Central Valley & surroundings

This is the continuation of my California trip. We started our trip by driving to Bakersfield and then heading up to the Seqouia Natl Forest and Park with friends. The next part of the trip, we spent a few days in the Los Angeles area, which will be covered in another post; followed by several days driving along the coast north from LA, which will be covered in yet another installment.

So here's the headwaters of the Kern River, in the Seqouia Natl Forest. Pat and Troy fly fished - somewhat successfully - while I knitted. We camped there for a night, which was quite chilly.


We returned to Bakersfield, to enjoy some delicious deep pit barbacue, and the next day we headed up to the Sequoia Natl Park which is home to some really big trees. Staci and Pooky (not her real name) joined us for this hike.
Sorry, no photos of Bakersfield itself. You'll have to make the trip out there yourself if you want to see it. On Thursday, we drove from Bakersfield to Chino Hills, part of the Inland Empire next to Orange County. The San Gabriel mountains separate the Central Valley from LA, and being mountains, we managed to find a dirt road that crosses them. Here's the view from the top, looking back at the Central Valley.We really didn't get a good view of the city as we dropped in from the mountains. It turns out that visibility is really, really bad in LA. See that blue sky in the photos above? You won't see that in the next post.

California Safari

We just returned from a 2-week trip to California, which turned out to be quite a wildlife-viewing trip. It wasn't really planned that way, but here's the list of notable animals viewed, followed by select photos.

• 5 bears - 2 on two different days near Kern River headwaters, then 3 (a mom with cubs) in Sequoia Natl Park the next day.
• Deer innumerable - most notably nestling among the hollow trunks of sequoia.
• Hawks and vultures innumerable.
• Sea lions - including a very friendly pup at Oxnard
  
• Harbor seals
  
• Elephant seals - the young bulls were play-fighting along the shore
• Humpback whales on two days at two different beaches - at Oceano we were treated to several whales jumping up with the front half of their bodies above water, then splashing down hard on their backs. The next day at San Simeon with just whales surfacing and tails slapping was anti-climatic.
• Dolphin on most days at the beach
• Pelicans innumerable dive-bombing for fish, usually right where the dolphin and whales were also eating.
  
• 1 bobcat - it sauntered across the road just few feet in front of us as we were walking around a campground.
• The Budweiser Clydesdales at pasture - okay, they're not wild, but they were just hanging out on a hill next to our campsite.

Sabbatical

And the OTHER reason to get tenure is to go on sabbatical, as Hubbers is doing now. Sabbatical simply means that he's freed from on-campus duties (like teaching) so that he can focus on research. He's writing a book on archeological myths and mysteries (check Amazon for his previous book).

Often, researchers travel during their sabbatical. However, writing a book can be done from home, although there is a danger in staying home during sabbatical:

Hubbers xeriscaping the yard today (also note the split-rail fence he built in January at the start of his sabbatical)

Building a custom gate for the driveway, soon to be motorized.

Custom door for the laundry room and built-in bookshelves.

Painting the bedroom floor.

Zoo Run

At the start of the Run for the Zoo 5k:
Approaching the finish line:
This is probably THE most popular run in Albuquerque. In fact, they have two 5k's - one timed, the other not, plus a 10k and a 1-mile. This year I ran it with a good friend, who just started running again within the past year after foot surgery and such had prevented her from running for a few years. I can't believe she's already running 5k's so quickly! We'll be working on doing the 10k next year.

April hike

Two weeks ago Vixen, Troy and I went backpacking in the Apache Kid Wilderness (just south of Socorro). We've been there before and have learned that you can hike for miles without seeing another person. Or you can camp in their primitive, but nice, campground and see a few people.
We got there on Friday, hiked a few miles to set up the tent. Then hiked through the snow on Saturday to the San Mateo Lookout tower. Got lost while looping back... but ended up back at our car early in the afternoon. It started snowing again Saturday evening, and we were just hanging out at a car-camping site, so we eventually decided to just hop in the car and drive home to a warm bed that night, stopping in Socorro for a hot dinner along the way.


View Larger Map

Granby hat and scarf

Soon, I will be home where the internet flows freely... well okay, I pay for it to flow at a specified bandwidth that I share with only one other person (Hubbers). I will not miss the frustration of sharing wifi with a whole building full of people and without somebody to hit "reset" on the router when it needs it. This is my excuse for not keeping up with the blog. It has just been too painful. Almost as painful as sharing a single washer/dryer with the whole building.

A while ago, I mentioned that I went to Lonesome Stone and got some new yarn to go with some previously-stashed yarn. So here's the deal. I knit this hat from their beautifully hand-dyed baby kid mohair:
However, I have no scarf that does not horribly clash with this hat. But a scarf made of the same yarn seemed a bit much. This stuff is just too bright and fuzzy. Here's where the new naturally-brown alpaca yarn comes in:
The brown was supposed to tone down the orange. Instead, it highlighted all those minor tones of blue and red. At any rate, it screams a bit less loudly. The pattern is the Anthro-inspired scarflet.Now putting the original hat with this, still looked too bright and fuzzy. Therefore, I needed a new hat to go with the new scarf (how circular). The first hat was too small anyway, so it makes a great ski-helmet-liner. Here's the new hat (pattern: Amanda hat from Sleepy Eyes Knitting).
Now if I just had a pair of gloves made from that brown alpaca, it would be complete. But I used up all of that yarn... maybe next winter.

Swap

Thanks to the coolness of Ravelry, I joined a yarn swap with other knitting grad students. They called it a dissertation-a-long rather than the more typical knit-a-long. This is my first ever yarn swap, and was a lot of fun. I set goals for things to get done by the end of February, and my reward for getting at least one of those things done was this cool package full of stuff to help me get more work done and stuff to distract me from getting work done :)
Of course, I also had to put together a package to send to someone else who completed a goal.

Now I have a stash of yarn sitting in a drawer next to the couch in our little condo. Any ideas on what I should make with it? I'm thinking about making leg warmers for cold-morning commutes next winter.