One long old-man game

Hi. Just played a lot of basketball at my heaviest weight ever. Blisters on the feet and ankles hurting, but have a pizza coming and no basketball on the tube, but maybe some Justified.

For the dogs?

Did a dog-friendly home story for work. Must admit this was stressful. We have this weird relationship with Yahoo. We do stories they think will be hot and they might or might not put them on their landing page for a while. This one had a lot of pageviews. Let's just say over 100,000.

Don't want to say too much, but will say, that I think you could've made this story all pictures and it might have gotten more hits.

Twin Peaks

View from Twin Peaks. Road the bike straight up Clipper from the Mission. Had dinner at a friend's two-story apartment with this view lighting up his picture window. The little lights on the East Bay Hills are big picture windows of all those Bay-facing mansions tucked all over the hills. As the setting sun hit each area minutely differently in time, the lights randomly shifted, always remaining only a handful. Can imagine what it's like if the setting sun's rays hit just right and powerfully enough and fired most of the hills' windows at once. Must be stunning.

Land's End, SF

Shaky video, and blabbery talk, and sundown at Land's End:

Tired Thursday night, So what?

Fighting a cold, blah, blah, blah.

Grapefruit seed extract is in my near future. So is bed.

Gnight.


John Muir's Mountains of California brightens life:

From the chapter (what a chapter title!) "A wind-storm in the Forests:"

It was still early morning when I found myself fairly adrift. Delicious sunshine came pouring over the hills, lighting the tops of the pines, and setting free a stream of summery fragrance that contrasted strangely with the wild tones of the storm. The air was mottled with pine-tassels and bright green plumes, that went flashing past in the sunlight like birds pursued. But there was not the slightest dustiness, nothing less pure than leaves, and ripe pollen, and flecks of withered bracken and moss. ... Young Sugar Pines, light and feathery as squirrel-tails, were bowing almost to the ground; while the grand old patriarchs, whose massive boles had been tried in a hundred storms, waved solemnly above them, their long, arching branches streaming fluently on the gale, and every needle thrilling and ringing and shedding off keen lances of light like a diamond. ... Nature was holding a high festival, and every fiber of the most rigid giants thrilled with glad excitement.

...

Oftentimes these waves of reflected light would break up suddenly into a kind of beaten foam, and again, after chasing one another in regular order, they would seem to bend forward in concentric curves, and disappear on some hillside, like sea-waves on a shelving shore. The quantity of light reflected from the bent needles was so great as to make whole groves appear as if covered with snow, while the black shadows beneath the trees greatly enhanced the effect of the silvery splendor.

---

He was in love!!!

OaklanDrinks comes out at Era Art Bar

More photos to come of photo-ing at Era for OaklanDrinks's break out night.

West Oakland

Went on a run in West Oakland, the bulging rectangle bordered by the yellow highways in the image above, and ran into a couple of neighbors. I live in West Oakland's dead center, the Ralph Bunche micro-neighborhood. Our subsection of that is bordered by 18th St. on the south, West Grand Ave. on the north, Adeline Ave. on the west and Market St. on the east.

Last week, just outside my place, there was an AK-57 shootout. My neighbor said it sounded like firecrackers and didn't take it seriously, but he did when he stepped outside and saw the car with blown-out windows on his street corner. Another neighbor had a bullet land just below her kitchen window. There's a Ford Fairlane, one of Linden Street's (my street) hallmark cars, now with a bullet hole in the windshield. Two weeks before this, my neighbor, a dude in the know, said, his neighbor behind him was murdered at 18th St. and Linden St. Didn't even know about that. The cops do their work and get out - no big deal here. A couple of months ago there was a murder just two blocks north at West Grand Ave. and Linden St., one that I semi-witnessed.

The in-the-know neighbor, who spends all day, most everyday, outside on the corner selling bootleg CDs and DVDs and random food items, says the hood is going bad, obviously. He's the one that outlined the micro-neighborhood, delineated above, as the bad area. "In all the time that I've lived here, it's never been this bad." Didn't ask him how long he's lived here, but I think a while. I told him to be careful. And he said, "Don't worry about me, I have my self protected." Let me just say - NOTED.

Mas luego. Am planning on going to the Oakland Police Department and getting all the recent activity in my neighborhood. Not that that's the tell all, but I'm willing to guess that crime's showing a marked ramp-up in the last few months.

On another note, here's a pretty New Year's photo: