Once upon a time my wife and I listened to the music stations on the radio, and sometimes read magazines about music, and generally learned about bands and songs the ways that quasi-hip people did back before iPods or even Napster. These days the only way we hear about new music is either from National Public Radio or in the occasional movie that we rent. The latter is how we got acquainted with The Shins, thankyouverymuch Zach Braff.

So when our friends suggested that we all go see The Shins as part of some multi-band music festival, it sounded like a decent idea. That's how I found myself today at a concert called Download 2006 with my wife, daughter, our friends, and their 7 month old baby.

First off, Download 2006 is a lame name for a concert. There are lots of things that one can do with music, like listen to it, or dance to it, but downloading it is one of the few things that you WOULDN'T do at a concert. Oh, I suppose one could argue that I figuratively downloaded the music experience into my brain today. I guess that's true, but only if you also think that I also downloaded my hot dog and beer into my mouth, and then uploaded my piss into the urinal. Me thinks their marketing department needs to work a little harder next time. The word "download" doesn't means what they think it means.

But maybe I'm just too old and out of it to really get it any more. For example, we encountered some kid in the parking lot selling extra tickets and we needed one more ticket, so my wife bargained him down from $30 to $25. We were congratulating ourselves on our wise purchase when we arrived at the front gate and found that the concert was undersold and they were handing out free tickets, which looked IDENTICAL to the ticket we had just purchased for $25. Perhaps the wisdom that comes with age is not always the shrewdest wisdom.

Then, later, as we were watching the concert, I was amazed at how boldly people around us were smoking pot. Joints were passed unfurtively. Back in the day when I went to concerts without 7 year-olds in tow, I sneaked the occasional toke, but you can be damn sure that I was clandestine and paranoid about it, as one should be! Today all I could really do was play along by taking a big hit off of Daisy's face, but the high was unremarkable.

The other game I played was looking around and trying to find someone older than me. It was really hard. We left the concert shortly after The Shins completed their set (Daisy's bedtime) just as a slightly older couple entered the amphiteater. It took all my self-restraint to stop myself from tapping them on the shoulder and saying, "Tag! Now YOU'RE the oldest people here!"

Anyway, with all the bands, it was probably at least an 8 hour concert. We stayed for about 90 minutes of it. We had to hurry home for Matlock.

There was a big deadline at work today. Our group finished in time, but the QA group, whose job it is to test everything, is running around logging incomprensible bugs and screaming that everything is broken. I keep having this conversation:

QA: Look out! The sky is falling!
Me: No it isn't.
QA: What's all that blue stuff on the ground then?
Me: Flowers. Those are irises. They're supposed to be there and they're actually quite pretty.
QA: Ok, but have you noticed that THE SKY IS FALLING?!?!
Me: Why do you keep saying that?
QA: Look at the sky! You can see the big hole where a chunk fell out!
Me: That's not a hole, it's the sun. I'd recommend you stop staring at it. You'll burn out your retinas.
QA: THE SKY IS BURNING ME!!
Me: I'm going to mark this bug as "Fixed".

The other thing I did this weekend was go on an excellent run at the Crystal Springs reservoir. It's my favorite place to run for a number of reasons:

1. It's a 12 mile course, 6 miles out and back. 12 miles is a pretty good distance for a long Saturday run for me. Short enough to allow me to complete my other weekend activities unexhausted, but long enough to make me regret being born with legs.
2. The course is fairly scenic. Some parts of the trail are completely shaded by branches that meet from trees on opposing sides of the pathway. Mostly I don't notice it because I'm busy regretting that leg thing, but every once in a while I look around and appreciate it.
3. There's one good-sized hill and it peaks right near the turn-around point at the 6 mile marker. It's nice to be halfway done and know that the only slope ahead of you is a downhill one.
4. The course is marked every half mile. For people like me who are anal-retentive about time and their running pace, this is both heavenly and punishing.

After I finished my run I saw students from a local college completing a 3-mile time trial. They clocked in around 15 minutes, which means that they were averaging about 5 minutes per mile. It always astounds me when I hear about people running that fast for that far (or longer!). I've been running semi-seriously for the better part of a decade and I think I'd only be able to keep up that kind of pace for about 1/4 of a mile.

They all looked super fit though. All of the guys ran with their shirts off and they looked like anatomy models. One guy had that perfect V-shape that men are supposed to have, but you never see in real life (or at least I never see in the mirror). And if I wasn't impressed by the speed by which he ran by me, I surely was impressed by the flames he had tattooed on his pectoral muscles.

A flame tattoo! On his pecs! At first glance I didn't know whether to douse his chest with my gatorade or just scream "FIRE!" into his bellybutton. Thankfully I'm unable to make decisions like that in the split second in which he ran by, so I did nothing. Slow-witted-ness has its occasional advantages.

And totally unrelated, I went to a PTA meeting tonight. I so want to make smarmy comments about the PTA, but I'm unable. The leaders pretty much seem to be a smart and caring group of folks and I can't quite muster the cynicism to mock them. I'll get there, but I'm not there yet. Bear with me.

My head is spinning with numbers. Over the last 3 days my baseball prediction program has just gotten pummeled, losing pretend-money each of those days. I've been immersed in the data all weekend trying to figure out if it's because of bad luck, bad data, bad math, or bad algorithms. The answer? Probably all of the above.

I fixed what I could, but the jury is still out on whether this will make me a pretend millionaire or not. I was a virtual millionaire once before. The previous time didn't end up doing much for my bank account in the end, but I looked mighty handsome in the mirror for a brief while.

When I wasn't obsessing over baseball stadium park effects this weekend, I was mostly doing family stuff. Today I spent a couple hours trying to bash all the gender stereotypes out of daughter. First, we played an hour of Lego, where I built various war-like and violent structures, and then crashed them around in comical ways. I kept interrupting her while she was trying to build a "peaceful park" out of Lego.

Afterwards, we did her soccer homework. Her coach had asked all the players to spend some time wrestling with their parents. So, I pinned her. Repeatedly. As it turns out, having 100+ pounds on an opponent was the advantage I was missing the previous times I had tried to wrestle. I totally kicked Daisy's ass.

We also played a little garage-door soccer (where one player is the goalie and defends the garage door, which is the pretend goal). She looked darling in her pink frilly dress trying to defend my adult-sized kicks.

In general the manliness bar is set pretty low in this family, but I'm doing what I can to man her up a bit. It seems like the right approach here in San Francisco.

The San Francisco Giants are a miserable team, just good enough to make you want to believe, and damned bad enough to dash your dreams. Giants fans should know better by now.

One of these years I will give up on this team. Also, I'd like a unicorn. A blue unicorn.

I've never owned a dog (sigh), but I understand that unruly dogs can be helped by attending obedience school, where trainers whisper at them, or something.

What if, instead, your dog is too obedient? And what if it's not a dog, but a 7 year old girl?

(Daisy, if you're reading this, quit it! Shooo! Go smoke a cigarette!)

So, yeah, what I'm really complaining about is that Daisy follows the rules too much. I know, I know, boo hoo for Mike, his daughter is too well-behaved. Honest to god though, this is not an optimal situation.

Daisy really follows rules to excess. She uses them as a crutch and sometimes as a form of self-punishment. She's the kid telling other kids not to misbehave, and the one kid who who blindly follows some absurd guideline that she may have even misheard. For example, she has complained multiple times that she doesn't get to play at lunchtime because they were told to pick up 10 pieces of litter before playing. Since there is hardly any garbage on their playground, she sometimes spends her entire lunchtime searching for nonexistent litter. It's futile and sad. She readily admits that no one else really follows the rule.

Consequently, I find myself in the unexpected position of having to tell my child to loosen up a bit. I'm explaining that good judgement can trump rule-following. I'm trying to teach her to question authority.

Is this even wise with 7 year olds? I think it is, but maybe I'll be creating a monster, taking my sweet obedient child and turning her into a cynical rebel, or, more likely, my lectures will have no effect.

I didn't expect to have this problem.

Dear tens of readers,

I would like to encourage you all to go read the blog of someone who ISN'T completely preoccupied with really boring software programs.

Love,
Mike


How many times does something have to happen before you believe it's not just blind luck?

With presidential elections that number is pretty low. People in this nation elected George Bush TWICE. That's not just luck. That's a nation of people who are completely incomprehensible to me.

What about making baseball bets? How many bets would you have to make before you believed your results weren't due to good or bad luck? Two probably isn't enough. I arbitrarily decided that 100 was probably a pretty good number.

As you may recall, I've been spending much of my free time over the last couple months writing a computer program that would allow me to beat the casino. At this point it's a fairly complicated program, utilizing my favorite baseball statistics, some widely-accepted baseball principles, and a few numbers that I pulled straight out of my sphincter. The bits from the latter are unarguably the smelliest bits.

The program is by no means done. The data that it uses for it's decision making could use some cleaning, and the sphinter parts need a little.... uh.... tightening up. Regardless, the program is probably about 95% as accurate as it's ever going to get with my limited brain power behind it.

I've been running this program for a couple weeks now, and I've been making virtual bets with it against internet casino odds that I've found posted online. I've "placed" 121 of these imaginary bets and I've been tracking my results to see whether I would have won or lost money had these been real bets. 121 bets doesn't represent a huge amount of data, but it's a reasonable sample size.

So, what are my results? So far it looks like for every bet I place, I can expect to win about 9%.

9%! That's huge!

If your stocks went up 9% every year, you'd consider that to be a decent investment. What if they went up 9% EVERY DAY? That's what has happened so far with my imaginary bets.

Of course, I realize that there's a lot of luck involved here, and my results over the last couple weeks don't guarantee anything about future results, but I'm positively giddy over what I see here so far. Although it's entirely possible that a few days of bad luck could wipe out my virtual winnings, similarly a few good days could significantly increase them. Really, there's only one teensy-tiny little eensy-weensy problem.

Sports gambling is sort of, kind of, not entirely legal in California. :(

So now I just need to figure out how to make money off this software. Would anyone out there like to pay me, say $1,000,000 for this? I'll throw in the damn Ginsu knives.

When I was a kid my parents watched 60 Minutes every Sunday night. I'd always watch the last 5 minutes of it with them to see Andy Rooney's weekly curmudgeonly diatribe.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Andy Rooney, he's kind of a caricature of a grumpy old man. His rants often start out something like this:


"These days medicines seem to cause more things than they cure."

or maybe

"Why are the cleaning instructions for my reading glasses so small?"

Some days I feel like I'm turning into Andy Rooney. Today is one of those days.

I hate my new toothbrush.

First off, there's a slight angle in the handle about two and a half inches away from the bottom of the handle. I can't really comfortably hold the toothbrush with that inadequate 2.5 inch length of handle. I like to have a firm grasp on my toothbrush. I brush vigorously and you don't want that baby flying javelin-style through the house.

Secondly, apparently someone has decided that toothbrushes need more features. Mine has a tongue scrubber on the other side of the bristles. This is really annoying. Now, when I brush my teeth, the inside of my cheeks get inadvertently rubbed and scraped by this useless feature. You know what, Colgate people? Every toothbrush I've ever owned already had the ability to brush my tongue. You know those bristles? They can brush tongues too! You want to add stuff to my toothbrush? How about ANYTHING more useful, like maybe a bellybutton squeegee or even an eardrum puncturer.

Also, I wanted a blue toothbrush. I like blue.

Meanwhile, as I rapidly approach total curmudgeonry, my mother is going in the opposite direction. Yesterday I taught her how to send a text message. Today I taught her to type, "C U L8R". Tomorrow, she's a h4x0r

Man, I've just been so weary the last week or two. Part of it is that I haven't been getting enough sleep. The other part, I think, is that I'm burned out on all the to-do items that clutter my day, like work, or brushing my teeth. I'm not one of those people who gets a lot of satisfaction out of being productive, or flossing.

Last weekend I was at the school picnic for Daisy's school last weekend, and I had the sinking feeling that I was supposed to be being helpful. As Lord Secretary of the PTA Board it's appropriate for me to assist at PTA events like school picnics. At one point, after a couple hours of picnicking, I saw one woman starting to clean up the food tables. so I figured I'd pitch in.

"Hey, how can I help clean up?" I asked heroically, mustering fake enthusiasm from deep down in the bowels of my spleen.

"Oh, it's not really time to clean up. I'm just trying to pre-clean."

Pre what? So, it's NOT time to do chores yet? And, yet, you're... This was baffling to me.

"But...." she continued, "if you really want to help out, come with me."

Doh! I realized at this point, that this woman wasn't even officially assigned to doing chores, she was just.... gah.... helpful. And now, I was helping her. She led me over to big stack of full garbage bags.

"Might as well throw these away," she said cheerfully, grabbing two of the big bags.

Since I outweighed her by a fair amount, I grabbed the remaining four bags and started to follow her down the path. After about 30 seconds, they got pretty heavy.

"The trash bins are a ways off!" she gleefully announced from ahead. I stopped momentarily to move one of the heavy bags from my left (mousing) hand to my right (phone dialing) hand, and at that moment she paused and looked back to check up on me.

"You can make two trips," she offered, eyeing my underdeveloped biceps.

I picked the four bags back up and trudged on after her. We eventually made it to the trash bins, that apparently she had scouted out ahead of time, and tossed the garbage bags into them in an orderly fashion. Afterwards, we walked briskly back to the picnic. She stopped about half a dozen times along the way, to pick up bits of litter and trash along the way. Each time she did it, I stared at her, dumbfounded. It's not that I disapprove of picking up random litter, or that I think I'm above it, but it just never occurs to me to start cleaning up the Earth. Have you seen this planet? It's HUGE!

She was just one of those people who gets things done. She finds opportunities to work. Me? I find cookies to eat. Mmmmmm, cookies.

Anyway, it's all just making me very tired. On the plus side, however, American males live to be around 75 on average, so I'm about half done with my chores.

Over the last couple months I've been spending much of my free time writing a piece of software that will predict the outcome of baseball games. This activity has been deeply satisfying to me and I'll probably bore you all with the details sometime.

The program isn't done yet, but it's functional enough to start tossing out some predictions with a reasonable level of accuracy. The goal is that one day I'll figure out a legal way to actually place sports bets using this software. Since Hank was in Vegas this week, I had a small window of opportunity.

So, after months of late nights working on this program, and after teaching Hank how to read a casino sportsbook chart, and after spending a large chunk of time this week massaging data, and running reports, I gave Hank some detailed instructions on which bets to place. This was very exciting for me, to finally see the fruits of my labor turned into actual casino bets, albeit on a small scale.

Well, although she isn't here to tell me the exact result, as near as I can tell, my herculean efforts have resulted in about $1 of profit. Meanwhile, Hank managed to sit down at a No Limit Texas Hold 'Em poker table for an hour and a half and earned $700.

The way I see it, we both turned a profit.

In computer science we have the concept of a background process or job. It's some task that a computer performs while simultaneously doing other potentially more important things. This ability to do tasks "in the background" is what enables our government's super computers to win the war in Iraq while at the same time keep illegal aliens out of the country.

Our brains have a similar ability. It's trivial for most of us to, for example, instruct our legs to walk, while simultaneously chewing the hell out of a potentially distracting piece of Juicy Fruit gum. Mmmmmm, Juicy Fruit.

Doing one thing in the background isn't too hard, but this week I'm juggling more than I can handle. With Hank out of the house on her Vegas "business" trip, all of a sudden there are a zillion things about Daisy and our daily lives that I need to track. At any point in time I need to be aware of:

• Where's Daisy?!?!
• Do I have her allergy medicine nearby?
• Is she wearing sunscreen?
• Is she dressed right for the weather?
• How many minutes left until school starts, or ends, or until dinner, or bedtime,
• Is she keeping up on her homework?
• What am I going to feed her?
• etc

By 7:35 in the morning I'm already mentally exhausted from ensuring that everything on the pre-school checklist is under control. I'm not used to cooking her breakfast while brushing her hair and thinking about what snacks to pack in her lunchbox. I feel like I'm always one moment of distraction away from squeezing sunscreen onto her bagel. $10 says she'd have an allergic reaction to it too.

Anyway, I'm just venting. I'm sure that many people are much more busy than me, but most of them probably aren't as lazy as I am. That's what really kills me. Where's my lazing time? Apparently it's at 10:16pm.

On a how-do-you-like-them-apples note, Hank called tonight. She's out dancing, and probably not even chewing gum at the same time.

Yesterday I attended a parents' meeting for one of Daisy's extracurricular sports.

The meeting was called because the guy in charge of the sport (and I'm being deliberately vague here) was fed up with poor parent behavior. The administrator called for a sport-wide meeting and gathered hundreds of us parents in a gym this weekend.

For 30 minutes the man lectured and berated us, enumerating all the different ways that parents had been misbehaving the last few years. He explained that many parents try to coach their kids during the games, others bring their own whistles from home to do some sideline officiating, some parents yell at each other, and every once in a while a fight breaks out.

The lecturer explained how he never had to expell a child from the sport, but he had had to get a few restraining orders for parents. He marched back and forth across the gym floor explaining how it was important for us to try and identify the berserk parents on our team. He suggested that we all should have a team meeting, so that early on we could figure out who the bipolar psychopaths were.

Truth be told, the guy had a pretty funny presentation style, but I walked out of the meeting a little stunned. I tried to think if any of the parents on our team might be violent freaks, but I couldn't identify any. Afterwards I went to an event for Daisy's school and I recovered from the meeting by telling some people all about the lecture, and what a personality the guy had.

"Oh, I know him," one parent confided to me, "There's a restraining order against him and he's not allowed within 50 feet of our school. Apparently he hit a kid."

I guess it takes one to know one.

Well, that last post certainly generated a lot of comments. As it turns out, people love pictures. And smut.

Additionally, rumor has it that there are a couple folks who are unable to comment here for technical reasons. I'm pretty sure this is because I stupidly switched over to the Blogger Beta prematurely. Normally Google is pretty good about their Beta programs, but this one wasn't quite ripe. For those of you whose comments get rejected for "Can't find your username" type of issues, then just leave anonymous comments.

Meanwhile, back in the non-virtual world, Hank departed today for a 5 day "business" trip to Las Vegas.

I don't know who she thinks she's fooling. Hank works in the Information Techology department of a search engine company. What part of that business needs to take place in Vegas? The last time I went to Vegas, at least I had the cajones to 'fess up that it was a bachelor party. If she comes home humming Klingon drinking songs then I'll know that she spent this week doing what I did in Vegas, getting drunk at the Star Trek bar. Yes, I am that cool.

Related to nothing, yesterday I had a super tasty meal at what many folks consider to be the best Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco, The Slanted Door. Hank recently discovered that she has relatives in the area, so we invited them to SF for lunch.

Yes, the restaurant was very nice, and the food was scrumptious, but in what is becoming a recurring theme in my life, what I remember most is my trip to the bathroom.

After sucking down a few glasses of ice water (I was warm from jogging from the train station to the restaurant, which I had to do because I was in mortal danger of being nearly 2 minutes late), I had to pee. I marched to the rear of the restaurant where I saw a line of women awaiting their turn for the restroom. I tried not to smirk as I stepped ahead of them looking for the always vacant mens room.

What I found were 4 doors, each labeled as a unisex bathroom. It took me several seconds of disbelieving eyeblinking to realize that The Slanted Door did not regard my penis as a bathroom Fast Pass. There was no dedicated mens room! I slunk to the back of the line. One of the women smirked at me as I shuffled past her.

As I stood in line, I saw an attendant standing at the end of the six foot long common sink. He appeared ready to wipe up any stray hand-washing spashes but mostly he stood there watching people go in and out of the unisex toilet rooms. Every once in a while, after someone would exit, he'd pop into the bathroom to see if it was still clean. It wasn't obvious to me how he decided which people to check up after. I figured he was probably pretty good at spotting the slobs.

After I got my big chance to use the potty, I was slightly traumatized to see that the attendant checked up after me. Me? I'm a very tidy pisser! I don't pee on the seat. I don't dribble my urine around. I was even nicely dressed. It made me remorseful that I had correctly aimed my urine.

Anyway, the rest of lunch finished trauma-free. Hank's new relatives seemed very nice. As we left the restaurant, with the entire clan in easy ear-shot, I asked Daisy, "So, kid, what do you think of your new family members? Thumbs up or down?"

I like to set Daisy up with nice fat pitches, slow and right over the middle of the plate. I knew her response would endear her to these folks.

"Thumbs all around," Daisy replied cryptically.

"Well," said one of Hank's relatives, "That's certainly a very....uh.... political answer."

Daisy for President.

I didn't always have my picture in this blog. First I had no images of myself, which seemed like the most anonymous, and therefore the safest, option. Then, I built a cartoon image of myself and posted that as my profile pic. No harm in that, right? Eventually I just bit the bullet and posted a damn picture. I know I enjoy seeing the faces of other blog authors, so what the hell. Besides, I was finding it increasingly difficult to masturbate to my own blog without it.

(Interesting factoid: The above joke, tasteless as it may be, is very similar to the type of joke that I make in real life. Sorry, Mom.)

Now that we've broken all those taboos, I'm posting Yosemite vacation pictures! Next I'll send you a fruitcake and we'll be best friends. Kiss kiss.

Here's me standing on a bridge over a river wearing my $4.00 sunglasses. If you use your CSI superpowers, you can make out Hank in the reflection. Hi Hank!

We hiked up to Vernal Falls seen here. I tried to capture the rainbow created in the waterfall mist.

At the top of Vernal Falls is Emerald Lake, which is filled by icy cold snow runoff water. We sat on the rocks by the shore for a few minutes being amused by the various people who chose to jump into the lake. Each jump into the tremendously cold water, including the one by the gentleman pictured at the bottom left here, was followed by tremendous screams of anguish and surprise. That's quality entertainment.

Here's a good shot that shows how the granite walls of Yosemite Valley just tower above the redwood trees. You'll just have to trust me that these tiny trees at the very bottom of this picture were impressively tall.

Everything in Yosemite looks like a postcard. I swear I could have taken a dump and it would've been picture perfect.

Finally, here is a picture of Hank and I having a romantic dinner. And, yes, her breasts do usually talk to me.

Today, of course, I celebrated Labor Day by not laboring.

This is very similar to being resentful on Thanksgiving or forgetting stuff on Memorial Day. I excel at this type of celebration.

In the morning, Hank and I took Daisy miniature golfing. Golfing is near the top of the enormously long list of sports that I suck at and do not enjoy, but miniature golf can be enjoyable about once every decade. (I feel the same way about Kentucky Fried Chicken, except that I don't suck at eating it).

Anyway, I'm pleased to report that despite (or perhaps because of) giving Daisy bad advice about golfing form at every opportunity , I won the First Ever Our House Golf Invitational. Daisy seemed to enjoy herself, but it still didn't measure up to the 10 minutes of Skeeball we let her play in the arcade.

Meanwhile, I ducked over to the batting cages. Although baseball is second on the enormously long list of sports that I suck at and do not enjoy, batting cages are a hoot. This was my second time trying one and boyhowdy do I ever stink at hitting a ball with a bat. Despite having the pitching machine on nearly its slowest speed, I still completely missed about half of the 100 pitches I swung at. I estimate that had these been real pitches in a real baseball game, I would have earned myself a tidy .03 batting average. If I can improve one measly order of magnitude, I'll be ready for Little League.

Afterwards the family went over to a nearby chain restaurant that specializes in Daisy's favorite food: pasta. As always, due to Daisy's allergies, we ordered her food very carefully, but we'd been to this restaurant before, and the waitress was attentive, so we felt comfortable that they weren't going to accidentally kill our daughter.

We ate a good meal, topped off with some excellent and refreshing lemon-flavored soda. Just the thing after golfing in the sun.

As we walked to our car after lunch, Daisy began to clutch her stomach. She was reluctant to admit that anything was wrong, but after a minute she cried out, "I DON'T WANT TO THROW UP!"

This is alarming behavior. Typically Daisy only throws up either when car sick, or when she's eaten something that she's very allergic to, like nuts or eggs. We carry an epinephrine pen with us at all times for those situations.

While Daisy moaned and yelled, Hank suggested that maybe some of the food had been cooked in a nut oil. She reminded me where the epinephrine pen was before bolting back to the restaurant to quiz the cook about the possible allergens that might have possibly gotten into Daisy's food. She came back a couple minutes later fairly certain that Daisy's food was allergen-free.

We comforted Daisy helplessly for a few moments before Hank offered, "Oh, maybe it was that soda. You don't usually have soda. Maybe you just need to burp?"

Ding ding ding!


Daisy's soothing burp came a few minutes later and we all breathed a sign of relief. Hank should be a doctor.

All in all, not a bad day.

Man, Yosemite is purty! I'm really lousy about going through the 18 herculean steps that are required to transfer a picture from my digital camera to my blog, but I'll try to post some pictures in the coming days. Patsy requested pictures, and you know how she gets. Anyway, it's darn purty.

We cruised from San Francisco to Yosemite on Friday afternoon. By cruised, of course, I mean that we sat in traffic while I silently cursed being tricked into leaving the house again. Eventually, after racing through Yosemite Valley probably faster than any sedan in history, we made it to the Ahwahnee Hotel, where we were staying, in time for our dinner reservations.

The Ahwahnee is the premier I'm-Not-Going-To-Rough-It-So-Charge-Me-Through-The-Nose facility in Yosemite. It's a grand lodge in a ridiculously majestic location. Tellingly, "Ahwahnee" is also a Native American word that means "Many wampum, few amenities".

Sure enough, we paid more for our room than I've ever paid for a hotel room before. I mean, it was nice, and it had a walk-in closet, which is a rare treat in a hotel room, but how about delivering a newspaper to my room? Or maybe providing a mini bar? Or perhaps they could take the money that we spent in 36 hours and buy themselves a kick-ass computer so that the lady at the reservation desk doesn't have to page through a ream of paper just to make a dinner reservation? Just some ideas.

Instead, it looks like they took my money and bought rocks. Much of the hotel was built with rocks (and wood and tall windows). While Hank was using the ladies room at dinner one evening, I looked around at the grand dining room and estimated that I had paid about one dollar for each rock in there. I guess that's a good deal. They were pretty big rocks.

Yosemite is all about rocks, as it turns out. What makes the Yosemite Valley so spectacular is that it is surrounded by these gigantic walls of granite. You stand almost anywhere in the valley, and there are huge redwood trees all around you. Redwood trees are amazingly tall trees and are almost always the tallest things around. In Yosemite however, they are simply dwarfed by the immense granite walls and features. The sense of scale is absurd.

I had been to Yosemite before, once as a flu-ridden adult, and once as a child, but I had forgotten how damn scenic it is. It was nice to share the experience with Hank, who had never visited the park before. We spent Saturday hiking, biking, playing games, eating well, and enjoying each other's company. This was the first time we had ever left town without Daisy. Although this is entirely appropriate for an anniversary weekend, it was also a little disconcerting. Thankfully she was well-cared for and had a pretty good weekend herself. Next time we go to Yosemite, maybe we'll bring her along.

Maybe.

It was definitely too short of a trip though.

Happy 10 year wedding anniversary to me!

Also to Hank, I suppose, but mostly to me. I mean, it's pretty amazing that she hasn't dumped my annoying ass yet. This is a big accomplishment for me. I'm not sure whether Hank deserves congratulations or condolences, or maybe just a boatload of respect for her immense reservoirs of tolerance. My nickname for her used to be The Goddess of Tolerance and it still holds.

A converation from earlier this week may be illustrative:

Me: So, riddle me this, how many minutes per week of conversation about my baseball computer program can you handle?
Hank: I don't like how this is starting.
Me: No, don't worry. I don't have anything in particular to say about it right now, I'm just wondering, in general, how much of that topic you can stomach.
Hank: Oh, don't worry about that.
Me: Well, I don't want to completely bore you too often, so how many minutes per week?
Hank: It doesn't really matter. I'm really good at just tuning you out. Talk all you want. I can work on the laptop or do any number of productive things.
Me: Nooooo! I'm not talking about those types of minutes. I mean the kind where you actually listen and interact.
Hank: Oh. Really?
Me: Yeah.
Hank: Hmmmmm, per week? Uh, maybe 30 to 60? Like 5 or 10 minutes a day?
Me: Hooohoo! That's way more than I need!
Hank: Good.
Me: .....
Hank: ....
Me: Soooooo, as long as I have a few minutes, here's the latest report on my baseball program....


Somewhere in that dialogue is the secret to a 10 year marriage. We'll see if it holds for 11.

We're off to Yosemite for the weekend. Hank has never been, which is shameful.