The Mud, The Blood, & The Beer

Nix the beer, I'm not fond of that, but the mud and the blood go together well for me. Last night was my first ultimate frisbee game of the spring season. I have been going to pick-up, but now we had league play on Wednesday nights. It rained from 4:00 pm until dark, so we had a wet and cold game, for some of us we also had a muddy game! As usual, after the games there is a keg of beer for everyone, but like I said, I am not much of the drinking type so I just hang out and chat with everyone. "The mud, the blood, and the beer" comes from Johnny Cash's song "A Boy Names Sue." It seemed to fit the scenario rather well.

I didn't get a blog posted yesterday, things are a little hectic around here right now. We got home Saturday evening and the house was around 60 degrees. We thought that was a little cool, but figured the heat was turned down or something (the girls upstairs control the heat). Sunday the house was still cold and it wasn't until Monday that the girls came and asked if something was wrong with the heater. So Tuesday we had someone come look at the furnace and he said he would be back Wednesday morning with the part... Well, Wednesday morning turned into Wednesday afternoon at 3:00 and he still didn't show up! So here it is, Thursday morning and the house is staying around 50 degrees because no one has shown up to fix the furnace! Luckily we just bought a radiant oil heater and that been nice to keep the door closed and heat a room.

Tuesday evening our old neighbor Jessica was in town and she went to Pub Quiz with us. Then yesterday morning we went for a walk with Jessica and Brooklyn (the dog) and then Laura went to the lab at noon. I spent some time dog-sitting Brooklyn while Jessica did some errands around town. I took some pictures of Brooklyn with her stick, more like small branch, she found on our walk and carried around for the next mile - trying to get me to throw it for her!

I'm going to lump our two days of San Francisco travels together today, and I have a bunch of pictures as well.

We left around mid-morning from Tracy to miss the morning commute to San Francisco and San Jose. We took some side roads as well, missing the interstate, but it didn't seem to matter much, it was busy most of the way. You can see from the first picture with Laura - she's geocaching - the rolling hills were very green and covered in wind generators. I really liked that part of the drive, it was amazing there were no trees growing on the hills.Our morning was nice and sunny, our entire drive to San Francisco was sunny and then as we were approaching the city the rain started. We decided to go check out some sites anyway and we wanted to have an idea of where we were going the next day. We left for Fisherman's Wharf around 1:00 and we made the 10 miles in just about an hour! I did some research on the internet and found a few places in the city which offered free parking around the tourist traps and we took advantage of that. We had to walk a few miles to get places we wanted to go, but I think we both agreed that the walking was worth it. That is, until we got two miles from the car and the sky opened up again! Laura and I watched the sea lions at Pier 39 while it rained. We watched them for about half an hour until the rain let up a little and we were on our way again.It wasn't long and the rain was back and the wind started blowing. That was miserable. By the time we reached the car we were soaked. My coat and t-shirt were totally wet and my jeans were as wet as could be. Luckily we had our luggage in the back of the Canubaru and we found some dry clothes to drive back across town. Laura had to drive back to the hotel because my hands were too cold to hold the steering wheel. The evening turned out to be pretty nice and we did some geocaching and shopping around the hotel since we only had around two hours of daylight left. The next day turned out to be pretty nice. No rain, but the wind was blowing. We went to the wharf again and tried to get tickets to Alcatraz but they were sold out. We were a little disappointed to hear that since we looked on-line and they still had tickets available when we left the hotel. Since we couldn't go to Alcatraz we went to the San Francisco Maritime museum (it was free with our National Parks Pass - I might have to blog about that sometime, it has come in handy). The Maritime museum has several old ships on display which you can go onto and check out. There was a tug boat built in 1907 named Hercules, along with an old ferry boat used before the Golden Gate Bridge was built called the Eureka - it was built in 1890 & refitted in 1920. My favorite ship was the Balclutha. The Balclutha was built in 1886 in Glasgow, Scotland. The ship made trips around the world for trade. In her maiden voyage she left from Wales and sailed around the tip of South America and then up to San Francisco, all in 140 days! Even though we didn't plan on going to the Maritime museum we thought it was definitely worth our time to check out. We did a lot of walking on the second day. I took the GPS along for our walking tour and we covered close to 15 miles. We walked from the Wharf down to the Golden Gate Bridge then we walked out onto the bridge.After heading out to the Golden Gate Bridge we went to Baker Beach, the picture above. We drove across town, burning the clutch up and squealing tires on the steep hills, and went to Lombard Street. I mention the squealing tires because we came to a steep street and got stopped on it. I have never set back so tight in my seat before! That hill was steeper than some roller coasters I have been on. Then the car pulling up behind gave us enough room to roll a few feet, but it took three feet to drive the car that day! I burned the tires up a little to get the car going, and we got a good laugh out of that, but the car stunk of burnt rubber the rest of the evening.Lombard street is 'the crookedest street in the U.S.' it has 8 switchbacks. We drove the street and then took some pictures of the area. The setting sun didn't give us very good lighting for pictures but we took advantage of it when we went to Coit Tower. We stood up on the hill and watched the sunset before heading back to the hotel. We could hear the sea lions from up on the hill and there is a great view of the city from there as well. You can see Alcatraz from the first picture with the flag. I liked the picture of the Golden Gate Bridge with the setting sun. Although it had been a long day, we really had a lot of fun but we were ready to get out of San Francisco. The traffic was more than we cared for and the constant roar of noise gets old quickly.

Time to get the heater running and try to warm up! The house isn't too bad during the day, but the overnight temps around the 20's don't help the fact that the house really cools down! Today it looks like we might actually get some sun and warm up close to 60 so here's hoping. Until again

-=Nolan=-