Nimue the Singer

 

A few months ago, Nimue joined a local children's choir, Cantabile. Last week, she got to participate in her first two concerts.
Thursday evening held an informal recital/dress rehearsal for friends and family for just her little group (about 30 kids). Then the kids all ate cookies and chased each other around outside the hall afterward for quite a while before I dragged Nimue off to get some real food for dinner. (Real food = Nim's favorite pepperoni and olive pizza in this case!)

 

Saturday's concert was a much more formal affair in a big church down in Campbell in combination with some of the older and younger kids. Chad's mom Linda joined us to see the performance. Nimue seems to quite enjoy it, though I suspect much of the fun for her is being able to wear a uniform!

 

Stuff in the yard this week

 

 

 

 

Mother's Day Mountain Bike Mud Madness

 

It hasn't rained for a couple of weeks. No, those clouds saved up their drops especially for Mother's Day, knowing that Chad and Nimue had agreed that I could get out for a rare bike ride on a weekend day. What to do, what to do? Since Chad had just installed brand-new extra-grippy tires on my mountain bike, I took it up for some mud madness fun up at Long Ridge and Skyline Ridge Open Space Preserves.

 

On the ridge yesterday there was every type of non-winter weather imaginable: fog, mist, full sun, drizzle, out-and-out downpour, sun+mist, sun+rain, wind, etc. Also mud. Sticky mud, grippy mud, clay-ey mud, mud full of half-decomposed sticks, slippery mud, splatty mud, sloppy mud, gloppy mud. Mud, mud, the mud mud. I have to say, the new tires performed quite well -- between being a little wider than the old ones, knobbier, and just plain newer, I reveled in the much-improved connection with the ground, despite said ground being mud, and rode further than I had planned given the rain.

At one point, I had to stop and investigate a horrible noise coming from the back wheel, only to find that the entire area surrounding the back brakes was encased in a sticky mud cement with the occasional chunk of branch to vary the texture. It was like the bike had somehow decided it needed a protective coating and deliberately accreted armor like a caddisfly larva making its case. One of these wood chunks rubbed against the wheel, making the disconcerting noise. There was also a layer of glop several inches thick completely encasing the cog that sticks down from the rear derailleur. I'm really not sure how the chain had continue to move, much less shift, in this condition (the stuff was approximately the texture of cold chocolate chip cookie dough), but it had been functioning just fine. At any rate, I hunted around until I found a stick that was both narrow and rigid enough to scrape out the worst of it; while I was in the process of this I encountered the only other mountain bikers I saw that afternoon. They asked if everything was ok, and then just laughed in sympathy upon finding that I was looking for the appropriate stick with which to de-mud the back wheel and drivetrain. Once the back of the bike was (sort of) cleaned off, my shoes and pedals needed the same treatment.

Besides the two mud-splattered mountain bikers, I saw a couple of hikers, a couple of people setting up a picnic in the fog for their cozy-blanket-wrapped aged mother, deer, a veritable explosion of quail, and lots of wildflowers, which included the red pea pictured below. Not native, but pretty nonetheless. (Notice the beads of water which really would prefer to be on the ground making the mud multiply.)

 

The flower/mud/Mother's Day juxtaposition seems somehow apt as yesterday Nimue gave me a bouquet of flowers from the school garden; the day before, she decided to excavate a giant mudpit in the middle of the back lawn where I had pulled up some weeds but hadn't yet reseeded the grass. "But Mom, you didn't tell me I couldn't do that!" Argh. Happy Mother's Day.

Pushing the envelope of what can be done during the school day

About 2/3 of the way through my ride on Tuesday, I realized that the loop was going to end up being 70 miles instead of 60. Needless to say, this led to an unplanned increase in intensity up the last hill, as I had to make it back in time to pick Nimue up from school at 2:30. Oops.


Notable moments:

--Big squashed rattlesnake on the side of the road on Pierce.

--Coming around the corner on Skyline to see what looked like two little yappy-dogs in silhouette, only to realize that they were two of the tiniest fuzzy spotted fawns I've ever seen. They weren't much bigger than our cat, and still looked a bit unsteady on their legs. I think I actually uttered "Tiny, WOW!" aloud as I slowed down and rode by.

--Not seeing any more kamikaze squirrels run onto the road after I issued the ultimatum "Next one gets runned over." The evil beasties were playing a game along highway 236 in Big Basin in which they repeatedly darted out of the bushes on the side of the road to zigzag erratically in front of me.

--Motorcyclist slowing down just slightly on the way down route 9 so that he could ride along side me and report my speed. "20, 25, 23, 25, ...." After several curves, he got bored and sped off; I just laughed the whole time.

--Bonking not during the ride, but when I was in the shower after getting Nimue home from school. I guess the chocolate milk and avocado I wolfed down just before the shower wasn't enough to stave off the depletion long enough to get to the real food.

New bike is good :)

In case the snails were too gross

Some eyeball candy from Fremont Older Open Space Preserve last week to counteract the sliminess of the snails in the previous post:

Vetch (non-native, but pretty)

 

Miniature Lupine

 

Crimson Columbine

 

Deer that wanted to get runned over as I made my way through Stevens Canyon County Park on the way home. Yes, it was standing in the middle of the trail giving me a look. If I had a baseball bat, we coulda had dinner...

 

I like biking this time of year!

School Volunteering

 

Some moms grade math time tests and stuff folders in the classroom once a week; I find myself hunting victims for the garden club Snail Circus. (~100 snails in a jug in the back yard).

I was lucky enough to help on Nimue's field trip to the Menlo Park USGS Earth Day thing, which was quite cool, aside from the fact that I ended up chaperoning the group of obnoxious boys. Needless to say, the highlight for them was getting shaken in the magnitude 8.0 earthquake simulator; Nim also enjoyed driving a little robot rover and several volcano activities.

Also built one of these and one of these for solar cooking experiments at said garden club. So far, I've accidentally made a big purple spot in my vision (temporary), achieved a puny 225 degrees, and cooked a passable apple crisp. The results of all this go to school for kids to play with in a couple of weeks, so I'm ahead of the game for once.

Biking at the edge of the Bay

My memory is faulty, so I'm relying on the contents of my camera to elucidate the last couple of weeks... after the ski trip, there were lots of pictures of sunny bike rides along the levees at the edge of the Bay.

Nimue and I took a ride at Stevens Creek Shoreline Nature Study Area, adjacent to Shoreline Park in Mountain View as one of our "Friday Adventures" allowed by her school's early dismissal schedule on Fridays.

We had barely left the parking lot when we were treated to a raucous display of crows divebombing a big red-tailed hawk. This is the hawk after he found a perch that was acceptable to the squawking flock of others.

 

Nimue quite liked riding through the mustard.

 

Nimue's "I'm riding fast" position. Note the big buildings at Moffet in the background (Nim also shouted "Hi Daddy!" at the top of her lungs several times.)

 

A couple days later, we all took a ride out at Alviso so Chad could enjoy the edge of the bay as well. I experimented with attaching the camera to my handlbars with a gorillapod. While this saved me the potential embarrassment of wiping out while trying to simultaneously steer and take pictures, I can't say it improved the picture quality any... (I left out the attempted self-portrait, which ended up just showing my giant shoulders from a truly scary perspective) Still, you can tell it was a gorgeous day as we wound our way around the levees delineating the old salt ponds:)

 

 

 

 

 

Sugarbowl to Squaw Ski Tour

As I was reminded again last night, we have once more fallen behind on the blog posts. Perhaps it's because we've been outside a lot since the weather finally got nice. Or maybe I'm just lazy, or distracted. At any rate, I am under house arrest today because Nim threw up this morning, so y'all finally get some more pictures...

Several weeks ago now, we did a one-day backcountry ski tour with Randy and Bruce, a couple of Chad's riding buddies from work. The idea was to start at Sugarbowl, climb up through the ski area to the saddle next to Mt. Lincoln, follow the ridge southeast to Anderson Peak and Tinker Knob, drop down to Mountain Meadow Lake, and then climb and cross one final saddle before dropping into the parking lot at Squaw Valley, where we had a car staged for our return. The whole route involves about 12 miles of skiing and something on the order of 3000 feet of climbing.

Read more about the route details here and here if you're interested.

At the start (note the EARLY morning light)

 

Traversing across the side of the hill just outside of the Sugarbowl boundary. I think this was the only section of right-leg-high sidehill; much of the rest of the route was left-leg-high sidehill -- like the terrain knew I had a sore left hip going into the trip...

 

Randy, looking happy shortly before we got to the first downhill. Unfortunately, one of his skis escaped at the top while he was taking skins off at the top. It slid right off the cornice and down into the woods, never to be seen again, despite much effort searching. Poor Randy had to hike back up to the edge of the ski area and persuade the liftie to let him ride down on the chairlift while the rest of us pressed on.

 

The ridge, with Anderson Peak at the horizon. It felt like we were travelling along the top of the world for most of the day.

 

The top of the ridge was veritably infested with bear tracks. At one point, we could see that the bear had been through since the skiers the previous afternoon, as its track was on top of a set of ski tracks that clearly hadn't seen warm April mid-day sun.

 

Benson ski hut, just before we hit Anderson Peak. Some skiers do this route in two days, overnight in the hut, and have time to play on the slope or sleep in; others like us go light and do it in one very long day.

 

Bootpacking up the slushy slope at the top of Anderson Peak. The picture doesn't do it justice -- this section was STEEP. Too steep and slushy for the skins to provide enough traction, and there weren't any alternative routes that looked any better. I had some serious heebie-jeebies, and had to do my best to ignore my pesky hindbrain complaining.

 

Us.

 

The view just before we dropped off the final saddle back down to civilization. Because we had started early, there was still afternoon sun on the snow, leaving it slushy, but delightfully predictable to ski on as we wound our way down through the trees and creeks on our way down to the parking lot at the bottom. Total time spent skiing: about 11 hours. I don't know about the others, but am sure that's a record for me!

 

More Fun on the Tandem

 

On Saturday, Nimue and I did the Cinderella Classic metric century over in the East Bay. We were strong, passing many people, and got to explore some nice little roads through the still-green hills that I'd never been on before. Nim was good, though her main comment about the adventure was something along the lines of "We rode too fast, Mommy, and it made me cold!" Over the course of the ride she stole all my extra warm layers and put them on on top of all her layers -- by the end, she was wearing an undershirt, a jersey, a wool sweater, her windbreaker, my fleece layer, and my windbreaker! I on the other hand, was working hard enough to be plenty warm in just my jersey. Despite the fact that I could clearly feel Nimue's effort on the bike, she still had enough energy to be goofy at lunch, and ran around the yard like a mad thing after we got home.



66 miles and a couple thousand feet of gentle climbing



Because this was a females-only ride, Chad got to do the epic jolly 100 mile loop over and around Mt. Hamilton instead. Details may be forthcoming...