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Showing posts from May, 2010

Kindle Once Again - this time for Walk, Hike, Saunter

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 Last time I did this was Dec 2017. At the moment, memory of how to do it is pretty foggy, but luckily I have my earlier blog posts on this to refresh my memory so printing them out to review. (look for Kindle label in this blog to find).  This book is a little easier than the others - text and inline photos, a table of contents, but no index. Susan has promised it will be out in two and a half weeks, so will try to do that. My immediate issue is that I remember that I have to make some changes to the Indesign file before putting out the epub file that I will update for Kindle, but don't remember quite what they were. Pausing to read my prior posts, and to review Kindle code for Healing Miles . From my 2012 notes I saw that to get reliable chapter breaks, each chapter had to be a separate xhtml file. The default of Indesign is to put out one big xhtml file, but it will break on a style, so I need to be sure the current Indesign document (for Walk, Hike, Saunter ) has an appropriat

Short but beautiful hike to Green Valley Falls

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This was a rare opportunity to once more see Green Valley Falls, tucked away in a Vallejo watershed,  gated, locked, signed and unavailable unless you can get into one of the seldom let Doris Klein hikes into the area;, through the auspices of Bay Area Ridge Trail. Doris is 84, and amazingly fit and spry, and at the present, the only person allowed to lead hikes in this area. It also requires reservations in advance, exact hiker names required, and when you get there, two signatures required, one on the Vallejo water district sheet and one on the Bay Area Ridge Trail sheet. If you are not on their reservation list, do not come. No one gets added. All that said, this is a low price opportunity to see two rarely seen Vallejo waterfalls, shrouded in mist, surrounded by ferns, and a wonderful riparian experience. It makes you feel like you  are in the rain forest area, a couple of hundred miles north. You meet beyond a normally locked gate and begin trekking up this green path, dodging

Cacophony, is this an in word right now?

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harsh or discordant sound : dissonance 2; specifically : harshness in the sound of words or phrases. A  week or so ago I saw it used in an article, and last night, when we had dinner with my niece and her husband, I heard it spoken for the first time ever, when she was describing time with their nine year old daughter and friends. Now I am having an absolute cacophonic experience as the old roof comes off right over my head - about three feet away to be exact. There is hammering, scraping, walking, thumping, chattering, shouting in Spanish.  If you can imagine black snow-like material sifting down, that is what is happening in the garage, which has the old style 1x6 board roof underlayerment, with about 1/4 inch gaps between the boards, and nothing further between the roof and the garage floor. The one little section of exposed beam ceiling in our house is right above my head - tongue and groove boards, so I didn't expect anything to come through, but right now b

Today's 8 mile walk - Bay to Breakers

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At our gathering of friends last night, one happened to mention the Bay to Breakers race today, from the San Francisco Embarcadero to the ocean. Susan had Long Walk written on the calendar for today, and that sounded like a good fit. Only problem was that we should be at the start around 8:30, and the last guest left shortly before 11pm. We left it as a maybe, so this am I nudged Susan about 6:30 and proposed my plan - leave the house no later than 8, be at BART by 8:20, and at race start between 8:30 and 9. Agreed, provided I get up immediately and not wake her till 7:10. All connections worked out and we arrived in SF about 8:20. BART was jammed, streets were packed, tortillas flying all over like frisbees, and we joined the crowds inching towards the starting line, which we reached about twenty minutes later. Fun though. This is not a normal race. Some 100,000 people take part, many in some sort of wild costume, vast quantities of beer consumed, plenty of naked people, and us, i

Jon Carroll Tasks - again

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Jon is a San Francisco columnist of some renown, and in the ancient past, (he is almost as old as I am), he wrote about those tasks you do that are necessary and important, in place of those tasks requiring immediate completion. i.e. you have company coming in two hours, and you decide that this is the perfect time to finally clean out the garage. Ever since that column, we have called such tasks "Jon Carroll Tasks", of which this post is one. I still have seven or eight hours till people arrive, so I am thinking about weed whipping the back slope, doing a blog post on my efforts to compare satellite phone rentals, catching up on the household budget ... more such tasks will come as I have less time remaining. We have a couple of major trips coming up, first wrapping up the GR 653 into Puenta la Reina, and then after a few weeks of intermission, wrapping up the Pacific Crest Trail through the State of Washington into Canada. Both of these trips have a lot of little details