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 5/11/2007 I've been planning a hiking trip to the John Muir wilderness for next weekend, the 18-19 of May. I called the Forest Service office to get a wilderness permit and the woman asked me what date I wanted. When I told her she said "wait you want a permit for May?" This caused me to reconsider my ambitious plans for assaulting the backside of the sierra mountain range in the early part of summer after what has been a very low snow year. She advised me that the nightime temperatures at 10k feet are often in the teens during the month of May and that I should consider going at a later date. I talked to Aaron, my partner in crime and we have altered our plans to car camp at about 8,500 feet and do day hikes. All the same I have been looking for a warm jacket that will work for backpacking. Typical warm jackets are far too heavy; for backpacking a down coat (or equivalent synthetic insulation even better) made with a thin nylon shell is ideal for cold weather camps in the high country; however the only ones that I have been able to find are NorthFace brand. This irks me somewhat because not only is the Northface logo bold and large in the chest pocket location, but it is also smattered on the back of the jacket as if it were a mirror image of the front. I went to all the trouble to make a bunch of my own backpacking gear a couple years ago so that I wouldn't have to be a walking billboard in the wilderness. Now I find myself needing to return to the sewing machine again if I wish to continue my silent tirade against corporate advertising in the last wild places. Apart from a little hiking, our trip will also be for the purposes of digging up some wild junipers. The two that I dug about eighteen months ago are finally growing well enough to start working with...but I find that they are too small for my current taste in bonsai, so I need to go back and dig up some bigger ones to avoid paying thousands of dollars to buy them. Bryce and I have been doing a lot of schooling lately. He has his classes and I have mine...some of them overlap. I tend to manage to learn some ASL during his ASL classes and then Dory and I also take a free ASL class from City College of San Francisco once per week. I was going along fine, thinking that I was getting pretty good at this signing thing when I ran across a deaf adult; the parent of one of the other kids in Bryce's ASL class. I always seem to understand what the teacher, also deaf, if signing about, but for the life of me I could not follow what this man was doing. At first I thought that it was the speed with which he executed his signs, sometime combining signs that are commonly used together. I could recognize many of the individul signs but could not follow the meaning of his sentences. After an hour of this I turned to the teacher to converse about it since she had been summarizing and "translating" for me. I asked her why I seemed to have such difficulty and she responded: He has very strong usage of ASL. I wondered why it was any different than hers for a minute before she explained to me that she always uses English word order in conversation with me. So knock me down a few pegs; I still have only a rudimentary understanding of ASL. While my vocabulary may be nearing the point of usefulness my grammar and signing structure are horrid. It is the same problem that I had for the first three or four years that I was learning spanish...I was still thinking in English. But in the case of Spanish, the grammatical structure is close enough that you can get away with it. The grammatical structure of ASL is somewhere between French and Chinese....thus I have a long way to go still. 1/5/2007 11/23/2006 10/1/2006 9/1/2006 7/20/2006 5/30/2006 5/20/2006 4/25/2006 3/22/2006 2/22/2006 1/25/2006 12/20/2005 11/17/2005 10/27/2005 10/8/2005 9/11/2005 8/26/2005 8/9/2005 8/1/2005 7/20/2005 7/5/2005 6/17/2005 5/27/2005 5/1/2005 4/15/2005 4/5/2005 3/24/2005 3/13/2005 2/5/2005 12/28/2004 11/29/2004 11/3/2004 10/2/2004 9/10/2004 8/23/2004 8/8/2004 7/21/2004 7/2/2004 6/8/2004 5/4/2004 4/20/2004 3/28/2004 3/10/2004 2/10/2004 1/15/2004 To reach entries prior to January 2004 click on one of the older entries on this list and scroll down to the bottom of that entry. e-mail Eric |