A Long Time Gone

I know I've been quite negligent in blogging---so many things have happened these past months. Here's a brief recap:

1. Ben gets a Mac. A good friend of mine, Dean, works for Apple. (He designed the little antenna in your iPod which lets you connect to the internet.) As such, he gets a pretty ridiculous employee discount, which made the MacBook affordable. Now, I typically hate it when people gush about how much better the Mac operating system (OS) is than Windows. And, believe me, it's not that much better. In some ways it's actually worse---for example, you have very little control over the places where you save things, and the power manager is pretty sub par. iPhoto and iTunes are easy to use, but you can only store music and photos where Steve Jobs says you can store music and photos. The "sleep mode" isn't very good, and it runs the battery down pretty quickly. There are several pluses, however. OSX (the Mac operating system) is just a front end for Unix, which means that executing stuff from the command prompt and ssh-ing into other computers is pretty easy. The apps that people have built are also very nice. For example, there's a program called Papers, which builds a database of all of my scientific papers for easy browsing. All in all, it's better than your average laptop. The operating system is good, the components are good, and it's easy to replace simple things, like hard drives and RAM.
2. The Trip Home from California. Bryanne and I drove from Palo Alto to Columbus in April, making a stop at the Grand Canyon for a spectacular sunrise and a plethora of Japanese tourists. The vistas were, of course, breathtaking: We also found other things of interest, including some dinosaur footprints in New Mexico:
3. Bryanne and I Celebrate 1 Year. ...by going to the zoo! (It's been a good year, in my opinion.) The Columbus Zoo is great, and they have some very good exhibits. These fruit bats look kind of like my dog Lefty: I made a new friend, with a goat: I really like the moose exhibit, although the mooses were pretty inactive: Bryanne's favorite are the frogs:
4. A Chorus Line comes to town. Bryanne's good friend Matt is the company manager for the national tour of "A Chorus Line". We'd seen the show in Detroit in January, but this time they came to Columbus. The production is very good. Typically the whole point of the chorus is to blend in, and be completely faceless, yet the show is about giving the chorus dancers some actual face. Some are looking for their first break, and some are looking to keep living their dream as a dancer, however low the pay, and however small their chances. Anyway, Matt and his husband Sandro were in town for the weekend, (which was our anniversary, too), and they joined us for drinks:
5. Ben Dundee World Tour 2009. Currently, I am sitting in the Columbus airport, about to embark on a European Adventure. I am attending a conference in Hamburg, and it was actually cheaper for me to spend two weeks in Europe, than to spend just 5 days in Hamburg. I fly into Hamburg today, and fly out on the 15th. The conference runs from the 6-10, so I'll have a few days before hand to spend exploring the city, as well as a few days after the conference ends to take a side trip to Amsterdam. I will be sure and keep the blog updated with pictures and accounts of my exploits.
   

More SF Adventures

Bryanne took some more pictures of our San Francisco escapades, and I figured I should post them.

This is my friend Nadir and I, with the main star of the dinner show that we caught on Saturday night.

All in all, it was a wonderful weekend---a great way to spend Valentine's Day.

Meet me in San Francisco

After a mere five months of being an $8 train ride away from one of America's most unique cities, I finally made it into San Francisco for a long weekend. The occasion, of course, was Valentine's Day, and my girlfriend Bryanne flew in from Columbus.

Saturday night we went to a dinner theatre, Teatro Zinzanni. My friend Nadir is the drummer and was able to score us tickets at the "Producer's Bar". We sat next to a facial surgeon from Las Vegas, who was one of the acrobat's boyfriends (her name, appropriately enough, was Tatianna). After the show, we were able to meet several of the cast back stage. Anyway, I'm sure Bryanne will have some (compromising) photos from the show.

During the day on Sunday, we headed over to the Mission District to grab lunch, and check out a few shops that drove Bryanne wild. This is one of the areas of town that hasn't been completely gentrified, yet. If you're not familiar with this word, it's more or less what happens when gay people move into an old part of town.

First, it starts out as a part of town where only meth addicts and artists (who can tell the difference?) can afford to live. Then, coffee shops show up because meth addicts can't pawn espresso machines, and the artists are too poor to take a cab uptown to get a latte. This officially begins the revolution---property values begin to rise, more trendy shops start to pop up (where else do gay people and artists shop?), and eventually the meth addicts can't afford their rent any longer. Ultimately a Whole Foods store opens up, thus completing the process. Of course, the gays and artists are long sense gone, and all that are left are guilty white people, who complain that the same process is happening in another part of the city. This ostensibly leads to white people pushing for laws that prevent property owners from charging their tenants market value for their apartments, which stalls the process and creates a situation advantageous for the meth addicts. (For more info, see here.)

There was still a bit of time before dinner (which Bryanne was in charge of), so we caught a cab over to Haight/Ashbury, for to see the epicenter of marijuana culture in America.

(Bryanne has some better pictures.)

After a bit of marveling at the uses of hemp, we got back to the hotel room for a quick shower and change of wardrobe for dinner,at McCormick and Kuleto's. I had monkfish stuffed with chorrizo, in a chimichurri sauce. It was wonderful. Even better was this (according to Wikipedia):

According to Seafood Watch, monkfish is currently on the list of fish that American consumers who are sustainability minded should avoid.

I guess that made it taste even better. I won't go into detail about what "sustainability minded" even means (what a fucking joke).

Although the weather was mostly uncooperative, we did manage to get a bit of sightseeing in on Monday afternoon.

I was able to get a pretty decent deal on a hotel room on the Embarcadero, the street which runs down the eastern edge of the city, along the bay. The expensive rooms in the hotel looked out across the bay, onto the Bay Bridge, and the Ferry Building:

After a lunch by the bay, we caught a trolley back down to Fisherman's Wharf, where we had been the night before. We walked along the piers, where a solid commercial fishing industry still seems to thrive.

We walked down the waterfront, past shops that were more or less generic, and people who were more or less copies of people whom I had seen before in Baltimore, or Galveston, or New York. Of course, not every shop was a Hooters or a Vietnamese woman selling sunglasses---Bryanne and I found a nice bakery where we enjoyed some fresh sourdough bread and a cappuccino.

The sun began to sink, clouds started to gather again, and we headed back to the trolley stop. As we walked down the waterfront, past street vendors selling fried calamari and hot, boiled crabs, I couldn't quite help myself...

And, of course, I would be remiss if I failed to come up with the obligatory pictures of Alcatraz:

and of the Golden Gate bridge:

All in all, it was a wonderful weekend in the city---good food, good company, and a healthy dose of culture.

Back to California

I had originally planned on heading back to California via the Grand Canyon (northern Arizona), however, I spent too much time stopping and taking pictures, and so I missed my schedule by a couple of hours---instead of catching sunset, it would have been already dark. This is coupled with the fact that I caught quite a bit of snow starting at the New Mexico/Arizona border.

My father gave me a GPS device that he no longer used, so the following will be enhanced by longitude and latitude numbers! Click on the links, and you will go to Google maps---you can then look at satellite views or (to give you a sense of scales) the topological view.

Gila National Forrest.

I spent the night in Silver City, NM, after hitting US 180 off of I-10 at Las Cruces. The drive into Silver City was straight and flat, and the drive into the Gila National Forrest was coming into the foothills of the Rockies, officially the San Francisco Mountain Range. My first stop was the Alfred Leopold Vista (33° 11.014' N 108°49.739' W, Elev 5197 ft).

I got out of the car and quickly realized how cold it was. I had to change into a sweatshirt as I took some pictures.

After leaving the rest stop, I traveled a few miles and saw a turnoff for the "Catwalk Whitewater Picnic Ground" (33° 22.342' N 108°50.547' W, Elev. 5131 ft.) . Luckily, the water wasn't TOO white, as the park would have been rendered inaccessible:

It was a very nice little picnic area, about six miles off the highway, with a small river running behind it.

And, of course, I had to try my fancy camera out. This is a small aperture and long exposure picture of a piece of driftwood in the water, doctored just a bit with Picasa.

US 180 continued through the mountains, with steep drop offs to one side, and sheer cliffs to the other. This is a turnoff at 33° 32.604' N 108°56.122' W, Elev. 5950 ft.

Apache National Forest.

I began to climb further and further into the mountains, and at about 7000 feet it started to snow. And, even more beautifully, they hadn't scraped the highway. Now, my truck has 4WD and a manual shift option (which makes engine braking a breeze), so I had no trouble navigating the roads. In spite of my Texas licence plates, I do know what I'm doing when I'm driving in the snow, but there are a lot of idiots around. I pulled off of the interstate at a pass (33° 43.945' N 108°56.101' W, Elev. 7835 ft.) and took a few pics.

I had to be quick, because it was a bout 25 °F degrees outside.

The Painted Desert and Petrified Forest.

As I came into Arizona, it was increasingly clear that I wouldn't make the Grand Canyon by sunset, so I decided instead to hit the Petrified Forest (34° 47.670' N 109°53.445' W, Elev. 5397 ft.).

Now, I was imagining a forest of trees which were petrified, as the name implied. If the name of the park was truly descriptive, it would be called "A Forest Once Existed Here, but all the Trees Died and Fell Over, and now They're Rocks", but I imagine that it wouldn't have fit on the sign.

I came into the park through the western entrance, and as I drove down the main road there were the fossilized remains of many ancient trees.

The ranger at the entrance to the park assured me that it rarely snowed in the park, and getting to see it in such a state was a real treat. Maybe it was a treat for her, but because it was cloudy, it was hard to see all of the colors for which the park is famous.

If I had to guess, I think that there used to be an ancient river which ran through this part of the country. The river deposited various sediments at various times, lending their colors to the sand.

This is a formation called the "Teepees".

I would have liked to have stayed a while longer, but it was getting late, so I had to move on.

I stopped for gas once I got back on the interstate, and found this dinosaur in Holbrook, AZ (34° 56.272' N 110°07.900' W, Elev. 5268 ft.).

Meteor Crater.

The final stop was Meteor Crater (35° 01.971' N 111°01.309' W, Elev. 5590 ft.), outside of Winslow, AZ (which is more than just a line in an Eagle's song). 50,000 years ago, a meteor hit the Arizona desert, leaving a crater about 1 mile in diameter.

It's a little hard to appreciate the scale of this thing. I'd suggest going to Google via the link above and looking at the satellite picture of the crater. It is really impressive.

To give you SOME idea of the scale, the rock I labeled in the picture is about the size of a house. That's the claim, according to the meteor people.

This is a piece of the guilty party...

All in all, I have to say I quite enjoyed my holiday. I got to see a good chunk of America, I learned some masonry, and I got to see Lefty. I also started a fossil collection, which (I'm sure) I'll post about in the future. There were TONS of fossils in Arizona, and even quite a few roadside shops which sold them. And, of course, Bryanne bought me a beautiful fossilized megalodon tooth for Christmas. But more on this later!