Category: life

Cometas

Something has happened here, the weather has changed, I’m really busy at work, and addicted to desserts.

First the weather, sometime in the last week, almost on cue with the arrival of August, the skies became more blue and the sun came out a bit more. Everyone told me that August is the Month of the Kite here, in part because of the winds that come and blow the clouds away. So far it’s true. This weekend I’m heading to Villa de Leyva (not far from Bogotá) for some hiking, camping, and relaxation. This small town is also the host of Colombia’s most famous annual kite festival. Though it is not this weekend, I am sure the place will not disappoint.

Part of the reason I am excited about this trip is that it will last until Tuesday. There is another holiday here and everyone has Tuesday off, so some people (like me) are making it a 4 day weekend. It’s great except when I turn to my calendar and I have little time remaining here. My project is picking up and starting to roll. Part of it involves sitting down with some of the City’s decision makers with regard to parks, and so that I must get down before I leave, other GIS and DB management, statistical stuff can be done from Atlanta.

Finally, I hinted at it earlier but I am getting used to the sweets and desserts that are a staple of the Colombian diet. Is this a good thing? It’s a delicious thing. Aside from desserts the most amazing thing about the cuisine is the array of fruits that exist here. It doesn’t help that I am bad with foods in the first place. I don’t know the names of a lot of fruits and vegetables in English, but I believe that the fruits here don’t have names, as far as I know, in the US and that is making it hard to remember what I’ve tried. Maybe I’ve had tomarillo, ochuva, lulu, guanabana, lucuma, and maracuyá but I am not entirely sure. I will try harder to remember exactly what I am eating and drinking. If it’s a fruit in the produce section, it’s a juice in the restaurant.

Of course, this was written on a rainy morning and I just had a donut.

Villa de Leyva
Festival de las Cometas
Photos from the trip

Media Maraton

I would not have believed it, had I not seen it with my own eyes. It’s amazing how experiencing something, even in the second person, can completely change your ideas of what’s possible. When I was visiting Machu Picchu a few years back I had this feeling, where wonder and confusion collide and even in your imagination you find it difficult to recreate. Someone told me we’re so far removed from the possibilities of man power, en masse, that we can’t really picture how stones were moved up there without machinery. In a weekend a few firsts I was happy to experience that feeling a few more times.

On Thursday night I finally managed to find my way into a futbol game, but perhaps not as you’d imagine. We played at a place called Futbol Cinco and there were ironically four fields. They were located in a former warehouse in a well-to-do neighborhood. Two fields on each of two floors with parking on the ground floor. The group I was a part of paid for an hour on the field and has it reserved every Thursday at 9. I think this is an idea waiting to happen in the US. Where, in Atlanta, could we find a location ripe for such a proposition? You need a structurally sound building and a crowd looking for places to play (places there are lit, dry and warm well into the night after work). Hmmm, maybe somewhere on Buford Highway, but I could also see something like this occupying the second and third floors of some space in Atlantic Station, make it all sleek with lots of walls of glass so people outside can watch and the fields can be used for anything, indoor football or futbol, field hockey, etc. B. Leary, call me.

On Saturday I went for a tour of a few parts of the city with a friend from the university. We started from my place in the south and headed north on Transmilenio. This is Bogotá’s Bus Rapid Transit system (BRT) modeled after a similar system in Curitiba, Brazil. If you’re in a traffic-choked US city or in a planning program you’ve probably heard the term thrown around. I had heard much talk of it in Atlanta, but this was my first time aboard for a ride. It works like a subway with buses running on dedicated routes. In Bogotá you enter the system at stations and pay a flat fare to go anywhere the system will take you. I have to see that it is very clean, efficient and pleasant. Also, it’s far cheaper than putting in subway infrastructure.

For lunch on Saturday we went to a Bogotá landmark, everyone knows it, and everyone knows it a little bit differently. It is actually just outside Bogotá in Chia and it’s called Andres Carne de Res. There is little I can do to describe it, expect to tell you that it was enormous, loud, delicious, exciting and I could have spent another 3 hours there. Jorge, who took me, told me that all told the restaurant employs an estimated 1,000 people; that includes cooks, waiters, parking attendants, actors, musicians, admin, etc. I went for lunch and every account I’ve heard since labels it a completely different brand of fun after dark, but I would say it’s a great time whenever you go.

I finished Saturday with a Futbol game in the city. Bogotá has two teams, Santa Fe and Millonarios and Jorge is a huge Santa Fe fan. Unfortunately, the home team lost to the defending league champ from Medellin, Nacional. But I did hear a lot of bad words and got to experience my second South American live game. The first was in Buenos Aires two years ago. In both case I did not have a camera. In Argentina I thought better to leave it in the hostel not knowing where I might get tickets and this time I was advised that it might get confiscated because it contained batteries that could be thrown.

All of this was a the day before my first running event, the Bogota half marathon (and 10K). It also happened to be a day after I re-ruined my left ankle playing basketball. When I got home from my day out on Saturday I removed the soccer sock that I had tied around it for compressions and it looked like, well, like this. I took what little ice I could scrounge up and started RICE again. I had felt good most of the day but when I saw this I had second thoughts about running on it. For two days I slept with it raised, actually with both of my feet raised, as I sleep in a tapered sleeping bag. On Sunday it had evened out but was still a bit big, still without pain. So I went for it.

http://nikeplus.nike.com/nikeplus/v1/swf/scrapablewidget/rundetail.swfMy goal was to finish in under an hour and it took me a grad total of 57:30. I felt good about it. At first it was slow going as the streets were packed with people and there was little room to make any moves, but that actually made the trip go by faster. Also, the first 5K wound through tight streets and there was no way to see how far you had to go when you looked ahead. Toward the finish at Parque Simon Bolivar, the buildings disappeared and you were offered a clear view of thousands filling the street for the next kilometer in front of you. Around 40,000 people participated in this one, now I can start thinking about the full 21K next year.

By the end of the weekend I had to completely alter my understanding of so many things. Maybe we could play soccer at Atlantic Station or build a subway with a bus. I still couldn’t understand who would throw batteries at a sports event (Ohio State Fans). Maybe I could even run a marathon, or at least a half; IronMan is still a long lost Inca capital for me.

Bogotá Media Maraton
Marathon Pics
Andres Carne de Res
Santa Fe Futbol
Transmilenio

From Gelato to Garbage

It’s amazing how a small alteration can completely change your concept of something. A simple demonstration of this came to me today as I fought off the midday ice cream craving I’m forming. Ice cream, the words, the thoughts, the object itself, likely bring about certain feelings of enjoyment, memories of deliciousness, maybe your mouth begins to water. However, add one letter and you get lice cream. Feelings of desire turn to repulsion. But, how could we make this energy flow in the opposite direction and turn the figurative crazy monkey into crazy money.

I began to think about this as I worked on my project with perceptions of parks in neighborhoods. In the case of perceptions the correlations with other, more measurable factors, are almost always weak if they exist at all. One reason is that the ways we form perceptions differ from person to person. Likewise we all form perceptions using different pieces of information including personal history. In my analysis safety is one aspect we’re considering for its ability to confuse or change the relationship between what really exists in our neighborhoods and what we think is there (and consequently what we use and enjoy, or don’t). A criminal incident in your neighborhood will likely affect the amount of time you spend outside around the neighborhood, what facilities in the neighborhood you use and your freedom to act as see fit in your immediate surroundings.

Even if the incident happened to someone you don’t know, on a street you’ve never been on, and the person was caught it is likely that something about the way you think of your neighborhood changes. The incident will be there in your mind. Suddenly the actions of single person have economic implications for shops in the neighborhood, stress implications for the residents, activity implications for the kids. Public policy is interesting to me as it might be a way to influence or even make decisions (by no means involving only a single person) that affect people’s lives positively.

A couple important problems come up before we arrive at the Utopian future you may have already begun to imagine. In both, the analogies used above break down. First, the actions resulting from a decision for expenditure of public monies often take place over years, not hours like a crime. Second, figuring out exactly what people consider to positively affect their lives is difficult and again, entirely personal. But sometimes it’s more fun to examine smaller decisions that went the other way.

Two minor examples of odd decisions (either for the benefit of the public or not) have caught my attention and both involve garbage trucks. The first is an example from the private sector in Atlanta. Perhaps you’ve seen the bright pink DreamSan trucks making their way around town. The second is here in Bogotá, where when you hear a familiar xylophone rendition of She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain it’s likely the trash pickup and not the ice cream man. In each case, someone has tried to change the way that we think about this negatively perceived, though very necessary, service. Are they doing any good? How would we determine it, if they were?

Dreamsan Sanitation

Jungle Friend

When you’re in a new place, meeting people who will never see your life as it normally exists, pictures are a great way to show them who you are and more literally who your friends and family are. After going through my pics with a few new friends I have stumbled upon a couple of gems featuring my cat. I understand it might seem a bit weird to have photoed a cat, but bare with me; these make me laugh every time I see them.

I can’t figure out who he’s a fan of, but FILA is apparently part of the audience that ESPN (or in this case FOX) hopes to attract with all of its Yankee’s – Red Sox games each summer. Watch how he moves around to get comfortable and looks back as if to say “keep it down, there are wildcard implications here”. I wish I could say he does this all the time, but he’s decided that TV is pedestrian and now he just reads books.
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-1273391204580697451&hl=es

I thought this one would land him in the care of animal control and it still may. Somewhere along the way (in the frenzy of a pet shopping spree) we formed the idea that the house was too cold for our pets and instead of making everyone a little more comfortable with the thermostat, we’d help FILA out by getting him a vest made for little dogs. This picture is during one of the 5 minutes the vest was in action before being returned. I know all too well that his posture is an affirmation of what we already knew; this was a stupid idea. The house is warmer for it though. (please don’t take him away, animal control)

I have more but I’ll stop there. If you know this cat and have any comments or funny stories of interactions with him, please share. Stories form allergic parties who view cats as satan-spawn need not submit.

Exito


I first heard about Exito on Friday when I asked someone where I might go to buy a pair of socks. I figured that there must be a small tienda or slightly larger, more specialized footwear store or even an entire district not too far away. In Colombia, like many other cities in developing places, the density is impressive and most people walk so it’s not uncommon to be able to find what you need in a short trip. As I hinted at, sometimes you see guilds pop up. Down the street from me exists a strip of about 20 optical shops in a row. In old Hanoi the streets still retain the names (and some of the shops) of the businesses that reside there. If this type of thing exists and it’s a specialty item, like glasses, a lengthier trip will often be made to take advantage of the market forces and the expertise. But this is socks.

Saturday I went on a hike through the countryside with a group here at the University. Many students carried plastic bags to hold their lunches and garbage as the day went on. Many of the bags said Exito on them, including one I had grabbed from home that morning. Now my interest was piqued, Exito seemed to be a staple of Colombian commerce and something I should see first-hand.

Sunday I stumbled upon Exito. I was walking down the main street and passes what looked like a renovated building (about half a block) that was being made into a mall. As I passed I saw the sign for the parking garage in the signature yellow. In this regard it reminds me a bit of Ikea with their blue but what people most often relate it to is Walmart because they carry everything from food to appliances, car parts and even socks. While that is one good reason that Exito is Wal-mart, there are several good reasons for why it is not. First, I walked there. Second, I had to enter the pseudo-mall and then go up an escalator to enter the store, which was not immediately visible from the street. Third, I had to go up more escalators to get to the second floor. This is what a Wal-mart would look like if they tried to put one in Manhattan. The fact that they’ve adapted their store design to fit into the dense urban fabric already would get them kicked out of Sam’s club faster than the Walton’s make their next billion. They are also set as anchors in the new malls that Bogotá seems to abound with. Finally, Exito is not the cheapest of the cheap. Colombians think it is surprisingly expensive (n=1).

A couple similarities do exist. As I said they carry everything from bananas to baby clothes to refrigerators. I went in looking for socks but found myself walking past a sad wall of HDTVs with nothing to broadcast in HD. Static-y programming looks the same in HD. Also, there are examples that resemble the US, big box, counterparts. I am interested on whether the design of the stores has evolved and they are moving away from the stand alone big box or if it’s just opportunistic. Also there are others following suit. Carrefour is one similar store that I have only seen through car window, standing alone, across a sea of parking. I have also been told of a Home Depot mimic called Home Center. I remember similar stores in Santiago, Chile. The fact is that in many cases the old, downtown sections of these cities remain dense, grid street patterns of development with multiple uses, however as the cities expand, people gain wealth, cars gain prominence and the scale of things change. I think paying close attention to these different development patterns is like reading the rings of a tree.

I have heard why I should hate Wal-mart and of movements to stop them from coming into neighborhoods, but maybe that’s just the way things are going. A lot of people do shop there, but is it because they have few other choices? Also, with everyone driving their cars is the big box thing so bad. What if we completely rethought the way we designed and arranged shopping centers? Take the mall in DC as an example; nobody has ever thought to come up with a pejorative term for those ‘big box’ monuments and museums that are all over the place. Of course I’m being a little extreme and the Mall doesn’t exactly plentiful parking… getting items from the store to your car or home could be troublesome but people could play kickball between Office Depot and Petsmart. Others could relax next to the reflecting pool that abuts Best Buy and Lowes. Just an idea. Of course, when we start making monuments out of shooping centers we have bigger problems. But sometimes it already feels that way.

Frontline had a really good episode on Walmart awhile ago, it can be seen here:
Frontline Walmart Episode

New Apartment = New Shoes

My preparation for this trip has been less than rigorous. As such, packing properly could be an impossible, if not aimless, task. My suitcase included a complete electrical adapter kit. However, one little visit to any of a number of websites may have told me that the outlets in Colombia are the same as in the US. Better safe than sorry in this case.

One important thing that I did think to look up before leaving was the weather. Being equatorial, individual regions of the country enjoy fairly consistent weather throughout the year; weather that one might assume to be very warm. However the weather in Bogotá is not hot at all. As I type this it’s about 2PM and a cloudy (semi-damp) 63 degrees. I really enjoy it so far but have slight issues with the cold floors. Having not been in a developing country for about 2 years I must have forgotten the ubiquity of construction materials of choice. And, truth be told, once again I did not give much thought to what the accommodations would be like before arriving.

Which brings me to the real purpose of this post, to provide some insight into my living arrangements. I am living in Central Bogotá which is also, paradoxically located on the eastern edge of the city adjacent to the mountains. It’s very near the university where I am working (Universidad de los Andes). It’s a rather young private university (less than 60 years) but is independent of both the church and the state – a rarity for Colombia and South America and universities in general. So far I am impressed with it and am gathering material for a post in the near future about some of the impressive architecture. More importantly my apartment is about a 5 min walk from campus (++).

Also, I have a roommate, Adriana. She assisted me with finding the place and provided some other housing options before I arrived. She’s a student in industrial engineering and is originally from Cali. She’s been helpful in showing me around school and helping me find where to buy groceries, etc. It’s also good to have someone around to try and speak Spanish with. I think I’d go nuts if I was living by myself, but she could very well be thinking that have a gringo around will get old fast, who knows (+).


Prior to my arrival she warned me that she had an extra room but no bed or closet. Partially on the advice of my professor here, I said no problema and arrived with a sleeping bag. At the last minute I left my sleeping pad at home to make more room. Again, I’m not sure what I expected but I can not state it more clearly than to say the floors are very hard, flat and cold. Thankfully there is the couch to sleep on while we wait for an air mattress from a professor (|).

With sleeping arrangements taken care of haphazardly, I can now focus on food. Space is at a premium here (as I should have known) and thus there is little room for food, let alone food for two people. We split a tiny fridge and I am realizing that much of the food I enjoy eating needs to go in the fridge. I miss my big American fridge at home. Nonetheless I am figuring out my way around this new kitchen (though not turning around in it) and discovering what I can prepare and what might be considered a little too daring. So far I have been motivated to make meals for myself at home since I don’t know anyone else and am still figuring out the neighborhood. Plus, I have my limit for eating out alone (|).

The only thing I can think to give a negative rating so far is the shower situation. Adriana has tried to explain to me how the hot water heater works. It’s really my fault for not having figured it out yet. Like last night she had turned it on and asked me to turn it off in 20 minutes. She told me it was so she’d have hot water in the morning and she wouldn’t be running the gas all the time. Because running the gas for an hour is like using 12 light bulbs for an hour. Cool, makes sense and I’m down with the energy savings vibe but I have no idea how she knows when to turn it on and when there’s enough hot water for a shower. When I got in there this morning well after she had gone to a 7:30 AM Saturday class there was not any hot water. I’ll work on getting to the bottom of this (-).

I feel like I should have known better what to expect but I guess it’s a reminder that you have to walk a mile in another man’s shoes and wipe your feet on the same entryway rug as him before you truly know his way.

Summertime

I have not been writing much lately and tonight began to consider why that is. There are actually several reasons. Most are centered around the fact that I have not been conducting my day to day in a manner that I am proud of. I have refrained from broadcasting such lesser points of my behavior but alas I have arrived at a point where I feel I must bear my soul in order to move on. Feel free to skip this post and return when better news is in the headlines (ie Transformers sneak preview coming up).

This summer and the last month in particular have seen me in a inexplicable spell of apathy and laze. My Spanish has hardly improved (I don’t think changing the menu language on my iPod is going to be enough), I have not run even a mile in preparation for an upcoming 10K, and there are still times when Lauren has to help out with housework. I have not done much in the way of yardwork, though the grass has not need cut in over a month. I did do some cleanup but it wasn’t too much. In part I blame the weather (heat mostly) but that’s a cop-out. I have tried to do a few other things around the house, but if you read this blog regularly you know the type of trouble I can get into when attics and insulation are involved.

My time has been taken up by a fury of activities that I engaged in rarely, if ever, in the months leading up to summer.
Video Games. I got an Xbox from a friend and FIFA 07 is slightly addictive, shall we say.
TV. A number of influences have led to this decline but mostly I have to attribute it to my increased access to DVR and HDTV at various people’s home (mannying, SB, and most recently in CT). In spite of this and the former I think my eyesight is holding up.
Soccer. I regularly play pick-up at Georgia Tech at 12:30 (M,W,F,Sat). Here is where my weather excuse fails me, I mean 12:30!!!.
Work. This is not a substantial commitment at the moment but I could use the money. I’m continuing my work with the Emory project I had worked with over the semester. No P-trak, just data this time.

And then there are the random things that come with summer: trips to be made (Providence last weekend), baseball games (5 this week for the visiting Sox and Tigers), and trips to the doctors’ offices (3 offices just this week). Mali had an eye infection after boarding and I fell off my bike. I managed to stay out of the emergency room but went to student health services the next day and was told that I had a slight fracture in my radius. I was then sent to an orthopedist/sports medicine clinic and was told that if it was fractured it was not serious enough for cast, etc. and instead they just drained the fluid from the joint and I was on my way. On a lighter note, it was a wholly surreal experience.

So… from this list I can easily see where more time needs to be devoted and which activities can be cut out. However, that’s only half the problem. I feel like my attitude has also changed in the last few months and I haven’t felt too good about some of the way I’ve acted. In general I offer too little respect to others and too much to myself.

One day I killed a snake that I found while cleaning up in the yard. I justified it as preventing a future attack on Mali, but kept thinking about tales of monks who, while digging foundations for buildings, move the worms they encounter to new dirt. I thought also of times I had captured flies in the house using a cup and a piece of paper so they could be set free later and I wondered what had (has) happened.

Later that same day I volunteered to give a man who was going door-to-door a ride to Autozone. I told him I needed 15 mins to do some things and he was gone when I came out. I found out later it was a scam and it was a good thing I had taken the extra time. I rode around the neighborhood for 20 min trying to find him just so I could verbally assault him as a way of releasing my anger, fear and vulnerability.

Today as Lauren graciously picked me up from the game the car behind her honked and I tried to wave them around her. I went on to respond vulgarly to some of the things he yelled at me and I am not proud of that. And all this only hours (4 hours in the constant 95 degree sun [weather is not an excuse]) after we picked up four out-of-towners who were wearing Tiger’s garb and waiting for a bus that I am not sure would have come or taken them to the game.

Forward will I go, as we all must. Patience, humility, forgiveness, and less video games.

Nine-Eleven times a Millionith; 0.000911

For me it’s always easy to remember the moments of intense nervousness, full of adrenaline, and a need for action. Specifically I am talking about replaying emergencies and tense moments in my head. Especially those involving self-injury seem to be the most vivid, carrying with them their added urgency. Yesterday saw one such moment at the Vargo-Stockman household.

I had taken to the attic for some insulation repair. Our house is fine during the days as it is afforded shade by some large trees on the property. However, in the evenings, when the temperature outside begins to level off ours continues to rise. We’ve already taken measures like installing fans. We feel the problem lies in-the-sulation, as they say in the business, though some might say we have the in-solution to your heating and cooling problem.

In any event I had taken to the attic for some insulation repair. I had been up there for what I guess would be approaching an hour. I was fully equipped with gloves, mask, and even some glasses I couldn’t stand to wear. Not prescription, as you might wonder after finishing the story. One thing I had not prepared for was head protection and as I leaned to get a tight space I felt my head hit the underside of the roof. I continued on until the cold, wet feeling of blood on my head drowned me.

I hopped out the attic as fast as I could and remember starting to breath harder. the sweat from being in the attic had already soaked my clothes an I peeled them off before I really knew what I was going to do. Also, I grabbed the phone and started a 911 call before I was finished with my pants.

I had the chance to glimpse myself in the mirror and continue to describe it as the cover of DMX’s Flesh of my Flesh, Blood of my Blood album, though upon closer reflection it was not THAT severe. I finally arrived at the conclusion that a washcloth applied to the wound with pressure was a better solution than a shower.

By the time EMS, or EMT, or AMR (the ambulance) showed up the bleeding had stopped, I had already tried to cleanup some of the blood spots from the floor and had retrieved my vaccination card to check my tetanus booster. Not to say they were slow but just to say that I was calming down, the wound was not as serious as I had first thought, and that I was ‘with it.’ It turns out that scalp wounds bleed a lot and that was what really set me into a panic. The only thing the two woman paramedics really offered me was a ride to a hospital of my choosing. They didn’t check vitals or even offer to clean the wound until I asked if they had materials to accomplish such a task. Instead of jumping in the glorified van for an expensive ride to the hospital, I asked to wait for my wife to get home. The medics checked with a supervisor and said it was fine if I choose not to go to the hospital but they could not leave until Lauren had arrived.

The next 10 minutes passed with an air of relief and palpable awkwardness. When Lauren walked in she said it looked like a scene from a porno flick with two young and uniformed harlots standing around the guy, vulnerable and shirtless. Of course, it couldn’t have been further from that and I was glad to see she had come to my rescue and that they could leave. We never went to the hospital but everything turned out fine as I proceeded to milk the minute benefits of such a misfortune, like an afternoon bath.

Kickball

This Sunday I had the chance to experience something that I haven’t had since grade school; kickball. For a long time I have been against the apparent resurgence of playground games for adults. For so long these games seemed designed to allow everyone to play and keep kids (or now adults) occupied. But I have to admit that getting out there and playing yesterday with the Atlanta group Kickball Rocks!!! was fun. I am not sure if I will make it out every Sunday to Candler park to join in but the option will something I consider from week to week. Thanks to Laurel for setting the whole thing up and getting us out there.

Santa Barbara :: Winding Down

The weekend of Chad’s Graduation Reunion finally ended. Everyone has returned home, including Guitar Hero and the axes. We wrapped it up properly with a huge day.

Freeman and the boys made a trip to the track to put some money on the Preakness ponies. Later the sun came out, the race was run and the ping pong balls replenished. We proceeded to grill up some madly delicious candied bacon cheese BBQ curry burgers before heading out to the club.

Saturday also saw our first real “man down” of the weekend. Mikey took about wicked long nap on the couch and was out of commission for most of the day. At one point of the night a game of flip cup ensued that found the two teams pitted against each other as ‘the smart team‘ and ‘the stupid team.’ Though I would only go as far as to call them ‘the less smart, as defined by a single narrow identifier, team‘, they began the flip cup competition by losing ten (10) games in a row. Gill, once well into the game of survivor, found himself pitted against all four of our team. He fended off two but ended up losing. He’s a good sport. Before heading out to the club, Mikey ironed his shirt while wearing it (on the recommendation from a member of the ‘smart team‘). Eventually we all went out on the town and had a time.

At the end of the night we voted to pick up burritos on the way home and found ourselves at a corner stand on the recommendation of our limo-van driver. Gill postulated that burritos in Santa Barbara somehow cost an incredible $2.50; an idea later dismissed when we received the bill for our nine (9) burritos. They were delicious. I had a great time with this weekend really enjoyed seeing all of my old friends. It may be a little early but if everyone wants to come down to Atlanta to celebrate my graduation (in a year and a half) with Lauren and me, we’d be happy to host.

Since everyone left we’ve had more time to unwind and get out a bit. Yesterday we went to the local high school field to kick around the soccer ball and play some catch. Tonight we went to a little BBQ at a friend’s house in IV. Isla Vista is a place littered with bikers… bikers riding helmetless down the street in a pair of Uggs with a vente late in one hand. The bike rack outside of what appeared to be a dorm rivaled something you might see in the Netherlands. At that point I guess you stop calling it a bike rack and start saying bike parking area. I really liked the whole feel of it. We played a bit of cornhole and watched the pistons take game one. I am thinking of trying to build a cornhole game of my own. But first I need to stain the deck.

Tomorrow we may go to the hills of SB for a hike, stay tuned.

One last little bit of awesome from this weekend. Enjoy.
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-8116157975502434908&hl=en