This morning Armen and I took the Caltrain from Mountain View to Bayshore with our bikes and then proceeded to ride them back to our apartments.

When we got to the Caltrain stop and purchased our tickets, I put in $11.50 for the both of us to ride one way through 3 Zones. We were rushing and worried we would miss the train so I just grabbed the first thing that popped out of the machine and we booted it over to the platform. A moment later I looked at the piece of paper and saw that it only claimed to be one ticket for $5.75. Armen ran back to the machine (very fast!) and there was nothing else in the dispensing area. Because we had in fact paid the correct amount, we still got on the train and I secretly hoped that we would not be asked to provide proof of payment. Two stops before our final destination a guy came through asking to see tickets. When he got to us, he did not believe the story about the machine and in my nervousness I blurted out that this was our first time on Caltrain and that we were Canadian. Well! That changes everything because it turns out that he is also Canadian (from Winnipeg) and that he has family in Cobourg. Phew! He let us off the hook and was very nice from then on.

Armen had purchased his bike from Target for $89 yesterday. At the time I had suggested to him that he reconsider this idea because any bike for $89 is probably not mechanically sound and it’s also politically dubious. About 1.5 miles from the apartments, after having strange rear wheel issues for about 6 miles, the bike finally crapped out. We inspected the bike to try and figure out why turning the pedals was not turning the rear wheel. The gears seemed to be loose from the hub of the back tire so we took it off and when I tried to inspect the gears, a ton of bearings poured out onto the sidewalk. That pretty much cinched the deal and I left Armen at a gas station to go home and get the car.

Needless to say we returned the bike and now Armen is going to look into either renting from Stanford for the summer or purchasing a better road bike so that we can do more rides.

For anyone interested, here is the map of our ride:

4 weeks in, 13 left. Wow. Feels like any day now it will be halfway to done. This is where it’s at right now:

I’m watching “Alice in Wonderland” out of the corner of my eye, the laptop is so hot that I have to prop it up on a pillow and tomorrow morning I will be going for pancakes with some of the interns. This week was different than the last three because now there are about 20 interns. The big batch (9 from Carnegie Mellon) landed last weekend, including my roommates. So things have been hectic.

I spent all of last weekend away from the apartment. On Saturday I drove down to Santa Cruz to go wine tasting with Hannah. We hit about 6 different wineries and I got to taste a lot of wines and even experienced a futures barrel tasting at Soquel.

My favourite winery was Bonny Doon mostly because of their really beautiful labels and artistic leanings. Other wineries really couldn’t compete in that area – they tend to have one template for all their labels and only change the text as needed. You can see an example of a Bonny Doon label in my slideshow, but also I would encourage people to look at their website, it’s pretty awesome. I bought a few packs of their leftover labels to stick all over my computer.

After the wineries, Hannah took my past the Santa Cruz surf museum where there is also a rock covered in seals. Mesmerizing….as I adored the seals, Hannah told me a little story about when she lived across the street:

With a couple of bottles of wine in the trunk, I headed up to San Francisco to meet Joey post-work. We had an easy night of watching movies and eating the most intense pizza I have ever had. It was 3 inches of melted cheese on what seemed to be a deep-fried crust, if such a thing is possible. Um, I shouldn’t know that this kind of take-out exists, it’s dangerous to a melted cheese lover such as myself. You can see a picture of it (a small!) in the slideshow:

On Sunday morning we picked up Sam and Anna Joy to drive up into Marin and go to Bass Lake. There is a nice little 3 mile hike which takes you to the lake. Since it’s inland a bit, there’s not too much of a crowd, and certainly nothing resembling a public beach. Watching out for poison oak, we wandered in to the furthest depths where there’s supposed to be a rope swing. Just as we arrived, a park ranger was talking to some guys about a recent death in the lake and he proceeded to cut the rope off right in front of us!

Next time we go there, we’ll bring a new rope. It wasn’t conclusive that the rope swing was involved in the death, the park ranger was just being a keener and taking out anything that could be dangerous.

Still game to swim, Joey went down the steep slope first and got herself psyched up to jump in. I’ve discovered what makes Joey take action if she hesitates:

Monday was all about card playing and teaching Kim, Naomi and Hillie how to euchre. I’m always happy with hours spent playing cards. A perfect long weekend all around.

This weekend I hope to do some quieter, at-home stuff like reading and then also on Sunday taking the Caltrain to SF and then biking back here. It’s about 36 miles, and will take about 3 hours. That will be good practice for the triathlon I’m planning to do in August.

Time for bed.

It’s been another fun filled week in sunny California. Seriously sunny – we had a little heat wave where the temp was about 100 degrees Fahrenheit and that’s almost 40 degrees Celsius!

In the past week I’ve finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” which I did quite enjoy even though I found her to be a little judgy sometimes, and way too flowery often. However, she’s patient and observes little things that I never do and I enjoyed seeing gardening from her perspective. As someone who kills plants whenever they are near, it’s a form of escapism to go into her world – and it’s a beautiful, appealing world. Furthers my notions of packing up when school is done and finding somewhere I can be a computer geek and also raise chickens, goats, sheep and learn to make cheese.

Inspired by the book, and all the other food related literature I’ve been devouring as of late, I went to the Mountain View farmers market two Sundays ago, and this past Sunday I met Naomi at the Alemany Farmers Market to pick up some fresh produce to bring to Kim and Hillie’s house. I had this plan to make them some snacks entirely from what was available. As well as produce, there was a great one woman band:

Boy was I not disappointed! There were pink mushrooms, orange cauliflower, fresh organic fennel, blue potatoes (which I love), can you see that I’m going for colour?! Also I picked up some sage goat cheese, knowing that Kim was mostly on a goat/sheep diet right now. These items resulted in the dishes you see below…oh yeah, there was some asparagus too.

After our pretty simple fare, Kim and Hillie proceeded to ignore me and play with their iPhones…naw – not really – but they sure did make me jealous.

I really kinda want an iPhone…and no, it won’t make me any more likely to answer a phone. It will just make me more likely to Geocache.

The next day was “Bay to Breakers” – a regular event in the city that draws out the weirdness in a predominantly young, heterosexual population. It was a sight to behold. On top of snapping pictures of costumes that interest me, I also enjoyed taking in the scenery as we walked from one side of SF (the bay) to the end of Golden Gate Park (the breakers) a total of 12Km during which we walked for 3 hours and 15 mins. The slide show below contains some of my favourite pictures from the event including salmon who walked “upstream”, Elvis impersonators doing a mass pee break, and Spiderman. Something that I find both amazing and confusing is the “Yes on A” campaign. Maybe if I was living here I would pick up on what the intricacies of that proposition were, but since I don’t, I think it’s funny to be pushing such a simple phrase that suggests nothing of what it’s about. “Yes on A!” … sure, why not?

A few choice moments were seeing the sun break through the clouds at 7am by Embarcadero, meeting an adorable little beagle, and seeing the building with all the furniture stuck on the outside:

The icing on the cake, in Golden Gate park after walking for 3 hours – Surf Rabbanim and Thing 1 through 8 (from Dr. Seuss):

On Wednesday night I got to attend a birthday party for Kim who looked so healthy and happy, it doesn’t seem at all like she just got that kidney 2 weeks ago…

Finally, this week at work the Mozilla Store needed some new pictures in preparation for the release of Firefox 3 and so a few of the interns participated. Here you see my friend Armen showing his love to the Fox…and the Fox hanging around. That costume is getting around…recently the Firefox completed a Triathlon.

Okay, that’s this week’s update. It’s a long weekend and I’m going to spend much of it outside and in the city, so there will be plenty more photos next week.