Another Giant Mushroom

This one dwarfs a hippopotamus. Okay, it mysteriously appeared in a set of indoor plants we have, and I happened to have this handy hippo nearby, but I knew you would all be interested.

Kitty TV?

I mentioned to my parents the other night how Pinto, my cat, has developed an interest in watching TV, particularly Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel. Her favorites are the birds of paradise doing their mating dances which she will get up on her hind legs to take a closer look at, but she also perks up for other types of birds and the big cats. Today she took an interest in Mythbusters... must be Jamie's mustache.

The Polo Continues

I'd sort of given up on the idea of playing polo post-college until I went back to Yale for our annual alumni weekend back in November. My coach wanted to know why I wasn't in touch with one of the local DC clubs and pointed me at one that might be sympathetic to my poor grad student status. I dawdled around a bit on getting in touch since winter here isn't exactly high season for polo unless you're in college, but I finally did get in touch with the Potomac Polo Club, located outside of Poolesville. Turns out the club is run by a husband and wife and surrounded by the ranches of her father and two brothers. The husband, Dante, is my champion in this whole thing. His wife, Mary, is the real pro. She runs the ranch, teaches at the school and plays professionally a bit, all of which is very unusual in the polo world.
After emailing and talking with Dante on the phone for a couple weeks he invited me out to the ranch so that he and Mary could meet me and watch me ride. Dante allowed me use of one of his horses, Cebolla aka Onion (the name is a story in and of itself), which turned out to be quite the honor. I was only the second person he'd ever let ride her and turns out I must have done ok since I passed muster with Mary. Mostly I'm proud of the fact that I didn't fall on my butt and embarass myself after not having ridden since November.
Having gotten the approval of Mary the next step was to find some horses for me to ride for the summer that I wouldn't have to pay for. Turns out Mary and Dante allow an army colonel to board her horses at their ranch and she was looking for someone to exercise and play them for her so that when she is around, they'll be in shape and ready for her to play. I found out yesterday that the colonel is on board with the plan and I'm scheduled to go out to the ranch again this weekend to possibly help Mary with a clinic and to start exercising the fat ponies. Stay tuned for updates!

The Lucky Girl - Act 39,627

Some people seem to have been born under a cloud but not me. It was no doubt the only warm, sunny, December 14th in history the day I was born. Those rays of sunshine continue to follow me throughout my life.

Yesterday I shattered my personal goal of 5 uninterupted laps of freestyle swimming. I felt so good after the first 5 I did 5 more. Amazingly I swam 10 uninterupted laps freestyle. I did 30 total, another personal record. Prior to this I had only done 2 uninterupted laps. (Swimming is hard - Dara you are my hero!)

Feeling pretty proud of myself, I got out of the shower, got dressed, did my makeup and accidentally brushed my wedding ring against my leg. Uh Ho - NO DIAMOND!!! So much for those extra years I just gained with my great show in swimming, my heart stopped.

Paul, the swim coach said the chance of finding it were like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. It's 1.5 carat and the clarity is primium. It's lovely and visible in the setting but the new setting was somewhere on the bottom of the busy 8 lane olympic pool at the YMCA. My grand plan was to put my bathing suit and goggles back on and feel along the bottom of the lane I was swimming in.

By the time I got back to the pool a man had found it - in the deep end, 2 feet from the drain, in the lane I had been swimming!!! My old golden horseshoe is still working after all these years!

Clear Day in Beijing

But, through a dirty window!

My First Race

Earlier this year I decided to challenge myself (again) with another one of my get in shape schemes. Some of my past endeavours have been fun but fell way short of acually improving my condition much, some left me laid up for weeks and in worse shape than I started in, but thats another story. This time I thought I was bound for glory... I started running. With my reclusive nature its the perfect sport, Its something you can do by yourself and gain imense satisfaction just knowing with every mile you are getting better and closing in on that fittness goal I set. Having dabbled in this before I knew I needed help to avoid injury and stay motivated so I obtained a great training book from Amazon, just me, my book, and some decent shoes and I'm on my way. I reached my first training milestone 2 weeks ago when I ran 20 miles in 1 week with 1 run being 10 miles. In my book it casualy mentions you may want to try a competitive run at this point. Great Idea, and there just happens to be a 10K nearby the following weekend. Thats when reality landed hard on my reclusive little world. I learned quite abit that day. 1st off at 52 I am young in this lineup of over 1000 runners, I don't know why, but I thought I would be in with a few old guys and maybe even make it to the podium at my age group. I couldn't have been more surprised, 3rd place in my age group finished a full 8 minutes before me. Worse yet at about 100 yard before the finish line this guy passes me, I figured he had to be at least 65, I may be reclusive but I'm also competitive, I just couldn't let this happen, I turned up the speed a little and caught up, but this guy has power and appantly wanted to win our little race to the line so he poured it on. With nothing left to do but give it every thing I had. I won by a nose in an all out effort. I have never done this before so I was feeling a bit selfconscience about the whole ending thing, was I breeching some kind of running ediquite? How good (or bad) should I feel about barely winning over this old timer? Later he came over and shook my hand, praising my effort at the end I was starting to feel vindicated till the age question came up. He seemed relieved to know I was in the 50-55 age group and not in his 62-65 group. I later met several older guys and girls that beat me so bad they were on their way back to their cars before I finished. My time was also trounced on by an 11 year old boy and a 13 year old girl. All in all it was fun and a great lesson in humility as well. I plan to continue my training and maybe compete again. So far the only injury is to my ego.

I'm Back

I won't bother with the lame excuses about my absense from the family blog but I will say I am not surprised at all the great things that have gone on, trips to China, Aruba, Planet Earth, entirely to much for me to comment on. I do however want to clear up the mushroom story. I remember quite plainly our freind, Ricki, and the entrance to his basement where you could view (in my mind, and apparantly Steve's also) the worlds largest mushroom it was huge easily 2 feet in diamiter at the crown. They even had a special light you could turn on to show it off to people. Steve if you can remember that surely you remember our sinister plott against our other neighbor there, Alison. Or the time you lost your new boots in the mud at the nearby construction site we were forbidden to be at. Or how about spilling that agllon of pink paint in Dads brand new car. I could go on but if the mushroom was in doubt the rest is over the top.

Back from China

For a plane ride that was billed as taking -3.5 hours, it sure seemed longer. But, I am back home again, and mostly caught up on sleep. On my last night in Beijing, I walked with a group down the main boulevard the hotel was on. This was the embassy district, a few miles away from the Forbidden City. It was a warm Friday evening. Within a mile or so we passed three MacDonalds, along with just as many Pizza Huts (a hot date destination according to my Chinese colleague) and Starbucks. The sidewalks were well populated, but not too crowded, and the variety of faces and nationalities wasn't much different than you would see in a lot of big cities. Lots of buildings had some kind of colorful decoration. I was expecting to see a sea of bicycles before getting here, and there were plenty; however, they were outnumbered by cars. There were very wide bike lanes, though, with their own traffic lights, and the car drivers gave them a wide berth. That day it had cleared up again so you could see the mountains in the distance from my 20th floor hotel room. Still, it looked like a smoggy day in LA in general, and I am glad to be back in a place where I don't have to rinse my toothbrush with bottled water. On the way back to the airport, it was amazing to see all the beautification effort underway -- tree planting and so on mostly. They're very serious about putting on a good face for the upcoming Olympics, and they surely will. I feel sure the commentators will spend a lot of time talking about what a clean, modern, friendly, and efficient city Beijing is.

Tour of China

Today during one of the presentations I sat through in the windowless room the meeting has been held in for the last three days, a Chinese presenter used photos of the Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Great Wall, and so on, as backgounds for his PowerPoint slides. It was a great tour.

If It's Thursday, This Must Be Beijing

As long as I'm sitting here just getting off the clock at midnight in Beijing, I figured I'd tell you how little I know about it. It's very well organized, nothing like the madcap crowdedness and chaos of Bangalore. There was lots of traffic downtown when I got in Tues around 3PM. Took over an hour to get to the hotel. You could see the mountains in the distance, although I heard today that that was very unusual. Today was just plain murk. Maybe it was sunny, but mostly it just seemed smoggy. Not that I got outside. Aside from breakfast and a before-dinner meeting, my entire day was spent in a windowless meeting room that could have been in Fresno. The same is on hand for tomorrow, although I think I'll get a chance to emerge from the hotel for dinner with some other people. The little bit I have seen of the city is not very distinctive. (This in spite of the glowing words from our hosts and others about how great Beijing is in the Spring.) Strangely, I have not seen a tree that did not look planted in orderly rows. Lots of high-rise apartments on the way in that look nice, not like the drab concrete bunkers you think of Soviet-style apartments being. I'm on the 20th floor of a fancy hotel, but at least where I am staying does not have that dense, tall, urban feel of NY or Chicago. My room is very modern, more European in styling than American. Lots of ferners in the hotel. There are 13 countries represented here, including Brasil, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia. Dinner tonight was a variety of Chinese dishes that ranged from dim sum and other things you might find at a Chinese restaurant back home, but also including oddities such as ostrich and french fries. That's about all I can think of! Off to bed while you're waking up.

Boston to London

More Google humor. Directions from Boston to London. Note the "Swim across the Atlantic Ocean. 3462 miles."

kite surfing in NE

I can't believe it! I was sitting here considering blogging some woes about the 45 degree day with gusts of wind to 40, a Nor'Easter breathing down our necks, and my fading tan when what did I spy with my little eye... A Kite Surfer on the NE River! (Wearing a wet-suit of course) TO my knowlege he's the first. I sure hope he can go more than just left. I'm a little worried about him as he's all alone and I don't see a support boat at all. It just seems like it should be a "Buddy" sport.

Off to China

Well, as Dara says, Lou Dobbs wouldn't be very happy about it, but I am going to China on Monday. To further infuriate Lou, I'm going under the auspices of the United Nations Development Program. One of the things my group does is work on standards. It involves sitting in lots of committees deciding how things made by different companies should fit together. In the hardware world, this is what makes makes monitors from different companies work with the same computer, and so on. In the software world, a lot of it revolves around how one program talks with another. Normally these interactions are done in standards-setting organizations, and in the US these organizations scrupulously shun government involvement. Businesses who participate strive to keep government out of the equation, because what they're trying to do is find ways to compete based on their implementations, but agree on standards to be able to expand their marketplace. In China, the European Union, and other places, governments are very active in their role in setting standards. This will be a meeting that includes representatives from businesses and governments trying to address interoperability of software. Three days of meetings to look forward to. Flying back I leave on Saturday at noon and arrive back in SFO Saturday at 8:30AM. Back to the future!

Pearls Before Breakfast

Via one of my lefty blogs, I saw the pointer to this article in the Post magazine. They set up world famous violinist Joshua Bell at the L'Enfant Plaza metro stop during morning rush hour in a crude experiment to see if raw talent in a street performer could induce people to stop and listen. I'll leave it to you to read the article to see how it works out.

The author is Gene Weingarten, among whose accomplishments was giving Dave Barry his start at the Miami Herald.

Weingarten instructed Barry to come up with a definition for "sense of humor." Barry disappeared from the office for a few days. He came back with this: "A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge."

Surprisingly insightful.

Snow in April

Talking with Keith and Kyla yesterday, they were complaining about the snow in springtime. I enjoyed this photo gallery from the Post. A good photographer can always make things look better :). By the way, you mushroom doubters will have to wait for Keith's explanation.

Filoli Fotos

Tiptoeing through the 102,000 tulips.

Look what the Easter bunny hid in the garden.

GMail

After PacBell started rejecting Dara's EMail constantly, due to bogus "quota exceeded" problems, I set us both up GMail accounts. It's pretty nice. With a little bit of effort, I also have GMail pull the mail from our PacBell accounts so that it's all visible in one place. You get something like 2GB of storage, which is roughly a year's worth on my work account and probably five years worth on my home account. The user interface is simple and it's fast. Really great spam filtering. Hard to beat. I've had a Yahoo mail account for years, and their new version is pretty comparable to Google's. Why would you do this, you might wonder -- isn't your shentel or earthlink account good enough? Yes, but aside from the unreliability issue we had, it's also nice to be able to check your mail from any web browser on any computer anywhere, and that's very easy with Yahoo or Google. Garrett told me I was a loser for using Yahoo not Google. It's tough keeping up with the younger crowd.