Killers in the Snow: Tree Wells

Ski Season approaches and I really want to be a backcountry skier, however...

Not too many things scare me. Mostly it has to do with not looking like a complete idiot which I guess is what this one is sort of related to.

There are some risks in mountaineering that are not avoidable like going through avalanche areas. I want to be more educated about avalanches so I'm thinking about taking this course:

http://www.babesinthebackcountry.com/products.php?catID=10
(I do love the Babes classes)

or IMG's
http://mountainguides.com/avalanche.shtml

Which looks totally cool though as always I do worry about not being a good enough skier.

However, going over the course particulars I spy something that has actually keep my up at night worrying about. I actually don't fear avalanches, so much as with avalanches I feel at least I have a chance. What I DO fear is: Tree Wells.

Tree Wells are collections of very soft powdery snow that collect underneath trees. The good thing is that a Tree Well is marked by a (surprise) tree. So if you avoid trees while skiing away from the groomed sloped of the ski resort you'll be fine. And if you want to be sure, then stay above tree line.

But there's a problem. To get above treeline you have to go through trees. AND also I am an intermediate skier who is getting better, but short on confidence, and have run into things (no trees) before on a kayak (for more info see my really long entry about my kayak class). It's called Object Fixation: where you run smack into what you're trying to avoid because you're, well. staring at it. (Look where you WANT to go, not where you don't).

The scary thing about Tree Wells is that they are almost impossible to get out of on your own. You run into the tree and suddenly upend into the super soft quicksand-like powder. Don't believe me? This set of web pages really scares me:

http://www.treewelldeepsnowsafety.com/

During a test 90% of people (and these are experienced skiers) could not get out on their own. Heebeejeebee.

They even have a clever acronym for it.
NARSID - Non-Avalanche Related Snow Immersion Death

It mostly occurs with trees that have a lot of lower limbs, so for a while I was reassuring myself that most of our trees don't have a lot of lower limbs. Then I read page 3. The number one region for NARSIDs is of course British Columbia. #2 is NOT Colorado or Washington State, it's California (eek), then followed by Colorado, then Washington, then Montana, then Oregon, Utah, Idaho, and finally Alaska.

I feel so reassured (not). I really do want to learn to backcountry ski, but NARSIDs usually occur on the ungroomed slopes. of the backcountry.

But the prevention pages give me some hope:
http://www.treewelldeepsnowsafety.com/prevention1.php

1. Avoid Deep Snow and Tree Areas

My response was: good luck with that, but the text clarified things for me.

"Remember, most of these accidents happen in treed areas during or right after deep snowfalls. Resisting the urge to ski or snowboard through the trees during deep powder conditions, no matter how inviting the untracked powder looks, is the easiest deep snow accident prevention."

Really? That's not so bad. Most of the time I want to backcountry ski is during the climbing season of May and June, which is after ski season. Tons of fresh snow is a rarity (new snow here and there is very common), Most of the snow is in a: warm during the day / refreeze at night cycle. There is not a lot of unconsolidated powder. So it turns out those "powder days" of the winter ski season that advanced skiers worship are the real killers, and during that time I'm at a ski resort or I'm snowshoeing.

The other tips are pretty common sense;
- ski with a partner and check in with them very often
- avoid trees (well duh)
- if you do fall in a Tree Well, clear some airspace by rocking your body gently and not thrashing
- "if you are sliding toward a tree well or a deep snow bank, do everything you can to avoid going inverted into the snow. Grab branches, hug the tree, or roll your body to get your feet below you. Do anything you can to keep your head above the surface or at least your feet below you."
- "carry a transceiver, shovel, probe, and whistle. This is the same personal rescue gear carried by backcountry skiers or snowboarders."

So maybe my fears are unfounded as I'm not a good enough skier to get myself killed that way. (I hope.)

Text Message Scam (And a Do Not Call List update)

(I love it when scams find me - make things all the more fun to check out.)

So scammers are branching out this year. I just received a text message (unusual because I don't text since it costs me extra - note to self to make sure I don't get charged for it.) allegedly from 36245 8888146669@communitybank.com saying "card blocked" for more information call 888-814-6669

Googling the phone number told me nothing.

Calling the phone number from a different phone and entering nothing says

Union Card Services
Our records indicate your account is restricted
please enter your card number

Evil little subterranean rodents.

A coworker dug up this missive from Commuity Bank from Feb 17, 2009
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS262762+17-Feb-2009+BW20090217

Googling for "text message scam" yields tons of references

The Community Bank web site encouraged me to call the FTC (877-382-4357) and out of curiosity I did. Within just a few key presses I was talking to Martin (I'm sure you know him - think he's from Texas though I didn't ask).

I wasn't sure if the FTC even wanted to hear about it, but they did and he filed a complaint for me. Took my information and noted the 888 number and the text of the scam message (and the message that the 888 number was saying.)

He also suggested adding my phone number to the Do Not Call List. Surprised, I said "But it's a cell phone."

He said that if it's registered on the DNCL that they can file it as a double violation
(I refrained from asking "You mean running a scam isn't enough?")

The number of the DNCL is 888-382-1222
or
http://donotcall.gov

On the website you can also verify that they have your phone numbers listed correctly and can even tell you the date that you added it.
The DNCL listings do not expire.

Life and Death in the Garden

I grew up helping my Farm Agent grandfather in the garden. I have fond memories of throwing fertilizer (which I don't touch these days), and digging trenches (I now use a drip system). Ah yes gardening in the 70s. My family also had a substantial (1.5 acre) orange grove, and as tradition dictates, I was conscripted child labor for it which I, of course, hated at the time and only after leaving did I realize what an unique experience that was.

So because it's in my blood, I do garden a little. I think of myself as the most non-serious of gardeners. just a few plants in the planters and a few herbs and others off of the edges of the yard. Ok, I did put in a drip system (who wants to have to remember to water?) and, well, I do mix my own soils, but that's because I read a Martha Steward book while on disability with carpal tunnel years ago (my mother gave it to me and she seemed totally surprised that I actually read it) and realized just how simple it is and just how much the plants love it. And I did rearrange and add to the tomato cage so it would actually support a 6' tall tomato plant. But I'm so not serious. Really. And I'm digressing (I think). This is where my namesake Degeneres says "My point, and I do have one ..."

There is a certain element of playing God when you garden. What gets put in and where, and more to this point, when to take something out. For the most part, I let plants I put in live their lives in peace save for necessary pruning and trimming. (Invading plants I have no problem being vicious with - especially vines which can be really evil.) With annuals that's easy. What prompted this entry is that I just took out most of one of the basil plants and made pesto - yum. With perennials that can present some difficulty and now that I've been a home owner for a while the time does come where it makes sense to end the life of something you helped give life to.

In the case where a plant is injured and isn't recovering it's a pretty easy decision. I had a lavender plant out in the sidewalk area that a kid rode a bicycle through and left it in a V form and after nursing it for a year (unfortunately you can't just cut them all the way back like you can with other plants) I gave up and took it out. Also, when my neighbors tree shaded my oregano the taste went away since it needs the sun to bring out the oil, so I pulled it out. Enough sun is an issue here. I plant Early Girl Tomatoes. It's Sept and only now are they ripening. Real early huh? Fortunately they're worth the wait.

But I now have a dilemma. I have this Orange tree (of course I do - How could I not?), a Washington Navel that I got at Orchard Supply. I've had it since 1993. I bought it as a dwarf and had it in a pot, but after I bought this house, I got tired of episodes of nearly killing it (because I'm bad about regular watering). So I put it in the ground and within a year, it completely forgot that it was a dwarf and is a very cheerfully happy full size orange tree. There's just one catch and this is my dilemma. It's appearing that it's not really hot enough in Alameda to make sweet oranges. Or at least where it's located. It gets plenty of sunshine, but it doesn't get the super direct, cook-the-brain sun for enough hours to bring out the sweetness. So I have an abundance of not very sweet oranges. After I pick them I leave them out in the sun for a few days and there is more sweetness but not as much as I (or anyone else) would like, and honestly I'm getting tired of the taste and I'm the only one who will eat them.

I've been doing this mucking about for a few years and now the tree is large enough to be really in the way. It just occurred to me that maybe I should consider taking it out, but deliberately killing a healthy tree (especially a tree as opposed to a relatively small plant) is so against my nature even though I have no attachment to its origin (like I would have if I'd smuggled one in from Southern California - yes, it's not legal because of a disease the oranges can get there). This tree came from OSH, nothing terribly special. I've given it quite a happy life for 16 years and now I want some payback, and I'm not getting it and we could really use the space these days.

The failure of this tree to produce sweet oranges is giving me pause in my other plan to put a tangerine in the front lawn. Tangerines have to be sweet. The front gets a lot more sun, but I don't know if it's enough. I suppose I could leave it in a pot for a couple of years and just move it around. As long as I put a watering system on it that should be ok. The only bummer is that I was going to put a full size one in and that won't work in a pot, but even a full size tree can live in a pot for a couple years.

But of course this doesn't help me to decide about the other tree. It's funny, as a tree it's perfectly happy it's just me putting my "publish or perish" "earn your keep" values on it. I suck at this God playing.

Reference that totally backs up my experience:
http://www.pinnaclenews.com/life/contentview.asp?c=189978

I leave the fruit on for as long as possible which helps - some.

For those feeling guilty about taking out a tree and they can't replace it they can support Plant A Tree:
https://www.plantatreeusa.com/individual/myweb.php?hls=42


UPDATE!
Just doing some more googling for references and I came across:
http://www.city-data.com/forum/georgia/97212-orange-tree-question-floridiot.html

Down a ways you see someone named Prichard say:

In Central Florida, I've lost a couple of trees to freezes. Even if they don't totally die, disease sets in and within a couple of years, the tree dies back to it's "sour-root" origins, i.e. the good graftings are killed off. When you start to get those long shoots with big thorns on them, that's sour-root. It produces some beautiful looking oranges, that are so sour and bitter, you'd think they were poison.

It's just sinking in. Maybe that's what happened to my tree. The sweet grafting died and all that was left was the full size sour-root stock. I don't see the big thorns that often though, but everything else totally fits. I'll see if I can talk to Four Winds in Fremont who was referenced in the first url. Four Winds were the people who told me about it not being legal to import cuttings from Southern California. I admitedly tried it anyway, but it never took and the oranges down south were allowed to pass away under a bulldozer (and 4831 N. Ohio, Yorba Linda, CA is the one place in the world that I won't go - though I do peek with Google maps once in a while.)

More confirmation here:
http://www.thriftyfun.com/tf92622115.tip.html
The tree froze, recovered but the fruit is "nasty" and they're asking about grafting.

I see grafting in my future.

At noon today I walked up to the trees and said
"You've been fooling me all this time."
I pick an orange and say
"You see this? It doesn't taste good."
It didn't see remotely intimidated.

Where I was on 9/11 - Endings and Beginnings

Because everyone has one here's mine, and it's actually slightly unique:

On 9/11/2001 I was at home (SF Bay Area) working at home on our company website because at the time I had better software tools at home (I forget why - something to do with a Mac no doubt.)

The phone rings and it's Catherine at work.
C: "Are you watching TV?"
Me (totally taken aback by the weird question): "Of course not, what do you think I do here?"
C: "No really, go turn on the TV. Someone has crashed planes into the trade center towers and one has fallen down. This is bad."
Me: "OMG"

The rest of the day was spent exactly like everyone else's. Glued to the TV in shock.

That evening I get a phone call from my friend Pierre whose wife Betsy is pregnant with twins.
P: "We have news."
I pretty much cry out "No! No! Please no more news. I can't take any more."
P: "No, we have NEWS"
Finally getting that he means the twins were born, I reply "Wow congratulations, how did you get anyone to pay attention to you at all?"
He joked about the doctors keeping half an eye on the TV screen.

The poignancy of getting that news at the end of that day really brought home to me that there is a future. And I will always know James and Katie's birthdays. Happy birthday. And happy birthday to my (unrelated) friends Celia and Cheri who also share this birthday with them.

The Nevada Nuclear Test Site - Gradual Declassification

A Very Long Time Ago in a Place Relatively Close By. I worked at EG&G. While the projects I worked on were not Top Secret they were used in Secret places so the information was sensitive. One project I was working on was the Weather Stations at the Nevada [Nuclear] Test Site. Working on Weather Stations is pretty peaceful especially because I was nowhere near Nevada, but I should have known that eventually during the installation the engineer would have trouble and ask me to come help. I was not happy about it, but I went to help him and while I was there I got a personalized tour of the place. Pretty unremarkable at the time and in retrospect quite a coup from a historical perspective.

The Test Site is no longer conducting Nuclear tests and much of the information about the site is now declassified, and there is a great Wiki page on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Test_Site

In the Really Bad Idea that wouldn't go away for a while Dept. was Operation Plowshare (which I like to call Operation F*ck Up). The idea was to place nuclear bombs in shallower positions in hopes the could be used to dig trenches. This is not a joke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plowshare

Nice try. It created radioactive mountains, and that area was fenced off when I was there - my normally level headed brave engineer coworker advised not to get too close - if he's says that then he means it. What's surprising is the radioactive level at a lot of the test site area not that high (that same coworker of mine measured it in several places - EG&G made the measuring devices so it was our business to know. )

Although there is no bomb testing going on the site is still very much being studied which to my amusement leads to all sorts of paranoia and conspiracy theories such as this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mrqeWSuxPM

Artifact? Dude take a breath, they're just measuring devices and yes it's likely they're still collecting data.

Given how much information has been declassified I may as well finally tell the one really tiny, but really important factoid that I couldn't part with until testing ceased and things began to be declassified.

Protestors would often sneak into the site to get to ground zero in an attempt to stop the test. What fascinated me was that our weather stations were in little silver trailers all over the site. They would measure wind direction and speed as well as temperature and a host of other items. If the weather stations weren't reporting in then there could be no test. Yes that's right. No weather data, no test. Period.

It was so difficult not to let the protesters (fortunately I don't know who they are) know that if they really wanted to stop a test (instead of getting on TV), all they had to do was break off the antennae's on those silver trailers scattered unprotected all over the place - it was a weak link. I never did anything about it as (a) I didn't want to go to jail (b) I do take having a security clearance ("Q") seriously and may someday need one again though I hope not (c) support for testing was waning quickly and likely would stop and (d) the protesters actual goals might not be to quietly stop the test, but to be visible to show disapproval for testing.

If I were to run into those who did the protests, I'd love to ask. If you knew how to quietly stop a test would you do it or would you prefer the march to Ground Zero to get arrested and on TV approach. I wonder what they'd do? Probably both is my guess, but what would they do if they had to choose? I honestly don't know the answer.

Bulwer-Lytton - the toilet roll that goes bumpity bumpity

NPR was talking about first lines of novels which reminded me to check if the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton results were out - they are. Bulwer-Lytton is that contest that "challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels." In all fairness NPR was talking seriously, but I don't know if after Bulwer-Lytton if it's even possible to have a serious conversation about first lines of novels without descending into silliness.

http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2009.htm

Honestly I think I like the runner up better, but neither compares to the ones from year's past where are listed here:

http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/lyttony.htm

Which contains my all time favorite from 2002. Whenever I think of Bulwer-Lytton I think of toilet rolls going bumpity bumpity.

On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.

--Rephah Berg, Oakland CA (2002 Winner)

And in case you haven't seen the inspiration for all this fun:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

Who had a hyphenated name long before it was fashionable. Such a trend setter in so many ways.

I keep thinking I should try to think of some entries, but the idea of trying to keep to one sentence is more than a little daunting though I dearly love all the weird imagery and bad metaphoric language and I'm realizing that I haven't ended this sentence yet - hmmmmm.

Pissy iPod

Pissy in the American sense (Picky Prima Dona) but the alcohol related British version is not far off.

My 16GB iPod Nano has been having odd fits of "can not be written to or read from" messages while syncing. Even though whatever I was trying to load on it played fine on my Mac. The last straw was today when it wouldn't load an Audible.com book I wanted to listen to this weekend. It wouldn't load it, even though it looked like it mostly worked it wouldn't show up in the menus. This weekend I'm going to be on the road for at least six hours so I was willing to spend some time to fix it.

First of all there are some podcasts that just won't load and I have to uncheck them, but the book was appearing to work. This problem is not completely fixed, but I did get a lot further by doing what they suggest on the Apple web site (figuring out the url is an exercise left to the reader.) I may have left out a step but this is the gist.

• update iTunes on the Mac
• attach the iPod
  
• select Restore
  
• let it wipe its brain (you will need your administrator password for this)
  
• check: Sync only checked songs and video
• in each ipod tab uncheck: Sync Music, Movies, and Podcasts (and click Apply)
• you should have a mostly empty iPod
  
• then selectively add things back
• if a non-essential item doesn't load then uncheck it

If you're not sure which one is not loading when you get the can't read message then click ok and try the sync again and watch the top to see what it's trying to load. When you find out what it is then go back into your library and uncheck it. Then try syncing again - it should pick up where it left off.

My book has loaded. Other items have not like Sasha Baron Cohen's (Borat et al) Fresh Air interview but I just listened to that now on the Mac. It also doesn't like half of Fareed Zakaria's videos which make's me think it's suspicious of those with funny names but it's full of World Music and lots and lots of funny names. Only podcasts and videos. It's balked at the occasional Stephanie Miller too. Maybe it's just a critic.
,
I have two iPod Nanos which I love but they are the more recalcitrant pieces of Apple hardware I have ever owned. Sort of similar to my dysfunctional relationship with my Canon Camera but no whacking is required.

Twitterese - messing with convention (mini rant)

I'm not on Twitter, since I have no shortage of places to express myself and since bits don't weight anything and since I don't make a habit of texting (it's not free for me) I don't feel remotely obligated to limit my musings to 140 character "Tweets" or less (in fact I think I'm past that already).

What's weird to me is Twitter trying to usurp commonly understood email nomenclature and it's messing with my head.

Quoting from the help (http://help.twitter.com/portal)

What are @Replies?
An @reply is a public message sent from one person to another, distinguished from normal updates by the @username prefix. If a message begins with @username, we collect it as a reply. Reply publicly to any update on Twitter by using the @username format.
-------

So someone from Twitter talking to me on Facebook will address me at @ellen. Now I speak email and internet nomenclature pretty well, so to me, the name comes BEFORE the @ and the domain comes after. @ellen means you're turning me into a domain name and it's jarring every single time. There are so many other design approaches they could have taken. Mucking with the well understood @ symbol, smacks of laziness to me especially since a # or a $ or % or & or <> or + heck even a ~ or -- would have worked fine.

I'm not a domain name.

Too Many Cooks

I'm working on this much longer entry that's taking forever so I'm just going to go with short attention span entries for the moment.

Dog people are notoriously not cooks to the point that I worry about them.
But every so often I find someone who is and in fact in the last week I've found two dog people who cook and not just because they have to but because they enjoy it. I don't know why I'm so thrilled by that. May be it's because I know there's a section of the dog community who won't have to resort to stealing food from their dog.

While washing dishes I had this idea for an amusing small party, but I'm realizing it actually could be a fun TV show. It's called Too Many Cooks. Put 4 experienced cooks in a small kitchen with the task of making a meal. Would every one work together or would it devolve into Survivor like tactics? (And unlike Survivor, everyone is armed.)

On second thought maybe this isn't something I should do with my friends. :)

The Callanish Stones

I have a thing for rocks, and I've been happy to discover that there are a lot of people throughout history who have also had a thing for rocks. And having a thing for rocks and art done with stone leads one on all sorts of fun adventures.

But it's not just rocks really. It's the people behind them. I love stone circles and other monuments and I love the things I learn along the way simply by following the stones.

I have been all around Scotland twice just looking at stones. It was fabulous because it took me to some fantastic places. I've been to Lewis Island in the Outer Herbrides. Which is so off the beaten patch but the (pictured) Callanish Stones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callanish_Stones) are there and I saw one photo of them and knew I had to see them in person

Journeying out to see them really brought home that it's so much more about the journey than the destination, but wow what a destination. Smaller that Stonehenge. Just as powerful and no big fences and far fewer crowds (who go away regularly). nothing like a few hour ferry ride to put a dent in the wandering tourists. We did run into some Americans but they were the nicest Americans you could wish for.

And the fantastic thing about Callanish is that Callanish I is only the beginning. On the wiki page skip down to "Other nearby sites" and you have the ultimate geocaching adventure listed. I was tromping about in a cow pasture, looking for one of the obscure marker stones, trying to parse out sort of vague instructions, and I realized that I was having a most excellent, outside the box, adventure. These days I have no doubt that all the sites have GPS coordinates, but I had no such thing and even if I did I would still have a fabulous time.

The bummer is that you can't do this on a tour bus. You need a car and one of you needs to know how to drive on the right side of the street (a pretty empowering skill I must say). A tour bus will take you to Callanish I and pause briefly at the very nearby Callanish II and III, but they are not about to drop you off by the side of the road with a basic map and say go for it. I really must find and scan in some of that material as it left me with a thing for rocks and I'm a geocaching fan too, but I must say geo caching is nothing compared to this adventure.

Yosemite 4 Mile Trail to Glacer Point

Elf has done such an excellent job of detailing our Yosemite trip on 4 Mile Trail here:

http://www.finchester.org/dogs/dog_diary/2009/08/mission-accomplished.html

Her Photos are here:

http://elf1.smugmug.com/Hiking/Yosemite-Valley-to-Glacier-Pt/

And my photos with my Canon Point and Shoot are here:

http://outdoors.webshots.com/album/574291472BCvdam

And let's have a photo geek moment...

Calling my Canon a Point and Shoot is a little unfair as I had it set in Program mode with the lens stopped down by a stop and a half or so. For those who had or have the old classic film camera the Canon AE-1 the top dial looks remarkably similar and you can find the exact same features (Program mode and also Aperture or Shutter Preferred modes) with some added goodies like Video of and of course there's the Auto mode which is usually a guarantee of mediocre photos.

You can get remarkably fantastic photos out of the small Canons. That said I'm really hard on mine and in turn it is cranky and unreliable and has been sent to the factory once for repair though the next time it breaks that's it. There's a short somewhere in the electronics and it will start taking black pictures. If I notice, I can twist the body some or give it the time honored whack and it will come back (This is not a joke.), but if I'm not paying attention I have a series of nothing, but grey streaks. Elf took of photo of me taking a photo of Yosemite Falls. That lovely photo never happened as I went for 10 shots until I noticed the series of nothing being stored by the camera which was irksome, but ok since I knew that Elf was checking every one of her shots. I should get another camera and will but for now my camera and I will continue our slightly dysfunctional relationship.

One more photo geek observation. I've gotten so used to preview on a digital camera that I was surprised that Elf's nice camera didn't have it. Took me a while to realize that the reason that it didn't have a preview is IT'S AN SLR. What you see in the viewfinder is what you're gonna get. Duh.

I've forgotten how fun it is to have someone else along stopping to take photos (unless it's raining or I'm hungry :). It means I don't have to feel guilty about stopping to take my own. The potential trouble is that for every photo buff along there's a time added factor. We knew this so weren't terribly concerned but it easily added over an hour to our ascent.


The trail hasn't changed much since I last hiked it 10 or so years ago (that long? Maybe not.) As Elf explained the remnants of asphalt that were originally put there are being left to decompose. In my experience, that means they'll always be little pieces left though it's already reverting quite nicely.

The squirrels are WAY too tame. The squirrels outside my backdoor are wilder. I think we should let dogs on the trail just to make the squirrels afraid again though dogs are allowed up at Glacier Point and the squirrels there are too tame. I even saw someone feeding them some of a popsicle. I just stared and didn't have the energy to confront her.

As this site: http://www.yosemitehikes.com/yosemite-valley/four-mile-trail/four-mile-trail.htm talks about there really is no better way to see so much of Yosemite from a trail than on this trail, especially if you want to see all of Yosemite falls instead of being drenched by it (which is also a total blast). The trail is carefully constructed not to be too steep, which means that it's considerably easier than Yosemite Falls and has less giant steps than the Vernal Falls trail.

Plus there's ice cream and sandwiches at the end so what's not to like? Unless you're a wilderness purist, but a purist wouldn't go anywhere near Glacier Point anyway. Plus you get to feel superior to those that drove up. (For the SF Bay Areaites this is true of Mt Diablo as well - though no ice cream there.)

And the fun of Yosemite is hearing all the different languages. I get so used to just hearing English, Spanish and a smattering of Asian languages, so it's nice to hear other languages wafting by. The only hazard is if they pass you on the trail and you understand a word or two, turn your head to listen more and fall over a rock. Oops.

And on the way down we were happily surprised to have a woman who we saw earlier catch up to us and ask to join us as she didn't have a light source and it was starting to get dark. Her name is Fides, and she's a 3rd year German medical student working/observing for a summer in Sacramento.

We talked about places she'd seen, places she might consider going to. She told me me that this week she's going to be in SF doing the touristy things and she is definitely going to Alacatraz and we made sure that she was going to be taking the audio tour where they have you walk in a cell and you hear the sound of the cell closing (heebeejeebee), she assured us she was. She also mention that she was going to be staying in the youth hostel there. Slightly alarmed, I asked "Er, which one?" "Not sure, it's north of that main street [which is Market Street]." Ok, I'm not a parent of human children, but believe me I can worry with the best of them as I'm realizing that the area she's describing is the high crime Tenderlion and they're just going to love having a sweet young German woman appear. I tell her about the area and she assures me she'll be careful and hopes she doesn't have to use her Jujitsu skills. [Via email later she gives me the address which is at Ellis and Larkin - Egad.]

Since I had a willing expert at my disposal and we still had an hour of downhill to go I asked her when I finally get to Germany what should I see? She then descibed the Rhine river and how you can take a trip down it and then get off and see some of the surrounding towns. I fortunately had her write these places down when we got back to the car and I need to find that piece of paper and get them written into my Google Docs area.

Elf asked what other places in the US she'd been and the most amusing one was her being taken to Dollywood in Tenn. which of course led to finding common ground being utterly baffled by the far too easy targets of US Southerrn accents and the Swiss German language.

Somewhere I found myself giving the routine reality check that Hollywood is oh so not glitzy, but more gritty and grimmy and the real Hollywood is not in Hollywood at all. That the studios are in Burbank, and the stars live in Berverly Hills, Bel Air, Hollywood HILLS, Malibu, and Santa Barbara. She had heard correctly that you can't actually see most stars homes anyway, and I added in that you'd have a much more fun time going to the UCLA college town of Westwood and I'm realizing now that I should have said go to West Hollywood which is a totally fun place regardless of your sexual orientation (which didn't come up in our brief 2 hour conversation.)

As dark descends on us Elf wisely requests that we get out lights. I blissfully had not brought a headlamp (note to self - always bring one) but of late I've been putting small Princeton LED lights on all of my jackets and I use them all the time including right then and it worked great.

Fortunately in the growing dusk the only wild animals we saw were quail and it was just light enough for us to be able to show them and their cool crests to Fides.

We gave Fides a ride back to her car and Elf and I headed back to the Bay Area, and we managed to get back to the Fremont Bart station without winding up at either of our houses first (Elf was driving so the risk was me ending up in San Jose though I think I might have noticed that "Hey, Hwy 101 is not on the way." or something like that.) This is Elf's story to tell, but driving my manual transmission for just over an hour (Oakdale to Fremont BART) was enough to completely undo 8 years of only driving an automatic and learning not to stomp on the brake thinking it's a clutch. She is recovering, but it wasn't immediate as she drove only stickshifts for years and when she started to drive it was like she'd been driving then exclusively all this time.

All in all a marvelous trip and I'm hoping that we manage to find more time for such adventures.

Yosemite Glacier Point - The Prequel

So one of my agility friends (also named) Ellen, (I'll call her by her nickname Elf), has been doing more hiking of late and has been enjoying it and had told me that she's interested in doing more.

From time to time I do these slightly outrageous day hikes (or ski trips) where I drive a fair distance to an incredibly gorgeous place and do a hike and then drive back. We all seem to have this internal gauge that you're supposed to spend more time doing your chosen activity than driving. When I started letting go of that assumption, I started having these totally fun mini adventures. The idea for it was planted when a friend in college told me that her and a friend drove from New England to Florida to go dancing. Ok, that's a little much, but then I noticed that places like REI's Outdoor Schoool and Bay Area Ski Bus do day trips, and those are great and I do them, but they don't always follow MY schedule (hmph), and also my Southern California family did long day trips for fun, so I then got the maps out and figured out what was possible.

I live in the Bay Area and if you draw a half circle around it that approximates things that are under 4 hours away, you find that you cover quite a lot of territory. Yosemite and Tahoe and even Lassen (sort of) are in that semi circle. And it's really not a circle as things that are near a (semi) major highway can be further away because you can go at higher speeds. And yes, this is not very ecological and I'm leasing my dog/ski mobile Scion in hopes that an affordable (well one can hope) hybrid version of it comes out - in the meantime, it gets 28 mpg.

ANYWAY, I asked Elf if she wanted to join me on a trip I'd been thinking of to go just past Tuolome Meadows out Tioga Road and climb Mt Dana. Elf being Elf, looked up the altitudes (10,000' up to 13,000') and politely (and smartly) declined. (That may prove to be a bit much for me as well though I'll probably try it one day.) Not being dead set on Tioga but knowing that she wanted to hike in Yosemite as she hadn't been in a while, I asked about starting out of Yosemite Valley which would move the starting altitude to a considerably lower 4000'. She liked that, and suggested maybe up to Nevada Falls or hey look we could take the 4 Mile Trail and climb 3200' up to Glacier Point ha ha ha. Now Elf is also a blogger and I'm sure she'll let us know whether she knew she was deliberately dangling bait or not. I then tell her that I've done the 4 Mile Trail though it's been a while and that the trail is well within her ability, and I'd love to do it if she was up for it or we could just go up part way as it's just an out and back trip.

To my happy surprise, she said yes. I was prepared to tell her that the trail was carefully designed not to be horribly steep and that it wasn't a race and we could take our time (I did tell her that part). Turns out she'd already read that the trail wasn't as steep as Upper Yosemite Falls Trail (a steep, but highly rewarding trail.) We agreed on a date a couple of weeks out that we both miraculously had available and worked out rendezvous details and that was that for a while. Being a much better blog writer than a reader I didn't realize until later that she was stressing about it some here and here, and she made this great apples/oranges comparison to climbing the trail and climbing the Empire State Building here. (During that time I did comparatively dull climb on an inclined treadmill sessions.)

Somewhere along the way I realized just how much it broadens my experience to have someone else there experiencing it with you. The other person notices things that you didn't and it really makes a huge difference. I love it and need to do it more.

I set out to write about the trail and haven't even gotten there yet. I'll make that a separate entry.

Demos need to Control the Healthcare Message Better

(Dragged back into political blogging as there's something I'm not hearing much yet.)

One thing the more out there Republicans are really good at doing is boomeranging political conversations into complete side shows.

The healthcare "debates" being the latest shining example.

Obama presents his heathcase proposal and is called Hitler. The last thing Demos should do is respond in any variation of "He is not." Stay focused on your message.

What I'm not hearing much and what I'd like to hear more of is Demos being more confrontational.

If someone with insurance opposes the public option then they should be directly asked

Why do you think the uninsured don't deserve insurance?

I think they owe us all an explanation and shouldn't be allowed to hide behind rhetoric.
I think they should be properly called Heartless and Despicable as I'm pretty sure they haven't thought it through.

Why is this such an issue? How have insurance companies gotten people to fight for them???
We have more than 5 working models of other countries insurance systems (Canada, France, Sweden, England, and, yes, the very non-Hilteresque Germany - my source is NPR On Health).

I Hate My Wired Phone Until ...

I hate paying for my wired phone service.
It's expensive, those phones mostly just sit around so we can ignore sales calls (oh yeah, we also pay for caller id) and we don't even use it to dial long distance since it's cheaper to use the cell phone.

Until...

- the power goes out (and I even have to keep a non-powered, non-portable phone so that will work)
- I need to dial 911 and don't want to have to explain exactly where I am
- the cell phone isn't working which happens more than I like

Guess I'll keep it. I know if I were in college a cell phone is all I would have but I can afford it and I know what I'd be missing if I didn't have it, so I'll just complain about it instead.

Home Maintenance Misadventures

First of all all parties are fine.

I was in the house working on a web page and Terri was outside working on the garage, and I heard this loud CRASH. Shit. I grab the wired phone that happens to be beside the door and run outside. I grabbed that phone so I could call 911 and they would know exactly where I was without having to explain much. My criteria for whether to call was: is she on the ground. She was, so I dialed as I ran up to her. 911 and I reach her at the exact same time and she's got dirt all over her and telling me she's ok. Not yet believing her, I tell 911 that my wife has just fallen off a ladder (turns out she was climbing over the short fence and her foot caught. "Do you need medical attention?" I relay that. Terri tells me: "No, it's just my knee." This time I mostly believe her as I've had a chance to see she's not bleeding. I tell her and the operator that I'll take her to Kaiser and grateful that she wasn't hurt worse, rang off from 911.

She tries to get up, I tell her not to move. She says something like: "No really I'm ok." and I tell her to stay still, she asks something very much like "Why?" and I respond mostly because it's still novel to me "Because I'm your wife. Stay still." To my somewhat surprise, she actually relented momentarily. She had bashed her knee quite nicely, and it was swelling fast so we decide that we need to get her pants off and she says that she really would much rather do that in the house. She's not dying, and we have a little time so I agree. The shortest way in is via the back door and that's locked, so I leave her a second and go in the side door and out the back door so that it's open and unlocked. She's standing up, I indicate in some fashion that I'm a little less than thrilled about this, but she's then uses it to say that she's not dead yet. I open the fence (which is what she should have done in the first place, but we often don't bother since it's a Corgi sized fence which is actually a modified trellis turned sideways and with extra slats added), and I help her up the steps and get to the bedroom where she can take the pants off and we can get a good look at balloon knee. Then get her to lay down on the hide-a-bed, elevate it and I put an ice pack on it and hand her the phone to call Kaiser to ask what to do next.

After asking questions about what happened and what the knee looks like, the Kaiser Nurse has her go through some basic self tests (for lack of a better phrase) and it appears that nothing needs to happen today (Sunday), but she should consider coming in on Monday. Despite her blood pressure medication frowning on it, she was ok'd to take anti-inflamatories (in the non-prescription realm we had Aleve and Ascriptin - she chose Aleve).
While this is proceeding Trek is being very clingy and concerned looking. It's all very sweet until I realize that it's 5:30pm and all she wants is dinner and Terri usually does their meals, so it was more worry about the food dispenser being broken. I fed them and the dogs went away for a little while, but to their credit they did reappear.

I have a trekking pole with a right angle grip that with a tip added doubles very nicely as a really cool cane (I found this out after opening my knee up on Mt Tam some while back), so I dug it out and adjusted it for her (another thing that makes it a really cool cane - much lighter than a cane too). So now she's hobbling around and scaring the dogs and in general doing ok though I have yet to find out how she's getting to Kaiser or if I'm driving her there.

I'm just glad she didn't fall off a ladder as part of the project she's working on does require being on a ladder part of the time.

Update: her knee is looking better and she's delaying going to Kaiser until the swelling goes down so they can evaluate it.

580 Bridge Murders

The suspect in the 580 bridge murders has been caught and the mixed messages continue thus proving that we're all still messed up humans.

Here's the SF Gate article

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/14/BAQS198PDH.DTL

in which Nathaniel Burris kept interrupting the judge saying "I did it ... Just give me the death penalty,"

Which brings up all sorts of observations the first is that you are guaranteed the right to a fair trial - whether you want it or not. Now you can screw it up by representing yourself as he seems to intend to but I get you this ain't gonna last.

This guy is obviously not stable (the family of the victim didn't think he was even before this happened) and most certainly deserves to be put on trial and have the rule of law work out to whatever it's going to be.

But I'm really struck by the I want to live / I want to die mixed messages.
- he ran - for hours - yet didn't really try to evade the police
- he did not shoot himself, yet he currently says he wants to be executed. He lives in Richmond. Point a gun at a gang banger if you don't believe in suicide, they'll be happy to take care of you.

This story has just started to come out.

Murder on 580:The Understatement of a Freeway Sign

It's funny in that unusual way just how much import you can get from a Freeway status sign. It's more what it doesn't say.

Tuesday we were driving North on Interstate 80 (technically it is 80 West but it was on that weirdo area where you are simultaneously on 80 West and 580 East, but you're actually going North.

Wait stop, it was before that on 880 North, and the Highway status sign just simply said

Richmond Bridge / 580 Westbound Closed
Use Alternate Bridges

[Fortunately we weren't going to be going as far as the bridge but...]

WHAT?! It's 6pm rush hour what are they doing construction for? Wait it said nothing about construction. Uh oh. Dive for the radio and put it on KCBS News.

As if it was answering my direct question (which felt completely spooky), it immediately said that someone using a shotgun has shot two people at the Richmond Bridge toll plaza, at least one of them a toll taker and the other waiting in a parked nearby truck. The suspect has fled in a Western Eagle shuttle van. The police do not think this was random. They then make brief mention of the systematic brutality of the crime.

I said to Terri that this is about Love (well its darker side). My theory was that this was an estranged lover angry at his ex and her new beau. I was half right. The breakup was correct, though there is no new beau. Given that the article says that the guy was shot first and then the shooter tracked down his ex-girlfriend, I'm pretty convinced that the shooter thought they were an item.

Here's one reference to this distressing news:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/12/BAOS197I28.DTL

The video has an interview with an eyewitness. I'm glad I'm not her though it makes me want to travel all the time with a video camera with a long zoom.

The shooter is clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He fled in an easily identifiable van and never changed cars. The highway patrol found him over in the Sierras still on the highway.

But I'm brought back by how much that freeway sign told me. It basically said in so many words, there is some very unusual, serious sh*t going down.

Undermining Your Message With Ad Words

While it's always tempting to add Google Ad Words to this and other blogs, giving up control of the message you want to send is honestly too much for me to let go of and I keep collecting very good examples of why.

Here's my latest. Recently, there is real research that finally determines what a lot of positive reinforcement dog trainers have known for over a decade. The strangely romanticized dominance theory is a pile of dog doo that someone made up from reading 1950's research of unrelated captive wolves thrown together (in my mind 10,000+ generations says that dogs are so not wolves despite being related genetically. Also a family of wolves in the wild don't act like captive unrelated wolves either).

One of the articles is here:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090521112711.htm

But what caught my eye is that the site uses Google Ad Words.

This is what the site looked liked when I saw it:



(Click to actually see the image and my annotations.)

Right there in Google Ad Words is an ad talking about Dog Whispering which is code for Cesar Milan's own odd style of bullying dogs which he claims to be based on Dominance Theory. I'm quite sure that the authors of the article would rather that link not be on the same page as their article.

AND here is the exact same issue again at a different site:



So to me it's not worth the few pennies here and there that a semi randomly chosen Ad word may make you.

My Email is Down and It's Driving me Nuts, but There's Always Facebook

I am email deprived and it's driving me nuts. Fortunately I have other email accounts besides frap, but frap is my domain and email via frap is what everyone uses for me. At least frap.org is up, it's just the promised glorious email upgrade that was going to take 4-12 hours has now taken 23 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds but who is counting anyway.

I called them at 18 hours and they were very apologetic and said they were hoping it would be done in 2 hours more. So off to a delicious dinner at a new blissfully delicious local Greek place called Troy located in Alameda on Central Ave near Park. I had a Chicken Shawarma Wrap and also a Baklava that was so good I would have paid $10 for. (It's around $2). Came back and no email. I have a dog seminar that I'm hosting tomorrow and I need to contact people. Fortunately, I have access to my address book, so I was able to reconfigure my gmail account to retain email and was able to send from there.

23 hours, 53 minutes 14 seconds ...

Amazing how dependent we are on email. If I choose not to be near it (like when out in the wilderness) that's completely fine and I don't miss it, but if I didn't choose it then it's surprisingly hard.

Fortunately I have Facebook and am liberally complaining about it.
I also sent email to support@verio-hosting.com just saying hello this is getting a bit much.

I'm just glad I'm not on their IT staff particularly right now.

--------------
A FB Friend is complaining about all the FB cuteness your "friends" can assault you with. She has employed a FB purity program to keep throw sheep and tossed cows off her status, but honestly I find it all kind a part of FB's charm. It reminds me of the fun Usenet groups like soc.bi which was a group for bisexual folks and their friends and it all got very silly at times and Google has actually preserved it for posterity which is just hilarious since on soc.bi I learned al about such terms as snogging, slagging, and of course tosser, but I digress... All of the quiz and games results and tossing of farm animals is a part of FBs charm and for some reason I don't find it nealy as annoying as say the old highly overwrought Usenet newsgroup alt.support.depression, that us alt.suicide.holiday people made fun of (long story - I have a much older blog entry about it somewhere around here...).

On the fly in a FB conversation I decided that FB is Permission-Based Voyeurism so why cut yourself out of such amusement? After all you did join FB - what did you expect? Besides it gives you ammunition to tease your friends with later.

24 hours 12 minutes 49 seconds ...

...

24 hours, 21 minutes, and 26 seconds later I have email. Phew.

Altitude Problem Solved (on paper)

I always say that if you do something wrong just enough times then you can't help, but get it right eventually.

I now have enough information to go up to at least some altitude.

The problem for me always comes back to running out of oxygen and getting sick from it.
This is caused by
- overexertion - particularly with carrying a backpack
- sleeping too high since my breathing slows down when asleep
- not enough time for a gradual assent - there never is

In the gradual ascent realm is: The one time we went through the Mitre Basin I did not get sick. I was at 13k and fine.

I have been sick at Outpost (10k') several times but at that low altitude was able to recover although oddly enough I have been at Lower Boy Scout Lake (also 10k') twice and one time was fine and one time was ill and didn't recover till I descended, but getting to LBSL is much, much harder than the Whitney Main Trail.

I have been sick at Trail Camp (12k') more times than I have been well.
This most recent time at Trail Camp I was fine when we got there and I was fine until I went to sleep. When I went to sleep my breathing slowed down and when I work up I had a headache, was nauseated and couldn't walk more than a few steps at a time. This is a real live example of the adage Climb High, Sleep Low.

One time I was fine at Trail Camp was when I had come up from Outpost with a day pack. I was able to continue on to Trail Crest and ran out of water and decided to descend (back in those days I was afraid to drink unfiltered water - now I see that there isn't enough evidence to support the claim that the water has Giardia - yes a little, and so does a public swimming pool which actually has more risk.)

I have been saying that the problem with Climb High, Sleep Low was that I could only get so high. Yesterday I looked up the elevation of Trail Crest. It's 13,600'.

Pause. Really? That high huh?

I had been saying it was 13k', but 600 feet higher is a Big Difference at that elevation. That day I climbed with a day pack from 10,400' to 13,600 which is a gain of 3200' which is not something to just write off with pat on the head saying "nice effort." The summit of Whitney is only 900' more in elevation gain. I have been past Trail Crest once, but was crawling and stopped at maybe 13,700'. In that case, I had slept at 12k' which I realize now, probably put me at a disadvantage.

So the take away lesson from last trip is clear: Don't sleep at 12,000', unless you are well acclimated to it. Sleep where there is more oxygen. Sleep with the trees. Thank them for the oxygen by exhaling on them.

And if I have trouble on a day climb with not getting enough oxygen there are the personal oxygen solutions which do well in a pinch. Though I need to mess around more with them.

I have tried Oxia and really didn't like the fact that a lot of it seemed to go out into the air. Plus I also had two canisters leak.

So if I'm going to make use of it while climbing. I need to find another source.

Some choices are still listed from the last time I did this search - others seem to have disappeared.

http://www.truo2.com/
http://www.alpineaccessories.com/Personal-Portable-Oxygen/products/105/
http://store.oxygenpod.com/POD_p/pod.htm


Now, of course, I want to go back to Whitney. The only issue is when? My time is pretty booked and the trail quotas are booked for this year till Oct 15th (though cancellations do occur because of party size reduction). While it's tempting to go in late October (I can deal with snow - however snow really does slow you down, plus it's a lot colder then too), my time might be better spent testing out my theories on the higher peaks of Yosemite (Dana, Gibbs, Lyell), though those are only in the low 13's, but that's not bad as a testing ground.

Whitney Portal Fire Drama 7/14/09

Before I forget I really must post about this last Mt. Whitney story from our trip.

I do have some photos that I need to upload, but this is the gist.

We spent the night at Whitney Portal Campground to help some with acclimatization and because it's beautiful and sometimes I like to go up to the store to say hello to Earline and Doug Sr.

Because we wanted to get a really early start the next day I decided to forgot my store visit till when we got back from our trip, so having already eaten dinner down at Lone Pine we put stuff in the bear locker, cleaned the truck out of scented items, put the tent up and settled down to get some rest while it was still light.

After the sun went down, I was half asleep when I heard sirens. Now I live in a city, so while still asleep I convinced myself that it was several blocks away and nothing to worry about, but then a voice in my head chimed in going: "Hello? You are at Whitney Portal. There is no "several blocks away" there is one road. Period." I wake up and peer out the tent since we haven't put the rain fly on. I see flashing lights out at the road (we're on a small access road back to our campsite.) Then we see another set of lights up on the other access road. Uh oh.

Terri who is starting to wake up innocently asks: think I should put a shirt on? I reply: Umm yeah. That's starting to sound like a Good Idea.

Less than a minute later we can now make out a flashlight moving from camp to camp. Uh oh again. This is starting to resemble watching something on TV and the person comes out of the TV to talk to you. - I hate it when that happens.

The flashlight approaches. We say hello to the flashlight and ask what's going on. Now a sad commentary on the state of things is that I'm explecting Flashlight to tell me that a prowler is on the loose (In the wilderness? Oh please).

Flashlight says "[his name] Highway Patrol. We have a fire just down the hill and you need to pack up and evacute." Terri asks if we have time to pack everything up and Flashlight says yes. I ask where it is and he says it's just East of the creek.

We start to pack stuff up and Flashlight moves on. We pack for about 5 minutes and the tension in the air noticibly increases (sirens are getting numerous and loud, people are starting to shout), we start to hurry as we can now make out where the fire is. Terri who hasn't been through a fire before is starting to stress some, but is holding it together. We get everything stuffed in the truck and we have a brief disagreement about my taking a moment to close the bear locker. There is stuff in there (trash) a bear shouldn't have, so I ignore her entreaties for a moment. I have told her that I'm pretty good in an emergency and she is resolutely remaining unconvinced. "You're not good. you're terrible in an emergency. We need to go." (She took it back later. :)

We exit the campground and there to our right is the fire with a couple of trees a blaze and being doused with water. We pull over and watch for a little while and I take some mostly unusable video and trade stories with the other folks in the campground. This is all turning out not to be the typical restful Whitney Portal experience. The fire subsides and comes back and subsides again. A whole bunch of fire equipment is arriving and you can hear more coming in. For what appears to be a relatively small fire this is a Very Big Deal. Mostly because the area has houses. If it was in the wilderness area it would have not been treated this way.

After a while it becomes clear that this will go on for a while and all these people are going to be looking for hotel rooms and the thought of a bed is sounding really good right now, so we head down to Lone Pine. Neither Terri or I has been an evacuee before so it didn't occur to us that since we were displaced that they would have found a place for us (there was a meeting hall commandeered for the purpose).

Going back down to Lone Pine we pass many fire crews coming up. Then we come to where the incoming road is blocked by a fire truck. It is at one of the lower campgrounds and it's full of Badwater Marathon vans (my blog entry on the Badwater Ultramarathon is here). I had forgotten about them. They moved the finish line down here since the road was now blocked. This also had another meaning that was slowly sinking in. On the very busy day of Tuesday, in the ever so hopping town of Lone Pine (not), every hotel room was booked. Eek. The woman at the desk found us a room in Bishop and we took it. Bishop is one hour away. As we drove up we were still being passed by fire crews coming in the other direction.

The next morning I called the Whitney visitor's center to see if the road was open. It had opened at 7am, which is a huge bummer for the day climbers who need to start around 2 or 3 am to finish in one day.

We drove back to our abandoned campsite and cleaned out the trash in the bear locker and found a couple of small forgotten items including a great flat Victorinox knife set that is so small I lose repeatedly and then find again months later.

We then looked at where the fire had been. Six trees had been chopped down and several others charred. While it was a small fire, it was a sobering thing to realize that our campsite was about 500' away from it. Fortunately for all concerned, there was no wind and perfect weather.

The fact that the fire was small is a credit to the Calif Dept of Forestry. the Whitney Portal is full of connifers that just so want to burn, but really can't be allowed to in that area. Fires here can get out of control in a huge hurry so they hit fires with everything they have, hence all of last night's drama.

Cause is still under investigation. We did talk to one firefighter who said the investigator was down there right then. Now that would be a cool job. Kinda high pressure but how fascinating. I later did talk to a ranger who said that he saw a military plane in the area fire off an antiaircraft flare right about the same time.

All in all this misadventure only put us 4 hours behind schedule for hitting the trail.

When we came out of the wilderness, intermitent thunderstorms were ongoing and the firewatch crews were out. We went to the portal store for one of their delicious lunches and I find Earline monitoring the radio for fire updates. On the night of the 14th they had already left, but this was now in the middle of the day. One road access makes getting out of there in a hurry difficult (though I must say on the 14th it was pretty easy) We had an enjoyable lunch amongst the fat chipmunks and while lightning did strike close enough to hear the alarming initial cracking (as opposed to just a distant rumbling), nothing struck close enough to make us want to run though I was glad that both Terri and I were off the mountain. On the drive down, we passed a couple of the firemonitoring crews and could see a fireburning in the mountains that I think they just let burn out, but keep a careful eye on.

So all in all, not your typical Whitney trip.

The Bummer of the Maximum Heart Rate

I'm only realizing now that someone my gym instructors are half my age. (The ones that are actually older are very impressive I must say.) Keeping up with the younger instructors is a challenge and is pretty empowering. Then every so often I am reminded what a disadvantage that I am at and this is why they put athletes in different age groups.

The disadvantage that older athletes face is the Maximum Heart Rate (I usually refuse to call myself older, but in this case, it's pretty inescapable). As you get older, the tissue stiffens and the maximum rate that the heart can go decreases. The bummer about this is that a younger person's heart can pump a significant more blood than an older person's and man I'm jealous - sometimes I wish I'd appreciated it then.

I overheard one of my gym instructors say that her near max heart rate was 195. Mine is about 174 or 175. The standard formula (220-your age) would put it at 173, but fit people usually can go slightly higher. This means that on demand her heart is able to move around that much more oxygen than mine. Because she exercises just about every day her resting heart rate is 38 (I asked one day) and mine remains at 58 despite exercising four times a week plus dog walks. That means that her heart is that much more efficient as well.

Because I can't get my heart to beat as fast as hers, efficiency and being comfortable at higher heart rates is the only way I can keep up. The standard text books are fond of telling you that you want to work out at 60-80% of your max HR. If you're no longer 20-something and training for anaerobic things like mountain climbing (or just trying to keep up with the 20-somethings), then you have to get comfortable working much harder. you get to learn all about how to work at that "anaerobic threshold" where your body is no longer processing oxygen. It's that leg burn phase and you can push that threshold up further.

My anaerobic threshold used to be around 160 bpm. Now it's 163-165 bpm. Yes it hurts - but only briefly. ;) The way through that is usually by doing intervals where you vary the intensity of what you're doing, while there are a whole bunch of different ones, right now I just use the ones in the RPM Spin classes I go to.

If you'd like a decent book on this subject there are 100's (mostly all pointing in different directions), but one good, albeit humbling, one (I'm lucky to match their fitness minimums and I often don't) is:

The Outdoor Athlete
by Courtenay and Doug Schurman of Body Results
http://www.bodyresults.com/p1outdoor-athlete-book.asp

So it turns out there is an honorable reason to (ahem) chase 20 year olds.

I want to take Sarah Palin's guns away from her

Let's just be forthwith about this and just justify all of Palin's terrible fears

I am a Hollywood Starlet (ok, that's so not true) and I want to take Sarah Palin's guns away from her - particularly her guns.

Yes I'm being flip. Sort of.
My British friends find our country's gun fascination pretty scary. Actually I do to. Especially after doing the research.

Having a gun in the house is a very good predictor of gun violence. It is so not a protection.

I though getting the stats would be difficult since there's so much opinion but the Brady Campaign came through for me very nicely though they are certainly not above categorically stating opinions without stats, but here are the ones where there are solid numbers:

- The risk of homicide in the home is three times greater in households with guns.(2)

- The risk of suicide is five times greater in households with guns.(3)

2. Kellermann, AL, Rivara, FP, Rushforth NB, et al. "Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home." New England Journal of Medicine. 1993; 329: 1084-1091.
3. Kellermann, AL, Rivara FP, Somes G, et al. "Suicide in the home in relation to gun ownership." New England Journal of Medicine. 1992; 327: 467-472.

More info
http://www.bradycampaign.org/issues/gvstats/


My opinion is that anyone who wants to possess a handgun (since handguns are much more the issue than rifles - Sarah Palin aside) must go through the same amount of training as a police officer. I don't want the Wild West days back again. I really don't want a whole bunch of untrained, armed vigilantes running around.

Palin quoted that hairbrained "We eat therefore We hunt."
Hello? Last time I was in a grocery store I didn't need to be armed with anything more than a debit card. Next wolf she shoots she has to eat. Whole.

I just heard her resignation speech. I must admit it has a certain strange poetic brilliance to it. What I really love is that Conan O'Brien had William Shatner read it on the air.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/28/william-shatner-makes-pal_n_246034.html

But of course all I can really say is what I've already said before: RUN SARAH RUN

Ripening Tomatoes Through Careful Neglect

2 weeks ago I had a tomato plant died suddenly of Southern Blight (the previous blog entries are here and here.) I picked the orphaned tomatoes and stuck them in a container while I waited till I had time to make that Green Tomato Relish that Jan C. told me about.

Then a funny thing happened. One tomato ripened. It was delicious. Probably would have been better if I'd ignored it some more. Then another did the same thing. Now it's happening to two more. Not sure how long I can take ignoring it as it looks really good. While the tomatoes are small, for some reason it's still gratifying to see what should have been a complete failure of a plant still give me something yummy during its short life.

The other plant is doing fine and is 6 feet tall. Perhaps due to swift removal of the sick one or just because of complete happenstance.

Badwater Ultramarathon

Because of our Mt. Whitney permit reservation, unbeknownst to us, our trip coincided with the Badwater Ultramarathon which is a 135 mile foot race (I never saw them run) from Badwater in Death Valley to Whitney Portal trailhead which is the start of the Whitney Main Trail. The promoters kinda like to let it be implied that the race involves Mount Whitney which it doesn't except for going up to Whitney Portal, but let's give them a break given this is basic insanity.

The main page of their web site is here: http://badwater.com/
The map of the route is here: http://badwater.com/route/index.html
A recap of this race is here: http://www.badwater.com/2009web/

The recap refers to a fire that I will give much more personal detail in a later entry as it was only 500 feet away from my campsite.

It's 5pm and we're hanging out in Lone Pine eating an early dinner before going up to portal to camp and aclimate, it's around 90 degrees or so and obviously had been much hotter. Every so otten, I'd see someone dressed as a runner with one or two other people walk by with an obvious purpose in mind and clearly looking in pain - pain that they had signed up for, trained for, and paid for. Each racer had a support van with the competitor's name on it and signs like "Caution Runner." There was someone else in the restaurant and I worked up the nerve to ask him if he was associated with it (it also took me a while to figure out a polite way to ask if he was involved in this mascocistic quest.) He was and said that his daughter would be along soon. He said that they had started yesterday and ran all day and into the night. I asked him if they slept and he said they have the option to if they want (she slept about 30 minutes or so), but the clock doesn't stop. They didn't even stop the clock for the 10pm-7am road closure of Whitney portal access road bedcause of the fire.

Temps where they started the race in Death Valley can get in the 120s. This time it was considerably over 100 degrees, but I don't know how hot it got. Given that my body stops functioning at all around 110 degrees, the thought of running in such temps is pretty unimaginable. The winner of the women (who came in 5th over all) didn't even get any blisters. Her crew made her stop every 20 miles (!) to make her change her socks. 20 miles. The only way I've done 20 miles in a day outside of a car is on a bike. The idea that 20 miles is just a marker to take a break is so unfathomable to me. Not only did she not get any blisters (which means that she did far better off than the average adventure racer), she also didn't get sick from the heat which is another common problem.

Our first day on the Whitney trail was the day after the race had ended. Every so often I'd look up and see a very lean person with great legs and a Badwater shirt. I'd ask "So Badwater wasn't enough for you?" which garnered a variety of reponses. The best which was

"Yes we're card carrying mascocists"

I'm on the Whitney trail with a full backpack (obviously not a couch potato) and I believe I said something like "Yes, you're making us all look like wusses."

What was amazing was that the support people often run along with them. One did 45 miles and another ran 50. That's nearly TWO marathons. And you did it just as a support person. This makes me pause and marvel every time I mention it.

Another thing is that this race is very difficult to qualify for. You have to have a history of running in these types of races. they only let 90 people in. Yes, more than 90 people want to do this and you have to assemble a crew of people to chase you around in a van so that you don't die out there.

So given how hard this is to get into and to prepare for there must be some pretty sweet rewards right? This is the awards list quoted from the web site:

AWARDS: All racers who begin the event will receive a Badwater Ultramarathon t-shirt, hat, Race Magazine, and a goodie bag. All racers who officially complete the event within 60 hours will receive a finisher’s medal and a finisher's t-shirt. All racers who officially complete the course within 48 hours will also receive a commemorative Badwater Ultramarathon buckle.

- So if you start the race you get a t-shirt, a hat, a magazine and a swag bag.
- If you finish the race you get a medal and a finisher's t-shirt
- If you finish under 48 hours you also get a commemorative buckle.

Sign me up (not). Note the lack of anything monetary. Someone told me that if you win you also get free entry for life. They also told me that there really isn't much sponsorship money in it. One very accomplished racer gets free hats and socks. That is amazing. Racers may incure $6000 of expenses plus airfare if they're international. I thought us dog agility people were nuts. Not a chance.

I wonder what attracts people to this? The ultimate challenge? An accomplished runner or triathelete can make some of their expenses back in race wins. Certainly not in this case.

A google of: why ultramarathon
is surprisingly not coming up with much save for this little gem here:

On the insanity meter, this is second only to the running of the bulls.

There is an additional recap here:
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705317132/Utahns-compete-in-Badwater-Ultramarathon.html

The winners finished in under 24 hours. Which means they were doing an average of 5.63 mph, and given that I personally never saw them run, it means that when they were running they were going faster.

Of course I can't help, but notice in what great shape they are and how lean they are.
I'm in good shape, but I have elevated triglycerides. Aspiring to be as lean as they are or even just close would likely do me a world of good though my knees and feet might not like it. But my knees are fine right now so it's likely worth working on more. Even just shedding that extra 10 pounds I carry world likely be a boon. I have started back to treadmill running since I got back from Whitney and if I have anything startling to report I may put it here, but for now it will reside in my boring Training Diary.

But while someday I may enter a 5k, it's pretty much a guarantee that I'm never doing a marathon and it is a guarantee that you'll never see me in an ultramarathon. For them, I'll be happy to be an impressed bystander.

Whitney Marmots

At the higher elevations of the Sierra Nevada you will often see Marmots who are described as basically being really large squirrels or groundhogs. However the very same page says that they typically eat "many types of grasses, berries, lichens, mosses, roots and flowers." Let me assure you that around Mt. Whitney's Trail Camp that is so not the case. They will eat anything they can get their mitts on and are accomplished thieves, and will rip right into things they think contain food (including tents).

Through out a lot of the Sierra, backpackers are required to place their food and any scented items like toothpaste in a bear proof container. While you are not terribly likely to encounter a bear, you will come across marmots and the container is pretty essential at keeping them and chipmonks and jays at bay. And along with their Ursian brethren, if you underestimate their skill you will pay for it in food.

So we're at Trail Camp and I'm trying to recover enough from altitude sickness so we can move to a lower altitude. I am just starting to feel a little better when I hear a suspicious noise just outside the tent. I look up to see that one of two marmots has just nosed the lid off of one of the bear canisters that we hadn't fully engaged. I yell HEY! and throw a boot (Terri's) at them and they run off, but not before one of then graps a ziploc bag of something.

Without even thinking about it, I shift into determined "I will catch you" dog owner mode and take off after then, but Terri says "Hey what about my boot?" in which I of course pick up and throw back at her on my way after them. The "Ow!" at my back tells me I should have paid more attention to where I was throwing said boot. I call "Sorry!" over my shoulder. "What do they have any way?" "Cheese" she replies.

We are camped beside a lake surrounded by boulders. Now if you're a non-human animal the odds of you ripping into a ziploc bag quietly are pretty much nil, so it was actually pretty easy to find said marmot who was pretty darn startled at having a human pursuing him or her. So I'm facing off with Ms Marmot and her cheesy contraband which I know isn't good for her anyway, and finally a voice in my head gets loud enough for me to hear. "Helloooo? This is not your dog. You have just cornered a wild animal who has a very valued resource. They have teeth and claws and you really have no idea what she will do if you push further." I am on a rock above her hiding place and if I had a trekking pole I could have stabbed the bag and anchored it in hopes she'd leave it. She is clearly considering what to do and I decide to try to let up a little to see if she will leave it. I give a foot and call out mostly for my own amusment "Step away from the cheese." She thinks about it grabs the package and retreats further into the rocks. Terri by this time has handed me a trekking pole, but I have decided that I've pushed things as far as I'm comfortable, so I leave her be and go back to the tent to collapse as I'm still not well and have used up my energy.

Anyway the lids to the bear containers then got completely screwed down. It wasn't long after till Terri saw another one testing the lid. She's sure that they are going to evolve a nose that jutes out just long enough to test bear containers.

One enouraging thing is that while said marmot was initially ripping into the package, the ripping and rustling sounds stopped pretty quickly after our face-off. I'm hoping it's because she didn't like what she found.

Anyway the startled look on the marmot's face was pretty funny. I should say that in this area particularly, being unfriendly and scary to wildlife is tacitly encouraged. The animals are getting tamer, bolder, and losing their fear of people. With the smaller animals this is a mere annoyance albeit bad for their diet, but it's deadly to bears. A bear that starts harrassing people for food is usually shot because they're too dangerous. As the rangers like to say: A fed bear is a dead bear.

Mt. Whitney - last time (well maybe not)

[Apologies in advance, I copied and pasted this from my training diary and there are some spaces missing and I don't know if I caught them all.]

I knew it would likely work out this way. That I would go to Mt. Whitney and I would get sick, but I have to try one last time. [of course I take this all back in a later post.]

The crushing thing was that things looked so good the day before the scheduled summit day. I did everything right. I am in great physical shape (training for Shasta makes a mountain with a trail look easy). We went up slowly (which I really don't like as I'm an adrenalin junkie and like all the over-exertion and heavy breathing and completely underscores that this really isn't the activity for me), we took multiple days (stopped at 10,400' then on to 12,000' the next day), took medication (Diamox) when I started having some trouble keeping my respiration deeper than normal, took aspirin as well to thin my blood some, was able to help set up camp at 12,000' - in fact did a lot of it, cooked dinner and was able to eat no problem. I was even fine in the middle of the night, but after I fell asleep (instead of just dozing), my breathing slowed down (hence taking in less O2, and I woke up ill. I now have a hard limit - I should never sleep at 12,000' or above. I've done it before but only successfully once or twice. Even though I was ok when awake, when asleep my body degraded when asleep. There's a reason for the Climb High, Sleep Low mantra.

When I woke up, my head was splitting and I couldn't move hardly at all. Took the altitude medication and some aspirin. The headache gradually got better, but I felt nauseated, and still couldn't move more than about 10 steps without having to lay down. I stayed hopeful for about an hour and a half, but the window in which we could leave and get back down was closing and then it became get better enough to get down while carrying a pack.

Once you are ill, there are three things that are recommended that you do: Descend. Descend. Descend. Getting better on the mountain (past doing things like taking aspirin, orDiamox . Oxygen if you have it) is very difficult In my case, if I had oxygen I may have gotten better as I wasn't violently ill, but the thing is that while O2 will help you feel better, it will not help you aclimate and for me one time when I brought some, completely prevented me from aclimating to even 10k'. Over then next few hours I was able to move around enough, and even chased a marmot who had stolen food (that will be a later entry), and eventually was able to carry a pack back down to Outpost (10,400'), in which I nearly kissed the first tree I saw since there's a very noticeable difference in the oxygen level when you come to that first tree, but I never felt good again though was able to eat at Outpost (couldn't eat at all at Trail Camp after I got ill. Would I eventually have gotten better? Maybe since I wasn't violently ill, but it would have meant another day there and I didn't have it, and when you're ill, you're not very happy about choosing to stay ill. Would I have gotten better enough to summit - not likely. It's Monday, and I don't think I've fully recovered. Which is ironic as I could have run up that mountain if it were at sealevel (ok maybe not all of it but summitting would not have been hard.)

If I had another day the best choice would have been to descend to 10k' or 11k' or 11.5k' and sleep there and try to recover enough to climb from there (I knew I said this above - worth reapeating - once you're sick it's very tough to recover at that altitude). In our case, the weather was degrading and we were all too happy to hike out on Sat (7/18/09) as it had rained on and off all night at Outpost and a thunderstorm rolled in and stayed for the day, which is a bummer for those wanting to summit - not that day.

Ironically, Terri didn't have any trouble with the altitude this time. She has in the past, but other times has been great and has summitted (I have not). That's what's so funny about altitude sickness/sensitivity, there are so many factors that it's difficult or impossible to predict it. You can see obvious potentials: Terri gave a water bottle to a kid struggling up the trail, and she told him to drink it and fill it at every stream. But preventing it from happening is not much of a reality.

I think I'm done with my Whitney obsession (I made sure to stop in at the Portal Store just to chat with Earline and a staff member a little and say hi to Doug Sr. who was busy).

At the east side of the park off Tioga Road, Yosemite has mountains that are 12k and 13k - if I want to play with day hikes, I can do it there and Yosemite is way closer (and I bought a yearly pass again (only $40) so it's already paid for). The problem of not being able to sleep at 12k or higher is that there's a limit to how far past my sleep altitude I can go. I have gone from Outpost (10.4k') to Trail Crest (13k'), but I didn't feel that great at Trail Crest and the summit is another 1500' and the odds of getting that far are poor for me.

We're going to focus on kayaking for a while now (we're at sealevel and by the water - duh). We've done some before but it's in abundance here, and we would never run out of adventures. and of course there are our dogs and my dog sports obsessions which take up most of my time and attention.

The trouble is I like to climb thing and the mountains are so beautiful, alluring, and downright seductive. I can't help but want to climb them, when I see them.

The cool thing that I've written about before is that in the process of not attaining my goals I get to see some beautiful country that you don't get to see unless you go. Plus I have picked up a lot of skills having to do with camping, hiking, mountaineering, climbing. I can scamper around with trekking poles, glissade with an ice axe, and cook when it's windy using the tent vestibule as a wind block (one of those "don't try this at home" things that most every backcountry camper has to do at some point in time.)

But that doesn't change just how disappointed I am and it's just sinking in. It's supposed to be that if you train for something that you should be able to do it. Not in the case of altitude. There are ways to work with it but there isn't a way to condition for it. You are what you are. It's funny though. According to textbooks I'm more typical and everyone else is just getting away with breaking the rules. Textbook aclimatization is 1000' gain per day with 2 days at the same elevation every few days (I'm forgetting the number). No one does that - not even on Everest. I think the textbooks would say they are not aclimatizing. On Whitney that's true. On Everest that can't be true as if they didn't aclimatize some they'd be dead. But this is a disgression from just how profoundly sad I am about this. It's a loss and one that I'm still processing.

Other topics for later

Marmots

Fire / Whitney Portal evacuation

Badwater Ultramarathon - "card carrying masochists"

Depressed appetite in the mountains and the inability to eat enough - (I lost 3% body fat in 4 days). This one is not yet written as I don't have enough information.

And where I take it all back:
Altitude Problem Solved (on paper)

Michael Jackson - His Effect on Others

While I am of the opinion that Michael Jackson, systematically killed himself, probably unintentionally, through the things that he repeatedly put his body through trying to make himself into something he wasn't instead of celebrating the incredible gifts that he had. He really was quite honestly one seriously messed up dude. HOWEVER!

I'm watching his memorial service on msnbc.com (thanks for allowing us to see it) and have been following the story over the past few days. He continues to have the most incredible effect on others - maybe even more so now. The anguish and the outpouring of grief - seeing what he meant to them. He was very much a symbol. It's been pointed out over and over just how many color barriers he brought down.

Every one who spoke, clearly never, ever expected to be in the position they were in now. They obviously wanted to do it, but not something they would have anticipated.

Speakers and Performers (I have missed some):
Stevie Wonder (spoke), Kobe Bryant (spoke), Smokey Robinson (spoke), Rev. Al Sharpton (spoke), John Mayer (guitar), Brooke Shields (spoke), Jermaine Jackson (sang), Martin Luther King III (spoke), Bernice King (spoke), Sheila Jackson Lee (Rep D-Tx) (spoke). Usher (sang), [right around now the feed has gone down drat] Finally got it restarted - everyone who spoke plus a lot of others is on stage (Jesse Jackson is there) and I don't know who is on stage but she's singing Heal the World (make the world a better place for you and for me), and I have never seen Usher and Brooke Shields standing together. The brothers Jermaine and Marlin are making parting comments. What's different is they are now talking directly to Michael, then shifting to talking about him. Marlin made the pointed comment of "You had to take so much pain. .. Maybe now they will leave you alone" he also requested Michael give Brandon (who has passed away) a hug. His daughter, Paris, came on to tell me he was the best Dad and thanked him and cried (if nothing else gets you this will). Then Marlin said goodbye and the casket was wheeled out.

The entire Jackson family was there with the men all wearing one glove.

Stevie Wonder was of course amazing, Sharpton was moving and talked about all the color barriers that Jackson brought down and how he never quit [to his detriment I think], Lee spoke of politics and making a difference like MJ did, and couldn't resist throwing in "innocent until proven guilty," and she and many others talked about his good works, and hospital visits, and charity work, and that MJ will be honored as a world humanitarian by the House. But no one seemed to see as incredibly genuine as Brooke Shields. I have never seen Shields really stop and appear to really really connect with her experience and relate it so well. Just watching her in a completely different context is fascinating. I never expected to be teary eyed watching Brooke Shields (?!)

Some friends are saying that they're avoiding watching the service. I do such things as cultural literacy but I was completely sucked in as it's really moving and I realized I was watching something much much larger than a simple memorial service.

More info: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31772026

Tomato Plant II

Consider this a post mortem, alas there will be no sequel at least for this plant.
It's basically a drying stick with green tomatoes on it. Its death was dramatically fast (days).

After thinking about all the ways I could have caused it (here), I realize now that, not only did I not do anything much wrong, I was missing the obvious one to point the finger at: Home Depot. The one thing I didn't have control over was the soil the plant was planted in and the Southern Blight could have easily slipped in that way (ok I didn't control the seed or it's initial "upbringing" (if you will) either or what it was fed which come to think of it if you're growing something to eat is very much a concern.)

This time I didn't grow plants from seed (actually only have done that once - quite rewarding, but takes more time). Usually when I buy started plants it's from a local nursery who gets them from local growers. This time I was at Home Depot anyway so I decided to try their tomatoes and basil. So far we're 3 for 4. I made the mistake of tossing the tag so I don't know where the plants came from. I know that Home Depot would replace the plant if I asked them to but after thinking about it for about a second I decided no thanks. I don't want to bring in any more "gifts" from them. I'm just glad they're in a planter and not in the soil.

So my local nurseries (Encinal Nursery, East Bay Nursery, Grand Lake Nursery, also Thompson's and Berkeley Hort though I've never bought tomatoes there) will be happy to know that I'll be back and am very sorry I strayed.

So now it's what to do with green tomatoes besides frying them. IF I want to eat them at all as Southern Blight eventually affects the tomato as well. I'm keeping a careful eye on the other plant which while not sick is not looking spectacular either.

Sarah Palin Stepping Down as Alaska Governor

CNN Breaking News tells me that Sarah Palin is resigning as Alaska's governor, and already there is speculation that she's considering a run for the presidency in 2012.

If I stop and listen, I can hear a the murmur of liberal pundits, writers, humorists and bloggers throughout the land saying with one voice:

. Run Sarah Run

Her running as the running mate of a competent contender is what was worrisome in this past election as having her one step away from the presidency almost by accident was more than a nightmare.

But she, herself, running for president? How perfect is that? We get two years of entertainment and slightly appalling flashes of being presented with Too Much Information, and get to watch the Republican Party try to manage her and not be able to. I really want to see her debate Obama though I know she won't get that far. As Stephanie Miller said: I miss the [Palin] word salad. I'm sure Rachel Maddow will be thrilled also.

Oh this should be fun or a train wreck or both.