San Francisco

The evening I returned from southern California, Joanne, who I met in Vietnam six moths ago, arrived on a flight from Las Vegas. Since I had last seen her she had made her way through England, Ireland, France, New York City, Miami, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Los Angeles, Colorado, Utah, and Vegas. She was in the final leg of her trip and had arranged to spend a couple days with me in California and then come out to Hawaii for a week or so to get nice and relaxed and tan before heading back to Australia.

She is the second of the people I met on my trip to have come and visited me. Mark, also from Vietnam came through Hawaii a couple months ago. That being said, all of you that I met on my trip and those of you who are old friends from the mainland are always welcome to come and enjoy the nice weather any time you like.

Armed with my Dad's car and a map of San Francisco, we headed into the city. Our first stop was the new De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. The completely new museum was finished in 2005 to much architectural controversy (I like it). One of the best features of the new museum is the 9 story tall tower which has a 360 degree observation deck on the top floor that you can go up to for free. It offers some amazing views of the central portion of the city.

After we enjoyed the view from the museum we made our way along to Clement Street in the Richmond District of San Francisco where we had dim-sum for lunch. Dim-sum typically consists of various types of meats and veggies wrapped up in dough and steamed. Lunch for two came out to about $5 and we were totally full.

After lunch we headed to one of the most recognizable structures in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge. Surprisingly enough, I had never actually walked out onto the bridge, so this was a new experience for me.


We only had so much time on the parking meter so we were only able to walk out to the middle of the span, but the views were amazing!



From the bridge you get one of the best vistas of San Francisco itself.


After enjoying our walk across the bridge we headed down to the north edge of the city to go to Fisherman's Wharf. The area is SUPER touristy, but we were able to accomplish two very important things. One, Joanne was able to continue her systematic sampling of every Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavor, and, two, we were able to check out the california sea lions at Pier 39. They are an exceedingly noisy lot, but they are great fun to watch as they jostle for position on the platforms and push each other off. A pinniped king-of-the-hill sort of thing.

After seeing some of the touristy sites in the city we headed out to the Mission District to meet up with my friends Dan and Emily for drinks and dinner. We started at The Lone Palm where we had a couple drinks with some of Dan's co-workers from the Nature Conservancy. I was a little surprised when one of them, who I had never met before, called me a liar when I told her that I was an archaeologist and that I lived in Hawaii. My job and place of habitation isn't that strange is it? After drinks, we headed out to a really good sushi restaurant. After giving Dan and Emily a ride back to their house because it was raining, we headed back to my folk's house after long day.

Sculpture

After returning to northern California I went over to the ranch side of the Djerassi Program and took a few photos of a couple of the sculptures on the property.

Architecture Research

On the morning of January 3 my sister and I headed out from McKenzee's house in Costa Mesa, who was kind enough to allow us a place to stay (Thanks Kenz!). Our destination was Hesperia, California, which is about an hour up Freeway 15 north of San Bernadino, and is home to the Cal Earth Institute.

The Cal Earth Institute is run by Nader Khalili, who has spent his architectural career developing low cost housing techniques using natural earthen materials. His basic goal is to develop techniques for building sustainable, environmentally friendly, affordable housing.

At the Cal Earth Institute he primarily works with superadobe. It is basically 8 shovels of earth/sand/dirt etc., a shovel of cement mix, and a can (the big 6 lbs kind) and a half of water. These ingredients are mixed up either by hand or in a small mixing machine and then poured into sand bags. The sand bags are then laid out into a parabolic dome shape with layers of barbwire between them. The end result is a structure that can be constructed for next to nothing. Once people learn the technique it is possible to build a structure large enough for a family of 4 in about 2-3 days. Because the structures are made from earthern materials they are very thermally conservative, meaning that if they are heated - even with a small heat source - they stay warm, and vise-versa in terms of cold. In addition, when the structures at the Cal Earth Institute were subjected to a hydraulic earthquake test, not only did they pass with flying colors, they nearly broke the testing machine.

The potential applications for these techniques are very far reaching. In places like Pakistan where they had devastating earthquakes this past fall, this technique has been used to build housing for people who had their homes destroyed. Jim Guerra, a man that my sister met with at the institute, is teaching the technique to migrant farm workers. He is also spearheading a push to get the structures approved by the State of California so that they can be built on farmers' lands, thus providing migrant farmers a place to sleep that is a lot better than park benches. Representatives from the United Nations and many other organizations have traveled to Hesperia to see the work that is being conducted.

The basic techniques are also being further developed so that through a combination of building methods, full scale houses can be built. The institute is about 80% of the way through completing a 2500 square foot house for a total cost of about $90,000. It includes three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a two car garage.












It should be noted the Hesperia is in the high desert at about 3700 feet and so it was really really cold. Especially for the weenie boy from Hawaii. I ended up hiding in the car, which was warm from sitting in the sun all morning and reading while my sister interviewed Jim about his ongoing efforts.

The trip to the Cal Earth Institute was extremely educational for me. I learned a lot about environmentally friendly architecture, but more importantly, I learned a lot about my sister and her interests.

Road Trip to Los Angeles

On January 2nd Ceara and I departed from northern California for a four day to trip to the Los Angeles area. Ceara was going to conduct research on her batchelor's thesis in architecture that she is working on so that she can graduate from Brown University this May. She got a $400 grant from her university to conduct the work, so she was able to rent a car and have money for us to eat. She is researching low cost housing on the U.S. - Mexico border for migrant farm workers. In the future she hopes to be able to help alleviate the problem of people sleeping in cardboard boxes, under bushes, and in metal culverts like they most commonly do today.

We departed fairly early in the morning in a driving rain storm and the car was soundly pummeled all of the way south until we got over the Grapevine, which are the mountains just to the north of LA. With some time to kill in the late afternoon we headed down to Santa Monica where we wandered around the 3rd street promenade. We walked out to and along the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean and we also went to Hennessy-Ingall, which is one of the largest architecture bookstores in the western United States. Unfortunately for Ceara, she is a poor student and could not afford any of the really expensive books that she liked. Fortunately for me we did not have a lot of time left on our parking meter which meant that we did not have to spend all afternoon in the bookstore.


After we hung out in Santa Monica we headed down to Costa Mesa in Orange Country on the southern side of greater Los Angeles to see my friends Ian and Linda. Linda was one of the very first people that I met at college and She Ian and I all lived in the same dorm freshman year, which is now nearly a decade ago. In addition to them my sister and I also got to see their new baby girl Lindsay who was about 11 weeks old when we where there. She is absolutely adorable and as you can see she has a full head of bright red hair that sticks straight up no matter how hard her parents try to get it to stay down. As the single batchelor that I am, it is a little weird to have friends my age already married. It is even weirder to have had two of them produce a child. There is this perfect little human that is 50% Linda and %50 Ian. I have not had much experience with babies and was quite pleased when I was able to hold her for a few minutes and she did not start screaming. That being said, I am very glad that she is not mine and I have no plans to have one of my own any time soon!

Out With A Bang...

Some of this story appeared in an e-mail or two, but I thought that I would share it with all of you.

So I had a rather rough last day of 2005. My friend Emily from college had been staying with my folks and I for a couple days before her scheduled departure back to Chicago where she is a graduate student. She was supposed to leave early on the morning of the 31st from the Oakland airport, which is about an hour and 15 minutes from my parents house with no traffic. Things didn't go exactly as planned.

There was a HUGE storm the night of the 30th-31st and so when we got up super early to head out to the airport in my dad's car we found that the road out from my parents house was blocked by a small tree that had fallen across the road. Mind you this is a single lane road that runs along a mountain edge with no rail on the down slope side and it was still dark and pouring rain at this point. We drove back to my parents house and got my dad and a chainsaw. My dad decided to drive my mom's car out behind us, but as he was backing out of the car port he accidentally drove the left hand side of the car off the driveway and down a hill. The car was sitting at an precipitous angle and so we called the whole thing off and went back into the house. Emily simply had to get another flight and chew on the consequences. This is just the way that things go when you live out here in Woopwoop. She managed to call the airline and get on the same set of flights the following day which was the 1st.

We all went back to bed for another 4 hours or so and then got up, and we glad to see that the car had not fallen down the hill. The power had also gone off while we had all gone back to bed. Dad, Emily, and I got into his car and headed out the road with the chainsaw to see if we could get to the end of the road and out onto the county highway. We found that an even bigger (1 m diameter) tree had fallen parallel with the road since Emily and I first tried to get out to the end of the road. To get out we had to set to work with the chainsaw de-limbing the tree to make enough space to get a car down the shoulder of the road. This took about an hour and a half. We then drove further on, cut off the small tree that Emily and I had first encountered, and then had to cut off two more along the way to the county highway. We picked up the newspapers and headed back in from the county road. (It is 5 km from the county road to my parents house.) We went over to the ranch side of Djerassi and got the ranch truck which is a great big monster dodge pickup truck and brought it back to the house. Using it and some chain we managed to get my mom's car back up onto the driveway.

Because the power was out we made pancakes on a cast iron griddle that we placed onto the gas barb-b-que. We did bacon as well!

After I took a shower in the afternoon I was walking down the stairs and my mom's cat was hiding halfway down the stairs curled up again the vertical face of the one of the stairs. I did not see her and completely ate shit and slammed my back onto the edges of the really hard wooden stairs. They do not have any sort of padding on them at all. I now have a big bone bruise on my right shoulder blade and several large abrasions on my back. My right shoulder and right upper arm are really sore and it still hurts to do a lot of things. I also jammed several of the toes on my right foot and so I was gimping around. And the cat of course escaped unscathed.

Another big storm was supposed to blow in for the night of the 31st-1st so Emily and I decided that we had to get off of the mountain so that if more tress fell we would still be able to make it to the airport. So we headed down to San Jose where a bunch of our friends from college were going to be throwing a party. I was already planning on attending this party after Emily had left, but because of the storm she got to come to the party and I got to spend a little more time with her.

The party was really great and we all had a good time. Bob and Tina did a great job hosting and it was great to get to hang out with Dan and Emily (different Emily), Greg, Mike and Meghan, Dave, Chris and Katie (Congratulations!), and every one else who attended. I was going to take a bunch of pictures of everyone, but bringing out my nice camera while heavy drinking was occuring seemed like a bad idea.

Emily and I got up very early the morning of the 1st and I managed to get her to the airport and make it all the way back to my folk's house in one piece where I begrudgingly fed the cat, took two tylenol and two pepto bismol, unplugged the phone, and went back to bed for another 4 hours!

Rats on Stilts

As I mentioned in an earlier post there is a variety of wildlife that lives around my parent's house. I caught these six mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) having an afternoon snack just below the deck. The deer around here are as common and fearless as a rat - except they have long legs - and they destroy mom's garden.