Mitt liv som Tobin

So Maria and I drove out to Loyalton again (an hour north of Truckee) for a winter weekend adventure. My uncle Mike's partner Andrea has a house out there, in Sierra Valley, in a little tiny town in the least populous county in all of California. It's cozy with a wood stove and Victorian furniture.

We went snowshoeing in a gale, in a heavy cold rain accompanied by strong gusts of wind. But we were attired appropriately for a short jaunt in such conditions and therefore were happy. My first time snowshoeing! Happily the rain turned to snow, and after an hour or two tromping around we returned to base.

Returning to the Bay Area, I enjoyed driving back via CA-49, a circuitous mountain road that visits several terribly idyllic small oldtime mountain towns, like Sierra City and Downeyville. The Yuba river was a gushing torrent in the canyon, and long sinuous white cataracts added highlights to the canyon walls. Dinner in Nevada City at Three Forks Brewing.

A cozy and fun winter weekend was had. Nonetheless still a bit envious of my colleagues and their Ski Weekends. Gotta do a little social networking to get invited on such a jaunt.

Each of the last four or so snowfalls I've written off as Winter's last hurrah, only to be surprised by yet another. Likewise, surely today's is the last? But I'm not complaining - I love the snow.

Winter is here - first day below freezing!

Current subject of indecision: whether to spend New Year's in the U.S. or not.

Some things to do in the U.S.:

• See my family
• Visit my dentist (Yay!) - I just don't really trust the dentist(s) I've tried/found in Germany.
• Do some airplane flying. I'd really like to try doing some glider flying in Temecula and get some experience flying gliders with an English-speaking instructor. Do they even fly in the winter in California? Seems like they would.
• Do my biennial flight review? This is an evaluation done by a flight instructor that's needed to keep my pilot's license valid. To do the BFR I would also need to do some practice flight beforehand.
• Visit SpaceX to see a former colleague and check out the job prospects.
• Eat at In-N-Out
• Visit four in San Diego
• Visit friends in San Francisco?
• Hot springs trip for New Year's?
• Generally relax in a place whether the weather is comfortable and everything is easy and familiar.
• ?

Reason to come back to Germany on Dec 30:

• Get an early start on the year in .de
• Not leave the dog at the pet-sitter for too long (although the petsitter herself isn't coming back to Hannover - with Bella - until Jan 6)

Complicated nearly-last-minute travel arrangements are a special kind of hell I regularly inflict upon myself.

 

It's snowing!

WTF!

Keith made an elog entry from the lab saying:
Greetings from Ice Station Livingston

We are feeling a bit bored, cold, lonely, and miserable. Mostly cold. The house where we are staying is unheated, and in any case our room is more of an "enclosed porch," and so it is with some irony that we are wistful for our heated-to-65-degrees home in Rochester. Sleeping beside a wood burning stove actually sounds quite appealing, out of place though it may seem for Southern California.

As for the rest: we are looking forward to getting more established here and being busy again. The house we're moving into will be available on Monday or Tuesday, and it is heated, albeit poorly. As an added bonus we'll finally be able to unload our car, which has contained All Of Our Worldly Possessions for a whole month now, freeing up some seats in it to carry around our soon-to-be-met friends on our soon-to-be-had camping trips in the deserts and mountains.

Possible agenda for tomorrow:

• Flea market at Pasadena City College (PCC)
• Eat at Fox's or Andy's, two reputed diner-like establishments here in Pasadena. (Oddly enough when I googled for Fox's, the first link was to a diner by the same name in Rochester.)
• Possibly visit my grandparents in Ventura county

I blame our delayed departure on Global Warming. How could we leave last week when it was still 65 degrees and balmy--unseasonably warm weather, two-sigma unseasonable I'm told, and record-breaking on three consecutive days. But now it is snowing pleasantly and our anxiety about the non-arrival of winter is alleviated. Tonight we had a full-moon bonfire in the snow and now we're going to the hot tub. Tonight we'll snuggle beside the wood-fired stove, and in the morning we'll head out over snow-covered streets.

I remember now the advantage to the short days of northern climes in the winter: evenings of infinite extent. You think it's late, then realize it's only 9pm. As daylight was in the summer lavishly applied, now eveningtime is. Yesterday: Korean barbecue dinner, then a lounging in the pillows-filled nook at Java's cafe while forking chocolate brownie cake and sipping spicy "aztec" cocoa. (I'm not usually one for silly café creations, but hot chocolate + espresso + cinnamon + chili peppers = a winner.) Lying on pillows while eating chocolate cake, in the evening, in public—this is really the decadence in the best of ways. Then we retired to the loft.

This afternoon, it snowed.

It is snowing.

The biggest winter storm in New York City history — destined for lionization as the Blizzard of '06 —buried the region under snow.

Oddly enough, it did not snow here in Rochester, and neither is it snowing today.

Winter has returned to Rochester. Now the forecast is snow every day, following a freakish few weeks of midwinter springtime—positive temperatures, no snow on the ground—that was sufficiently prolonged and sufficiently mild to have people actually talking about being scared. "If this gift horse might have global warming up its throat," I think Rob quipped, "Then it's worth looking." I was moved to ponder what Rachel Carson's book would have been titled had it been about global warming. It's wrong extrapolate from such short term anomalies, but still—it was bizarre and it was wonderful.

Though I favor the snow and even the winter coziness—in place of the garish, vital vulgarity of summertime—I do feel its hold, the way it instills pangs of desperation, the way its omnipresense pulls us into a struggle to find things to do, to keep things interesting. Objectively it's beautiful, but psychologically it's sapping. Last week ironically I worried that I'd missed Winter with the hot tub; this week it's savagely frustrating owning but not posessing the thing, navigating the hoops of getting it transported and installed. Hot tub. Our best hope.

Last night Bree grew restless and we went out for a walk, first driving to the Eastman House, where on the front lawn are planted more than a dozen huge prints of Malibu sunrises. You'd think the juxtaposition novel. California sunrise, over ocean. Planted in snow, night time. But at midnight the prints were illuminated by the sickly glow of the sodium vapor lamps over the highway, and frost behind the plastic obscurred the images. And, as a photographer with similar work in Berkeley quipped, as if to absolve himself of the indictment: What self-respecting photographer photographs the sunset? We moved on.

The other day I was guided to the most amazing place, and we went there this time—an old warehouse overlooking a railroad switching yard, an old warehouse now filled with everything you can imagine. Students and artists rent out the spaces. There seems to be all manner of things there. Glass casting, metal working, print shop, and other installations more mysterious. Best of all you can climb up to the roof and spend the hours gazing out over the urban expanse of the city, from a bunker watching the secret lives of locomotives as they assemble trains.