I didn't think I could do it.

Other than a blister, for which I acquired a one inch wide band-aid, I was remarkably pain free this morning. Of course the dose of Ibuprofen last night and again at 6:00 AM this morning might have had something to do with it. Even the blister didn't really hurt, I just didn't want it to get worse, or affect my skiing. While the location of the blister may have prevented me from skiing, it wasn't about to affect it. I'm just not that good.

Today we did all the blue, including redoing the blue we did yesterday. Since that only took until slightly after lunch, only because we decided to eat lunch at the Bjorn Loppet hut and that put us a good half an hour from the trail head, we decided to finish up by snowshoeing. It was only after my daughter talked me into this that she suggested we snowshoe one of the black diamond trails, Equipe. At the X-country center where we traded in our skis for snowshoes, we learned that the round trip of Equipe was three miles. Of course, there were some snowshoe only trails that we also had to go on.

See the pictures associated with this blog entry in my Kodak Gallery.

The first one was about a mile out and back. Fortunately we had someone else's snowshoeing tracks to follow. If there isn't a groomed ski trail, where the trail would have been is marked in some way thus far inscrutable to me. This snow shoe only trail started and ended right at the Equipe start, so we were quickly on the black diamond probably moving faster than if we had been on skis.

The scenery was worth it. At a far point we came upon one of the warming huts, very much like the one we ate lunch at. While I believe I could have skied this trail, I was glad to be on snowshoes.

We got back to a main cross trails at 4:10 PM, too early to stop and too late to do anything major. So, we decided to go as far as we could on yet another snowshoe only trail and turn around by 4:30 PM when the trails officially closed. (When we picked up the snowshoes, we learned that the rental place stayed open until 5:00 PM.) Again we followed someone else's snowshoe prints. This time they led to a beautiful stream and turned around. At this point we knew that they had gotten somewhat off trail but we didn't mind. It was a beautiful spot.

Tomorrow hopefully won't merit a blog entry. We are just heading home for me to find out if I have jury duty and my daughter to pick up my truck for her moving next month. I hope nothing exciting happens.

All out skiing

I miss Marilyn now in more ways. She always set a leisurely pace for my cross-country skiing. I carried the water and would always get to stop and let her drink. Even though I did that again today, my daughter rarely stopped. Further, with Marilyn I could count on maybe two hours in the morning and an hour in the afternoon before she was tired enough to hit the stores, restaurants or even the hotel room. Excluding breaks, we skied three hours before lunch and two and one half hours after lunch.

She would have probably had me ski more but the trails closed just 15 minutes after we got off of them.

It wouldn't have been too bad had we not had competing objectives. She wanted to maximize her exercise and I wanted the fun of downhill. She just added my objective to hers. This meant that we had to ski all of the green, easiest, trails because they were mostly flat and required the most work. She was also okay with going up hill although except for the short shallow downs, she walked back down.

The first major up slope trail we tried, was after I thought she was ready for some steeper downs and had her try one out. I don't know what happened, but she had a serious nose plant, which turned her off of steep downs. Fortunately there were some shorter shallow downs on the Bjorn Loppet trail. I had her practice first just starting and stopping, but going straight, for a few times. (I didn't go down every time she did, which helped separate her objective from mine just a bit.) Then I had her go down only stopping at the bottom. Then I had her snake down the slope. The next short shallow down had a turn in it. I have some pictures of her doing this in my Kodak Gallery album.

After lunch she laid out her ambitious plan to ski all of the green trails, which had us going from the Warming Hut as far to one side as possible and then back to the other side. When we were about to finish before 3:30 PM, she realized that we had missed a couple of short sections of green. Rather than just boringly retrace our glides, she suggested we make the Aspen Forest loop. We did. Finally she was tired and talking of exhaustion but we still had two trails to complete. Fortunately, one was truly on the most direct route from where we were to the trail head.

If we hadn't rented the ski equipment for two days, I don't think we would be skiing tomorrow. As it is, we may not be skiing long. We don't have that many trails we haven't been on that are open.

Death hike up Avalanche Hill

After we arrived at the Bear Valley Lodge, at 3:30 PM, and checked in, it was too early for dinner and too late to do much else. So, my youngest daughter suggested trying out the snow boots we had both brought as a way to work out the kinks from riding so much in the car.

I thought this was a good idea and even suggested walking up the snow covered roads of Bear Valley Village, something that Marilyn and I had done in a twilight six years ago, without snow boots.

I had some trepidation when she looked off in the distance and said that she would really like to hike to the top of a ridge but it looked too far away. We kept walking the roads, Bear Valley Road, Flood Ridge Road, Avalanche Road, constantly going up until low and behold we were at the base of the very ridge she said she would like to hike. It was actually a ravine that was too steep for any houses and she wanted to walk up it.

We made it, as you can see from these Kodak Gallery Pictures, but it wasn't easy. If she hadn't been breaking trail I probably wouldn't have been able to make it. As it was, I was heavier and frequently broke through her compacted snow to a much lower compaction, more than once burying my leg up to my crotch. There were a couple of times that I didn't even bother trying to step but rather crawled. There were only a couple of those times because after the second time I noticed that I was getting chapped knees.

We did get to see the sun set from the ridge she had set as her target. Then the wind picked up. Neither of us had put on our full winter weather gear and the wind chill on the ridge and the first hundred feet down the slope was truly chilling. We could have easily succumbed to hypothermia had the wind been this cold all the way back.

Going down was modestly easier only because the direction I slid in burying my leg deeper was also the direction I was going. This time we made our way to a driveway that had had recent use and missed at least some of the ravine. When a leg was buried, I still had to lift it exceedingly high to get it out of its hole. But again, the downhill slope didn't require quite the lift that uphill had.

I guess I have a strong heart. If anything would have given me a heart attack, this little hike would have. My daughter is training for the Pacific Crest Trail, PCT, to be hiked this year. While I had planned to start exercising more, I thought it would be a more gradual increase.

After this hike, I'm a little concerned about the skiing tomorrow. This was more than I would have thought to do for a warm up. I didn't think warmups are supposed to leave you stiff. It's too soon for soreness but I'm sure that's coming as well.

Walking about San Francisco

Today I was fortunate to have been invited to a lunch with a couple of people I used to work with. I had planned to either ride my motorcycle in to the city or at worse drive to the BART station I used to drive to for a mass transit ride into San Francisco. Unfortunately the "maint req" light flashed on in my Prius yesterday. So late yesterday I called and was able to get an appointment for 8:15 AM this morning to have it serviced. While I felt fortunate to get an appointment for the very next day, it did lead to a couple of things: First, I set my alarm clock last night. Second, I got in to San Francisco early.

Now, I did get up in time to turn off the alarm clock before it actually went off but I didn't want to chance it. I also left in time to make it on time to Putnam Toyota in Burlingame although there were times that the volume of vehicles and slowness of the traffic made me think I might be late. (Even though I didn't really care if I were late, thinking about it and trying to avoid being so is just part of my Type-A personality.)

After dropping off the car, I walked the short distance to the Burlingame CalTrain station and for $4.25 one way rode into San Francisco. CalTrain's San Francisco station is at 4th and Townsend, a good ten blocks from where I was to meet them. Since I was walking anyway I thought that since I had time, I should just make it a "walk about" of San Francisco. But somewhere on the path from the CalTrain station to a Starbucks near where I used to work I decided that that walk was sufficient.

The portion of San Francisco I walked through today was dirty. Not as dirty perhaps as New York City but I did pass booze bottles, open trash bags, trash, puke, spit, and miscellaneous unidentified debris that quite frankly I didn't want to examine closely enough to identify. This may have been just a phenomenon of the area and time in and at which I was walking because I have often seen retail businesses that get the sidewalks in front of the businesses clean at least once a day. I did walk the same path back to the station and most of what I noticed this morning had been cleaned up.

Even as I found myself falling back into my commute habits, (I bought a paper and did the puzzles rather than interact with any of the other passengers.), I couldn't help but notice what I call the commute face on every one I saw. Truth be told, it was probably on me as well. This is basically a completely emotionless face. It negates interaction before it can start. It says, "Don't engage me. I'm not interested."

Part of my walk took me past 201 Third Street, where my very first San Francisco office was located. A lot has changed around that spot, some of which was changing while I worked there. (I was there when the hotel that was being built across the street had something big and heavy fall from one of their cranes and crash into and through the fire house next door. Fortunately for the duration of the hotel construction, that fire station was shut down. Several of the restaurants around were not only under new management but under new names as well. Somewhere I read that the average age for all restaurant businesses is five years. This supposedly includes the ones that have been in business for centuries.

After my coffee, I walked to the Ferry Building and the Sur La Table located in it. Then, with time still to kill, I walked to Stacey's. There were at least three new books that I didn't have but I only bought one of them. (When I arrived home the other two were on my front porch as I had pre-ordered them from amazon.com.)

The one change that struck me the most poignantly was the flower shop that I used to buy half-priced flower bouquets on Fridays for Marilyn. When my office changed, I didn't buy her flowers nearly as often but I did so most anniversaries. She didn't always appreciate chocolates, because she liked them all too much, but she always appreciated flowers.

Today would have been our 31st anniversary.

What a day to stop/start blogging!

I was thinking I would take a break in my blogging, at least more than the few hours I did take, but I have the bug. I was getting tired of my LAL blog primarily because it was too much backward facing. I'm not going to count the days and may not even make daily entries in this blog because its focus will be on doing things, going forward, living my third life.

While my "third life" may have started earlier, I don't have any specific date, so it is appropriate that this blog about my third life starts on the day that a president that I helped elect was inaugurated. I am optimistic about his presidency but was mildly disappointed with the delivery of his inauguration speech. It's almost as if he were constrained by his own realization that he was speaking for posterity. Fortunately, it reads much better. I was more inspired reading it than I was hearing him deliver it. I think his convention nomination acceptance speech was delivered better.

For two days now I have been diligent in my exercising, well three if you count the golf that made me sore the day before. Today I went for a walk in the hills around Pacifica. I'm going to do interesting things more often but I still have all the mundane maintenance things to do. I've decided I just won't write about them. This is why this blog may not be a daily thing.

Today my doing consisted of hiking a portion of the "Planet of the Apes" road. At least that is what a former boss of mine called it and I can see why. It is actually an abandoned paved road, Old Pedro Mountain Road between Pacifica and Montara, that is slowly being reclaimed by nature. It has a nice gentle but consistent rise to the ridge it crosses. Where it crosses the ridge, there are two paths to the left and one path to the right. One of the left paths is actually the trail to the top of Montara Mountain. I took the other left path, which was essentially a maintenance road to some electrical wires. Earlier on the hike, I had thought to myself that I'll keep walking until the next bench I pass after 1:00 PM. These creosote coated logs became my bench.

After eating lunch I took the trail to the right and came upon "Bill's Overlook" bench. In my haste I had missed the perfect lunch spot, with a view, and instead chose a non-flat surface which required wading though at least some poison oak. (Even if it wasn't, I'd get sympathetic itches just thinking that it was, and it really was.)

I chose to walk up still further to a point that my oldest daughter, her husband, and I had walked soon after we had moved to Pacifica. The trail down to the paved road was just as I remembered it. Since I originally hadn't planned on walking that trail I wore my tennis shoes for the hike. While I never slid or worse, fell, I didn't technically need my hiking boots but there were times that I wished I had worn them. They fit better and my toes feel less jammed on the steeper downhills than they do in my tennis shoes.

I didn't really see that much wild life and just when I was thinking that the only wild life I had seen were birds, although I saw a lot of fur as if the remnants of a meal for some non-bird carnivore, I saw something brown streak across the trail going up hill in front of me. It looked to be smaller than a bobcat and definitely wasn't hopping like a rabbit. Later I saw a kitten, which may or may not have been wild. It scampered off just like a wild thing.

I was waxing quite philosophical on my hike about how the works of man are temporary with this "Planet of the Apes" road as the embodiment of the metaphor. There were slips and other soil incursions from the upper side of the road and an accumulation of decaying leaves and other on the downhill side. Both supported encroaching growth. Then there were a couple sections where slips had even taken out part of the road.

I did see a lot of horse and dog scat. Those I was looking for to avoid. I didn't see, or if I did, didn't recognize any other animal droppings. While I didn't see any horses, I did see a couple of dog walkers, one of which was obviously doing it professionally. She had at least eight dogs, only three of which, the smallest three, were on leashes. A couple mountain bikers passed me and about three fellow hikers. Otherwise, it was quite a solitary experience.

Unfortunately, I didn't undertake this hike as well prepared as I would have liked. I had intended to start carrying a plastic grocery bag with me so I could pick up litter. I forgot to do so and left it all up there. This gives me reason to walk it again. I also forgot my mono-pod in the car. Thus my telephoto pictures may be blurry. You can see the whole album of my hike in my album on Kodak Gallery.