I played around a little with the main page. How does it look on your browser? Crappy? Ok? Ok, but crappy?

A friend of mine offered her horse for me to ride in the Quicksilver Fall endurance ride tomorrow so I get to wake up at 4am to drive down to Grant Ranch in San Jose! :) Thankfully managed to recover from my crippling soreness from earlier this week and I'm ready to hop back into the saddle. Wish me luck!

Moo.

wtf, that image scares me! Eeek! LOST tonight!!

This is an awesome google tool. It tells you the approximate distance of points that you designate on the google map. Great for trails.. just press 'start recording' then double click point-to-point the distance you want to measure.

http://www.sueandpaul.com/gmapPedometer/

Oakland Hills Elevator Ride story up!

I've never been so sore in my life.. Matt gave me a massage yesterday which felt great (with a happy ending), but today I'm hobbling around just as bad as I was yesterday. I've taken 2 way expired Advils, 4 Aleve's, and 2 ibprofen's (oi, my liver) since Saturday night and I'm still horribly sore! We thought walking would help so yesterday we walked about 10 blocks to the Pacifica Fog Fest which felt like the longest walk of my life!

I'm soooooooooo excited about my latest horsey purchase. I haven't been this excited in a while!! Anyways, I purchased a saddle off of ebay and re-sold it for a few hundred dollars profit, so I went ahead and made the splurge to buy one of these:


A full sheepskin saddle cover for my endurance saddle. My sorry little saddle cover is 1/3rd the size and is pretty flattened after 4 years of riding in it.. but this new cover goes all the down the fenders and is absolutely LUXURIOUS. I can't wait to try it out this weekend at the Oakland Hills ride!

On another note, I also ordered a rump rug that was supposed to be in the package.. and it looks like after talking to the owner of the company I ordered it from, that someone tampered with the box and stole the rump rug and added additional packing material in its place. WTF, who the heck would steal a rump rug? Anyhow, that sucks.

Can you believe it's raining here? What's the deal? I always remembered September/October being pretty toasty. Maybe my internal self is off-balance since moving to Pacifica which is a complete change of climate from the east bay. Oh well, I'm not complaining. It got a little hot here yesterday (climbed into the mid-80s, yikes) and I felt totally oily all day long. Yucko.

I don't get it. Last night I got up about 6 times to go pee in the middle of the night. Today I've gone to the bathroom maybe 3 times since 7am this morning. Damn you, overactive bladder.

This past weekend was pretty mellow. Matt finally got his truck fixed (thank God!). I was sooo getting tired of driving back and forth from the city. I went on a long ride Saturday am, then conked out for a while. We discovered two, yes TWO more edible restaurants in Pacifica.

El Toro Loco - Peruvian food with YUMMY burritos. The salsa they serve will kick your ass.. mmm.

Some Hawaiian Restaurant - cheap food that serves spam. The smoked pork was very good and any place that serves spam is A+ in my book!

Isabella and I have the East Bay 25 mile ride coming up this weekend then the Quicksilver Fall 25 mile ride in Grant Ranch the weekend after. Busybusy!

Click here to sign my Graffiti Wall! (Powered by
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OMG this picture is awesome. Elijah Wood at an NYC art fair with his gf.

Damn you logic!

Your IQ Is 120

Your Logical Intelligence is Below Average Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius Your General Knowledge is Above Average

A Quick and Dirty IQ Test

You Are the Very Gay Winnie the Pooh!

Come on, he doesn't wear pants! And he's a little too obsessed with Christopher Robin

What Gay Childhood Icon Are You?

Haha, Matt will love this:

Your Summer Ride is a Toyota Prius

Sure you're a little sensible and quite green But no one enjoys outdoors more than you do!

What's Your Summer Ride?

It was October and the Indians on a remote reservation asked their new Chief if the coming winter was going to be cold or mild. Since he was a Chief in a modern society he had never been taught the old secrets. When he looked at the sky he couldn't tell what the winter was going to be like.

Nevertheless, to be on the safe side he told his tribe that the winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the village should collect firewood to be prepared. But being a practical leader, after several days he got an idea. He went to the phone booth, called the National Weather Service and asked, "Is the coming winter going to be cold?" "It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold," the meteorologist at the weather service responded.

So the Chief went back to his people and told them to collect even more firewood in order to be prepared. A week later he called the National Weather Service again. "Does it still look like it is going to be a very cold winter?" "Yes," the man at National Weather Service again replied, "it's going to be a very cold winter."

The Chief again went back to his people and ordered them to collect every scrap of firewood they could find. Two weeks later the Chief called the National Weather Service again. "Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?"

"Absolutely," the man replied. "It's looking more and more like it is going to be one of the coldest winters ever." "How can you be so sure?" the Chief asked. The weatherman replied, "The Indians are collecting firewood like crazy."

I'm finally getting a chance to write about the mishap of a camping trip that Matt and I took this past weekend. At around 11am on Sunday we decided we'd go and spend the night outside somewhere in the wilderness. On Labor day weekend. I had gotten the inkling he would be wanting to do this, so in my obsessive planning nature, I went to the California state park website earlier in the week to see which, if any, campsites would be open. Fortunately, there were quite a few state parks which had openings (because of the fuel prices, I'm assuming). Big Basin SP seemed to be the closest so at around 2pm, we assembled all of our camping belongings (which incidently took up almost half the bed of the truck, wtf - why is there always so much junk you have to bring when you go camping??) and we headed on our merry little way.

After miles and miles of curvy road, we finally made it up to Big Basin. The majestic redwoods would've been more impressive if it weren't for the 1000's of families and kids overflowing the campgrounds. As expected, we got up to the campground office, and everything was filled to the brim. We obtained a sheet of paper that said, "Big Basin Campground Full??" and listed the other campsites within a 50 mile radius. *sigh* So off we go again, this time Matt driving the miles and miles of curvy road. I called just about every campground listed and FINALLY was able to secure the last walk-in campground spot at Butano Creek SP. Once we got there, we found why it was the last walk-in campground spot. It was possibly the furthest distance you could get from the road. So we got on the task of hefting half the truck bed full of crap over to our campsite (with me feeling a little queasy from all the twisty turny roads). It wasn't long before nightfall hit and Matt was able to get the tent and air mattress set up in record time. We had our ramen with spam, kimchee, and tofu (dinner of camping champions) and roasted marshmellows at our campfire into the night. Little did we know that was about the most peace the night would offer us that evening.

For the past three days, us neglectful/stupid owners had not let out China to run or expend any sort of energy except the 5 feet from our front door to the dirt mound where she is expected to potty. Add onto that about 4-5 hours of driving where she just slept the whole time sleeping in the back seat, and we had a firecracker waiting to explode. As Matt and I drifted into sleep that night, China had other plans. She stood and stared outside, she paced the 2x2 feet of tent space which was designated hers, got bored at staring outside and stared at us (which was very very creepy), tried to crawl onto our air mattress with us (which was the only way she would sleep, but then the 100 lb animal would take up half the bed). We got little more than 2 hours sleep that night with that incessant animal on a mission to keep us up and punish us for not letting her out.

When the birds started squaking, Matt eventually got tired of it all and rose out of bed around 6am to let her outside. All he had to do was whisper, "go!" and China sped around like a deflated balloon, whipping and turning all over the campground at mock speed. I had my earplugs in and tried to get a little more sleep in. At around 9am Matt came into the tent, crouched over me, and admonished, "OH MY GOD I'M SO BORED, LET'S GOOOOOoooo..." So I dragged my tired ass out of bed and ate breakfast wearily while Matt loaded the truck. I was so exhausted on the way home.. then I began to get very nauseous and queasy from the curvy roads. We arrived home and although we were supposed to go over to Walt's that evening, we instead collapsed and slept for a few hours, trying to recuperate our energy.

Despite our resolution to keep China up and not let her sleep in revenge for what she did to us (every time she'd close her eyes we'd yell, "China!! GET UP GET UP GETUP!!!"), we gave up after a while and that friggin dog slept ALL DAY LONG on Monday. Bitch.

Lesson learned. Next time we go camping, run the shit out of the dog beforehand.

Correction to my last post. As of today there are 144 confirmed dead, hundreds more missing. Poop on that article I read that misinformed me!

Matt wants to go camping this weekend, but I'm not too sure about it. However, he obliged me this evening by going to see that penguin movie that I had been pestering him to take me to for a while. The movie was very cute.. but for some reason I expected more. The story was pretty amazing though.. little penguins waddling/sliding 70 miles several times a year! That's crazy talk. Anyhoo, I think he liked it, but in return he's going to drag me out to sleep somewhere in the wilderness. egads.

I can't even begin to express my disappointment in this country's leadership. Billions of dollars have gone into preventing an outside attack from destroying our country, but when a natural disaster hits, it takes a week before any serious action is taken. Today Bush sent in the National Guard to "restore order" into New Orleans.. after thousands of corpses lie in the streets of the city, after women were raped, after disease is running rampant in the waters which are soaking the remaining refugees.

He refuses to withdraw troops from Iraq to send to New Orleans. This morning in an interview on one of those morning shows he stated, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." Yet in 2001 when the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

His approval ratings are the lowest of his presidency at 45% as of today. With this debacle of a rescue attempt, and the costs of fuel which have skyrocketed and affected everyone, I hope America will wake up and remember this in the 2008 election.

From a craigslist post: There's a line in a Hazel Dickens song that goes, "Working people get help from your own kind because your welfare ain't on a rich man's mind." It seems we have no choice now.

Please consider donating to any charity helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina. If you're a friend/family member of mine and would like to double your donation, please email me and let me know which agency and which amount you'd like to donate. My company will match your donation and you can pay me back anytime.