2013 isn't 'next year' anymore!

Hey, the year changed on us! Do you still catch yourself writing down 2012 when you have to write down a date on a sheet of paper or when you type one onto a form?

2012 sure was an eventful year. Yours truly moved to yet another apartment with another roommate (a real keeper, if you ask me), got a bicycle and ditched the cane - which means I'm speedier if not all that much more stable, I suppose.

I'm afraid I didn't go to enough concerts and performance arts events last year. Not because there wasn't any good show, mind you! Hopefully I'll manage to show up at the various concert halls and theaters more this year. The San Diego Opera is putting on five very different shows this season starting with Donizetti's operatic romantic comedy that is La fille du regiment (Daughter of the Regiment) on January 26th. It features L'Ubica Vargicova and Stephen Costello as Marie and Tonio. Even more irresistible for mezzophiliac me are the two supporting ladies in the cast: Ewa Podles as the Marguise and Carol Vaness as the Duchess.


It's winter here in America's Finest City, however, which means that the days are cold (or even cold) enough for long cycling rides in the eastern mountains. So when it isn't raining and the job isn't demanding too many daylight hours I am to be found huffing and puffing up the gorgeous roads east of town, preferably going up Mt Palomar by South Grade Road (S-6) and coming down East Grade (S-7) for a nice view of Lake Henshaw, or along the many mountain highways between the Poway and Julian... or in the mountains south of Alpine. 

 

A lot of climbing... But that's how it goes, my friends. No pain, no view! The last time I went riding around the Great Western Loop (the big mountainous loop formed by Dehesa Rd, Japatul Rd, Lyons Valley Rd and Jamul Dr) I put the camera's video feature to good use and made the above video. Bonus points if you can identify the soundtracks!

Anyhow, thanks for stopping by. Hope 2013 has started well your way and keeps getting even better!

Meet my new girl friend....

Well, I have moved again, into another apartment within the San Diego city limit. It's a really good move! My new roommate is the walking model of courtesy and consideration. I'm still close to cycling routes... and there's a pretty lady next door who's been making it a point to ambush me as I come out of my door every morning and then hangs around to see me when I come home later in the day.

Here she is... the most affectionate lass I've met yet! I call her Casey, and she seems to respond to the name. Casey really likes to be petted by a cycling gloved hand. And when you really pet her well she'll return the favor and give your arms and legs some good and rough licking (I didn't realize that I'm so ticklish until she did a good number on my knee the first time we met). 

The other day she decided to check out my living quarter and slipped in as I took my bike inside. The living room was rather dimly lit and she just plain disappeared into the many black corners!

I finally found her after a few minutes, hiding in between the books under the coffee table. The cat is a reader. A keeper if there ever is one!

Just a smorg update

Just a little Smorg update because I've been bad about emailing lately. Sorry! I got into cycling a lot this month. Had this wild idea to ride 20-40 miles a day while the Tour de France is going on in Europe. It's nothing compared to what those pros are doing, but it is making me appreciate more how tough they are. I ride a fraction of what they do each day (and climbing no hill comparable to the Alps or the Pyrenees), and after only a week even my eyebrows are sore.... not to mention everything else! 

Then I went on a hilly group ride in the North County on Saturday. Had a blast... then decided to ride all the way back home instead of catching a bus (so the day's tally was around 56 miles). I made it back, but was completely spent... and nursing a sore throat - which then became a full blown flu by nightfall. 

Venturing a bit off topic, I'd just like to formally register a complaint here that those Christians who think it charitable to turn their radio on at full blast at 6:30AM on Sundays to force everyone around them to listen to their favorite pastor's fire & brimstone sermon are really a bunch of inconsiderate assholes. One of those assholes lives in the apartment complex next door to me, and this was the 3rd Sundays in a row that he'd done that. What a lousy attempt at evangelization. Let a Muslim blare his radio at you at 6AM on Sundays to broadcast his god and see how you'd think of Allah then... 

Anyhow. It's a type of flu that blows itself out quickly, I think. After 2 days of crashing in bed I'm much better now... and will answer the emails soon! Thanks very much for your patience!

Been buzzing around...

April was quite an eventful month chez Smorg. There was a lot of work to do, both the nerdy and the not so nerdy kinds. Then I caught a nasty flu that caught the flu vaccine totally off-guard and lost me 6 lbs and many work days.

Then, out of the blue I had family reunion, called on a very short notice. No worries, everybody's okay, and the meeting went well enough that I almost considered moving back to the Midwest again.... but most likely not. I mean, I like the Midwest and all, but the California coast has spoiled me a bit. Whenever I start to go crazy after spending way too many consecutive hours in a dark computer room (because the place hasn't got WiFi, so I'm cabled in, so to speak) I could hop on my big fat mountain bike and go off to enjoy views like this...

It takes a bit of riding to get to Sunny Jim Cave from where I am, but La Jolla scenery is always worth a bit of sweat. The air is always cooler along the coast, and the lack of Midwestern weather makes most days here ideal for cycling (and other physically taxing outdoorsy activities like hotdog chasing, planning and laying ambush on the ice-cream carts, not sharing granola bars with pleading squirrels, or attempting ferocious karate moves on the marauding sea gulls that are trying to help you finish your fish tacos).

Okay, okay, so I do share granola bars with squirrels, but that's not the point!!!

Riding around town on the mountain bike has helped me recover some rather disturbing personality traits that I thought I had successfully shed and buried a long time ago. For one, I can't seem to ride leisurely... Don't get me wrong, I'm a very careful cyclist. I even stop at stop signs and signal before I turn... but let me a bit of space on the pavement and sooner rather than later I'd get into a time trial mode... on a mountain bike (and that, my friends, is pathetic... mountain bikes don't go!). It's bad enough zooming my way down the many wonderful hills in town, but I even try to sprint uphill whenever I could.

Torrey Pines State Reserve Service Road... a pity it's too busy to zoom down this thing most of the time.

Of course, there are a few hills around here that you just don't sprint up. Some are so uncivil you can hardly walk the bike up them!

Bandini St in Mission Hills

It should surprise no one, then, that every now and then my legs would say enough is enough and perform a very good imitation of the rigor mortis in protest. On days like that, all I can do is to coast down to the San Diego River to the friendlier company of the California sunflowers...

or into the delightfully flat downtown to catch some culture...

The San Diego City Ballet was giving a free preview of their upcoming performances of Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet (the Prokofiev one) at the PGK Project's Dance on the Edge in Little Italy two weekends ago.

... before catching a ride home on a bus. 

It's terrible! I have this mountain of books that I want to read, but haven't managed to yet because it is way too nice out to stay inside for long. Then when I come back from one of these rides I'm too spent to concentrate on a book.  

Maybe I should move back to the Midwest after all. It'll soon be too hot and humid there to even walk a block to the frozen yogurt shop let alone out for a bike ride!

On the other hand, there is nothing quite like the independence of getting to places on your own power and at your own pace. By the way, did you know that May 14-18 is the National Bike To Work Week? See that delicious cup of frozen yogurt I had down in Little Italy (yup, all that chocolate and cheesecake and red velvet chocolate cooler with assorted nuts and hot fudge topping)? It's a lot easier justifying such a treat when you bike to and back from the shop than getting there on gasoline!

And that was 2011

Hello! Hello! I hope everyone is well and having a good end of the year holidays season!

I had a rather unexpected change of residence again a month ago. Was going to move out of state to snowier pasture, but was blown away by a whirling wind of weirdly freaky circumstances and now I'm hanging in limbo for another month. May still move to another state later in January, or may stay put as a Southern Californian beach bum. Don't know how it'll go. We'll see!

For a boring smorg, 2011 was rather eventful: I made some new friends and got closer to a few who are effortlessly even nicer and more caring when the times are rough than when the going is good. Even if you don't know who you are (darn these good Samaritans! They do good deeds so naturally that they don't recognize their own goodness much of the time!), you are a jolly good fellow, fellas. Thanks very much!

Being boring can be a virtue in dog-trainers...

 Inspired by the amazing Youtube clips by Kikopup (Emily Larlham) I also acquired another side job/hobby of dog-training. There are dog-trainers and then there are dog-trainers! It is amazing what you can teach just about any dog to do with positive-reinforcement technique only... with no punishment at all! Once you get the concept, it is quite easy... Of course, the hard part has to do with training the dog owners to stay with the program and not give in to intimidation/punishment-based 'short cuts'. As tempting as they are short cuts have ways of coming back to bite you in the long run! Anyhow, I got to meet quite a lot of cute and cool dogs in the past year for this. It may make the neighborhood cats more wary of me (you look sort of like a human but you smell like 4 or 5 different dogs. What the flea is wrong with you???), but on the whole it really is a lovable experience!

I slacked off this year a bit on the opera/concert-going front, though. I don't know if I'll be around to catch the San Diego Opera's 2012 season yet, but it sure looks a very tempting one! For the first season since the 2008 market crash the SDO now has enough cash flow to put on four operas instead of just three. What's more, they even managed to poach Renee Fleming, who will turn up here in America's Finest City for a concert in March.

Renee Fleming is coming to San Diego on March 24th, 2012!

After years of dodging religious evangelists at street corners and bus-stops, I broke my tradition and hung out with a few Mormon missionaries for quite a few months. A few are staying friends even though there isn't much hope of them ever converting me to that strangely socialistic and polytheistic religion. It is possible to love people even while being utterly repulsed by their dogma, I found. I hope our encounters benefited them as much as they benefited me.

Ever since I broke away from religions I've loathed to look back on the days that I spent in one. The missionaries reminded me of my younger evangelical Christian self, and it has been endlessly fascinating to re-examine things from such a different perspective. The more I learned about Mormonism the more inclined I am to worry about my new friends... but these gals are intelligent, I think, perhaps more so than I was. If I could escape my net, then I'm sure they can, too... and their journey is one they have to make themselves.

Having been such a slow reader of late, I am surprised to find that I managed to read more books than I thought I would in 2011. Robert Conot's River of Blood: Years of Darkness about the 1965 Watts Riot in Los Angeles started of the year on an alternatively chilling and instructive note.

I'm a genre-spree reader. I get into a certain sort of books and read a bunch of them one after another. Having labored through Bill Clinton's pudgy biography, My Life, I went a bit flaky and picked up Andrew Morton's Diana: Her True Story from a pile at a thrift shop's books section... along with one biography of her former spouse, Charles: Prince of Wales, by Anthony Holden. While Morton's homage to Princess Diana seems to have been written by someone a bit overly sympathetic to his subject, Holden's treatment of the young Prince Charles (before he married anyone) is quite fair and incisive. Pele's autobiography, Pele: My Life and The Beautiful Game, was a revelation. I already knew of his technical grace on the football field, but what he overcame to get to where he was and to still maintain his integrity was very inspiring.

Reading Gordon Ramsay's Roasting in Hell's Kitchen somehow didn't make me admire the man more. I love his UK version of Kitchen Nightmares, but the US version put a bad taste in my mouth (why does Fox have to turn every show into another version of hyper-sensationalized Judge Judy?). His sure is an interesting life, though he is such a type-A personality even in writing that I needed a break from the dude by the end of the book.

Even though I'm not a fan of operatic coloratura sopranos (though I'd make exceptions for Edita Gruberova and Natalie Desay), I was not above picking up Beverly Sills' Bubbles while browsing a local bookstore one summer evening. For all the bubbly persona she displayed in her public image, the gal was one tough cookie... and a heck of a singer, too!

I also got into a spree of real life adventures reading with Bear Grylls' Facing Up, Sir Edmund Hillary's 'Nothing Venture, Nothing Win', Stephen Venables' Everest: Alone At The Summit, Freddie Wilkinson's One Mountain - Thousand Summits, and Peter Jenkins' Across China. Except for the last one, these recount high-altitude climbing. Grylls was the youngest Briton to summit Everest in 1998 at age 23. He is better known to us Americans as the weirdo who does dare-devil stuff doing extreme survival things on a tv program where he seems to enjoy taking his clothes off for a skinny dip and eating raw fish fresh from the stream. Somehow his book persona seems quite more normal and sane by comparison. 

Venables' account of his amazing first oxygen-free ascent of Everest via the Kangshung Face is gripping and gives a great glimpse into what sort of mentality drives people to risk so much to achieve something that doesn't really seem to benefit anyone. Freddie Wilkinson's telling of the 2008 K2 disaster not surprisingly made me revisit the similar story of the infamous Everest tragedy of 1996. It amazed me that the only two climbers (Chhiring Dorje and Pemba Gyalje) on K2 in 2008 who had enough stamina to mount a rescue attempt after having summitted the peak themselves were, like Anatole Boukreev and Lopsang Jambu on Everest in 1996, superfit professionals who were climbing without the aid of supplementary oxygen. It's food for thought, at least, that in the end technological short cuts are no match for knowledge and rigorous preparation.

Sir Edmund Hillary's memoir is now one of my favorite books for his no nonsense and amazingly understated and unassuming narration of his remarkable life. The man was so bent on not crowing about his own abilities that I almost felt the urge to slap my mental image of him in the head... Of course he mentions his ascent of Everest, but that is only an icing on an already remarkable cake, I think. I hadn't known anything of his leading an expedition to the the South Pole, and the various other things that he went about doing that most people would only dream about. It takes a very secure man to not let all that get to his head.

I don't climb high mountains, though that doesn't stop me from reading about them.

Peter Jenkins didn't climb any mountain in his book, though he walked across quite a magnificent expanse of foreign landscape. I was familiar with him from his first book, A Walk Across America, a very interesting tale that got a bit less interesting for me when the dude turned religious toward the end of it.

I got 3/4 way through Rebecca West's venerated tome, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, about her travel through the Balkans in the 30's, but didn't finish it. It is an amazingly insightful book... though sometimes the author annoys me to no end with her philosophy.

The more interesting books I read this year, though, were Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Akio Morita's Made in Japan, Azar Narfisi' Reading Lolita in Tehran, Stephen Jay Gould's Ever Since Darwin, and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Malinowski's account of the Trobriands of the Kiriwina Island (near Papua New Guinea) almost made me wish that I had majored in anthropology in college instead of biochemistry. If Indiana Jones could write a book about his exploits... I don't know, I think I'd still go for Prof Malinowski's vividly objective prose.

Akio Morita was a co-founder of Sony Corporation, and his self-made story is one capitalist Americans would love to claim for our own but can't. I suppose most of you readers will have read Narfisi's book and already wonder how to write like that in one's second language. Being a slow slug I'm still trying to catch up on the background reading required to completely understand her lessons!

Having to take lots of biology classes in college saved me from having to catch up on much background readings for Stephen Jay Gould's Ever Since Darwin, though I still found that I feel a bit smarter each time I re-read the book. The man made critical thinking seem so sexy...

Oddly enough, I found Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible reading through one of my favorite Mormon missionaries' favorite books list. It is a remarkable book. I should have liked to come across it while I was still a teenage Jesus-freak. I don't regret having gone down that road once, but I do regret the amount of time I spent on it... that and the lost opportunities. The book probably reads quite differently for those going through a religious phrase than it does for me. All the same it still flabbergasts me a little how anyone can read and like this thing and still volunteer to go on a religious mission afterward.

Anyhow! Tonight the calendar flips to a new page. I guess I will be staying up late, though mostly to try to get more work done than to watch the ball drop in Time Square. I don't think the cats around here even know what a 'new year' is, so I don't really celebrate days like this as much as normal people do (on the other hand, I love it when the wind changes to bring in a new season... or when the earth does strange things like trying to swallow the moon like it did earlier this month!). I'll be too busy to post much here for a week or two, so here is thanking everyone for putting up with my rambling posts. Wishing you all a very happy holiday season and 2012!