Fluid Flow

Lets start this at the beginning. After moving to San Jose, I discovered the San Jose Giants Minor League Baseball team. I fell in love.

In 2004, I purchased season tickets for the SJ Giants. The day after the season ended, I started SJ Giants Fans (http://www.sjgiantsfans.org/). 2005 was a great season. The website got a following and my photo graced the MiLB website when the SJ Giants won the Cal League.

Fast forward to September 2007. I’ve been promoting the SJ Giants for three years now. As a season ticket holder, I missed four games out of seventy in 2007.

But as we win the Cal League Championship again, the fans hear the that the front office is unhappy that season ticket holders aren’t showing up to games. Too many empty seats on the video feed.

Then came the letter. That was the first blog post where I criticized the front office. I also vented a bit in the comments.

I also commented that the City gave the SJ Giants Baseball Club a sweet deal. Though that was really more of a rant against the City.

And then the was the post that got me banned. I wrote about it on the site two weeks later..

So that’s the story. Two years later I am still banned from the ball park. It is a bother, because I miss the game and I miss my friends there. But it is what it is.

The Big One is inevitable. Catastrophe is not.: “The message for Southern California from the horror in Haiti should be — but probably won’t be — to prepare for disaster.

(Via L.A. Times - California | Local News.)

I actually started this post before this LA Times article came out. But it is an easy post to work off of. While we don’t expect a natural disaster will turn our cities into third world countries, we must expect it.

There is a difference between a natural disaster and a man-made one. We make man-made disasters by being unprepared.

I am not sure why. Perhaps it’s because I am approaching 50 (in a year or so), perhaps it’s because I am reading Farley Mowat’s “final” memoir, I am not sure.

It certainly isn’t because I have something to write. I have never had a desire to write. Prose and poetry do not leap from my keyboard. The only time that my writing has achieved passing marks is in journalism, geology, and one composition class at UCSB, where the teaching assistant did not mind my simple and direct approach.

It isn’t much to hang your hat on.

But I do like telling stories and I have lived long enough to have a few.

So I have started an outline. The two top headings are “Timeline” and “Themes”. I don’t know where this is going to go, but it seems worthy of exploration.

I fired up the truck this afternoon. Suddenly it is sounding more like a Sopwith Camel than a Toyota 4Runner.. After my WTF moment, I looked under the truck and a 3 foot section of tail pipe was missing in front of the muffler.

Strange, why would some one take a hacksaw to a three foot section of muffler pipe. Was this some kind of prank?

Sadly, the answer is no, because my catalytic converter lived within that three foot section. Apparently the metals in the converter are worth enough these days to steal.

4runners and other SUV/trucks are an easy mark because you can slide under them, cut the tail pipe with a cordless hacksaw and be gone in a few minutes.

Of course it takes me a few minutes to climb under my 4runner, but that’s I probably why I never went into crime.

So once again, I am called to stimulate our economy, by purchasing something that I would have otherwise not.

And this might be the stimulus that keeps me spending, because now I am thinking about an alarm system, anti-theft devices, and enhanced insurance.

Alternatively, I can lock my truck in a garage and buy a Prius.

Either way, I am stimulating the economy.

If you want to donate to my efforts to get us back on track, let me know.

So I got to do my part for the economy the other day. I plunked down $400 for new driver’s and rear windows. I will also get to spend $150+ for a new/used iPod, $200 for a new sleeping bag, and $3-5k for a new bike.

All of this spending thanks to one reasonably small act of crime. Judging from the business that the auto glass place was doing, it seems like crime may be rivaling federal investments to promote consumer spending.

Crime hurts those of us who have been putting off investments while our income is down or non-existant. I was quite a happy with my 17 year old truck, my 20 year old sleeping bag, 6 year old iPod, and 5 year old bike. I was fine with what I had and had no plans to replace them.

Now I have to replace them, or do without. It just sucks.

California experiment successfully concluded:

Around this time 10 years ago I was wandering around downtown San Jose on a sunny Saturday. I had a day to kill after my interviews at the San Jose Mercury News so I roamed the city’s mostly empty streets…

…now we’re working through our second bust, which has pummeled the paper and put many friends out of work. In three weeks I’m joining them.

(Via Tom Mangan’s home page.)

Tom Mangan, who’s Two-Heel Drive blog introduced me to the hiking blog genra as well as a number of Bay Area hikers is leaving the Bay Area.

Happy Trails.

Well, I survived another 4th of July. They always seem to be busy days for me. A few years ago I took over 500 photos on the 4th, starting out at our neighborhood parade and picnic and ending with a San Jose Giants baseball game. In between, I downloaded images and cleared my cards so I could keep shooting.

This year I didn’t shoot that much, but it was just as hectic and required more driving. I started the morning in Monterey, then drove up to San Jose for the Naglee Park 4th of July parade. I wasn’t planning on returning to my old neighborhood, but then they named me Grand Marshal for the parade. You don’t say no to such an honor.

In years past, I was on the sidelines taking pictures of the parade. This year I had the unique perspective of being in the parade and taking pictures of the spectators. It was fun to turn things around. As always, you can view my shots on flickr.

After the parade and a side trip to Supreme Dog, we headed over to the park for the block party. The coals were just right, so our dogs were among the first on the grill. After 15 minutes and a few singed arm hairs, lunch was ready.

As usual, neighbors provided a wonderful assortment of potluck salads and deserts. Sadly, I couldn’t partake in the potluck as I had of another engagement to get to.

My 6th grade class decided to hold a reunion on the 4th after 36 years. Why would you have a 6th grade reunion and schedule it for the 4th of July? Well, our class was special or gifted or just plain nuts.

So I left the Naglee Park celebration early and headed over the hill to get stuck in traffic.

I crawled, along with half of the South Bay’s population, from the third turn past the summit down to Scott’s Valley. With no end in site, I left my South Bay brethren and took back roads from Scott Valley over to the coast just south of Davenport (I knew my degree at UCSC would come in handy someday).

When I finally arrived, it was to half a dozen folks trying to guess who I was. Apparently the beard and sunglasses weren’t enough, John jumped up and pinned a name tag on me, with my name and a picture of a face that I have seen 36 years.

We had a great dinner and it was fun to catch up with my classmates. But toward the end of the evening, I started to feel much the way I felt through most of those years, outside the various little groups.

Most of who I am has been defined by the last 30 years, not the first 18. So while I feel a kinship to these folks, I am pretty sure that they have no idea who I am.

I left the party earlier than I had planned to and headed back to Monterey.

I was up early the next morning and heading back to Aptos to meet up with 6th grade classmates Craig and Dan for a bike ride up into the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park.

This was much more my speed. We had a great time, as Craig described it “watching Tom suffer”. Craig and Dan set a leisurely pace and we talked the whole climb.

This was a better venue for me. Somehow it is easier for me to open up and talk about myself when I am gasping for air.

Anyway, it was a great weekend and I am looking forward to the next get together with my 6th grade class. But I think we should make the bike ride obligatory.

On Saturday, I got out on Coyote Creek to help clean it once again. The occasion was Nation River Clean-up Day and the Friends of Coyote Creek joined a number of groups in cleaning the creek and its banks.

We had a big crowd on the water and our boat spend most of the day acting as a garbage scow, ferrying the trash pulled by our volunteers in canoes to our dump site. If fact, I don’t think that I pulled anything out of the creek myself.

There was one logistical problem when we discovered the boat filled with trash would not fit under a downed tree, so we had to offload half our collection and then haul it overland to the dump site.

All told, we collected about a ton of trash, including 4 shopping carts, a couple of bicycles, a few bike tires.

The creek seemed cleaner than usual, though we couldn’t get to a couple of large trash rafts. We didn’t find any car tires, which I think might be a first.

I am guessing that the lack of trash in the creek is more the result of blockages upstream and a generally mild winter (with few storms washing trash into the creek) than anything else.

But I am pleased to say that the reach that we worked on is cleaner than it was. Many thanks to all of our volunteers

Three falcon chicks hatch atop San Jose City Hall: “For a mother who just watched three offspring hatch — and is watching her fourth egg — Clara appears to be in excellent health today from her perch atop San Jose City Hall.”

(Via Mercury News: News.)

More good news. Once again, I think that $300 million for a platform for falcons to nest is money well spent. For all the stuff that goes on inside the building, I am not so sure.

Update: Make that four new falcons. I don’t think even Ford could do as well.

California Is Due for Katrina-Style Disaster: “The Hayward Fault in the San Francisco Bay Area has a major quake on average every 140 years. The last one occurred 140 years ago. The next one could be a disaster of Hurricane Katrina proportions.

(Via Wired News.)

The last big earthquake on the Hayward Fault was 140 years ago. Now would be a good time to make sure that your emergency plan and supplies are up to date.