This Makes No Sense At All

When it comes to duties of office, is Arnold Schwarzenegger a better governor than Mark Sanford? When the Governor Sanford affair popped up recently, I took a contrary point of view to someone's Facebook remarks. My comment: Well, I don't know. Are you looking at your politicians for moral guidance? I'm certainly not. For a pastor, a priest or teachers, yes. From my elected officials, I expect them to perform the functions of their offices - maintain necessary services, insure that revenues balance expenditures over the long run. Do you require that your local postal clerk or grocer have an impeccable family background, do you even care? Certainly there is a lot of pain going on in that family. Why pile it on? I should add that my primary expectations are competence and honesty. The original poster responded that their expectation was integrity. I agree. An excellent word - I would have used it initially if I'd thought of it. I would qualify it to mean integrity in t...

Back on the EBRPD Sibley to Tilden Park trail after a couple of weeks of absence, and noticed that they have done their annual trail maintenance. A twelve foot wide swath cleared and about six feet of it scraped with a small tractor down to Old Tunnel Road. Bikes are allowed on that section. After that it is about six to eight feet cleared, and not total scraping. After Fish Ranch Road, EBMUD has also done their annual mowing of a big grassy field that the trail skirts along. Still, this entire trail is still one of the most pristine available in the East Bay. My question - thought is about the effect on the seasonal creek that runs along quite close to the trail for the first mile or so. The creek still has a trickle now, and later in the summer you will notice that it flows in early morning after heavy fog, but is dry in the afternoon. The plowing of the trail pushes berms of dirt right up close to the waterway. Never into it, but a heavy rain would carry a lot of dirt right into ...

Our workflow on Windows 10: Capture the card data (or on smartphone, plug usb cable to computer and drag) into a folder called PhotoStaging (our computer has slots built in for the various memory cards). We put the card in the slot and get a choice of programs Canon for the Canon camera card and Nikon for the Nikon camera card. Rename every image so it starts with date - time - for example: 2007-03-07_11-19-07_1222_SD700 IS.JPG This is easier than it sounds. There is a powerful free utility called Rename Master that does it once I select all the images. It pulls the date, time, camera model out of the info stored in the image. More on RenameMaster later. Sometimes at this point when all new images are in the staging folder I will use Adobe Bridge to give multiple discriptive tags to the images. I have a master folder called Photos. In there are subfolders by subject, such as birds, mammals, East Bay Regional Park...

We're trying to start this year's backpacking season with less weight before we put the backpack on. The training regime is not doing it fast enough, so we have resorted to WeightWatchers. If you are not familiar with it, this system gives you points for various kinds of food, and you are limited to a certain number of points per day. The point calculation is a little complex, as the amount of fiber and fat grams in the food make a difference in the number of points. They even go so far as giving you a little sliding calculator, where the fiber grams in a serving reduce the total points, and the number of fat grams increase the points. I'm watching Susan as she is, after the fact, sliding the calculator and reading the horrifying values for the PopTart that we had used for a mid day snack on the morning's hike. My inspiration was, "what if it had more fiber, would the points be less?". That turns out to be true. Each gram of fiber up to 4 grams reduces th...

We just saw our local production of this play, and while the message re violence still seemed quite relevant, I could not fall into the audience's role and accept Romeo's dialog. Juliet's seemed more realistic. I do remember being in the state of mind where I could think of nothing but the woman I loved, and could not wait to see her again, but in the times away, I certainly did not become a babbling idiot, and neither did any of my young male contemporaries. Still, as Susan points out, there were a lot of truly nauseating love songs written when we were young, and men wrote most of those. Another thing going on was the telephone, so we were apart, but in contact, sometimes for hours at a time. In Shakespeare's time apart was really apart, so maybe they were driven to such odious actions as speaking in verse, but I think alcohol and intense activity would be more likely forms of release. My thought is that the pedestal is the root of the poetry and the change. In the ...

I get enough comments-questions about this so that I thought I'd post it. Now I can just say look at my blog entry. I had a 10 foot length of 1/2 inch copper pipe left over from a plumbing project. I drove a piece of rebar into the ground at an angle and put the base of the pipe over it. The pipe also gets support higher up from part of the gate. The bottles are a two liter soda bottle (which we use in backpacking - carried 6 in the desert), and a one liter bottle. A faucet washer stops them from sliding further down the pipe. I did have to make a hole in the bottom of each bottle. The squirrel can run up the pole, but as soon as he steps on a bottle, they swivel around and dump him off. Sometimes he will get on the top of the fence, and divebomb the feeder, but usually he can't hang on and doesn't like the fall, so doesn't do it often. An aside, we've been getting some unattributed taking of blog content so inserting © 2009 backpack45.com

I never knew Jennifer Griswold, or her hiking group, but we were of the same age vintage, so I feel a certain kinship. The bench dedicated to her has one of the most beautiful settings I have ever seen for a memorial bench.  2020 Update. The bench now has no back, and bronze marker is gone. The EBMUD Memorial Bench program is rental based. The cost is $2500 for 10 years, and then another $2200 if you want to extend it another 10 years. During that period, EBMUD will maintain the bench. !st 10 years is over for Jennifer's bench and it doesn't seem to be renewed. We've had to defer hiking for a week or so while I did some urgent fence repair, and Susan did some knee healing, but today we were off again. Years ago we had hiked a loop along the San Pablo Reservoir out of the Valle Vista staging area, off Canyon Road near Moraga. My recollection was that it was about three miles, so we took off. The EBMUD trail title is King Canyon Loop. Mostly dirt road walking, but very pleas...

I on a whim, put up an off topic post on Jean Quan, our very competent city councilwoman. That provoked a responding comment from someone who clearly didn't share my opinion, laced with conflict laden words. I have no interest in pissing contests, so I rejected the comment, and then on further thought deleted the entire post. My thought though, is that this is one more example of those things that make no sense at all. The people I meet while out hiking are a significant reason that I enjoy hiking. There is a shared purpose that crosses age and gender boundaries. We enthusiastically share route and gear tips, and tales of the trail. Back home, when I encounter the same people on the online forums, some calming influence is missing. I see rants about guns, about bear canisters, about authority, etc. You know what I mean. There is a significant minority of people that are unwilling to put their minds to problem solving, to constructive agreement. That minority makes so much noise...