Auberry trip day one

We left this morning for a quick trip to see a bit of snow and a part of California that we are not all that familiar with - the Auberry metropolitan area. Joining Mrs Notthat, The Boy, and I on the trip were Yram (not her real name), her daughter Neremac (not her real name either, and I'm probably misspelling it in any case), and their wind up dog Murphy (his real name). Yarm's husband Nitsuj will join us tomorrow night. The place we are staying at belongs to Nitsuj's parents Evad and Yhtak.

Our van seats eight and holds an amazing amount of stuff. Since there were only five of us and we were only going to be gone two nights, you would have thought this would be a piece of cake.

Ha! We did manage to squeeze everything in, but just barely.

Auberry is a nice little town of about 2000 people sitting at about 2000 feet above sea level. Where we were going though was a few miles west of town and straight up a mountain. I'm not sure what the elevation is here, but it's high enough to have some snow.

Yram called Evad as we were getting close to find out whether the road to their place was safe for a pretty minivan - the answer was no since it had warmed up enough for the snow to melt and make a muddy mess of things. So we parked the van and waited for Evad to pick us up. Above is Mrs Notthat admiring the view, which is quite breathtaking.

Evad showed up with a huge diesel truck (The Boy said "Yes!") and we moved all our stuff over to it. The plan is to go get the van in the evening once the road has a chance to freeze up a bit. (The dog in that picture is Murphy.)

Neremac had grown up around here and was thrilled to be back. Apparently a local custom is to kick off your boots before swinging. (It was probably in the mid 40s at this time. No way I'm kicking my boots off.)

Everyone in this picture looks like they are standing around in mourning for the dead gopher that Makita (the Akita standing next to Mrs Notthat) found somewhere and felt she needed to bring to us. Actually, I think they were trying to work out where to put it so that it wouldn't make a return visit, which I'm pretty sure it did at least once more.

Here you see Murphy annoying Makita, which seems to be his primary goal in life (when he's not dragging dead rodents to the doorstep).

And here is their Emergency Backup Dog, whose name I forget but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a power tool.

And here The Boy gets in a staring contest with the start of their goat herd.

Here Neremac is doing her best Super Hero pose, or something like that. She is so in her element out here in the country. (And thankfully is back in her boots too.)

This is the shop with attached apartment that Evad and Yhtak have been working to build since they moved to this area a few years ago. The shop is huge and impressive, the apartment is still pretty unfinished, but will work great for us to use while we are here. They live in a trailer next to the shop.

And this is the view they have to put up with, being way up on this mountain.

The Boy is in love with this place and would love to turn his Jeep loose up here. The mud, the snow, the nearly navigable roads are all calling to him.

Tomorrow we are going to try to find lots of snow to play in, which I doubt will be hard to do at all. Hopefully the tire chains will keep nice and dry in the back of the van.

That's it - move along...

More treehouse, grandkids, some mud, and future snow play

The treehouse is coming right along, but still has quite a bit of "right along" to come.

The grandkids showed up Sunday, and even though there was no railing or even real steps, they began enjoying the treehouse immediately. Darci wanted a table and chairs so that they could eat lunch up there. Then she started listing all the things the treehouse was missing. "A door, shelves for putting our toys on, a flag, a roof, a trap door..." and on and on she went. Note that she never mentioned anything about a safety rail. (They are looking up because I pointed out two nests above them that might be abandoned or might have angry raccoons in them.)

The Boy showed up and gave it a bit of a stress test. (He noticed the missing safety features right away. And took advantage of the lack of them.)

Now there are real steps and the beginning of a real rail. I believe Darci is still listing the things the treehouse is missing.

Once it started to get dark we headed inside and Darci went to work on a flag. I haven't the faintest idea what any of this is - I'm pretty sure she just wanted to use as may colors as possible.

The next day she planted the flag in an elaborate ceremony that mostly involved her telling me where she wanted the hole drilled. And then where she really wanted the hole. And then again where...sigh.

The grandkids spent the night, so we got out the folding cushions for them to sleep on.

Here we see Riley tormenting poor Darci.

And really REALLY enjoying it.

They went to sleep fine, but I was jolted awake at 6:00 AM by Darci's normal greeting for Idiot Dog Teddy: a screamed "NO!"

She was hungry, and foolishly the night before I had promised chocolate chip pancakes, so at 6:05 we were busy making them.

Unfortunately it was too cold and windy out to work on the treehouse, so we played with Legos, watched an Ice Age movie (fitting!), and ate lots of snacks.

Tomorrow morning we are heading to the snow country, to a town named Auberry. I had never heard of it either. The Boy is excited that he will get to fool around with his snowboard. Here he is wearing his boots and goggles. (I'm pretty sure he isn't going to wear them to bed. Probably.)

In any case, there will be pictures and such when we get back on Friday.

That's it - move along...

PS: The Boy tends to take lots of pictures of his muddy Jeep. So far he has found two different urban mudholes to wallow in, although both were "fixed" (one filled in and the other fenced off) shortly after he found them. He cannot wait for more rain to hit so that he can start searching for mudhole number three.

Oh deer and a treehouse, sort of

Mrs Notthat had an appointment that meant we could not go for the normal walk with the SJ Fit group, so the two of us headed up to Wunderlich Park just outside of Woodside to get in a few miles.

First, the obligatory porta-pottie picture. Also note how Mrs Notthat looks like she could survive a blizzard.

Note that Mrs Notthat now looks much more like this is a northern California December morning. Also note that it is not raining. There was still some mud to watch out for, but much more of a concern were the presents the horses that also use these trails leave behind.

And lastly, note the walking poles she is using. Weirdly, she still tried skipping with these.

We were stopped about halfway up one of the trails by a group of rangers clearing this fallen tree. So we had to turn around and double back to a different trail...

...which ended up working out pretty well since we saw three deer up close. This young buck wanted to share my peanut butter pretzels, but I'm not that nice.

And that was as exciting as the walk got. Once we got home and showered and ate lunch, I went to work on the treehouse sort of thing that I had promised the grandkids I would make from the old garage door.

It doesn't look like much here, but the hard part is now done (which is the part where I needed to get off my dead butt and get started).

I wonder how good Darci is with a circular saw? (Probably no worse than Riley will be with that axe if I don't remember to put it away before they show up tomorrow!)

That's it - move along...

The Boy gets certified and the grandkids should be

After sloshing through the mud on Saturday morning, Weird Haired Mom and the grandkids came over for fun and dinner. I made a wonderful chicken cacciatore, but only Mrs Notthat and I ate it (WHM is a vegetarian again, The Boy wasn't hungry, and the grandkids ate what they normally eat - chicken nuggets and pasta with red sauce).

But first, The Boy got a scary looking envelope from Skyline College. This is a bit of an odd time since he is just finishing the current semester, so he was a bit nervous when he opened it. It turned out to be a certificate for the spring semester's class that ended way back in May. Apparently it takes seven months to print these things out (I'm thinking they need a faster printer). In any case, this certifies that he can reliably look at a defective engine and flip the hidden switch to make it all better.

Riley dressed up as a French Spiderman (not sure how the Scooby Doo socks fit in exactly) with a beret and a "What do you mean you are out of baguettes?" sort of attitude.

Darci did her princess thing and is pointing to the baguettes.

Even Mrs Notthat got into the act a bit, wearing the green feathered crown and pink lei of a queen. Idiot Dog Teddy is confused about whether there really are baguettes or not.

And on the medical front, Darci is about to lose her first tooth! She is pretty excited about this (others at her school have already lost teeth) and wanted me to tie it to a door knob and yank it out.

And that's about it. It was a very full Saturday that led to a nicely calm Sunday. Except for IDT who is still looking for the baguettes.

That's it - move along...

A moist "A" only a dog should love

This Saturday's San Jose Stay Fit walk was our first real test. The trail was an "A" (extremely hill infested) and the forecast was for significant rain with the high temperature in the low 50s. And some wind.

The saner members of our group managed to come up with perfectly valid reasons for not being able to make the walk. Llib (not his real name) does not like lightening (which was only a very slight possibility), Eve (not her real name, but sort of...) had to go out and murder a tree, one had choir practice (really!), another had shoe issues, and so on.

The one guy who had a really good excuse, Coach Truc (who had come back from a vacation at some exotic place or other a few days earlier, only to find his house flooded due to a ruptured water line, forcing him to stay in a motel) was there bright an early. As were the several other hardy group members, including probably most surprisingly, Mrs Notthat.

Here we are gathering in a school parking lot. A special guest walker was Ijus and her wonder dog Razz (his real name). Truc is the one in shorts - exotic vacations do things to a guy I guess.

It was a short hike from the parking lot to the head of the trail where Ijus was able to dispose of a gift that Razz had left on a lawn along the way. (Note 1: I'm pretty sure I have included a picture of a porta-pottie in every one of these posts. You're welcome! Note 2: this "short hike" between the trail head and the parking lot is only short when starting. When you are returning, you swear that the school has been moved at least six blocks further away.)

Here we are warming up. Uidualc is studying the park map, verifying the complete lack of formal bathroom facilities once we leave this point. We were in Almaden County's Quicksilver park.

A lot of the hike was spent avoiding the trails. Actually, a lot of the trails were not all that bad, mud-wise, due to them being too steep for water to hang around long enough to make mud. Flat and muddy or steep and not so muddy - pick your poison!

Here we are at an overlook (there was a lake you could look at, but it was extremely low and depressing). I love that only Razz was willing to get on that soaked bench. The rest of us saw it as an opportunity to scrape some mud off our shoes.

There were many impromptu creeks that had to be forded. Note that Truc, the one in shorts, also is the only one with walking sticks. Soon Mrs Notthat is going to wish she had a pair of these.

The thing about the mud is that, no matter how deep the lugs on your shoes are (and both Mrs and I wore our hiking boots), they quickly fill up and you end up sliding around in this stuff. Plus so much mud sticks to your shoes and pant legs that it is like wearing twenty pound leg weights. It is a challenging workout.

This is the scariest wild life we saw on the hike. Everything else (mountain lions, deer, bobcats, the moose that Razz caught scent of and chased through the hills) stayed tucked away somewhere. They're not stupid.

Here's Nonra, a coach with a running group from San Jose Fit. His group ran past us, but he stopped to take our picture. (Is he prepared? His camera battery died and he had a backup with him. No, it would not occur to me to carry a backup.)

And this was a surprising thing - as miserable as the conditions were, we were far from alone on the trails. We were met by a woman probably my mother's age who was cheerfully walking her dog. She was coming the other way - she had already been to where we were going and was returning! There were people on bicycles and quite a few runners, and not just from our group. And all of these people seemed happy. Weird.

Mrs Notthat pauses for a picture. She was doing really good at this point. She had even been seen skipping down a hill (which apparently inspired Truc to do some skipping as well - that is a picture I am seriously disappointed to have missed).

Me. What you can't see is that I have a backpack on with shoes for Mrs and I (in case the hiking boots turned out to be wildly inappropriate), a spare raincoat, and Mrs sweatshirt that she took off after getting too warm. I was hugely disappointed when I got home to find that this 20 pound (at least) backpack actually only weighed 10 pounds.

Sadly, Mrs Notthat managed to somehow hurt her right knee, which made it painful to bend or to put weight on when going downhill. Coach Luap had a band of some sort that, when strapped below the knee, helped a fair amount. But we still turned around and headed back. The walk was to be 11 to 13 miles and we were only about halfway into it at this point. By taking shortcuts back we still ended up going about 8 miles though (maybe more - I never heard an official estimate).

I'm walking alongside her. It was slow going which led to the next problem - the lack of vigorous walking meant she could suddenly really feel the cold and wetness. Plus it started raining harder (off and on) and the wind gusted a bit more often. But she was determined to get back to the car and actually managed to go faster than I would have expected.

Finally we started going through the neighborhood to get to the school parking lot. We found an unexpected bonus - the water running through the gutters provided a good place to get a lot of the mud off our shoes and Razz. (This dog absolutely loved this walk and could have gone on all day. And all of us were happy that Razz was not having to ride in our car - that was one wet and muddy dog, even after the gutter bath.)

It's not easy to see, but that hill you see in the background was where we had just spent five and a half hours sloshing around in the mud. The thing is, I can see why people do this. After a while, the wet doesn't matter much and you get better about dodging the worst of the mud. The air is fresh and the hills are glorious. And the accomplishment, the refusing to do the easy thing and stay in a warm house watching TV, makes you feel pretty good.

I asked Mrs if she would go on another of these very moist hikes and she said no. But then, well, maybe if she had better pants and walking poles.

So maybe...

That's it - move along...

PS: We got our winter shirts! They are so cool. Note the stocking cap, scarf, and the splashing in a puddle.

Teddy plays nice

Idiot Dog Teddy gets along well with people. Other dogs though, not so much. He grew up with a ridiculously high strung little yappy dog named Belle, and to his credit, he never ate her.

Here Belle is showing her stunning intellect by laying under the bed.

IDT also got along OK with my parents little dog named Issa, as long as we carefully introduced them.

Here my dad is being the equivalent of a demilitarized zone between Belle and Issa (who actually got along fine, as long as everyone knew that the house revolved around Belle).

But that's been about it. We tried to introduce him to our house sitter's wonderful dog, but that went badly - our theory is that since he grew up with a small dog, he can tolerate them fairly well, but medium to large dogs are still on his list of the most evil things on earth (along with squirrels, cats, bugs, and some mildly threatening leaves).

So when I came home Monday and saw a strange dog in the house, it was a surprise. Even more surprising was that IDT didn't seem to care.

Meet Sophia. She is Aubri's remarkably well behaved dog. She's not a big dog, but not a tiny one either (and certainly not a yappy one - I have yet to hear her bark), and IDT is fine with her.

He is curious, but Sophia just ignores him, which perplexes IDT a bit.

There is no way this earmuff could be put on IDT.

Riley, on the other hand, will try anything.

Even The Boy gets along with Sophia.

And finally here is Aubri and Sophia.

One thing that has come out of this is that Mrs Notthat is starting to talk more about getting another dog. A cousin in Arkansas has a dog that had a litter of Redbone puppies. I am positive that if we lived a bit closer we would already have one of these. And a local friend of hers has a dog similar to Sophia that also had a litter of puppies. Fortunately the friend intends to keep the puppies, but we all know how things can change once the puppies get a bit bigger and ornerier.

In the meantime, we are currently suffering through a bitter cold snap that has left IDT's water dish frozen the past two mornings.

And even worse, rain is predicted for Saturday's group walk. It will be interesting to see how this goes.

Maybe we will be too busy dealing with a puppy by then to go out walking in the rain.

Heavy sigh...

That's it - piddle along...

Helpful tip: the Stanford Dish is not a restaurant

Today's San Jose Stay Fit group walk was up to the Stanford Dish. Again, the weather was fantastic (if nippy) and the hills were hilly (this walk was rated a B). It's funny how a 10.5 mile walk now sounds short, even to Mrs Notthat.

We met in the parking lot of Stanford's football stadium. Coach Luap (not his real name) started by showing us how to use a few of his favorite things. Yes, this includes the "F" word - the Foam Roller.

Mrs Notthat volunteered to be the demonstrator, although Luap was disappointed that the roller did not bring the promised intense pain.

After showing us a few more torture items, we were off on the walk. The trail is paved and filled with relatively gentle hills. The Dish Trail is pretty good - there are lots of good views and bikes aren't allowed on it.

All I'm going to say about this picture is that the biggest problem with the trail is that it has no formal bathroom facilities.

This is one of the dishes the trail is named after. Mrs Notthat is trying to topple it onto that poor old tree. She's nothing but trouble.

This is the sign you see as you leave the park. Here's the thing; we are on the grounds of a California campus whose mascot is an obnoxious Tree and whose band has been banned from a number of events due to their unconventional presentation of musical numbers - do you have any idea how strange a coyote would have to act before it would even be noticed? I'm talking walking on its hind legs in a tutu and barking "Who Let the Dogs Out" while texting rude things to the Cal Bear. (OK, if it was not using an iPhone it might stand out a bit.)

In any case, it was a fun walk at a place that was not all that far from Redwood City - it was nice not having to drive 30 minutes as we normally do.

We've got a dubious forecast for this week which is making next weekend's walk look potentially damp. This may make things interesting. At least we won't be seeing the foam roller again.

Probably.

That's it - move along...