Overall, I had a great last year. Joey and I lived in Switzerland for 3 months, which was something we had wanted to do for a while. We also visited Seattle for the first time in January. I took a month off of work in October and then talked myself into a job that more closely fits my skills while Joey passed his quals and is now officially in the phd program. He also got his first, first-author paper accepted into a major journal and I took an art class at our local community college.

Joey and I both became vegetarians, and are eating organically grown vegetables from spud.com (and almost our backyard!). We cook 99% of our meals at home and make most things from scratch - ridding ourselves of processed foods.

Lola has become much more mellow and was fantastic on our road trip to South Dakota. More importantly though, the cats didn't have any major surgeries this year!

We also made great strides on finishing our back yard although that project is still far from complete.

So all in all things have been good.
Here are our specific resolutions from last year:

• become bilingual - totally ditched this one. Joey and I both realized that this just isn't that important to us. We got by just fine in Switzerland with English, gestures, and simple words. We did well enough that it seems better to spend our time on more worthwhile things.
• run 1000 miles this year - soo.. the thought behind the idea was sound, but the actual objective wasn't completed. I am now in much better shape than I was at the beginning of the year, and Joey and I are also eating much better than we were. (becoming vegetarians who focus on natural food made the latter very easy). I am going to count this as completed because the spirit of the goal was achieved.
• have the dog and cats get along - we made a big change this year and Lola now stays inside the house while we are at work. This has made life with all of the animals infinitely better. She no longer tears up the yard, and instead sleeps and guards all day. The cats and dog are inside together, an no one has been eaten yet, so I would say they are doing much better at getting along. Lola also goes to doggie daycare twice a week to help get rid of her excess energy.
• be able to walk the dog off leash around the block - i am abandoning this goal. Lola is a good dog, but I don't think she will ever not run after a tempting squirrel - at least not until she is so old she can't run anymore (ie never)
• be able to take the dog to school for a whole day - i tried taking Lola to work with me again, and it was a complete bust. Joey had better luck though and is able to take Lola with him when he isn't working in the lab. Unfortunately, he has been doing a lot of lab work lately, and dogs just don't fit there. Having consistent doggie daycare times and keeping Lola inside makes this goal less important though.
• finish all major housework - we made great progress here, but it all moves slowly. During my month off of work I made a lot of improvements to the organization of the house and Joey and I have put a lot of work into the backyard. However, there is still a lot to be done.

This year, I have a lot of things that I want to accomplish, but I am only going to highlight a few:

• explore more 3d art projects - I really want to keep pursuing art. I hope to take a sculpture or welding class and make some great pieces this year.
• get a six pack - It is going to be awesome. Wish me luck.
• volunteer and donate - More things in my life are now under control, so now is the time to start really giving back.
• keep working on the house - We really need to get things more organized and under control so that we can go on a...
• camping/backpacking frenzy - I really want to do more camping, hiking, and backpacking this year. (I've never done the latter) Going out with Lola is fun, great exercise, peaceful, and beautiful. I don't think we will stray far from home this year as Joey already has conferences in Quebec, and Denver and so far I have to go to Boston. However, there are a ton of great areas in northern California, so I don't think we will be lacking in any way.

That sums up the gist of everything.
I think this is going to be a great year (and it better be as I will be turning 25!)

Photos from around the house, Sequoia National Park, and Big Basin.

The public wants a hard drinking, uneducated, lowbrow commander-in-chief. Important qualifications in the past 8 years alone have been being likeable and not enjoying anything too foreign sounding, like arugula. It just doesn't make sense. Consider Bob. He's lazy, isn't too bright, and only repeats what his friends tell him to. But he is a fan of your favorite sports team, which scores a few points. Would you want to work with Bob? Would you hire Bob? Hopefully not, but if you get enough people together, they would put Bob in charge of the country.

But it isn't just a problem with the electorate. The goal of a politician is to be elected, which is achieved by satisfying the desires of the largest proportion of your constituents in the very short-term. Successful politicians continue on, perhaps moving up the ladder to bigger and better positions, mentoring others along the way. It seems reasonable that success would depend upon things like staff loyalty and earmarks. Natural selection of memes takes care of the rest, with the result being incompetence, mismanagement, and corruption.

Rather than figuring out the most efficient use of our resources in the long term, just cut taxes and borrow money to get elected right now, because you'll be onto something bigger and better by the time it comes around. In a business like health insurance where the whole point is to bring together a group to share risk, keep it small with lots of overhead and people in suits rather than increasing the pool to include the whole country because that would be socialism. It's easy to find some justification for a decision and then brush over the counter arguments. I think that these problems (which only scratch the surface) are inherent to full-time politicians of any affiliation, but are most obvious with right-wing, fear- and war-mongering representatives who appeal to the worst in people.

Don't get me wrong. I think that there are tons of bright, productive people here. However, the people that we elect have their own interests to look after and the people doing the voting care about very strange things. It's a chicken and egg problem, but short of moving to an island, a start is giving lasting support to thoughtful, intelligent politicians who have a deep knowledge of the issues.

One last thing about the financial crisis. You can only spend more than you produce for so long, and in the best case it will turn out like Sweden, and more likely it's going to get ugly for a decade or more like Japan. But an investment at (hopefully) the bottom of the market makes a lot more sense than a hand out.

Anyways, I just wanted to get that off my chest to feel less of a need to share Reader items that highlight these things.

Mainly, I wanted to concur with Noah (from his new tumblog) that Shad is absolutely filthy and you should check him out immediately. There are a ton of videos and music from him on YouTube.

We drove down there on Sunday, 7/27 and came back on Saturday, 8/2. We camped at the trailhead the first and last nights. Our route took us over Timber Gap to Pinto Lake (Day 1), over Black Rock Pass to Little Five Lakes (Day 2), a layover (Day 3), past Big Five Lakes through Lost Canyon to Columbine Lake (Day 4), and over Sawtooth Pass past Monarch Lake back down to the car (Day 5).

Here's what our trip looked like on a USGS topographical map (here's a good free source of USGS maps).

I brought my handy GPS along for the trip in order to geotag the photos I took. A nice side effect is that I recorded the distance (30.5 miles), total climbing (13,645 feet), total descent (14,061 feet), and maximum elevation (11,679 feet). Nice.

I've included some photos from the trip (there are many more on Flickr) and you can view the photos on a map. Also, in writing about the trip, it was interesting to see all of the other people who have taken a similar trip.

We met up on Sunday with Tom and Doug, two co-workers of my dad, and Doug's son Chet, who works as a hunting guide in Alaska. We took off Monday morning on the trail.

There was late snow this year, so we ran into quite a few creeks and fields of wildflowers.

We stopped on Monday night when we came across a bear box and some nice looking campsites. We couldn't find Pinto Lake and were a little bit unclear on where exactly we were.

The next morning we started up Black Rock Pass, and could clearly see Pinto Lake now that we were above it. I came across a few marmots on the trail and made it up to the top of Black Rock Pass around noon.

From Black Rock we descended into Little Five Lakes and setup camp beneath some trees. Interestingly, a married ranger couple was living out there this summer off of a few thousand pounds of supplies brought in by helicopter. They had a yurt surrounded by an electrical fence powered by solar panels to fend off the bears. Once we setup camp, we had some tasty dinner and passed out for the night.

The next day (Wednesday) we didn't move camp and mainly sat around reading. Doug and my dad did some fishing and Lyell managed to get caught on the wrong end of a fly fishing line. We also caught some nice photos of the sunset over the mountains. The mosquitoes were out in force, and there were typically 10-20 of them on you at any given time.

On Thursday we parted ways with Tom, Doug and Chet, who decided to stay another day at Big Five Lakes. We headed down into Lost Canyon and back up, following a creek to a nice climb to reach Columbine Lake.

We played in the snow a bit, looked at Black Rock Pass from a completely different perspective, and enjoyed the relative dearth of mosquitoes. That night the stars all over the place and the Milk Way was a stripe of milk foam across the sky.

We headed back to base camp the next day (Friday). On the way down we came across a few more marmots and covey. We camped back in the realm of toilets and running water that night and had a blueberry cake to celebrate Lyell's 18th birthday.

I've been fiddling around with EveryTrip, so here's a slideshow that shows the photos overlayed with the map. It's what Flickr should have but doesn't yet.

Mineral King

1. Yellow cheddar cheese is artificially colored with Annatto. The original reason for coloring it have been long forgotten, but how weird would cheese whiz look if it was white? Most importantly, there is no difference in flavor between yellow and white cheddar, although I could have sworn...
    
2. You know the brightly colored ponds at the south end of the San Francisco Bay that you can see from the air? They are salt evaporation ponds which were purchased by the public from the Cargill Corporation in 2003 in order to convert them to wetlands. They're still being used to produce salt for industrial purposes but someday will no longer be bright red (the color is due to all of the brine shrimp and other little beasties living in the ponds).

photo credit: kevin_kemmerer