Henry W. Coe State Park

It's Spring Break!  Jevon and I had been talking for a while about going camping over Spring Break, but there's still snow in Yosemite, and we didn't want to be gone for too too long anyway, so we opted to explore a park in our own backyard: we packed up the tent on Sunday morning and drove down to Henry W. Coe State Park, which is around 90 minutes southeast of here.  I had no idea what to expect going in, but it was really beautiful, and we had a great time.  We went for a long-ish hike after we arrived yesterday afternoon, ate a camp food dinner (apples, peanut butter, cheese, hardboiled eggs, and a few hunks of bread), and then read until the sun went down, at which point we promptly crashed.

Then we woke up this morning, ate more camp food, and went for another short hike before packing up and driving back.  It was a great little trip!

There's our little orange tent, on the left.  What a campsite!

The barn by the Visitors' Center.

Looking down the Visitors' Center steps on the fog this morning.

More morning fog.

California poppies on our hike.

Cool tree!

Beautiful weather yesterday.

Look at this huge turkey!!

Parked at the campsite.

Morning fog, and Jevon sitting at the picnic table.

The fact that I'm leaving California soon makes it all the easier to appreciate trips like this.  This is a beautiful state, and I am so happy to have called it home for a time.

But it's time to see my other (real) home soon - I'm leaving for Illinois on Wednesday, and I hear a small mountain of snow awaits me!  See you all soon, my Illinois loves!

Santa Barbara (and homeward bound)

Well, we made it safe and sound back to Berkeley yesterday evening, after a wonderful, wonderful trip.  I didn't take many more pictures, but here are a few more just for fun.  What a ridiculously beautiful town.

Whale skeleton at the Natural History Museum.

All in all, I think we obtained the perfect ratio of doing-stuff to down-time.  We had 2-3 planned activities/outings per day, so I felt like I got out a lot and saw a lot of fun stuff, but we also were really good about knowing when to rest and recuperate.  It was more or less the perfect vacation; I don't feel like I missed anything major, and I also never felt like I was dragging myself through another museum visit that I had to do, for example, which can sometimes be the case with vacations.

I think my very favorite part was running along the beach.  On Wednesday afternoon, we ran 5 miles along the bike path, which ended at the parking lot to Goleta Beach, and then we stowed our shoes in the car and ran about 2 more miles on the beach itself.  The tide was pretty high, and the water was so chilly and refreshing, and it was really neat to feel how a completely different set of muscles is recruited for running in wet sand.  My feet, ankles, and calves really felt it, from being barefoot and having to navigate the landscape a little bit, which you don't normally have to do with shoes on.  We ran right along the edge of the water, so the waves would crash into our legs and pull us into the ocean a little bit as they went back out, and it was also really fun to get splashed and then have to fight against that pull a little bit as the waves sucked us in.  At the end, tired and a little achy, we ran straight into the water and got engulfed by cold, rolling waves that woke up every living cell in my body and tasted so strongly of salt.

Then we shuffled soggily back to the car, toweled off, and hit the In 'n Out drive thru for some hit-the-spot hamburgers and milkshakes.  I was completely, blissfully exhausted, though I somehow managed to stay awake until about 9:30, when I crashed and slept like a rock for about 10 hours.

And then we drove home yesterday - these last few pictures are from the car ride.  I must admit: I'm kind of starting to understand why people think California is so great.  I found myself honest-to-goodness physically overwhelmed with the natural beauty of everything, especially at the beginning of the trip.  The first full day we were in SB, last Saturday, I was totally exhausted by mid afternoon, and I just had to take a nap.  I ended up taking a short nap most of the days we were there, in fact, which is so out of character for me, but I think it was just all of the brand new sights and smells and people, plus all of the walking, fresh air, and sunshine.

The whole trip was so great, and since the Napa Valley Marathon was so much fun... me and Jevon decided to combine the two and run the Santa Barbara Marathon in November.  So now I get a few months off of training to just chill out, run casually, and then kick it back in sometime in late summer.

That's got to be all from me for now.  Time to clean up a bit and maybe do some more work before figuring out something fun to do tonight!

Santa Barbara (a little bit more)

View from the wharf.

At the wharf: all of the flags that have ever flown over Santa Barbara.

At the Sea Center, at the wharf: shark egg sacs!!

More view from the wharf.

The courthouse.

The courthouse close up.

View from the top of the courthouse.
I have approximately 15 pictures from up there, and they are all impossibly gorgeous.

Me and Jevon, on the roof at the courthouse.

The Mission.  We didn't go inside, but we took a little nap on this grass for a while.

Sunset on the beach.

Goleta Beach, looking at UC Santa Barbara.  Can you believe people go to school there?

Santa Barbara (a little bit)

I'm in Santa Barbara for Spring Break!  Unfortunately it's rainy today, which almost never, ever happens here, but it's actually very beautiful; there are billowy clouds with lots of different shades of gray that roll right up into the mountains, and the ocean is dark blue and gray too.

Way more unfortunate than the rain is the fact that I took my camera with me when we went out to the wharf today and I only got this one picture before the battery died.  I was so bummed!  There was an awesome life-size sand sculpture of a mermaid that I really wanted to get a picture of, and we went up in the courthouse tower and got a really beautiful view of the whole town.  Thankfully I brought my battery charger, and I'll be here until Friday, so I'm charging it right now and am going to take lots of pictures the rest of the week and post them soon.  And it's supposed to be sunny and 65 degrees the rest of the week too, so there should be no difficulty in forcing myself to walk around outside and snap some good shots of downtown, the beach, the flowers, the waves crashing...

It is so beautiful here!  But for now it's warm coffee, bumming around online, and hopefully a little bit of work before I head out to dinner with some friends tonight.  More soon!

ZZZzzzzzz...

If last week was all about the "ahhh" sound effect, this weekend has definitely merited a "zzzzzzz".  (But not in a boring way - in a good way!)  I am ready for a nap, but instead I'll type up this blog post while I wait for my tapioca pearls to boil.

My conference went great!  It was fun, and I got to meet a lot of cool, interesting, smart people and hear some very cool talks.  I'm really glad I got to go this year, and I think I'll definitely go back to this conference sometime in the future, but it's not quite the conference for me.  I guess I knew that going in, since it's called "The CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing", and I don't really do sentence processing, I do sound processing.  There were a few more phonetics-oriented talks, and I got some good feedback on my poster and saw some other cool posters on bilingual speech processing.  Man, bilingual research is totally the way to go.  It's just so fun.

Anyway, I was lucky enough to be able to stay with a friend in Palo Alto on Friday night, so we kind of had a psycholinguist girls slumber party.  It was great, but I didn't get too much sleep, and then I went to a birthday party last night and didn't get home until ... 4:00 this morning.  (!!!)  I left the party at a somewhat reasonable hour (around 2:00, probably) with two friends who live somewhat in my neighborhood of Berkeley, and the three of us walked the 3 miles or so home, since the bus service is so limited late at night, the weather was pretty nice, and a walk just sounded good.  And it was a nice walk, with nice people, and we stopped to talk on the street corner for longer than I realized, and pretty soon I was walking in the front door at 4:00 am.  I crashed right away, but since I just can't sleep in anymore, I woke up around my usual time, at 8:30, and couldn't get back to sleep.

So today has been lazy and long and sleepy, and I took the dogs for a really long walk late this morning, listening to NPR news and wandering around Berkeley in the cool breeze.  Then I decided some bubble tea sounded good, so I went to Berkeley Bowl and bought a bunch of tapioca pearls, but it turns out there's a difference between instant tapioca pearls and, I dunno, infinite cook time tapioca pearls.  These things have been boiling for like an hour now, and they're still not done.  And I want my bubble tea, dagnabbit.

Speaking of culinary adventures, though, I made the greatest pear tart yesterday, in about 50 minutes flat.  While I was sitting in the conference, my mind kept wandering back to the tart pan I splurged on this past week.  A good friend of mine just bought an apartment in Chicago, so I sent him some French-style café au lait bowls as a combination housewarming/early birthday present, and while I was picking them out, I saw this great tart pan.  A tart pan is one of those things that you don't need, but they're just so pretty, and every once in a while, I want to make something that would work much better in a tart pan.  So I got it, and I must say, it was an excellent purchase.  The pear tart I made was pretty dang good, if I do say so myself, and just so impressive with its fluted edges and browned top and crumbly crust, even though it wasn't hard at all to make.  I wish I had a picture to show you!  But I'll be making one again soon, so maybe I'll get a picture then.

Well, bubble tea is done, so I think I'll try to get some reading done, unless I fall asleep.  Today might be a lost cause...


Completely unrelated P.S.: I think I'm taking Portuguese this fall and am starting to get kind of excited about it.