zoo

We have passes to the San Diego zoo this year and have gone several times. My favourite animals are the hippos, but we also really enjoy the enclosure with monkeys and river otters, although the otters are pretty good at hiding. It's a big zoo, of course, and nearly impossible to see all in one trip. In fact, we just explored the reptile corner for the first time on our most recent trip. Our passes also allow us to ride the Skyfari, the ropeway above the zoo. It was an interesting and different way to see the zoo.

-Jason

Camping and the Reagan Museum

Our anniversary celebration this year was a little camping getaway to Simi Valley, near Ventura northwest of Los Angeles. We didn't decide what we wanted to do until relatively late, so a lot of camping options were booked up by the time I was looking. I did find this one in Simi Valley that had room, though, so I grabbed it.
When we arrived, I thought maybe I saw why it was available so late. It wasn't a very luxurious campground, just a basic municipal one. Though it was big, there wasn't much to explore, as it was mostly just open dirt fields. To top it off, our campsite was maybe a stone's throw from the railway tracks. When a freight train rumbled by a few minutes after we got there, I was afraid we were going to be rattled awake all night.
Fortunately it turned out that the trains didn't run through the night, and although there wasn't much to our campground it turned out nicely. Since there weren't many people there it was pretty quiet and we could just sit and relax.

We did venture out one day to the nearby Reagan Presidential Museum, since there wasn't a lot of activity at the campground. It was an interesting museum, with a lot of information. It was a little heavy on the Reagan propaganda; unsurprising, I know, but by the end it was getting a little much. I still liked the history. The best part is definitely the retired Air Force One that's housed there. I was actually surprised at how small and cramped it felt; I guess I assumed it would be amazingly luxurious, without having taken into consideration that it would still be the size of an airplane. Granted, this was the Air Force One from the Nixon-Reagan years, so they've presumably upgraded. I also enjoyed the replica of Reagan's Oval Office. During construction he apparently made the contractors dig a hole so the office could be set deeper, allowing it to be the exact height of the original in Washington. Consequently you now have to head down a few stairs in order to see it.
There was also a Reagan portrait made entirely out of his favorite snack -- jelly beans.
-Jason

Swoon dessert bar

On our anniversary we decided to go out to a dessert bar that had opened near us a couple of months earlier. (It's a quirk of our neighbourhood that there are a couple of dessert places within blocks of each other). A dessert place seems like a natural for me, but it turned out to be not quite our scene. It was a fancy, foodie-type place with rotating creations. We had a chocolate cake filled with cream and infused with thyme - or something like that, I forget the details - and sprinkled with sea salt. It was pretty good, but pretty small. I probably would have been happier with a larger slice of regular chocolate cake. I guess this means I'm not a foodie.

Circus train

Last week I was taking the trolley to work as usual. There's a train yard just south of Petco Park, usually filled with idle Coaster trains and a few freight trains. But on this trip I went by a Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey train. I read Water for Elephants last year, but it hadn't occurred to me that circus trains were still in use. Seeing the train was probably more interesting to me than the actual circus, though.
-Jason

Chula Vista Community Run

Back in May Chelsey and I participated in the Chula Vista Community Fun Run at the Olympic Training Center. This was a good follow-up to my Carlsbad 5000 race, mostly because my library sponsored our entries. I also got my friend Chris in for free. He almost decided not to run because he was sick, but the free bib got him in. Good thing, too, as it turned out.

There were a lot of kids at this race, and as usual the kids went out fast. It probably didn't help that we started downhill. Around the mile mark Chris had moved into the lead, and I was coming up into second. I was pretty excited for this; probably too excited. Between that and the downhill start, I was flying! I thought I was going to crush my Carlsbad time. Unfortunately, I hadn't really thought about the hill waiting for me on the way back up to the finish. I blazed through 3km, but the last two were quite a turnaround, so my overall time was slower than Carlsbad. I also lost ground, dropping from second to fourth. Chris, however, held on for the comfortable win, so I guess it was a good decision to run.

Meanwhile, Chelsey was staying stronger on the hill than I did, as she passed people all the way to the finish. Despite not focusing as much on running, what with all her other sports, she was the seventh woman, which is pretty good, I thought.

The race was pretty low-key; the bib numbers weren't even assigned to specific people, which makes official results impossible. It's a nice event, though, and I liked running at the OTC. Next year I'll just try to remember the hill.
-Jason

Barrio Logan

For my birthday Chelsey offered to take me to any five stations on the San Diego Trolley system that I want. This is a great present for me. I chose Barrio Logan as my first stop. Barrio Logan is a neighbourhood just south of downtown San Diego. The trolley stop is almost directly under the Coronado bridge. Barrio Logan used to be known as Logan Heights; its named changed as Mexican immigrants moved into the area. In the 1960s, however, the neighbourhood was split by the construction of I-5 and then the bridge. Both of those projects created huge concrete flyways that cut through the heart of the Barrio. In partial compensation for this, the land underneath the bridge was left as Chicano Park. A few years later, however, the city planned to develop the land. The residents of the neighbourhood protested, staging sit-ins in the park and painting murals on the concrete support pillars. The city eventually relented and the park remains.

That's where we headed on our trolley trip. We had a nice little time walking around the park, which is not that big. We also stopped by a new grocery store to grab some lunch. The store is a distinctly Mexican grocery store; it was not entirely foreign, but walking through it was like a little reminder of wandering through the grocery stores in foreign countries and trying to figure out what some things were.
-Jason

sports

Almost as soon as we moved to San Diego, we found an adult water polo group. They're a great group of people and we rarely miss a Friday night pick-up game.
When I started my new job, one of my favorite things about the office was the Thursday afternoon inter-office volleyball. I'm now the volleyball commissioner. I've also joined the office soccer team (organized through the office but in a city league), and started an office tennis league (inter-office). This week I was convinced to join the office softball team (city league). So, my new schedule is:
Monday: Softball
Tuesday: Tennis
Thursday: Volleyball
Friday: Water polo
Sunday: Soccer

Whew!

Carlsbad 5000 2013

I came back from my Carlsbad Marathon disappointment with another race in Carlsbad - this one the shorter, faster and more famous Carlsbad 5000. I've run this race a few times but never had a really good race here, including last year when I ran quite poorly. I was excited this year, however; since coming back from the marathon, I'd been doing some good workouts with my track club and had a pretty good idea of what I was capable of - and it looked to be quite a bit better than last year.

My main concern in that regard was getting caught in traffic at the start of the race and held off my pace. So I made sure to get near the front and get out fast. As it turned out, it was a little quicker than I had planned, and for a brief moment near the first mile marker I thought I might be ready to run even faster than I had been hoping. That was not to be, however, as I slowed down in the last two-thirds of the race. However, I didn't slow down that much; I more or less held on to the pace I had expected coming in. Consequently, I finished in 18:47, easily meeting my goal of under 19:00 and knocking over 2 minutes off of last year's time. That's pretty good in a 5km.
-Jason

Carlsbad Marathon

Back in January I ran the Carlsbad Marathon. I was hoping to qualify for Boston, or at least get close enough to set myself up for a good shot in my next marathon. However, after a relatively successful race at the Borrego Springs Half Marathon I think I got a little lax over the holiday season. My big concern, after making that mistake in Borrego Springs, was not going out too fast. I accomplished this by sticking with the 3:15 pace group. Nevertheless, after about mile 10 I started to feel badly, which is never a good sign in the marathon. A few miles later I was struggling along with a bit of a headache and having trouble with my vision. When I saw Chelsey a little after halfway I bailed out of the race. I felt quite terrible about dropping out of my second marathon in a row, but I did not feel very good and still had over 11 miles to go, so it just didn't seem like a good idea. Live to fight another day, and all that.
-Jason

J&C Plumbing

One night a few weeks ago we were driving home after I picked Chelsey up at her photography class. It was a little after 10 p.m. As we turned down our alley, we were frantically waved down by a woman outside the house on the corner. She said she had a water leak and needed help getting the water turned off. I went and parked the car while Chelsey tried to help. When I came back the woman was trying to get Chelsey to help her turn off the water from the street, using an access point in the alley. I don't think it is really meant for civilians to turn the water off and on, and so it wasn't working.
After abandoning that plan, Chelsey and I followed the woman inside the house. There was a young boy there, and the woman was videochatting with some people, possibly the home owners, via an iPad she was carrying around. The whole thing was a little hysterical. It turned out that the hot-water tap in the bathroom sink had snapped off, and water was shooting like a geyser up from the tap. It was hitting the bathroom ceiling and then spraying all over, creating a flood 2-3 inches deep out of the bathroom door and into the hallway.
Chelsey decided to run home and get a tube from our vacuum, then used the tube to direct the water into the bathtub where it could drain, thus alleviating the flooding situation. While she went home, I went poking about the house trying to find a main water valve or the hot water heater or something. I didn't find those, but I did look under the kitchen sink and find the valve on the pipes there. Thus, when Chelsey came back and got the geyser under control, I crawled under the sink and was able to shut off the water to the tap in question. Whoo! Crisis resolved. At least temporarily; obviously they were going to have to deal with the flooding and broken tap at some point. But I thought that seemed like a job for a professional plumber. Then again, maybe we should think about a career change...
-Jason

oh my

The following is an actual email that I received from an author/professor/client this week. He had written me to ask if I could update his book's posting on Amazon. I wrote him back and said I would. Then I received this:

Thanks Chelsey, I hope you included the dedication in the sneak preview.  The dedication talks about love.  Every Sunday I drive right past your office on my way to La Mesa.  I go there for a meeting of our church.  We are to be the bride of Jesus Christ and in order to be the bride of Jesus we have to live in love.  All transactions are to be done in love, not money.  Imagine if the world lived in love and not money.  No more football games or popcorn, no more tv or movies and no more drugs or rock and roll.  Just math problems to stimulate critical thinking skills as we prepare to live in eternal life.  And eternal life is all about love.  ((client name removed)) 

I write math problems for the American Math Competitons, it says so on my book.

 

Xmas

More housecleaning: here are some pictures from Christmas at my sister's house. Ethan is a little bit bigger now.
-Jason

glad they cleared this up

Czech ambassador clarifies that Czech Republic is not Chechnya

Borrego Springs Half Marathon

 We're still catching up on the blog, but no one will want to have missed an update on my running, so here's a report on the Borrego Springs Half Marathon that I ran back in December.
This was the first race I had run since the disappointing Coronado Independence Day 15km in July. Borrego Springs is a small town over an hour into the mountains between San Diego and Imperial County. It was the closest half marathon I could find that month, so I decided to give it a try.
It turned out to be a nice little race. It started and finished at the local high school and consisted of two laps on relatively flat roads. It wasn't a very big race; maybe 50 people total. The race organizers hadn't bothered to close any roads, since there were so few runners and such little traffic that it probably wasn't worth the bother.
My race got a rough start; I tried to stay with the lead group, since there weren't a lot of people to run with, but that turned out to be way too fast for me. I ended up right on my target pace at the halfway mark, but I could tell I was starting to struggle a little. I was concerned about the second lap. It did end up being slower than the first lap, predictably, but I was actually fairly pleased with it: given the rookie mistake I made at the beginning of the race, I was happy that I was able to hold it together as well as I did and still end up with a respectable time. It was a little lonely on the second lap, though; I had a six-minute gap on either side of me, so I didn't see anyone except Chelsey cheering for me. Even that was interrupted when she was distracted by the sea serpent crossing the road.
I mostly ran this race because it was the only half marathon near me, but it ended up being quite enjoyable. After the race, the organizers served us homemade peanut butter sandwiches. Very nice.
-Jason

battle of the marching bands

One of the events in the lead-up to the Poinsettia Bowl was a battle of the two schools' marching bands through downtown.They eached marched in from opposite ends of the street, then had a faceoff at an intersection. San Diego State was creative and had the hometown advantage, but BYU held their own.

Jason & Tessa

I am sure that our siblings love when Aunt Chelsey and Uncle Jason teach their kids fun things like "here's how you put a spoon on your nose."Then we get them all wound up and run around the house. (Sorry the video is sideways ... blogger won't let me rotate it.)

zoo

What's that behind Jason? It's his favorite exhibit at the zoo ... the hippos, of course.

chocolate cheddar cheese

Proof that just because two things are good on their own doesn't mean that they'll be good when mixed together.

Dec. nights

We went to the December Nights celebration in Balboa Park again. As with last year, there were a lot of people there. The highlight was the food; I enjoyed the Hungarian sausage, but maybe not as much as the hot fudge sundae. The museums were free, but most of them had really long lines. We did wander through the Museum of Photographic Arts, which had an exhibit on photos that had been digitally manipulated. It sparked some interesting discussion on whether or not we liked the changes that had been made to the photo.
-Jason

railroad park

It was back in November, but we had lots of fun at the railroad park riding the train and the carousel.

stacking rocks

There's a man down at Seaport Village who stacks rocks into crazy formations. He swears that he doesn't use anything to attach or glue them together, which makes their seemingly gravity-defying positions all the more impressive.

Joe's Farm Grill

While we were in Arizona in November, Chelsey's former high school made it to the state volleyball championship game. Since we were in town, we went to support the team. They got out to a great start and were on the cusp of winning the title before the other team rallied for the win.
Since their was a Triple D near the site of the game, we decided to console ourselves at Joe's Farm Grill. It's an interesting place in Gilbert. The eating area out back is an open area backing onto the farm. The burgers were good, but the part that sold Chelsey on the restaurant were the fantastic onion rings. Mmmmm.
-Jason

chili cookoff

Some time in December (we're far enough behind that I can't remember the dates) we stumbled upon a chili cookoff just down the street. It is an annual event that's a fundraiser for one of the local schools. Your fee gets you a ceramic bowl from the studio on the corner and tickets to try any five of the chilis from local restaurants. We got a late start, so some of the chilis we really wanted to try (like Phil's -- the bbq place that catered our wedding) were sold out. But we did try some really excellent ones. Our favorite was a mole chili from a local pub. Unfortunately it is not a regular item on the pub's menu.

Jason & Ethan

Who looks more uncertain about this situation?

new treat

Many of our readers know that one of Jason's favorite treats are Cadbury Creme Eggs -- those Easter confections so overwhelmingly sweet that one per sitting is more than enough for most peope. Jason, however, could eat them by the half-dozen (and he would if I didn't hide and ration them).

Until now, Jason's indulgences were limited to once-per-year binges since Creme Eggs are only available at Easter. But, this Halloween we discovered Screme Eggs (they are exactly the same thing, only they're green). Needless to say, Jason was a very happy guy.
And, yes, we are that far behind in the blog that I'm just now getting to Halloween postings.

Greyhound

In November I took the Greyhound over to Phoenix. Chelsey had some business and some family matters there, so she spent a couple of weeks and I was going for a quick visit. Now, buses aren't as exciting as trains, but I think they're still a useful and underutilized form of transportation. This Greyhound trip turned out to be quite an adventure, though. It was supposed to be an overnight trip, leaving San Diego at 10 p.m. and getting to Phoenix around 6:30 or so. We hadn't made it three blocks from the San Diego terminal before we got stuck. Construction had closed an intersection, but our driver was unaware of the closure until we were right there - in a de facto dead end. It's not easy to turn a Greyhound bus around in a downtown street, so it took us almost an hour to get on our way again.
Despite that, we were seemingly rolling along until the bus had some kind of mechanical trouble in Yuma. We spent the hours of 3-6 in the morning in the parking lot of a truck stop just outside of Yuma waiting for a mechanic. At one point it appeared we would have to wait until 10 or 11 in the morning so that a replacement bus could come from Phoenix to get us. Fortunately they managed to fix our original bus and we got back on the road. We arrived at our destination a mere four-and-a-half hours late.
To be fair to Greyhound, my two other trips on the carrier in November were essentially trouble-free.
-Jason