Left 404

Since I had a 10AM meeting with a professor this morning, we had to leave pretty early to get downtown on time. This was with the director of our center as opposed to the director of our program, which is apparently a major distinction. In fact the first chunk of our conversation had him explaining his role. Then I was asked a bit about my plans, background, and ideas. A pleasant discussion, augmented by the fact that the professor’s office has a good view of the nearby park. So there are perks to being in the administration. As it happens, he too is an anthropologiest, just like the program director whom I met with yesterday.

After the meeting, I went to do some odds and ends at the library. And, what do you know, I received an e-mail from housing: “You’ve been accepted off the waitlist, though we don’t know where exactly yet, and you need to fill out this paperwork and make a $1000 deposit.” So after a bit of thought, I did precisely that. True I don’t know exactly where I’ll end up, but after yesterday’s conversation, both with the housing office and the broker, it looks a sight better than any alternatives.

I popped by the bookstore next, to see if I could find my texts. Very crowded (think same size as the Stanford bookstore, but with twice as many books and students). A metaphor for the whole New York experience I suppose.

My father and cousin were off taking pictures down by the civic center, so I walked down to join them. A brisk 20+ block stretch of Broadway later, we met in a little park, near the heavily secured civic center. Inviting sort of area.

From there, we walked over the Brooklyn bridge on a nice elevated foot/bike-path. It appeared to be a popular place both for tourists, joggers and genuine commuters. We had some nice views as well, but nothing sufficiently unobstructed of Manhattan to satisfy my cousin. Once we had reached Brooklyn, around 4PM, we had a hard time getting back to the waterfront, as the path we took didn’t have many exits. We saw a fair bit of Brooklyn in the process, before reaching a nice promenade sitting just above the expressway. There, we had clear views of Manhattan, and the nearer unused shipyards. However we discovered a little park right next to the bridge, with a great and unobstructed view of the downtown skyline. It was, coincidentally, right next to the “Brooklyn Ice-Cream Factory” (?) and the site of “Bargemusic” where I’d heard classical chamber music played on a boat, some 9 or 10 years earlier.

Going back to our parked car required a goodly walk, including navigating Broadway in the midst of rush-hour foot-traffic. Quite a sight to behold. The drive back to Westchester was impossibly slow. When we finally made it to Manhattan, we tried taking city streets instead of the parkway, heading up the “Grand Concourse.” The result was a long slow ride through a number of partly depressed neighborhoods.

We finally reached the house around 8PM. Long day, but at least the future has more than a great big question mark. Still don’t know what my other cousin, who will be attending the same school, is doing for housing though.

So I moved across country today. Well, sort of. At least for the next 2 years.

Got up around 6:30AM, and put the last touches on my packing. We wound up leaving the house around a quarter past 7. Weather was nice, but a few high clouds overhead. Traffic going to Cupertino was surprisingly decent for rush hour.

We arrived at the parking by my dad’s office just about the time that taxi cab did, although he was in slightly bad humor, as the buildings had apparently been renumbered. Whatever. Aside from a near wrong turn, we made it to the airport in San Jose in good order. Taking all 7 of our packages out took a bit of time, but we were right near curbside check-in.

The problem with curbside check-in was that it was pretty popular. It took a good while to make it through the line. When we did, we discovered one of my bags was overweight. So we had to make some emergency rearrangements, plus sign a waiver disclaiming damages if the printer (one of the pieces of baggage) were to come out the worse for the wear. Fine.

The security line was easy enough, but it was still a pain having to de-metallize, and take out the laptop. The plane began boarding around half an hour later.

As always with Southwest, there were no assigned seats. We wound up with an entire row (the plane was a 737, so this meant 3 seats) to ourselves. We were right behind the wing, and the windows was amazingly clear, so throughout the flight, I was taking through-the-window photos.

The balance of the flight was actually spent on two things: admiring the scenery (when it was visible) and trying to complete a game of Sudoku. I’d never played before, so the game, which came on the box with our ’snack’ in it, took quite a while, between the two of us. The worst part is where you make a mistake, and have to go back to square-one to start again. As for the scenery, we definitely had some memorable scenes, including bits of the San Francisco bay, Sacramento River Delta, Sierra Nevada Mountains, Great Basin, Rocky Mountains and what I presume was Kansas. Quite a bit of variety.

It took about four hours to arrive at Chicago-Midway, the local and regional airport (as opposed to O’Hare) with a distinctly suburban feel. We had an unexciting 2 hour wait, during which our connecting flight was alternately delayed, and moved back onto schedule.

Our next plane was an ATA 737 (first time flying with them), and we had seats right in front of the jet. The window wasn’t quite so clean, but I managed a few more pictures. The flight was only about 2 hours to New York, and because of heavy clouds and the sunset, we saw very little until we were basically on the runway.

My grandparents were as usual waiting when we arrived. However, my cousin had arrived at a different terminal. So we determined to go and pick him up while my dad waited for the baggage. Clever idea, but hard in practice. LaGuardia had miserable traffic, coupled with poorly-marked directions to the other terminal, and it took a good hour to get to the other terminal. Still, we did find my cousin (we were trying to locate each other via cell-phone when a helpful person heard us both at the same time, no more than 20 feet away, and pointed this out. Then getting back to the other terminal took a bit of time. The final complication was that there was noticably more baggage than trunk-space, and so accomodations had to be made. The drive back took only about an hour, so we finally arrived at my grandparent’s place in Westchester somewhere in the vicinity of 11PM. This meant that when dinner and other things were all said and done, it was past 1AM, or 10PM PST. No troubles with jet lag in this case…

Spent an embarassingly large portion of the day trying to get my computer configured and backed up. Scintillating, I know. However, it has to be done sometime. I must say I’m not finding the switch to Windows all that appealing. For one thing, the quality of shareware seems to be a lot lower. Hard to find a good cheap backup utility. For another, I’m getting sick of rebooting because of this or that software installation. Annoying. Yes.

I managed to differentiate my large collection of clothes (and smaller collection of clean clothes) into two categories: to stay and to go. Problem is, to go is rather bulky. Had a hard time figuring out which bags or suitcases would fit. Eventually, settled on the largest ones we have that are genuinely rollable. Hopefully this’ll lesson the transportation difficulties.

Two friends from Stanford are renting a place in Palo Alto for the summer, and I was invited over for dinner. Tried to thing of something appropriate to bring along, and so wound up with a flat of strawberries from a stand down highway 1. They’re supposedly from Watsonville, so I guess that makes them pretty local.

Palo Alto was a bit more complicated to navigate than I last remembered, but after getting the address straightened out, it worked out okay. My friends are renting the guest cottage of a rather well-appointed house. The cottage is an amazingly cozy place, both in terms of feel, and in-terms of space constraints. While dinner was cooking, the stove apparently managed to blow two separate fuses, which made things a bit more complicated. Nonetheless, dinner was impressive (oh dear, I’ll have to be cooking soon, won’t I?) and it was fun to catch up in such a relaxed setting. Ended up spending a good bit longer than I’d really expected. Heigh-ho.

Returning to Half Moon Bay, the car starting doing its usual weird noises. Ugh.

So continuing where I left of yesterday, I finished unpacking the camping gear and equipment, not to mention the rest of my own luggage. Just in time to recommence packing for my next venture: grad. school.

I also completed my Windows migration today, with pretty much all the useful data now on the Compaq laptop. That took a lot longer than it had any reason to. I did succeed in installing Dragon Naturally Speaking 8, and playing around with it a bit. It seems decent, but it looks like I’ll need to upgrade, as it doesn’t support spoken commands in Firefox and Thunderbird.

I also gave the old webpages a bit of an update, and categorized a lot of the photos from the Mineral King trip. And yes, there are a lot of photos from that trip, although still not enough to fill up my 4GB flash card!

In the evening, I met up with a couple of friends I’d not seen in ages (well, at least 4 months). Looks like everybody is doing pretty well… Fortunately nobody is in danger of become conventional or otherwise ‘normal.’ Going to be a while probably before I can see them again…

We didn’t wake up quite as early as planned, so by the time we had gotten the tent more or less emptied and ready to pack up, the sun was peeking over the other side of the lake. As we ate breakfast, our friendly deer (or perhaps his cousin?) wandered by again, still largely oblivious to our presence. After a few granola bars, we were ready to attempt the return. It was just about 8AM

The trail going up from the other side of Spring Lake wasn’t too hard to find, but staying on it required continual care. After the initial ascent over the rock hill directly above the lake, we emerged in the morning sunlight, although we had some occasional shade for a while longer. The marmots were plentiful in the meadow, where we temporarily lost the trail. I counted 3.

Climbing across the meadow was actually pretty relaxing, and not too steep. Reaching the other end around 9AM, the trail began steep switchbacks up the talus slopes, and we once again lost it, this time recovering it only just below the main snowfield.

Climbing the snowfield was a challenge, but it felt far less difficult than descending had been. The 2 ski poles I had helped a lot though. As for the small class 3 section we’d had coming down right above this spot, we found an alternate rock to climb up, with no exposure, or need to drop the packs. Shortly after 9:30AM, we reached Glacier Pass.

As this was the morning, the views were considerably different from when we crossed two days before. We could definitely see bits of the trail on the other side of the valley, going up toward Black Rock Pass. Above that ridge, the top parts of the Kaweahs were also visible. We took a few pictures, had a snack, and determined what to do.

In a bid to make the return more interesting, and stay on a better trail, we elected to try and join the Sawtooth Pass trail, and descend via Monarch Lake. Around 10, we began traversing the white sand slopes on a reasonably well-marked path.

The problem with this descent was not that there were no paths, but that there were several. Finally, one promising pseudo-trail disappeared altogether, and we spent nearly half an hour scrambling down rocks and gullies to regain the main trail. Meanwhile, we passed a dizzying array of wildflowers, surprising given the sandy dry environment.

Once back on the trail, the remaining descent toward Monarch Lake was pretty straightforward. The lake, at 10,200 ft, shimmered a deep green. We weren’t alone at the lake either: good quantities of fish could be seen darting about. Sadly, mosquitoes were also present.

From Monarch Lake, we had a good definite trail. It was straight, a shallow grade, had no switchbacks, and had obviously required a lot of work. It traversed past a long slide areas of loose reddish rock, to return us, for the first time in quite a while, into a respectable coniferous forest.

In the forest, the trail changed character again, becoming all switchbacks. We saw our first hikers of the day, a pair who’d been going 6 days on a circuit to the eastern Sierras and back. One guy was wearing sneakers. Wow. Soon more hikers (mostly going up) followed. Ground squirrels and small birds were abundant, and we saw yet more marmots in several spots. The shade was very pleasant, as the day had become quite warm.

Emerging from the forest finally (I’d been counting altitude) at the crossing of Monarch creek, we stopped for lunch around 1:30PM. My blisters were doing okay, but I was pretty tired, so the half hour spent sitting under the trees by the stream was certainly welcomed.

Once finished, we resumed the descent. We were now on the dusty slopes below Timber Gap and Empire Mountain, and the heat was oppressive. Somehow, the last 700 ft. of descent felt like forever, even though we could see the parking lot becoming visibly nearer. At 2:30PM, we staggered into the Sawtooth Pass parking lot, hot and tired. We were followed by an equally tired group of hikers, one of whom was still nice enough to take a photograph of us at the trailhead. End of hike.

It took a good hour to change into clean clothes, retrieve our food from the bear locker and get ourselves and the car cool enough to think about leaving. We stopped at the ranger station on the way out for postcards, and the campground for bathroom and water. As the car was making disturbing screeching noises (as it had coming up), I let my dad drive.

The drive out from Mineral King was noteworthy mainly because it become steadily hotter, and because, as we were descending, we went somewhat faster. When we finally reached highway 198, around 5PM, I was feeling quite carsick. We had some nice views too, but the haze over the Central Valley tended to limit visibility in the direction we were going.

In Three Rivers, we stopped to pick up something cold to drink. The temperature was in the 90s, so it was more than just a question of comfort. Martinelli’s has rarely tasted so good.

From Three Rivers, I drove, continuing on 198 west, past Visalia, through Hanford, and continuing in a long and incredibly straight fashion towards I-5. We reached it around 6:30PM, with the sun offering a blinding glare in the west. From I-5, it was a long, but not quite so straight drive north. The trucks were numerous, and so I spent a lot of time in the passing lane, or attempting to avoid slipping into the newly paved margin. Around 7:30PM, I managed to get off at the wrong exit, getting the road right, and the direction wrong. Chalk it up to a long day.

On 152 west, the sun ceased to be a major issue, setting below the nearby hills. Traffic was considerable, but brisk, and we made good time to Gilroy. We arrived there around 9PM, with the sun having definitively set, and me tired enough to be happy to give over the wheel. The final stretch, up 101, then up 280, and finally home via 92, we listened to the trials and tribulations of Rumpole, the defense lawyer, in a libel action. A pleasant story, but the cassettes were hard to dig out of the overcrowded back-seat pouches.

We arrived back in HMB around 10:30PM. It was the usual 65 degree weather, which seemed downright cold after having baked most of the day on the trail and in the car. Once home, there was nothing for it but to have a quick dinner, and start unloading all the accreditions of the trip from the car. Went to bed with plenty more of that left to do tomorrow.