re glad we did. We thought it was strange that there was a lot of information about the San Andreas Fault in this little map/brochure. We didn’t know it then, but we were about to start walking on the Fault itself! Once we realized this fact, we noticed there are marker posts indicating the Fault line itself, and “historical markers” are all around though not at first evident. A fence that runs across the fault and which partially survived the 1906 quake shows how far the Earth moved that day. Trees that were knocked over during the quake continued growing, making a strange horizontal trunk with giant branches growing upward. The split in the Earth that day measure 15 feet wide near the Golden Gate and 3 feet wide where we were standing – between 40 and 50 miles in length. The split started in the North and travelled South at 5000 mph… It only took 20 seconds to travel that length… Anyway, we saw lots of the “signs” of deer everywhere but around that fault. They obviously stay away, but we were jumping up and down on it! It was a very cool, spooky, strange hike today.

On the way back to civilization we stopped at another spot along the road called The Foothills Open Space Preserve. We didn’t have a map of these trails and there was no parking lot like at Monte Bello, so we decided to keep it simple and take one trail here and then return to the car. The main thing about this trail is that it’s overgrown with high shrubs rather than trees, and the shrubs grow up and come together at about shoulder/head level – meaning you have to stoop over while going uphill. The backs of my legs were so tired… And with every step we would nearly knock ourselves out by kneeing ourselves in the face. Sometimes we were stooping so low we could have just crawled through the bushes. We finally got to a clearing on the other side of the hill top. It gave us a great view of the southern portion of the bay.

Be sure to check the latest date in the photo album to see the pics.

Oh, I forgot to mention in my earlier post about getting laid off that it’s also my 39th Birthday! Woo Hoo!

I’m sure everyone has heard the news by now that AOL laid off 450 employees – 400 in California. I was one of the unlucky ones – well “unlucky” may not be the right word since a good number of those people really WANTED to get laid off… The entire campus was affected from the bottom to the top as a large number of managers, and even a VP got the chop. We were emailed and told to meet in a conference room in building 21 and about 100 people were told all at once. This happened in several building simultaneously at 10 a.m. with managers being told at 9 a.m.

They gave very good severance packages to everyone, but the kicker was that they also gave us the opportunity for 2 free months of AOL!!! When they said this during the meeting everyone roared laughing! The AOL big wig that had delivered the bad news looked mighty nervous during those minutes. I would say it was at that particular time when he realized the former Netscape employees who had been converted to AOL employees had no love at all for AOL…

Anyway, it’s all done around here, and I figure unless something good appears and soon, I’m going to return to Oklahoma. Gotta go update my resume now.

A friend of mine that works for both AOL and Mozilla is a HUGE Lord of the Rings fan and had purchased a bunch of tickets several weeks ago for a series of movies in San Jose… Last night was Lord of the Rings 1, next Friday is Lord of the Rings 2 and then the following week is Lord of the Rings 3. Aside from the mall in which the theather is located being like a military complex with valet parking, it wasn’t bad a bad theater… Otherwise, God, what a horrible place outside the theater… I’m not sure I’ll ever go back once we use up all these tickets. I’d be willing to bet there’s not much worse commercial shopping on Earth.

So, there are three things are wrong with this movie – or maybe I should say I noticed three things that I shouldn’t have, which detracted from the movie, though everything else is great. It’s the first of an epic movie that will most likely go down in history. Truly the movie is an incredible piece of cinema that will live for decades as a great movie – providing you can sit through 12 total hours of it of course…

The first thing I noticed that was “wrong” was the accentuation of certain words which made the speech of the characters sound – well, a bit STUPID at times… For example, if Gandalf were to say, “Jack and Jill went up the hill – to Mordor!” It would actually come out like this, “Jack and Jill went up the hill – to Morrrrrrdorrrrr!” (Roll the R’s very heavily). They should either speak with the heavily rolled R’s all the time, or drop them all together rather than mixing it up like that. It’s just sounds stupid to my ears…

The second thing I noticed is that AT LEAST twice someone said, “We have but one choice!” Well, no you don’t have but one choice! It’s not a “choice” if there isn’t a second option! There’s no “ONE choice” possible. They might have had no second or third options, but they never had only one choice… That’s just bad script writing…

The third thing is when they reached the Dwarven Kingdom of MoRRRRRia and had to answer the crazy “magic riddle” to open the massive stone doors before they could enter the underground chambers of the Dwarf Lords – they had to answer an Elvish riddle… So, why is there an Elvish riddle protecting the Dwarven Kingdom? Hmmmmm???? The only answer anyone could give me was that at one time in history the Dwarves and Elves were friendly to each other… I don’t know if that’s correct, but it’s as good as any answer in a fantasy movie I guess…

One other thing outside all the other things that kind of stands out through the first two movies to me is that Elron, the Elven King, IS AGENT SMITH! I cannot separate the actor playing the Elven King from his roll in the Matrix as Agent Smith! I mean, I sat there thinking, “Hey! It’s NEO BAGGINS! Kick Elven Lord Smith’s BUTT!!!” I normally don’t talk during movies, but I had to say something to my friend, and the guy next to him heard it too. Oh well, no movie is perfect, but some of these things just JUMPED out at me during this viewing of it….

Am I crazy or did Tokien get sloppy? Or is it the script writers that got sloppy? I’ll wait for someone else to read all this stuff to correct me…

I’m watching a National Geographic program about the photographers of the Vietnam War, both American and North Vietnamese. It’s an incredible documentary about 2 or 3 specific photographers and what they went through to photograph the war.

My recent life has taught me that soccer is a great universal pass-time that brings people together. It’s true in many ways, and my son is a perfect example of how the sport of soccer can bring widely diverse people together in a common cause. As a kid he had coaches from Nigeria, Scotland, Bolivia and Brazil – coaches and trainers from all over the world. We travelled around the Southern US from Kansas City to Dallas to Tampa, Florida to Memphis.

None of this can compare to the message in this program though. Through all the warfare and fighting and death the photographers from both sides wanted the same thing – to get the best pictures possible. They didn’t like taking pictures of the death, but of the fighting and the war. The death was too difficult to accept, let alone photograph. Without realizing the fact they wanted the same things, they were thinking the same thoughts, having the same feelings and emotions. War photographers are a different breed…

It’s been a while since I posted, I know, but plenty has been happening. First of all I went to Fairfax, California to see my pal Chip and his wife Kathryn for Thanksgiving. I stayed damn near the whole weekend with them – well actually I did stay the whole weekend with them and had more fun than is probably allowed by law in at least 40 states.

I left on Thursday morning (Thanksgiving day) and it took about an hour and a half to get there. It’s such a beautiful drive up Interstate 280 between San Jose and San Francisco, then to drive through SF and through Golden Gate Park, the Presidio and across the Golden Gate Bridge tops off a great drive. From the GGB it’s about another 20 to reach the San Anselmo exit, turning under the highway onto Sir Francis Drake, which I follow all the way to Center Blvd., and then into Fairfax. The California hills and mountains and valleys are incredible from the car, but we eventually got up close and personal with nature!

So I arrived and Chip was already working on the turkey. Vivian and I got them a smoker for their wedding present, though I’m not sure Viv would take much blame or credit for it’s choice – as it was my idea… Anyway, smokers will change your whole outlook on life after a good half-dozen meals cooked in one. The turkey was his first. It had been cooking for a couple of hours when I got there. He had resisted opening the hood to check it up to that point so when I got there we checked it and – WOO HOO!!!!!! What a beautiful site.

We hung out drinking coffee until almost noon and decided that we’d abstained from the traditional “drink beer as you cook meat with fire and smoke” long enough so we opened a brew. I’m not sure there’s much better in life than the following set of ingredients – fire, meat, smoke, beer, friends and family (though I wasn’t with my family it was still good)… The turkey smoked for about 6 hours or so before we checked the internal temperatures with a meat thermometer and found it was READY!!! It tasted so good I can’t tell you. The whole house smelled like smoke of course which is the icing on the cake if you ask me… Anyway, we ate until we were full, then moved to the patio that runs across the front of their house and watched it get dark while we listened to cool tunes.

We planned to go hiking on Friday to help walk off the turkey and other foods we had eaten, but it was raining in the morning so we basically spent the day just chilling and watching movies. We played the game of Life, and the card game, Mille Bournes until we’d finished all the beer and wine and other drinks we could and one by one passed out that night…

Saturday we got up and decided that even though it was overcast we would go hiking. We left around 10:30 or 11, and walked through the quaint little town of Fairfax to Deer Park (I think that’s the name). From there about 4 or 5 trails split off in different directions through the Marin Headlands. We went southward toward Bon Tempe Lake. It was about 3 miles away so we decided that would be good. The problem was that the FIRST stage of the hike was the hardest (which is better than leaving it for last!), but it was also incredibly scenic. While we hiked Chip and Kathryn sang TV jingles and such… I told Kathryn she had to stop when we were looking at some incredibly beautiful valley and she started singing the “Clap on, clap off” commercial! Later I apologized because we’d all degenerated to doing bad TV songs, and I told her she could sing the Clap On song again… She declined though…

Anyway, we got to Bon Tempe Lake and took a break and had some water – Seltzer water. It was refreshing and all, but damn I was getting hungry – all of us were getting hungry. We decided to circumnavigate (good word!) the lake and head back. The south side of the lake was incredibly beautiful, quiet, and dark. The redwood trees rose like no trees I’ve ever seen before – straight and tall. They aren’t the biggest in California but if you’ve never seen them or stood next to them, it’s an incredible experience. They are awesome things indeed. There are other trees we named “Nudey Trees” that are probably Oaks with a heavy bark on the outside, and an incredibly smooth, red skin underneath. The bark pealed off to reveal the skin and you could see the red from quite a distance.

Finally we headed back northward toward Fairfax. We were all pretty much exhausted, but there were several miles to go before we could collapse. During our walk we discussed food and decided M&G Burgers in downtown Fairfax was where we were going! Mmmmmmm! Burgers!!!!!

We had to start out with the Pumpkin Trail which led us back UPHILL into the hills – meaning it was really really really hard to do by that time… My feet were beginning to kill me in those Doc Martin boots… We got to the top though and again the forest was so dense and beautiful that we almost (ALMOST) didn’t notice how exhausted we were. By that time though, I was in the “don’t stop now or I’ll not get started for a LONG time” mode and just kept walking. Forget the beauty – I wanted a BURGER! Still I managed to get a pic of the trees right at the end of the hike that Chip pointed out to me with the incredible Yellow and Red trees next to each other across the valley. Incredible!

Well, eventually we got back to Fairfax, and then began the walk through town to the M&G’s. My feet were almost numb by this point and I was so tired I didn’t care anymore. I slowed a little, then a little more, and when we rounded that last corner and saw the back of the burger place I almost passed out with joy! We went in to order but the catch was, I was the only one with a wallet on me and I had about 8 dollars and a VISA card. Of course they didn’t take Credit/Debit cards and pointed us down the street to the ATM Machine… Great! Jerks!!!

When we reached the ATM Machine we decided that 1) we COULD go back to the burger place – which was UPHILL or 2) we could go DOWNHILL to a little Pizza place they had been thinking of trying for a while. Needless to say the Pizza place downhill won…

We got a pitcher of beer and an extra large pizza with so many things on it I can’t count that high. It was so gooooood. Chip burned the top of his mouth but couldn’t quit eating… He kept eating and complaining, and eating and complaining. Finally I think he drank enough beer to cool it off everything was ok again. It was sooooo gooooood.

Then we went back to the house, had a nightcap or two, watched “The Hill” with Sean Connery, and then tried to watch “The Man Who Would Be King” with Connery and Caine, but we were all falling asleep… The next morning was Sunday, so I left after some coffee and conversation and came home.

I’m SOOOOO sore….

Check the Photo Album for the “Thanksgiving Hike” to see pics of the trip. Good stuff.