cindy's world

This is Yosemite National Park, California. Mr. W and I drove there last Thursday, checked into our hotel, then went to explore the Park and scope out potential activities to plan our visit. These are all photos taken with my cameraphone.

Famous landmarks: the steep cliff on the left is El Capitan; the waterfall to the right is Bridalveil Fall; behind the Fall toward the center of the photo is the silhouette of Half Dome. In between the mountains, the trees permeate Yosemite Valley.
A closeup of Upper Yosemite Falls from the Valley floor:

Here’s another angle looking up at Upper Yosemite Falls.

I looked up in the sky at one point and realized that the moisture in the air from the nearby waterfalls caused a rainbow halo to form around the sun. I tried to capture it with the cameraphone, but I didn’t do it justice. Here’s the gist anyhow:

This is Bridalveil Falls, from across the Merced River. Gorgeous Thursday.

We did a low-key hike to Lower Yosemite Falls, then made our way to the Visitor Center and spoke to some rangers there. They recommended that to avoid the crowd, we hit the popular long hikes early in the morning on a weekday, i.e. the next day, Friday morning. We decided to take the scenic 7.2-mile round trip hike up to Upper Yosemite Falls (2425 feet above the Valley floor; hiking this requires a 2700ft elevation gain). This is the highest waterfall in in North America. Yeah, you know the waterfall in the pictures? Yup, right to the top.

This is classified as an advanced, strenuous hike 6 to 8 hours in duration, with lots of switchbacks. It wasn’t very crowded, especially as we passed the halfway point and saw others turn around. The view along the way couldn’t be beat.

This is the half-way marker: the first glimpse of Upper Yosemite Falls from the hike path:

Curving around another bend approximately an hour later, tenacious hikers are rewarded with this moist angle:

“Don’t slip, don’t slip, don’t slip…”

Some more uphills and rocky switchbacks…

…and we’re finally there.

Walking to the Overlook…

It’s a scary thing when you realize you’re looking DOWN at the source of a waterfall:

At this point, I’m still higher than the Overlook. But I’m making my way down.

Let’s lean over and see where the waterfall goes, shall we?

I realized that day, as I laid belly-down over an unrailed cliff so that I could get a better look at nature with my binoculars, that I’m not scared of heights as I’d previously thought.

Looking down through binoculars, I was actually able to see our car parked below.

See the circular road below? The car’s at the bottom of the circle. I made a mental note to take a photo from the car pointing up to where I was now looking down. And here is that photo.

See the rock above and to the left of the waterfall? That’s where I was hanging down.

The next day, Saturday, our calves were so sore we could hardly walk (plus I think I tweaked my right knee a little since my hiking shoes were so old that I spent parts of the descent stepping awkwardly sideways so I didn’t slip more than I had to to my death), so we flip-flopped a shorter, flatter hike in the Mariposa Grove, where the tallest Sequoia trees live.

I love my $5 Hawaii flip flops; if I ever find my way there again I’m gonna buy 10 pairs. They were more comfortable to hike in than my worn hiking boots that gave me bruises under my toenails and blisters. They greatly eased my painful limping during this hike.

This is a taaaall tree. And I thought I felt short standing next to DWAINE…

Doe! A deer! A female dear! And her buck and fawn.

I thought this cabin in the clearing looked so quaint, I half-expected dwarves to run out as a black-haired cartoon girl chased after them with their suppers.

I saw these triplets, and I looked up…

…and up.

We soaked our sore legs in the hotel’s jacuzzi Friday night after the hike, then hung out at a nearby Starbucks for a nightcap. Saturday, we discovered an outdoor shopping and entertainment center close to our hotel and had the best Italian food we’d had in awhile. We also caught a movie. Guess which one:

Great movie, BTW. We saw it in 3-D. We drove back on Sunday and stopped by a great shopping outlet on the way, where I spent hundreds of dollars I didn’t expect to. Oh well. We also pulled over TWICE to catch the beginning and then later the end of the Lakers vs. Magic Finals Game 5, which turned out to be the series-winning game. Marie Callender’s bars: great place to watch games. Who knew?

Mr. W enjoyed the trip because this was his first time in Yosemite, where he’d always wanted to go, and he said he’d never seen so much natural beauty in one place. I enjoyed it cuz I actually had someone to hang out with at night; he didn’t hit the hay at his usual 9pm bedtime every night. Plus, the last time I was in Yosemite, I was a cranky 14-year-old on a family trip with my parents’ friends. I wasn’t terribly excited about it. Mr. W and I bought the annual pass which gets us into all federal parks around the country, so I’m going to invest in some hiking shoes and toss my 15-year-old slip-n-slide Nikes. This makes Mr. W happy, as I’m now intent on DOING stuff. Today, in fact, I helped organize an upcoming biking and camping trip with my jujitsu friends whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. I think I’ll be investing in a good bicycle, too, in anticipation of this trip.

Where’ve I been, you wonder? Well I’m so glad you asked! I’ve been here:

Anyone recognize the famous landmarks here? More to come!

I also realized while “doing” stuff this past weekend that I’d inadvertently left out a few things from my List, namely:
* swimming offshore in Barbados
* reliving the 19th Century on Prince Edward Island
* white-water rafting down the American River, camping downstream along the way (I want to do this REALLY soon, anyone wanna join?)

I’ve never really wanted to jump ahead and read the ending of the book of my life. I hadn’t even wanted to skip to the end of the chapter, “just to know.” I think knowing would influence my decisions, and I risk losing the lesson. But today, I took a stand in my life and wavered a little doing it, so my court reporter invited me to meet her at a coffee shop after work and talk to a specific clairvoyant who conducted a free workshop there every so often. I did. I didn’t think I had questions as I was in a now-rare moment of clarity (or so I thought), but soon the questions came. A lot of what Rebecca said was dead-on, although I gave her virtually no information except a first name. Some information was not comforting because they were things I already knew and was hoping wasn’t the case. Other information answered questions that I’d had for years, and confirmed things from earlier in my life. A great thing I took was when she answered someone else’s question about a screenplay he was working on. She said that altho it’s going the independent route, it was going to be picked up shortly before Sundance, but that it wasn’t going to happen for a few years because one member of the writing team would take a brief hiatus to take care of health issues, and they were going to do a major rewrite around 2010. When it REALLY picks up and takes off, she said, is in 2012. This is significant because…that means there’s a 2012! My uncle was wrong, the world is NOT going to end in 3 years! Yes!

Yesterday evening, Mr. W and I visited my parents and Aunt Jessica (who was also visiting at their house) and took them out to a newish Japanese restaurant near their house for dinner. It’s noteworthy that my aunt ate raw fish for the first time in many years, because she still swears that the last time she had raw fish, she felt parasites crawling around inside her chest. (:/) I found out over dinner conversation that my mother regularly checks my blog’s image hosting site for photos. YIKES. I must’ve stupidly neglected to delete my history when using my mom’s laptop. This is quite a disturbing revelation, cuz you guys know the photos I post here. =P I wonder what my face looked like when my mother made the comment that the photo of the sashimi platter we ordered at Yama Sushi looked good. Thank goodness she doesn’t have this blog address. (I hope.) After dinner, we sat around my parents’ kitchen table having tea, and my dad and aunt mentioned that one of their Canadian brothers (the only member of the family to have a phD, I might mention), believes all scientific evidence suggests that the world will end in 2012. I did not enjoy that conversation. Seeing the discomfort in my face, my Aunt Jessica said, “Lemme tell you what kind of person your uncle is, Cindy. Remember when he came down from Canada for Grandma’s funeral in ’99? He believed THEN that the world was going to end in 2004, and sold his property in Florida because he didn’t see the point of owning land when it was all going to be gone in a few years, anyway. And here we are in 2009 and the world hasn’t ended. Also, when we were younger, he was so mean, he tied a string to a tree and he had the other end, to mess with your cousins –”
“No,” my dad interrupted, “That was ME.”
“That was YOU?!” my aunt asked my dad incredulously. What? What?
Then my dad told the story about how their eldest sister’s two boys (who are now in their 40s) were spoiled brats as children, so he’d decided to teach them a lesson. They were all sitting around the table chatting one day, much like we were that night, no one knowing that my dad had rigged a tree outside by tying a long fishing string to a branch by the front of the house, winding the string along the outside of the house and in through the screen window, and tied the other end to his foot. And then my dad asked, “Is there a ghost here? If you’re here, tap the house one time.” He moved his foot under the table, and the tree banged against the wooden door out front. The boys looked up in alarm. And then they said it was a coincidence. My dad ordered the powers that be, “If you ARE a ghost, pound on the door THREE TIMES!” And the door banged three distinct times. My aunt remembers the boys hysterically crying.
“I can’t believe that was YOU!” my aunt said.
“You knew about that?” my dad asked.
“Yeah, I saw broken string outside the next day so I knew it was trick, but all these years I thought it was our older brother. Did you ever tell the boys it was really you with a string that night?”
“Not to this day,” my dad gloated.
The conversation then went into all the horror and disturbing stories inflicted on us in our childhood by our older relatives, and the psychological scars they left. Stories with such characters as giant man-eating apes, hopping zomboid dead bodies out for revenge, tigers disguised as old grandmas eating little girls’ fingers. My aunt Jessica was afraid to look up into a tree at night for YEARS. I wouldn’t let her tell me why, because I really don’t have room on my plate right now to be scared of looking up into trees. As for the cruel joke my dad played on my cousins? It came back on me. I can’t write all the disturbing crap the younger of the two boys fed into my head when I was growing up. Over about a gallon’s worth of tea, we had some good laughs at the absurdity of my dad’s side of the family.

I got to hit one of the items in my list yesterday, thanks to Ann. We had spa day at a Burke Williams dayspa in my city that I didn’t even know was there. “That’s sad,” my massage therapist Scott said about that, “We’ve been here ten years.” But I’m so glad Ann looked it up, found it, and we went!

It was a much needed girl day; we started by meeting for a brunch of crêpes at Lulu’s Creperie Cafe, a local favorite of mine. La Galette with ham, mushroom, & spinach Brittany topped with 2 poached eggs, yum. Then we wandered into a Mediterranean bakery where Ann bought a bunch of little pastries before we hit the spa. I soaked in the whirlpool for awhile, slinked into the steam room to sweat out all my impurities and months’ worth of stressers, then met back up with Ann in the Quiet Room to read in fluffy recliners before an attractive man came in to collect me for my 80 minute relaxation massage.

I had a great time on that massage table. Scott is the therapist who trains the other massage therapists there on the deep tissue technique. He also does physical therapy and personal fitness training at a rehab gym in an affluent nearby area. I happened to have a lot of gymming soreness. “I guess I got lucky,” I said, face-down.
“I’d like to think so,” Scott joked.
I had one of the best conversations I’d had in awhile. The topic started off with physical training and nutrition, transitioned into his other job, and by the time 80 minutes were up we’d hit sociology, theories on what motivates human decisions consciously and unconciously, religion and its effect on the masses, personal searches for defining and achieving happiness. It wasn’t too unlike the conversations I have with Dwaine, even recently, but it was a great uninterrupted 80 minutes of it. What I also liked, was that he actually listened to me and wasn’t afraid to call me on something that I’d said without putting sufficient thought behind it. Kept me on my toes. And he made me laugh. “Do you and your friends sit around coffee shops and have long talks like this?” I asked.
“No,” he answered fairly quickly. “I don’t have enough friends like this who I can talk to about anything philosophical.”
“That’s too bad,” I said, and I meant it. It’s not often I find a really introspective man who can also be blatantly honest about himself with a stranger. Then again, Mr. W is always astounded at how much random people open up to me. The rarity with this guy, though, is that the conversation wasn’t one-sided. It wasn’t just him telling me stuff, asking me how I see his situations. We had a very nice mental tennis match. Entertainment like that while getting an effective sports massage and diagnosis by an actual trained physical therapist who was able to relieve my sore muscles and tell me how to tweak my workout routines made for a great first half of the day. He also provided a new perspective that balanced my flailing spirit, but he’ll never know.

My attempt to “do” yesterday didn’t work out too well. I tried to race home after work, but the awful congested freeways stopped me. When I finally made it, I grabbed Mr. W, and we went to a Oggi’s Pizza & Brewery to watch Game 1 of the Lakers-Magic playoffs, but it was so ridiculously crowded we knew we wouldn’t get seats, much less service. We came home and had a night in instead. It allowed me to harass the other people in the playoffs bet with me online, anyhow.

I want to spontaneously go away; it doesn’t have to be far, just different. Maybe even San Diego for a weekend, live a short fantasylife at Hotel del Coronado.
I want to disappear to sorta-faraway places, too, like finally stay in that bed-and-breakfast at the Niagara Peninsula, just for a few days.
I want to have random highlight-of-the-week wine dinners and spa days with friends.
I want spur-of-the-moment barbecues and lake kayaking with my local cousins, some of whom have never been to this house or the private lake.
I want to romp around Orlando waterparks with Jordan.
I want to visit Bathhouse Row in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
I want to drive through and explore the Old South, walk in the old plantation areas, see if I feel anything, any tugs, while I’m among the ghosts of the past.
I want to feel comfortable on a street bike and a sea-doo.
I want to tap a maple tree and extract my own maple syrup, boil it, and make maple candy by pouring the syrup on packed snow.
I am aware that I may have lost my mind.

I’ll be good again, someday soon.

I had an epiphany in my car on the drive to work today. Relive it with me. Play this below as you read.

Okay. You’re flying low, 90 mph with 306 horses purring underneath the control of your right foot, leather steering wheel of your luxury sports sedan smoothly steady in your hands, this song pumping in Mark Levinson premium surround sound.
As your right hand involuntarily lifts off the wheel to mark each pulsating rhythmic beat, you find your body swaying ever so slightly left and right, and then more defiantly now, until you are dancing in your seat. The music matches your elevating mood, draws it farther upward, triggering your body to release adrenaline and endorphins. “Let it rock, let it rock!”
I’m sick of being stressed. I’m sick of feeling immobile. I choose, right now and here, to be AWESOME instead. Thank you, Barney Stinson.

I refuse to be powerless. I will not spend my youth watching things pass by. Screw the walls I keep turning into. I can’t wait to start doing, effective immediately.

The stress has done its thing in the recent past days. The below photo is from Tuesday, when I was so not-feeling-it that I called in sick to work. Some hours went by when I moped in bed for awhile, but then I forced my body into submission (so to speak) by making it trek the 2 hilly miles to the Lake, kayaking for an hour, and then of course returning on foot.

The result was kind of funny. During the hike there and back, I was in a tanktop, which resulted in a deep bronze tan on my arms and outer shoulders. Kayaking was done in the outfit above, and I got sunburned with the reflection off the water, so my upper shoulders are pink. Of course the parts the straps covered, which also re-covered the Dominican Republic’s bikini tan, is soft white. My shoulders now look like Neopolitan ice cream. I am now Awesome Neopolitan Ice Cream.

(I can’t wait for “How I Met Your Mother” to return.)

Somehow I found myself involved in a Lakers vs. Magic wager with some Orlando friends last week. At the time, although both the Lakers and Magic were doing well in their games, it was still up in the air who would be involved in the finals. As of this weekend, it became official. All I can say is, I’d better not have to walk around wearing a Magic bikini.

While I was on vacation, Dodo got the best kittysitter ever: Vanessa!

Vanessa is the natural choice, because she and I were briefly roommates so she and Dodo were already familiar; she and I met in jujitsu so I know if/when shit hits the fan, she can defend Dodo with killer debilitating moves on any would-be (c)a(t)ssassin, she works very close to our house, she’s highly dependable, AND she’s easily bribeable with Yama Sushi (yes, that is the lakeside sushi joint I’m always blogging about). =D She came over the Friday evening before I left for Florida. Can you believe this is how Vanessa looks after a long day of work?! So unfair.

We had our sushi chef prepare an omakase premium sashimi platter — basically, whatever is the fresh recommended fish of the day, price is no object!

Here is the completed masterpiece, for about $100:

Ama-ebi (sweet shrimp), hamachi toro (yellowtail belly, the “filet mignon” of yellowtail cuts), ahi (yellowfin tuna, also in the “filet mignon” quality of cut), Tobiko red roe (flying fish caviar), black roe (can’t recall what fish these are from), hotate-gai (fresh scallops from Japan), ono (wahoo — the fish, not the involuntary scream of excitement nearly impossible to contain when one observes such a platter of delectations), hirame (halibut, which I understand is really “ohyo” in Japanese so I don’t know why every sushi restaurant I’ve been to says “hirame” [flounder] is “halibut”), and some other stuff I no longer remember and can’t identify from my cameraphone photo alone. Vanessa called this “some damn good sushi” in her post.

We asked the chef to pick a roll for us, something different, so he came up with this flash-fried rice-based roll with spicy sauce, avocado, fresh tomatoes, some spicy fish that I can’t even remember now.

It was my first time trying an oshi sushi roll (sushi made from rice pressed in a box or mold), and I just remember it was delicious.
Having seen photos of the quail egg sushi on my blog from my outing with Diana, Vanessa wanted to try quail egg for her first time, so we had this: salmon with masago (smelt caviar), topped with some chopped scallions and a quail egg. Plus special sauce.

Vanessa was very pleased, and showed her gratitude for dinner with excellent Dodo-sitting service. (I’m just kidding, Vanessa, I know you would’ve done it anyway, but the dinner was a thank-you.)

And that, ladies and gentleman, was the last good sushi meal I had before the absolute worse sushi meal I’ve ever, EVER had in my life, which horrible meal happened in Florida. (That’s called foreshadowing.) And unfortunately, I dragged a victim into the pits of raw fish sewage hell with me. Coming up soon.

I know I said I wasn’t gonna keep doing this, but I can’t help it. Sue me! No, don’t, I spend enough time in court as it is.

I got this photo text message yesterday from Nikki, who is apparently keeping me informed as to the ins and outs of herself and her little sister, Erin:

The photo came with the following message: “Erin got a bruse in school” (don’t you love kid-spellings?)

After some more communication with Nikki, I learned that Erin had gotten the scrape when she tripped in school. Looking at the adorable pout in the photo, as much as I feel pain for the little one’s boo-boo, I smiled imagining Nikki saying, “Stick your arm up, Erin, I’m gonna take a picture of this and send it to Aunt Cindy,” and Erin abiding piteously.