I lucked out today! I didn't end up preparing all that well for my presentation last night. I only spent about an hour on it and then an hour from 8 to 9 this morning. I would have muddled through more than likely, but the other fellow making a presentation, Russ, went over his time for his presentation and so we had to postpone my presentation till after lunch. But after lunch only Russ was available and not the conference room. So I got to give Russ a private informal presentation in my cube. That went very well and he encouraged me to communicate with Jim from the Open Cascade class who is hard at work doing Open Cascade stuff too and might be able to help me out with the things he is discovering as he works on it. I'm relieved I didn't have to give a more formal presentation. I have that "saved by the bell" feeling!

Sunday I went hiking with my friend Linda at Sanborn County Park. We got there at 10:30 a.m. and started out a day of not very well maintained trails, badly signed trails, and heart pounding hills. We had to do lots of map reading on this trip as there were hardly any signs indicated what trail we were on. We had to look at the map to figure out what junction we ran into and where we needed to go next. On the heart pounding up hill portion, we saw lots of extra trails that folks had made by trying to cut across the switch backs. Grrr, that is not good for the park environment. You should stay on the trails as they were built. There was also lots of poison oak on the sides of the trail. I managed to avoid most of it till we started to come downhill when I brushed a branch of it. Oops ... there came a Tecnu bath for me when I got home. Tecnu is a special soap that is able to wash off the poison oak oil before your skin starts reacting to it. Knock on wood that I got it all off and won't come down with a case of it in a few days! We got a good work out on the hike as it was all uphill then all downhill and it was a hot day so we sweated lots and drank lots of water. It was fun despite the orienteering challenges,the elevation gain, and the hot weather. We had the trail to ourselves most of the way up and saw some nice Redwood groves.

Its been a fairly good day and I'm not as tired as I thought I would be. I went to Wen and Ki's house for dinner last night. Then Wen, Laura, and I popped over to Marcia's house for a hot tub after dinner. I didn't get home till 11:30 p.m. and asleep at midnight and thought for sure I would be yawning my head off today, but I haven't. I have been a little sleepy but not so much that it has been affecting my work. Work seems to be going well today. I did a lot of little cleaning up things to my code and I got the report figures finished for the TPS analysis on an aircraft today. I have to cover for Lily while she is on vacation. I feel as if I really got stuff done today even though I didn't get a whole lot done on my code.

I got the sad news today that my Uncle Ed died yesterday. Only 2 weeks ago was the first we heard that he was sick. He got cancer and it took him fast. It was pretty far advanced when they discovered it. I did not know Uncle Ed very well. I met him about 3 times in my life. He was an odd bird but I will have good memories of him. He loved to ride on trains and go to restaurants and make friends with the waitresses. He spent most of his life working in a print shop. I hope my Mom is OK. It must be hard to have a brother die.

I'm going to my first Stanford Women's Volleyball game for the 2002 season tonight. They play Cal. Sorta weird to get the rival match in right at the start of the season. I'm looking forward to checking out the new freshman players. I am hoping to squeeze in a quick bike ride and shower before the game to get some exercise for today.

Woo Hoo. I am down to 174 from 178. Although I'm a bit dubious about having lost 4 pounds in 3 days -- wonder how much of that is just the ubiquitous water weight.

I had a nice weekend. My hike to Henry Cowell went really well. Four women showed up for it and we were all nicely matched in terms of pace and interests. The conversation flowed and we all enjoyed going up and down the ridge and hiking by and through the San Lorenzo river. We had a great lunch stop on Pipeline road with a marvelous view of the river and Santa Cruz in the distance.

Sunday I finally got to sleep in late in my own bed! It had seemed ages since I had done that. It was truly marvelous! Then I happily puttered around at home till it was time to go to the GLS hike leaders barbecue at John's house. The barbecue was pretty mellow. John and Tina S. greeted me with inquiries about whether I knew much about barbecuing. Neither of them had much knowledge. I played expert which I'm not really and instructed John in how many coals to put in the barbecue grill and how much lighter fluid to squirt on (I prefer to use the no lighter fluid method of starting the coals but John didn't have the contraption you need to do that). We got the coals lit OK and barbecued our food. I splurged and had a nice steak but passed on the chips and dips. We talked about past, present, and future trips mostly. We talked a bit about finding folks to serve on the board next year. I continue to resist volunteering to do it myself. Several of us took off at 5ish.

I happily managed to get lots of home stuff done over the weekend and the past two days also. I planted the plants Linda gave me in my garden. I removed the rat skeleton from the dirt exposed when I tore down the shed. I emptied the garden trash into the condo dumpster. I threw the plywood pieces I had saved from the shed floor into the dumpster since Jen said they were not good to burn. I bought two new inner tubes and tires for my bike and got them on the tire rims and then on the bike so I have a working bike again. I finally got the last of the camping gear put away. I moved my old Mac computer from my bedroom to the guest room and shifted the shelf in the guest room to my bedroom as my book collection is growing and I needed more shelf space in there. I stuffed the four inch foam pad that I use to car camp back under the bed in the guest room. Phew.

Yes ... two days in a row Cathy is blogging!

I decided to keep a fitness journal on the web at the web site, www.fitday.com. So now you can tune in here and tune in there and wonder why I'm not writing anything! OK, OK, I'll try and write more in both places. The fitness journal is to just make me pay attention to what I'm putting in my body, how I'm feeling in general, and what exercise I am doing. The site has other tools I'm using too to help me count calories and see a plot of my weight. I figure I'll weigh myself every 3 days. Day by day is too much for me.

What is this?? An actual blog?? Yes indeed it is.

I spent all last week in Cleveland, Ohio taking a Open Cascade software training course. By Friday my head was too full to accept anymore information but for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I felt I learned quite a lot. I missed being in the bay area with my liberal friends and the more liberal attitude in general here. I'm guessing a few of my classmates were staunch republics. One guy was moaning about Title 9 and how it wasn't fair and he was trying to convince me that not all slum lords are bad after I told him my brother used to work for the city of Cleveland prosecuting slum lords. Rather than argue with him, I just changed the topic to something safter like talking about baseball or football!

This week I have been busy recovering from travel. I have been doing all those pesky chores like unpacking, getting held mail, and grocery shopping. I also had to squeeze in selecting books for Rhoda on Monday. Then on Tuesday I attended the first 15 minutes of a neighborhood watch meeting before I had to run off to my usually therapy at 7:30 p.m. I feel in need of some time after work today to just putter around the house and relax. At least that is the plan!

This week I am concentrating on getting exercise everyday and on eating better and losing some weight. It was no big surprise but I have ballooned back up to nearly 180 lbs. I'm not quite there yet (178 lbs) and hope to stop the train wreck! I'm using the same methods I used before when I lost 30 lbs and got down to 147. Alas, I was hoping not to Yo Yo like this. Maybe this time I'll figure out how to maintain the weight once I lose it.

I'm back from my weekend backpack. It was a nice trip but we were a bit disappointed that the only folks to show up for the trip were the trip leaders. Two participants had to pull out two days before the trip. The third participant just never showed up at the meeting time Friday night. I sat around for 45 minutes waiting for him to show. Not a real fun way to start off a trip. Oh well. He never showed up the entire weekend.

I hit the trail at 6 p.m. and went at my fastest pace for the 3 mile trek to Slate Creek camp. It felt a little daring to be doing it solo. I love solo hiking but I don't do it that often. I got to camp at 7:05 p.m. I took site number 1. It was a nice little site. There were 5 sites at the camp ground. I put my tent up but then decided it was too nice out to be sleeping in the tent so I put my thermarest on the ground and dumped my sleeping bag on top of it. I cooked myself some dinner, cleaned up, and then got in my sleeping bag and read my novel waiting for Wen and Ki to show up. They were due to arrive around 8 or 9 p.m. They got to camp at 8:30 p.m. and were glad to see my light. They decided to skip using their tent too. Later this turned out to be fortuitous as they discovered they forgot their tent poles! After unpacking their sleeping bags we all settled in and chatted for a while and then went to sleep. Our sleep was disturbed a couple times by racoons coming into camp. We had bear cans for our food so the racoons were frustrated by us since they couldn't get at our food. We still yelled at them to scat though two times that night.

Saturday we slept in late. The plan for the day was to just hang around camp and relax all day long. I had planned on leading a hike during the day but Wen's knee was really sore and she got some nasty blisters so she stayed in camp and Ki wanted to stay in camp to keep her company. I didn't want to hike alone so I hung out with them. We had a marvelous time enjoying the redwood forest environment, reading, eating, and talking. We also got to observe day hikers pass through and watch other backpackers arrive at camp. At 1:45 p.m. a big troop of girl scouts arrived. They had a real nice leader who came over to us three times to apologize in advance for the noise the girls might make. They were not that bad and we rather enjoyed their rambunctiousness. Our friend Linda was hiking in that afternoon to hang out with us and we thought stay the night but she arrived with just a day pack as she did not plan to stay the night after all.

However, the high light of the trip was Linda brought a backcountry oven, pizza fixings, and brownie fixings and made us pizza and brownies in the oven! The pizza was great. She brought Boboli bread and lots of cool toppings and we each made put on our favorite toppings and cooked it in the oven. It took a long time for all of us to get our pizzas but we had plenty of time and it turned out just great. We joked that we had pizza delivered to us on a backpack trip! It is probably the best meal I have ever had on a backpacking trip. Linda took off at 6:30 p.m. and the rest of us cleaned up real well in the hopes that the racoons would not visit us so much this night. We crawled in our sleeping bags at 7:00 p.m. as it was getting cold. We all had warm bags and had comfortable nights and enjoyed being out in the fresh air instead of in a tent. We chatted, read a little, and slowly drifted off to sleep.

Alas we had more night time visitors that night. We watched one racoon sniff around our bear cans and leave. Then around midnight, I stirred and saw a racoon right at Ki's feet with something in its mouth. I yelled to Ki to wake up and that the racoon had something of ours. It took her a while to realize that the racoon had her trousers! The racoon started taking off with the trousers but dropped them several feet away. Poor Ki had to get up, put on her boots, and glasses and go fetch the trousers. Fortunately the racoon had not chewed up the trousers in anyway or damaged them. Ki put them under her head for the rest of the night! I believe that coon was our last visiter that night.

I woke up at 7 a.m. and just lay there till nature caused me to get up to visit the potty :-). We had a very slow mellow morning of eating breakfast and packing up. The hike back was fairly quick and uneventful. It was indeed a mellow but fun trip for the weekend. Its just too bad we couldn't have shared it with some beginners!

Dang it all. I just wrote a nice description of the weird dream I had last night and it all disappeared when I tried to find the "Post" button in the Blogger site. So here goes again ...

I had one of those dreams last night that is going to make me think all day and ponder its meaning. I was in the house in Columbus, Ohio where I grew up. My college chums Andie and Kathy were visiting. They were sitting together on the front porch. I ran up to my room to get some pictures to show them. When I came back downstairs all jazzed to show them to Andie and Kathy either my Mom or my sister told me that they had migraine headaches and implied that I really shouldn't go out on the porch to disturb them. This upset me and I threw the pictures on the floor and flew back to my room and threw myself on the bed and fled my feeling by sleeping basically. My sister and Mother came up to my room to see if I was OK but I was not terribly responsive and just wanted to keep sleeping and not deal with them so they left.

The scene shifted then. I was still in bed trying to sleep and also feeling angry that I couldn't visit Kathy and Andie and yet at the same time understanding that migraines are awful and I should respect that and not try and hang out with them. But now I was in a huge mansion of sorts and there was a big family reunion going on with my parents as the stars of the reunion. People started coming to my room to try and get me to come out and join the reunion. Some came and just hung out but got bored of me so left. A niece of mine was sent in and she almost brought me out of my funk just by being cute and lovable. But I knew that they sent her in to get me to come out so I didn't come out right then. Finally I got tired of folks coming in to try and get me to come out of my room so I got up to escape.

I walked around the mansion. The first place I went was a huge room with pictures of my family all over the place. I saw a nice big one of Bob but never spotted one of me. Before I finished scanning the walls, I had to trot on as folks were finding me again and I wanted to be alone. I ended up in another room set out like a department store and hid in the aisles of the store. Then I decided I needed to go back to my room but I couldn't find the way back. Then the dream ended and I stirred in my sleep and realized it was a dream. Ug. It wasn't a real fun dream.

Woo Hoo ... another backpack trip to describe :-)

Caribou Wilderness Backpack

Wednesday, July 3, 2002

I got up at 4:30 a.m. and had a quick breakfast and was on the road to the Caribou Wilderness by 5:00 a.m. I had a strong cup of coffee before I left. After about two hours of driving I stopped a truck stop area for some more caffeine. I got this soda called Jolt but not the Coke Jolt but a raspberry soda version of it. It woke me up and kept me going. After passing Sacramento on I5 I found a rest stop and took a bathroom break. Then it was off to Red Bluff and a gas stop. At Red Bluff I peeled off on to route 36 to a town called Chester. Shortly after Chester I turned on a small road, road 10. From there I turned onto a dirt road that took me to the Hay Meadow trailhead of the Caribou Wilderness. The wilderness is to the east of Lassen National park. I got to the trailhead at 11:30 a.m. I was to meet W. and K. at noon. They arrived pretty much on the dot at noon. As I waited I had to swat at a few mosquitos.

We got our packs out, locked up the cars, ate some lunch, and we were off at 12:55 p.m. Our packs were heavy with all the food we needed for 5 days of backpacking. I’m guessing my pack weighed about 45 pounds at the beginning. As we started to hike we soon all pulled out our mosquito head nets and applied our insect repellent to exposed skin. The bugs did not dampen our spirits though. We were prepared for them. The trail was nice and flat and passed through Hay Meadow and then went uphill gradually to the Beauty/Long Lake junction. We headed off to Long Lake. We passed Long Lake and had to make one somewhat tricky water crossing or maybe I should say swamp crossing! The actual trail was covered with water so we had to hike a small bit along the water to a long log across it. We all very gingerly made our way across. We all assured each other that if we fell it was no big deal and we would just get a little wet. It would have been only a one foot fall into about knee high water. None of us fell though and we were much relieved. It is hard to balance over logs when you have a heavy pack on. Long Lake was beautiful but a little shallow with a reedy shoreline. After Long Lake we passed two more nameless shallow small lakes. Then we passed South and North Divide lakes. The mosquitos got really bad in this area and we were all tired. It was hitting me hard that I had gotten up at 5 a.m. , driven for 6.5 hours, and then backpacked for 5 miles. The last 3 miles of hiking were the kind where you try not to think about when you will get there and you just concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other and try to ignore the mosquitos. I almost missed Black Lake but W. pointed it out and said the magic words that the next lake was Turnaround Lake where we were going to set up camp for the first night.

We arrived in camp at 5 p.m. We were too tired to search for a perfect campsite so took an adequate one close by. Its biggest fault was that it was close to swampy lake land and so we had lots of mosquitos to deal with. W. and K. had brought a mesh shelter that you can hang up with rope and handy trees. It was about 5 by 4 feet and about 5 feet high. So you could crawl under it and sit three people on the ground to escape from the mosquitos. We came to call it the mesh palace. We had our dinner in it that night after it was done cooking. Its hard to eat dinner with mosquitos buzzing all around your face. After dinner we escaped to our tents and did some reading and decided that since the next day was a lay over day and we were just going to go on a day hike that we would sleep in as late as we wanted. I was using a tent I borrowed from L. It was nice and roomy with good mesh windows so I could see out but the bugs couldn’t get in! I slept well that night.

Thursday July 4, 2002

We didn’t stir till around 9 a.m. Then we took our time getting breakfast ready and packing our day packs (for all of us the top of our packs can be removed to make a butt pack) for the day hike. We hit the trail for our day hike at 11 a.m. We hiked to Jewel Lake first. It was a gorgeous clear little lake and we found a pile of rocks right at the shore that were perfect for getting into the water for a swim. We stopped and stripped and had a marvelous skinny dip. There were very few mosquitoes there and the swimming was awesome. The water was a bit cold but I grew used to it fairly quickly. K. got in by wading to her knees in the water and then diving. I got in by wading to my knees and then losing my balance and sliding down the slanted rock and plunging in. Oops. W. had brought her pink floaty tube, her name for her pink inner tube. It took her a while to blow it up. By the time she finished K. and I had gotten out to warm up. We enjoyed watching W. float around on her pink tube. Then we had some lunch and headed off to Gem Lake. However we discovered that the trail on W.’s topographic map did not exist so we changed plans and headed to Cowboy Lake. We descended down about 300 feet and saw Cowboy Lake. It wasn’t very impressive. We continued on to Emerald Lake. We had to hike back up those 300 feet to get to it but it was very worth it. Emerald lake was beautiful, better than Jewel lake. We all loved it and we took another skinny dip there. It felt so good to plunge in after that 300 foot climb! We also nicknamed Emerald lake Hypothermia lake. It was much colder than Jewel but still not so cold that it kept us from enjoying the swim. There was a nice stiff cool breeze blowing the whole time and absolutely no mosquitoes. We were just purring at how wonderful it was there. Alas we had to move on. We continued hiking our loop and finally reached Gem Lake. It was an OK lake but most of its shore was covered with reeds or logs and so wasn’t too inviting to swim in but was pretty to look at. Gem Lake was the last lake of the loop. We then continued back to Turnaround Lake. The mosquitoes were fierce again right before Turnaround. We got very accustomed to pulling our mosquito nets down and reapplying the insect repellent on this trip. We came to call reapplying the repellent to “re-deet” in honor of the ingredient in the repellent that really does the most effective job of repelling those bugs. Our day hike ended up being about 7 or 8 miles so we were pretty tired when we got back.

The bugs in camp were bad that night. We started a camp fire, lit a citronella candle, and lit a mosquito coil. The candle and coil didn’t seem to do diddly squat but the smoke from the fire provided some relief. I still escaped to the mesh palace to eat my dinner but W. and K. braved the bugs and sat around the fire and ate. I sat with them but had my mosquito head net on and my rain coat to protect myself from the bugs. I usually ate right before W. and K. because we were sharing one stove. I would get my boiling water to have my instant mashed potatoes and raman noodles. Then as I was eating they would use the stove to cook their dinner. It worked out fairly nice that way. The bugs drove us to our tents early again that night at about 8 p.m. I read my novel some (One True Thing by Anna Quindlan) and then fell asleep fairly early. My tent quickly became my comfort haven away from the mosquitoes. Oh we didn’t think too much about it being the 4th of July but we did notice a party of folks who had ridden to Jewel Lake on horses for a picnic who were dressed up in red, white, and blue cloths!

Friday, July 5

We got up a bit earlier the next day. I believe we were on the trail by 10 a.m. We were breaking camp that day and moving on to camp on Widow Lake. We hiked along the trail next to Turnaround Lake and hiked right past our junction. We realized we had been on the trail too long and should have seen our junction so we backtracked but not far enough. We looked at the topo map and determined that we were going the right way after all. But the trail just led to a steep rocky hill side so we looked at the topo again and determined that we needed to backtrack even further than we thought. We finally found the junction this time. Our hike to Twin Lakes and Triangle Lake was a sort of quiet tired hike. It was hot, the bugs were a pain, we later found out from W. that her knees were killing her and her reaction was to just be very remote and quiet. When we got to Triangle Lake though we stopped to pump some more water through our filter and go for a swim. This rest and swim stop improved our spirits greatly and the breeze blowing across Triangle seemed to keep the bugs away. Triangle Lake was colder than Emerald so we dubbed it Frostbite lake. Triangle Lake was quite big and there were many people there that day. When we skinny dipped we put on a little show for some day hikers. Of course it was me that was standing there naked trying to get the nerve to dive in when the hikers came by. Oh well. I just ignored them and finally got the nerve to dive in. The hikers were greatly amused but not offended. We were not offended either and laughed along with them. The water was too beautiful and clear to for go a swim just for modesty sake!! After a swim we ate lunch and headed off on the last 2 or 3 miles to Widow Lake.

The hike to Widow Lake was hot and dry and a wee bit stressful as we were worried about missing another junction. I led this section of the hike and mostly kept on the right path by following the foot prints of other folks. We passed by a sign telling us we were in Lassen which was good as Widow was supposed to be in Lassen. After what seemed like ages we finally hit the junction we wanted that pointed the way to Widow Lake. We were a bit glum to see the sign saying it was .9 miles away. We were surprised when five or ten minutes later we got to Widow Lake. We couldn’t figure out how it could have been .9 miles. Widow Lake was beautiful but a bit of a disappointment after Jewel and Emerald Lakes the day before. It was a murkier lake and the shoreline was grassy or muddy. No nice rocks to jump off like at Emerald and Jewel. We couldn’t find a very good camp site and ended up camping up the hill from a grassy shoreline. We put up the mesh palace and headed down to try out swimming. The water was warmer but it wasn’t much fun to have to walk through the slimy mud to get to the deep part of the lake. W. and K. were also not happy about the taste of the filtered water from the lake. We finished our swim and headed to the tents for naps as it had been a sort of cranky tiring day. During nap time I heard serious discussion from W. and K.’s tent but I didn’t really pay attention to it much. After naps we had some dinner. W. and K. proposed to me that we not stay at Widow for two nights but head to either Jewel or Emerald Lake the next day. I agreed with this idea as Widow was not very impressive and was full of bugs. I later braved the masses of mosquitos at the lake side after dinner to pump some water. As I sat there pumping there were about 10 to 15 mosquitos hovering around my mosquito head net and I would have to swat them off my hands every once in a while. Even the deet didn’t seem to repel all of them. Anyhow, we were driven to bed early again by the bugs and we decided to get up at 6 a.m. so we could do the hot dusty section of the trail back towards Triangle Lake in the cool of the morning.

Saturday July 6, 2002

We got up at 6 a.m. and I was greeted by K. with the question of had I seen or heard the bear that came to our site last night. I hadn’t. Apparently it came by around 11 p.m. and sniffed at our packs but found nothing of interest in them (we stored our food in bear proof cans and stashed the cans far away from the tents). I guess I was so tired that I slept through the entire visit. I did hear the noisy squirrel earlier in the night. We giggled about that squirrel. It was the noisiest little thing. It must have carried on for 5 minutes. It was in the tree right above my tent. I have a window in the top of my tent so I watched it race here and there and make its funny noise. Any how, we checked out our bear cans and they had not been disturbed at all. We had breakfast and packed up everything and got on the trail by 7:45 a.m.

We found the hike back to Turnaround Lake much easier this time. We knew where we were going for sure. It was cooler. We had a nice stop at Triangle Lake to pump more water and eat a snack. We reached Turnaround Lake at around 11 a.m. I think. We decided at this point that we had enough energy to go to Emerald Lake, our favorite lake! We braved the mosquito row part of the trail and reached Emerald Lake at around 12:30 p.m. We were a little disappointed that we had to share the lake with two other women and they had snagged the good campsite. We found an OK site for our tents. Then we had a delightful afternoon of resting, swimming, napping, and reading by the lake with no mosquitoes bothering us! W. was able to plunge her legs in the water and in effect ice her knees. They were very sore. It was good that she got plenty of rest that day. We said hi to the two other women. They were a Mother and daughter backpacking together. They were impressed that we were all women and had no men with us. We asked them where they had been and they said they had been at Evelyn Lake and really liked it. We cooked dinner on the rocks looking over the lake. It was so pleasant to not have to worry about bugs and be able to cook dinner and eat it without mosquito head nets and re-deeting or lighting a fire. The mosquitoes finally did come out around 8 o’clock. As usual we escaped to the tents. We decided that day that we would backpack to Evelyn Lake the next day and hope the two women were right that it was nice. That way we would have a fairly short hike out the last day of only 2 miles or so.

Sunday July 7, 2002

We were up at 6 a.m. again and on the trail by 8 a.m. Unfortunately there were tons of mosquitoes around that morning. We decided that it was the stiff breeze on the lake all afternoon and most of the evening that had kept them away before. In the morning the water was very still and you could see clouds of mosquitoes in the sun rays! Ug. Oh well. We soon got on the trail and made our way past North and South Divide Lakes and headed to Long Lake. We reached the infamous log and had to traipse over it again. This time we all just flew across. We must have gained our hiking legs over the past few days. After the log crossing we hit the junction to the Posey/Evelyn/Beauty trail. We reached Posey Lake and it was nice but again had a reedy shoreline and didn’t look like pleasant swimming. So we headed on to Evelyn hoping the two women at Emerald were right about it. It turns out they were very right. Evelyn Lake was a deep clear cold lake with a nice camp site with rocks on the shore where you dive right off the rock into about 10 feet deep water. Over on the other side of the lake from camp were more rocks and we had lunch on them while waiting for the campers from the night before to pack up and leave the camp site. We got there at 11 a.m. and the camp site was vacated by noon. We had a nice lunch and swim before we hiked over to the site and set things up. The water was very cold but not so cold that it kept us out of the lake. W. and I had two wonderful swims and K. was in there three times. My, she loved to swim. Swimming on backpacking trips in clean clear lakes is marvelous. Not only is it refreshing and fun but it cleans you up a bit too! It was good to get all that sun screen and deet washed off for just a little bit before you had to reapply it later. We all loved the swimming. The bugs were not too bad at Evelyn either. Some came out in the early evening but not so many that dinner was a pain. We didn’t bother putting up the mesh palace that night. We did head to bed around 8 p.m. We all finished the novels we had brought with us for the trip on that marvelous sunny bug free afternoon at Evelyn. I got in a nice one hour nap too. It was a great way to spend our last full day on the trails.

Monday July 8, 2002

We got up at 7 a.m. and sadly packed up our gear and said goodbye to Evelyn Lake. It was a great place. We were on the trail by 8 a.m. We hiked back to the cars and Hay Meadow Lake and a good pace. I think we were all anxious to get the long drive home started and get some relief from the mosquitoes. We reached the cars at 9:30 a.m. I changed into some clean cloths I had left in the car and we drove on the dirt road and the small paved road to the main route 36. We made a quick pit stop at a rest area to use a real bathroom! That was nice after a week of going in the woods and having to wave mosquitoes away from your butt! Then we drove to a gas station and filled up. We caravanned till just after we got in I5. I signaled for W. and K. to pull into the next rest stop and requested that we ditch the caravan as K. liked to drive at 75 mph and I preferred 70 mph. So we hugged goodbye and went our merry ways. I had a long uneventful drive home with one stop for gas. I had my air conditioning on full blast in the car as it was in the 100’s in the valley and in the 90’s in the bay area. I got home at 4:15 p.m. I had some McDonald’s for dinner. Since then I have unpacked my backpack and done laundry. I’m mostly ready now to head back to work tomorrow. All in all this trip was great. I could have done without the bugs but Jewel, Triangle, Emerald, and Evelyn Lake were so beautiful and the swimming so fun. I also enjoyed spending 5 days with W. and K. They are great friends. We had so much fun together on this trip.

OK ... so the other meaning to CLOGS besides Cathy's LOGS is that sometimes stuff gets CLOGed in my head and never gets logged. LOL! But here is a description of the Lost Coast backpack trip I just got back from with W. and K.

Lost Coast Backpack Trip report, June 7-11, 2002

Friday

I packed up the car and met W. and K. at the park-n-ride lot in Palo Alto. We caravaned to the Lost Coast together. We got stuck in rush hour traffic just after San Francisco. It took forever to get through Marin county and Santa Rosa. After that it was pretty much clear sailing though. We saw lots of Harley-Davidson motorcycles and determined that there was some event going on where Harley owners were driving down the California coast and stopping to camp every so often. We got to our campsite at about 10:30 p.m. It was a site about 4 miles in on a bumpy dirt road. We set up camp in the dark with a howling wind for company. We hit the sack quickly and had an OK night's sleep at camp.

Saturday

We got up at 8 a.m. and packed up the cars and drove down to Black Sands beach. We left W. and K.'s car there and piled into my car. Then we drove to the Ranger station to get a fire permit to use the backpack stove on the trip. Then we were off to Mattole and the end of Lighthouse road. It was a long twisty drive on back country roads. We finally got to Mattole and the trailhead at 2 p.m. We were finally on the trailhead by around 2:30 p.m. It was very windy but we were hiking with the wind thank goodness! The sun was out bright though and the ocean was beautiful. We hiked mostly on sandy beaches but with some hiking up on bluffs over the beach. We saw a baby seal hanging out in a low tide pool. That was cool. We got to what we thought was our first camp, Cooksie Creek, at 5 p.m. We set up our tents on a semi-flat spot just up the hill from a creek where we got our water. As we settled in we got out our trail description and determined that we were actually a mile and a quarter short of Cooksie Creek. But we liked our campsite well enough and decided to just make Sunday a longer day. We also examined our tide table and determined that we needed to get up at 5 a.m. and be on the trail by 7 a.m. in order to hike the trail before it got covered by high tide the next day. K. cooked us a great tofu scramble for dinner that night. We were both very proud of the rock shelter we built for the stove to keep the wind away. We saw an awesome sun set that night over the Pacific ocean and then headed to bed.

Sunday

I was up at 5 a.m. and at 5:30 a.m. roused W. and K. We had a cold breakfast and packed up camp. We got on the trail by 6:40 a.m. The hiking was mixed that day. Some was on the beach, some on a nice flat section of coast on a old jeep trail, and some over these nasty boulders on the beach. We made good time though and got past the sections of trail that we needed to during the low tides. This day seemed to be the day of seeing dead things on the beach. We saw a dead sting ray and even grosser a dead sea lion. Ick! We had a nice lunch stop about when we hit the nice flat jeep trail at 10:30 a.m. Getting up at 5:30 a.m. made us ready for lunch a bit early! The weather was very nice and not so windy yet. After lunch we continued on and saw two cabins that folks come to vacation in (not sure how they get supplies to them). We got to Big Creek at noonish and that was our destination for the day. We found a great campsite. Someone had built a drift wood shelter on the beach and had made a nice fire ring and found drift wood for benches. So we had a cushy site with nice soft sand to sleep on. We spent the rest of the day napping, soaking our feet in Big Creek, and reading. It was great. We had dinner at 6 p.m. K. cooked bean burritos for herself and W. I cooked my own dinner of raman noodles that night as I didn't care for beans. I also had some instant mashed potatoes. After dinner we checked out our trail guide again and found that we were in store for another early start. High tide was at 12:42 p.m. and to get past on our route we would have to get to the end of our day by 10:42 a.m. We skipped watching the sunset that night as the wind was just howling and almost blew you over if you came out from behind the drift wood shelter. We went to bed at dusk.

Monday

We got up at 5 a.m. and managed to pack up and be on the trail by 6:15 a.m. It was lots of beach walking this day. We kept what we came to call our "tide" pace. A bit faster hiking pace so we would get to the proper places in our route at low tide. We made good time and the weather was awesome: not too cold and not too hot. We saw many sea lions off shore. We also saw some other backpackers just getting up. We came to rather like hiking early in the morning before the afternoon wind kicked up and while the beach was cooler and in the shade. We reached our last camp, Buck Creek, at 9:30 a.m.! We had another long day of kicking back and relaxing ahead of us. There was another party of backpackers in the campsite that we coveted. They said they were leaving so we took off our packs and hung out on the beach waiting for them to depart so we could swoop in on the site. The didn't end up leaving till noon. We ate our lunch and played at building rock sculptures on the beach while we waited. After they left we were a little annoyed as they did not clean up the site. They left an empty bag of cookies and had tried to burn cans and plastic in the fire ring. We put the smelly fire out and shoved the cookie bag in our trash to be carried out. With that done the camp site was nicer. We set up our tents and then spent another lovely afternoon of napping and reading, and soaking sore feet in the creek. In the morning while we were waiting for the campsite we saw a river otter swim in from the ocean and go up Buck creek. That was a great sight. We were really jazzed by that. The afternoon was delightful. It was an extremely pretty camp site and the great wind had finally died down. I had a great nap in the soft sand on the beach with a warm sun beating down on me. I had a good read in my tent too which turned into a second nap! We had dinner and determined that finally we did not have to start hiking at 0 dark hundred the next day. We did however have to get up at 7ish in order to have time for the 5 mile hike, car shuttle, and driving back to the bay area the next day.

Tuesday

We were woken up at 6:30 a.m. but a very surprising sound of a motorcycle driving by camp. This must have been one amazingly skilled motor bike rider and also a rebel that didn't think that the rule of no motorized vehicles on the Lost Coast past Gitchell creek applied to him or her. He or she drove in on a very rough steep down hill trail that ends at Buck Creek. Then he/she zoomed up the beach going north where he/she wasn't supposed to be with a motorized vehicle. I got up shortly there after and went to the beach to confirm that I really had heard a motorcycle. I could see the tracks in the sand. I also confirmed with W. and K. that they heard it to and actually saw it from their tent window. What a bizzare thing to be waken up by on a backpack trip. We had a nice breakfast and headed off to Black Sands beach by 8:30 a.m. This day was all sandy beach walking. It was just beautiful hiking. We managed to get close enough to the ocean to hike on the harder packed sand. We ran into a woman on our way to Black Sands and had a nice conversation with her. She was there to do some mellow backpacking and to mostly hang out and write on the beach and enjoy some solitude. She was glad to see a group of women on the beach and we reassured her not to worry that much about the rattle snakes or bears. We hadn't seen any rattle snakes and only saw bear tracks. The bears never visited our sites. We also reassured her that we hadn't seen any unstable looking icky men on the trail either unless you counted the young dudes that trashed the campsite at Buck Creek but they were heading off into the hills that day not continuing on the beach trail. It was fun to chat with her. After that we soon reached the end of our trip at Black Sands beach. K. hiked up the short hill to get the car and bring it down to where would could load our backpacks into it and not have to carry them up the hill. We stripped off our filthy cloths and put on nice clean ones we had left in the car. Then we packed the car and started off on the long drive back to the start of our trip to fetch my car. We stopped a couple times at stores for munchies. I had a nice cold can of Mountain Dew at the first stop. That tasted so good! We finally reached my car at 3:30 p.m. Then we settled in for the long ride back to the bay area. We did have a nice stop in Willits to check out a restaurant called Organic Fast Food. W. is a vegan vegetarian and this store was made for her. She got a nice fake-steak burrito and a smoothie with some protein powder mixed in. We had stopped earlier at a Subway sandwich place but W. didn't find much that she could eat there. K. and I filled up at the Subway place. After that it was pretty much a dull drive back to the bay area. I got home at 11 p.m. Poor W. and K. had another 45 minutes to go to get to their house in Santa Cruz. I took a long hot shower and then collapsed in bed. Quite a fun but exhausting trip!!

Tomorrow is the big Henry Coe hike with J. 17 miles and some fun elevation gain to get to Mt. Sizer and some wet hiking on a cross country route through a stream. Should be fun but I just know I'm going to be totally exhausted tomorrow after the hike. My cut on my heel has healed nicely so it should not be a problem at all tomorrow. I got myself two different new Odwalla juices that they refer to as sports drinks. They have those good electrolytes to help me stay hydrated on the hike. I'll also be carrying 3 quarts of water and will try and drink it all. I do need to get up a little earlier so I can stop at Safeway to get a sandwich for lunch. I forgot to buy bread at the grocery store this week.

Saturday night and Sunday is set aside for recovering from the hike and getting some chores done. I need to look at my finances, clean the house for Mom and Dad's visit next weekend, do some laundry probably, and some weeding in my wee little garden (all of 5 plants). I hope I have enough energy for all that.

I need to figure out why my checkbook register is not agreeing with my Quicken register. I want to examine if I have enough money to buy a new lap top computer. I'm hoping to get a fairly good lap top, a combination printer/scanner/fax machine, and some way to make it easy to hook the laptop up to the internet at home. The folks at work have recommended a Dell because the computer is fairly nice and the service is excellent. I do like the look of Dell's catalog. Also I have discovered a freeware program called CIGWYN which emulates UNIX on a PC so I can download g++ software and do coding on the computer if I so desire! So its not quite so important to me anymore to get a laptop on which I can install Linux. OK ... enough techy talk.

I had a good time at the end of work today trying to help K. figure out why the program I wrote for her was not working. She is fun to talk to and we got to chat while we were waiting for the silly program to crash after each test of my debugging. She kept getting calls from her husband who was asking for advice on how to handle the kids. She kept rolling her eyes at me while she coached him. I finally figured out the problem and was surprised to see that I had stayed a half hour past the time I get off and hadn't even noticed. I love work like that where I get so involved that time flies.

Confessions of a hiking junkie!!

I had a great time hiking with W., K., M., M., and L. this Sunday at Nissene Marks to Five Fingers Falls but I must confess I kept a small secret from them about my physical condition. Saturday night I continued my recent trend of having accidents. I left a plate and a fork on the floor next to the couch and forgot about it and next time I was walking back to the couch ... OW ... I stepped on the fork and one of the tines inserted itself into the side/bottom of my left heel. It didn't go very deep but was painful. I pulled out the fork and headed upstairs to clean it up, put on some neosporin, and a bandage. If I weighted my heel as usual it hurt but I could manage to walk in such a way as to not weight it so much. I spent most of Saturday night debating "to hike, or not to hike." I finally decided to give the hike a try as I really really wanted to do this hike with the gang. I decided to remain mum about the injury though as I didn't want to have to have a big discussion with everyone about whether I really should be doing the hike or not. If it turned out I couldn't handle the hike then I would come clean so to speak!

The hike was awesome. I love long hikes with varied terrain and varied views. We got to do three stream crossings, climb up to a ridge with awesome views of the valley with the woods rising around it, see Five Fingers Falls, and even do a boring but nice bit on the fire road. The falls were nice but it was a bit cold as we munched on our lunch since the sun was blocked by the falls and tall trees. I believe only two of us managed to stay dry on the stream crossings. For others the rocks were slippery or their shoes were slippery! I had the advantage of having my trekking pole with me for balance. Other things of note on the hike were we got to see the epicenter of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and W. rescued 2 banana slugs stranded on and near a piece of wood in the middle of the stream. After the hike we were planning on getting some food at Pacific Rim restaurant right outside the park but alas it has closed so we went to our old standby, Saturn Cafe. I had a root beer float and it really hit the spot.

The hike did not make my heel worse so my "junkie hiking" behavoir was OK this time. However I spent the entire day hiking so that the right side of my left heel did not get weighted very much. As a result I had one sore left leg especially the muscles on my inner thigh and my calf muscle. Its Wednesday and the muscles are still sore but I can tell they are getting better. Hopefully the cut and my muscles will recover in time for Saturdays 17 mile hike at Henry Coe. I don't have any major plans for Sunday other than to recover from Saturday's hike!

Too bad I don't have a digital camera. I have a lovely 3 by 5 inch bruise on my right leg from a fall I took on my hike yesterday. And get this, it looks sorta like an Easter egg! He He.

I was sorta tired on the hike yesterday and my left foot slipped off the trail. I fell over with my left leg hanging and my right leg wrapped desperately around a rock after having been bruised by said rock! I started to slip off the trail which would have meant a 4 or 5 foot tumble into a gully. I managed to shift my weight enough to grab a root and not fall but my was it scary for a few seconds there. One of the fellows hiking with me, N., ran back and grabbed my arm also. I sure was shot through with adrenaline and glad to have escaped the fall with just a big bruise. I also got a smaller bruise on my left leg where it also hit the rock. Its a very colorfull set of bruises. My Easter egg bruises! I did have a good time on the hike despite the fall. The weather was marvelous. It was sunny and warm. We had a marvelous lunch stop on a big sandy mound with great views of Big Basin State park and a nice toasty sun beating down on us.

Today I had a nice short hike with my friend L. We went to see Brooks falls in a park near Pacifica (so we got to see the Pacific ocean today on the drive). It was a nice mellow 3 mile hike with only water falls not Cathy falls! Afterwards we stopped for ice cream at Baskin Robins. I had a scoop of jamoca almond fudge and a scoop of chocolate fudge ice cream. My was that tasty!

I had a great 41st birthday yesterday and a very lazy enjoyable weekend. I slept in till ten oclock on Saturday morning. Then I lolled around watching TV and doing computer stuff till it seemed about time to go to REI to spend my dividend! I got all sorts of neat stuff: a locking carabiner, a NOLS wilderness first aid book, a new Eagle Creek wallet, a padded glasses holder, a light weight coffee mug for backpacking, a rain hat, and a new really soft comfy pile jacket. After REI I headed to Footlocker shoe store to buy myself some new tennies. I got some New Balance tennis shoes. I have been enjoying wandering around in them. They are very comfortable and light weight and way cool looking! At night I watched Stanford lose to Colorado in the NCAA regional finals. It was a very close and exciting game. I just wish Stanford could have won.

Sunday was my birthday and I got up at 9 a.m. and then drove to Hobbees at 10 a.m. for brunch with D. and L. I had my favorite Sonoma Browns dish (hash browns with tomatos, chicken breast, pesto, and cheese), a tall glass of apple juice, and a couple cups of coffee. The conversation was great and the three of us kept exclaiming about what a good decision we had made to cancel the backpacking trip since it was so wet and miserable out most of the weekend. After brunch D. took off and L. and I went to see the movie, The Lord of the Rings. I really enjoyed it. It was very much like I remember the book. We had heard it was rather violent but to both L. and I who are fans of the book it seemed to very much match the book. There is a bit of violence in The Lord of the Rings. After the movie I drove home for a small break and then headed to Santa Cruz.

In Santa Cruz I went to K. and W's house for a watch the Oscars and celebrate my birthday party. We had great fun making fun of the Oscars and groaning when the films we liked were beat by films we thought were poor. We ordered pizza and had lots of munchies. M., D., and A. came by to join us at different times and left at different times. It was good to see M. and D. and to meet A. By the time the Oscars ended everyone but me, W., K., and their housemates were gone. Then W. remembered about the cake so we finished off the evening with cake and I had a cup of coffee. During coffee I had a nice long talk with W. about work problems. It was good to bounce my woes off someone. When I finished my coffee I headed home. It was a great birthday and a great weekend despite the fact we cancelled the backpacking.

What's new. I'm tired again. I went to see the Stanford vs Tulane basketball game on Monday. It started at 9 p.m. so I didn't get home till 11:30 p.m. and then got up the next day at 6 a.m. as usual on a work day. I haven't really recovered my sleep yet. But the game was excellent. Nicole Powell was incredible to watch and the rest of the team played well too. They beat Tulane fairly easily.

I had a good time at work Monday hob nobbing with K. and S. I was complaining about the Open Cascade documentation online and asking to use internet explorer on K.'s PC to see if my problem was related to using a Mac browser. They were commiserating with me about what a pain the documentation online must be. Turns out the online documentation doesn't work right on a PC either. However later in the day I accidently stumbled on a solution and was able to gain access to the documentation that I needed. I wish my work involved teaming up with K. or S. I like them both a lot.

D. and I have cancelled the backpack trip this weekend due to low turn out and a lousy weather forecast. It is supposed to rain on Friday and Saturday. Backpacking in the rain is just not fun so we cancelled the trip. Maybe I can finally get caught up on sleep this weekend. I hope so!

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I wore myself out this weekend. Saturday I was up at 7:30 a.m. and went to pick up P. to go on a hike at Big Basin State Park. We did the Hollow Tree loop that was listed as a 10 mile loop on the park map but since it took us nearly 6 hours to do the hike, I'm convinced that it was actually more like 12 miles. I was sore and tired but happy after that hike. The hike was beautiful with lots of great views from ridge tops of the park landscape with the Pacific ocean in the background.

Then I get home, shower, and take off for Maples Pavilon at Stanford to watch the first round NCAA tournament games. Colorado State took on Tulane in the game one and Tulane came out on top. At first it looked like Tulane would win easily but in the second half Colorado worked really hard and got to within 3 points of Tulane before time ran out on them. The second game was Stanford versus Weber State. Stanford won easily and Nicole Powell had a great game and was beautiful to watch. I got home at 11 p.m. and spent a little time checking email before I finally succombed to my exhaustion and went to bed at 11:30 p.m.

Today I got up at 7:30 a.m. again. I'm just a glutton for punishment. This time I was driving to Santa Cruz to meet W. and K. and possible others for soaking in the hot tubs at Kiva during women's hours. It turned out only W., K., and I showed up for the soak. We had a nice long 2 hour visit and soak. It was pouring rain much of the time but that served to cool us off as we sat in the wonderfully hot water. I had to drive back home in pouring rain but it wasn't too bad. People were being fairly safe about driving on highway 17 in the rain. When I got home I was totally exhausted from Saturday's activities and from 2 hours of soaking. I lay down on the couch and was quickly off in la la land catching up on sleep. I slept for 2 hours! It was a great nap!

The rest of the day I have been checking my email, reading my boards on ivillage, and watching NCAA women's basketball games on TV. I'm starting to feel tired again now so will sign off now and hit the couch to watch some more TV and then probaby in a couple hours, head to bed.

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Hey ... just like an Enterprise captain, I have my own logs. CLOGS stands for Cathy's LOGS!

Good descriptors for this week: dull, dreary, and blue. My depression reared its ugly head and brought me down on Tuesday followed by quite a land slide on Wednesday. Yesterday friends and family helped me pick myself up and dust myself off. Now today I'm gingerly climbing back up the slippery slope. The weekend is looking good though. Hiking, hot tub soaking, hanging out with friends, and women's basketball! Now that's a set of real antidepressants for me.

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