bungle bungle!

september 11th's astronomy picture of the day!

catalina

much earlier this year rip messed up and i asked him to make it up to me. anything he wanted. whatever he thought was appropriate. he decided on a trip to catalina (cause we had bought groupon boat tickets earlier). of course, there was more drama before we went (like when and why we were going at all). but eventually we went a couple weekends ago with g and her husband. ...i know. i actually hadn't given it much thought, but t brought it up "wasn't supposed to be just you and him?" and yeah, it was. but i guess i figured that if we didn't go with g and bill, and soon, we probably just wouldn't and g/bill prob wouldn't either and we'd all end up wasting out tickets. anyway. it was fine. i mean, i don't know that i would really count this as "making it up to me" since it was mostly g and i that made it happen, but oh well, he's been pretty great lately.

descanso beach

after we got to the island we had lunch and walked around a bit. then we went kayaking starting from descanso beach. no pictures tho, since we didn't have a waterproof camera. :( which is a real shame cause the water is crazy clear! the scenery wasn't very varied, but it was nice to get out onto the water and be able to see the island from another perspective.

very few cars, mostly golf carts

later g and i went snorkeling in lover's cove while rip and bill stayed on shore. she had done it before and i was very excited to try it (it's on my bucket list, after all). i actually had a terrible time of it. rip had warned me about it before but i figured that since i'm a mouth breather anyway it would do okay. what i didn't realize was that it wasn't so much the physical part that was hard, it was the mental aspect. altho i knew it was totally safe, i just could not get over the fact that i was breathing underwater! it didn't help that for the first 10minutes or so i wore the mask wrong. i hadn't really looked that mask so i wore it like a ski mask, above the nose. rip eventually pointed it to me that i was supposed to wear it over the nose. even later after that, annie showed me how to get a good fit on the goggles. they still leaked a little, but it was much better.

now that i was wearing my equipment properly i had a physically easier time of it. but mentally i still couldn't quite get the hang of it. eventually i ended up swimming with my fingers on the lenses of my goggles, which helped. i think maybe so i wouldn't "forget" i was wearing a snorkel. i also tried to stay near people cause that made me feel more comfortable. even so, i would was still hyperventilating and screaming every time a wave came over me or when fish got too close (some big ones had pretty scary sharp teeth!). lol. even tho i didn't have a particularly good time, i would definitely do it again. the scariness is all mental, so it was worth it to see the fish in their "natural environment".

view of the casino from descanso beach

the next day we went on a bus tour that took us up thru the mountains and to the airport. we saw a few buffalo and watched an airplane take off. i like that catalina (well, avalon anyway, which is the main [only?] city on the island) is so small. i did everything i wanted to do, and didn't feel rushed at all.

after we got back we went to flemings for their happy hour and rip finally had their amazing burger. a great closer to a very relaxing two days.

pre-natal decisions

warning: genetically modified humans

"...human pre-natal diagnosis... The object of the exercise: to identify foetuses with the earmarks of genetic disease as candidates for abortion."

rip and i talked about this the other month. we agreed that if we knew our kid was going to have a major mental or physical disability we would most likely choose to abort it. reasoning: "growing up is hard enough. i wouldn't want my kid to go through more discrimination / bullying / hardship if he had no arms or some sort of major mental handicap."

one of us then asked what we would do if we knew the kid was going to be gay? i said i'd keep it, rip said he would have to think about it. i was offended. but after thinking about it, i now see how hypocritical that is. being gay is hard. in america most of us don't worry about getting killed just because we're a certain ethnicity (it does happen, but not often enough to be really worried about). but being gay is dangerous. crazy haters will make my kid's life miserable just cause he likes boys instead of girls. so if my reasoning for not wanting a child with harlequin ichthyosis is that i want my kid's life be "easy" doesn't that mean i should also not want my kid to be gay? but how far does this go? (and yes, i know i'm approaching, or maybe even on, a slippery slope here...) should i also not want to have girl?

it's hard to be a parent. good parents want whatever's best for their child. but what's "best" isn't always clear.

monument valley

august 1st's astronomy photo of the day

sf

backdrop to the races. pretty nice, no?

went to sf a few weeks ago with the team. then stayed a few days afterwards to hang out with chang. a few highlights of the trip:

gangnam style costumes

twas pretty cold there!

1. i actually cried after a race, which i've never done. i was stroking white boat, which was full of newbies. newbies tend to get excited during races and lose control, which is exactly what happened in our first three races. after the start we'd be in the top three and over the next 400m we'd drop to like last place (out of six). it was heartbreaking because it was no one's fault but our own! it was incredibly frustrating to me because even the other stroke was rushing me during each piece (i was lead stroke). for our finals race, most of us switched sides, so the other stroke was then on her "on" side and was lead since i was now on my off-side. and guess what? the whole boat kept it together and we finished in 3rd! :) i was just SO happy that we finally got it together for our finals race that i cried after. hahah. pretty crazy.

at black sands

i couldn't roll up my skinny jeans, so i just took them off!

2. annie and i went to many new places: black sand beach, chapel of the chimes (which was designed by Julia Morgan [she did hearst castle too]), mountain view cemetery, and point bonita. i love that every time i go to sf i see new things. eventually i'll do golden gate park. 

at the chapel. those "books" are actually urns!

not the only pyramid. and certainly not the fanciest mausoleum.

a few other fun things worth mentioning, but not worth going into detail about: space taking the tourney (finishing an amazing season where we took every tourney we were in [minus portland, which doesn't count cause that was a roving tourney]), gangnam style flash mob, drinking (not drunking!) 7 days in row which beats my old record by ~4 days, eating lots of good food (charcuterie, fried crawfish, also sea urchin for the first time...), discovering the panoramic function on my cell camera, scaring off the gay couple having sex at black sands (which is a nudist beach, btw. but anyway, underwear is like bikini bottoms, there was no one there, and my jacket pretty much covered everything).

otw back from point bonita lighthouse (which was closed)

cali stats

joan didion - where i was from

"As recently as 1993, eighty-two thousand acres in California were still planted in alfalfa, a low-value crop requiring more water than was then use in the households of thirty million Californians. Almost a million and a half acres were planted in cotton, the state's second largest consumer of water, a crop subsidized directly by the federal government. Four hundred thousand acres were planted in rice, the cultivation of which involves submerging the fields under six inches of water from mid-April until August harvest, months during which, in California, no rain falls. The 1.6 million acre feet of water this required (an acre foot is roughly 326,000 gallons) was made available, even in drought years... Ninety percent of the California grain was glutinous medium-grain Japonica, a type not popular in the United States but favored in both Japan and Korea, each of which banned the import of California rice." (25-26)

"It was in 1993 when the California Department of Corrections activated its first "death fence," at Calipatria. It was in 1994 when the second "death fence" was activated at Lancaster, carrying a charge of 650 milliamperers, almost ten times the voltage required to cause instant death... It was also in 1994 when standardized testing of reading skills among California fourth-graders placed them last in the nation, below Mississippi, tied only with Louisiana. It was in 1995 when, for the first time, California spent more on its prisons than on its two university systems, the ten campuses of the University of California and the twenty-four campuses of California Sate University." (187)