Category: Uncategorized

Lake Berryessa Open Water Swim 2010

Getting ready to swim my mile

Last weekend (June 12)  I woke up early and drove out with my wife to Lake Berryessa for the 29th annual Lake Berryessa open water swim.  I joined a local Masters Swimming program at the beginning of the year and have been swimming, when life doesn’t interrupt, three times a week.  This open water swim was the first event, outside of practice, that I’ve participated in.  My event wasn’t until 11:30 AM but we left early because this is a big event and a lot of people turn out for it, over 1000 this year.  There is are two events for adults the two mile and one mile swim children under 11 can swim a 500 yard race.  Some people take this very seriously but I was simply there to swim my mile and have fun.

I got a time, nice smack dab in about the middle, but there were a lot of people ahead of me.  I’ll consider swimming as a workout a success if I come back next year to the swim and cut 5 or 6 minutes off of my time.  The fact that others are swimming right by me stopped bothering me a long time ago.  It was exciting enough and looked fun enough that I believe the wife will do it with me next year too which is nice.

Finishing the mile 28 minutes later

Later this summer I believe I’ll be climbing Half Dome in Yosemite National Park and in August I’ll be doing a Sprint Triathlon which leads me to believe that I’m well on my way to crossing off ‘getting in shape’ on my list of 2010 goals.

First Fruits

“…Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till though return unto the ground; for dust thou art. and unto dust thou return.”

Genesis 3:17-19

It wasn’t nearly as hard as YHWH makes it sound but it wasn’t easy either.  We did have to plant the things and then protect them from every manner of pest.  This chard is the first fruits of the garden we planted this year, the first of many I hope.  There are 5 more plants of it left in the box but considering how little is actually there once you cook the plant I imagine that the all the chard will be gone by the end of the week.  If the temperature spikes though it could kill the plants, as their a winter crop and we planted them fairly late in the season, so we might have to pull them before we need them and hope that the crisper in our fridge keeps them long enough.

I never was much of a fan of chard until the CSA we subscribe to started sending us a head or two of it and its close cousin kale all winter.  I discovered that if you boil or saute the stuff it can go into just about anything:  pastas, stirfrys, a side with garlic and butter.

Tonight after pulling the chard, removing the root and cleaning it.  D chopped  and sauted it in olive oil and finely cut garlic with a dash of salt and pepper.  Once it was cooked I simply put it on top of the leftover Pad Kee Mao I had lying around in the fridge.  As I said though it would have been just as good on its own.  Hopefully I’ll be writing a lot more of whatever is coming out of the garden!  Or what I manage to get out of other’s!

What’s Unique about Mother? (Thoughts on Earthbound)

When I played Earthbound I saw a lot of things, some good some bad, but not amazing and mostly I saw a typical JRPG. Earthbound is Dragon Quest with a setting swap. This isn’t an insult to the game. It’s simply an acknowledgment that the game isn’t genre defining, revolutionary, or paradigm shifting.

It’s hard to say when I became a “nerd” who played video games.  Acquaintances in grade school might have pegged me as a “nerd” but it was because I took a great deal of enjoyment out too many think fantasy novels.  I got the Nintendo early on in its life cycle but never had more than  two or three games for the system until everyone had upgraded to 16-bit systems and were getting rid of their “obsolete” NESs.  I was there to accept or purchase cheaply their unwanted games.  Games like Bionic Commando, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, Kabuki, Castlevania, Metal Storm and others.  I even scooped up a copy of the NES Game Atlas.  It was with these 8-bit hand me downs that I became a “nerd”  who played video games, or just a gamer.  But, while all the other nerds were playing and talking about Super Mario World, I was exploring the intricacies of  SMB2 and 3.

I certainly heard people talk about Final Fantasy 3 and Chrono Trigger but I never played them until after the SNES was yesterdays news and people were talking of Saturns, Playstations, and N64s.  My earliest experiences with the SNES were at friend’s homes with games like Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, Star Fox, and Super Punch-Out.  I missed out on Final Fantasy 3, Secret of Mana, and the Lufias.  I sold my NES and all those games, nearly 50, to get enough money to buy a SNES when it started being bundled with Donkey Kong Country (’95 or ’96, I think.)  Again, many people were moving over to 64-bit systems and just giving away their games, move rental chains too were selling carts at a heavy discount to make way for Saturn and Playstation CDs. With people beginning to talk about 3d gaming and witnessing such early attempts as Jumping Flash, and later more refined ones as Resident Evil, I could only be jealous.  Luckily, I had such familiar, and phenomenal games, as Chrono Trigger and Super Metroid to sooth my gamer’s lust.  Those games that took my breath away and still do.

In 1997, I  succumbed to the marketing blitz of Final Fantasy 7 and sold my SNES and games to buy myself a PSX and that game… I can’t really say I became a fan of the series or JRPGs until then…  That is a different story though, and this introduction has gone on long enough.  What I’m trying to say is all of the above might have something to do with why Earthbound just doesn’t do much for me.

There are a number of games on the SNES that I can play again and again.  All of them I played for the first time more than 1o years ago though, the same is true for many NES games.  On occasion I pick up a game I’ve never played and play through it but I find that a lot of the charm I see in these old games must be supplied solely by me and the personal emotions that are tied up with them.  NES and SNES games I play now are not accompanied by any such emotions and so, the flaws and limitations of the them are much more apparent to me.

Earthbound fans love to talk about the game, and they love to tell you how amazing it is.  I believe them when they tell me these things, but I also believe that much of that pleasure is not in the game itself but tied up in their memories of it.  When I played Earthbound I saw a lot of things, some good some bad, but not amazing and mostly I saw a typical JRPG.  Earthbound is Dragon Quest with a setting swap.  This isn’t an insult to the game.  It’s simply an acknowledgment that the game isn’t genre defining, revolutionary, or paradigm shifting.  Someone I know stated that the Mother series was all about evoking nostalgia but when you have no emotional attachment to the game, and not much to its genre (circa 1995) there isn’t an fuel for the Earthbound to ignite and player’s without a specific history, a cultural reference, are left in the cold.

Did you play Earthbound when it came out?  Did it blow your mind?  How so?  I’d really like some other people’s thoughts on this…

Planting Gardens

So the clouds have finally parted and Spring is coming to northern California, I can’t say I’m not excited to see it.  I’ve missed the sun terribly since I saw it last sometime in late November.  Not everything about spring is great, my allergies have returned with the Sun and I’ve had to go back on a cocktail of drugs in order to breathe through my nose and see through my eyes.  Time will tell if this price is worth paying for.

With spring here, it was time to finally put my thoughts on gardening into more than just lines on a paper:

This turns out to have been a little too optimistic about what I could fit into the side yard and so I settled on a single 4’x10′ box instead of the two smaller ones, there just wasn’t enough room to move around with the original plan.  A quick trip to Ace Hardware, a realization that my automatic drill wasn’t up to snuff, a return trip to Ace, and a little bit of sweat and:

Soil arrives tomorrow to fill the box up, and then there will be one last trip to Ace for seeds and seedlings.  D and I plan on putting in eggplants, cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, melons, beans, and basil.  Give or take.  Since this is the first time we’ve done this some experimenting is on order and so we’ve planted tomatoes, beans, and peppers in the front yard too, where they’ll get more direct sunlight than the box on the side.  It only required my butchering one of the hedges (I’d like to remove all of them and put in some sort of sage grass, but I’m only renting.)  Hopefully, between the two I’ll get something to show out of this work.

Once the box is in place, filled, and planted I’ll take some more pictures.  If everything works this site should soon be full of the garden’s progress.  If you don’t see anything else about it, I’m merely hiding my shame.

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