The hike: Repercussions

I am not nearly as sore as I probably should be after that hike. In fact, I am not sore at all except right at the very top of my calf muscle where it attaches behind my knee. And whatever that muscle is is REALLY sore. It is also essential for walking like a normal person which I am currently not able to do. I can't quite fully straighten my legs when I walk so I look like I am pretending to be short. I hope the soreness fades before the short people in my office start to get offended.

The hike

Eric, Emerson and I went for a hike in Purisima Creek Redwoods park on Sunday. It was a gorgeous sunny day - perfect for a tromp around the woods.

We started our hike into the park from Skyline Drive, which as you might imagine runs along a ridge. The hike descends down into a gulch and then climbs back out of it ("canyon style" I think it is called).

Down, down, down we went! It's a beautiful day! The trees are lovely! The air is foresty and clean-tasting! Oh glory!

I believe we descended something like 1,800 vertical feet.

We had lunch by a very cold stream which Emerson kept trying to alternately jump into and throw things into. Then it was time to head back to the car which, we suddenly realized with horror, was really really far away.

Eric was carrying Emerson on his back and I was carrying the diaper backpack with food and water bottles. I knew it was going to be ugly when about ten steps up the trail I thought to myself "my legs feel tired."

In addition to underestimating the physical challenge of this hike, we had taken the forested, windy, not-too-steep trail down and now found ourselves climbing straight up a steep, wide sun-drenched half-dust half-gravel road.

"I don't think I'm gonna make it," Eric mused out loud during one break for water maybe a third of the way back up.

Miraculously, one foot in front of the other did get us to the top eventually but not without a fair amount of whining from everyone except Emerson who was happy as a clam.

My dad's friend Christine

On Friday night we saw Christine Brewer, and several other singers, perform with the SF symphony. This was our last set of tickets for our subscription and though we practically had to invite someone in off the street to babysit for Emerson we were able to get there.

We were particularly excited to see Christine not only because she might be the best soprano alive today but because my dad thinks of her as a friend. Christine ended up getting connected to my grandmother through the Obama campaign and they stayed in touch and eventually connected in person at a panel Christine spoke at before one of her performances which my father and grandmother attended - after which my father was not shy about introducing himself and taking a photo with her.

To her credit, she has been very gracious and my father has a growing collection of photos with Christine and various family members following her performances in Chicago, and possibly other locations. For example, here she is with my brother, my father and his neighbor friend Gloria. (Christine is in red.)

So I practically felt like I knew here when she walked out on stage on Friday night. She was absolutely wonderful and the performance was a true pleasure. We definitely went out on a high note with the SF symphony!

Unlike my father, I did not elbow my way backstage after the show to introduce myself and take a picture with her. Sorry Dad. I'm sure you're a little disappointed.

Zoom zoom

As we were walking up our block in the early evening, we heard an unexpected noise: it sounded like something going really fast.

It was a twenty-something hispanic guy wearing all black riding a skateboard full blast down our pretty steep street while balancing on one leg. If I had to guess, I would say he was going thirty miles an hour. But keep in mind I am not a very good judge of speed, so that's probably got a decent margin of error.

The point is: he was going FAST!

We watched him coast all the way to the bottom of the hill where it flattened out, then he turned the corner and our private mini-X-games event was over.

Leaving

Now that everyone knows that we move to Florida on July 31, our status is officially "leaving."

I think this is why I put off telling people for a long time. The time between now and our flight to Tampa has become purgatory: we are still around but all people can think about or talk to us about is the upcoming move and there is no way to just enjoy the present moment.

At its worst, we can feel people choosing not to invest any more time or energy in us because we will so soon be too far away to be relevant.

And I suppose we are guilty of it as well. How we choose to spend our time is now filtered through a lens of "is this worth doing before we leave." And while it sort of makes me happy that we have at least one dinner on our calendar with new people we don't know yet, part of me wonders if that even makes sense.

Eric and I started dating when he was in DC-SF purgatory - a particularly tricky year-long version of this geographical limbo. It almost kept us from starting to date. But we forced ourselves to simply live in the moment and know that the future would resolve itself, and of course it has.

You'd think that being as transient as I have been for the past 15 years (no more than 3 years in one place at a time) I would be better at this than I am. But as much as I love embracing the new adventures that come with moving, I really hate leaving.

Underpants police

On my way out to St Louis this week I discovered a new way to get pulled aside for additional screening: wear a slightly poofy skirt.

I was actually on the phone with a client while in the longest security line ever at SFO and when I got to the front of the line I told him to hold on just a moment and I would be right back, then I set the muted phone in the bin and pushed it into the scanner and stepped through the metal detector. Nothing beeped but the woman motioned me into the large glass box.

Then no one paid attention to me for several minutes. I was soooo tempted to do a silent performance in my personal mime cell but just as I was about to start, the secondary screener came over.

She explained that she needed to do a "lower half only" pat-down.

Is it the skirt? I asked.

Affirmative. Too puffy. Who knows what I could be hiding in there?

When she had confirmed I wasn't concealing anything other than my own nakedness and underpants under my skirt, I was released.

"I'm so sorry," I said as soon as I got my phone off mute. He was still there and he was actually very understanding.

"Knowing TSA, I thought it could have been a lot longer," he said.

Number 2

Debuting about two weeks before or after December 11, 2011. Until this child's birth (or at least until we learn its gender) we are calling it: Groucho.

What's in a name

Last night we had a PhD student over to our place to talk about names. She is doing her doctoral dissertation on how people choose names for their children and is looking to interview 60 families about their decision process. We thought it would be nice to help a student out, plus we got $20 for the interview. She also recorded our conversation on a digital recorder which made me feel both more interesting and more important than I know myself to be, but it was fun while it lasted.

She started by having us each talk about our own names and how we feel about them. Eric didn't have a strong feeling about his name but said he liked it.

"As a kid it was good because the only thing it rhymes with is 'generic' and that wasn't an insult kids got very fired up about," he shared.

In contrast, Ellie rhymes with "belly" and "like a bowl full of jelly" as well as "smelly" which are particularly unfortunate for a chubby girl with poor hygiene.

But I actually like my name a lot and in spite of a psychic I went to a few years ago telling me that I would choose to go by a new name starting around October 2010, I am actually quite happy to keep it.

We shared the name brackets that we used to inform our choice of Emerson, though not as directly as some might have hoped. She dug into why we liked certain names, what we liked about them and what we thought was important in a name, and even gave us a list of 10 names each for girls and boys and had us rate them and then explain why.

In the end she summed up what we were looking for in a name as "an established (ie not made up) name that is not too popular but not weird."

I think that's pretty close. And I still plan to scan her final thesis to see if she mentions our names anywhere.

While we were out of touch

During my hiatus from regular blogging a few memorable things did occur. One of them was me getting to meet Harrison Ford in person. It was at a gala for Conservation International which I attended with several colleagues, one of whom was bold enough to march the group of us up to Harrison and ask that he take a photo with us.

This is where I would like to insert a photo of me with the Harrison Ford (well, Indiana Jones) life-size cardboard cutout that we had in our dorm suite sophomore year of college. Perhaps I will find it in my continued garage clean out effort.

Sign of things to come