Kitty, the inaugural parade (WOO HOO!), and a faceplant is not a flower

The other night I was startled out of a sound sleep by Bill suddenly sitting up and yelling, "Get off me, you BITCH!!"

I thought perhaps he had had a bad dream, since he never speaks to me this way (he knows better). And I wasn't even touching him, much less on him. "Whas wrong?"

"Kitty just jumped on my head THREE TIMES."

Given the early hour and his lack of sleep I think he can be forgiven for mistaking her for a dog.
________________________________________________________
My friend S and I happened to be eating lunch today and the inaugural parade was being shown on a big screen TV near us. We were chatting about what a nice car Barack Obama's limousine is and how it’s probably bullet proof and bomb resistant (it is) when President and Michelle Obama got out and started walking. We were saying, "What? What's he doing? He's getting out? No! No! Get back in!!!" It was scary.*

When I told this to another friend (B), she says she wakes up every morning and listens to the news - worrying and half expecting something horrible has happened to him. This is going to be a loooong presidency. I can tell. Especially if he does frightening things like getting out of the car. TWICE!
________________________________________________________
I did what is termed “a faceplant” yesterday while skiing. I allowed my son to convince me I was good enough to try a funbox in a terrain park. This is a slippery box that you slide down and jump off the end. I did fine the first three times, but then I was feeling a little cocky and tried a bigger one. I'm really glad I wear a helmet, although I have a huge bruise above my eyebrows up past my hairline where my goggles and helmet tried to come through my skull. My head actually bounced. The rest of me is slowly seizing up today - especially my neck and elbow. Yes, this is my daredevil son. Why on earth did I listen to him?
________________________________________________________
Photos from David and Pete’s very cool wedding will be posted as soon as I can move again.
________________________________________________________
*We knew the security was out of this world tight. It still made us nervous.

Me, mountain bike?

Well, since I hadn't hurt myself enough last week when I went skiing, I let myself get talked into going on a death ride mountain biking with a friend yesterday. I rented a bike where the guy helpfully and cheerfully told me that I would probably fall down a couple of times, and that the $900 bike was fairly fragile, and of course, I would have to pay for any damage done. Isn't fragile mountain bike an oxymoron?

He didn't know that my friend is a seasoned mountain biker who gave me a very thorough tutorial on such things as changing gears - if you've never mountain biked, the number of gears the thing has and how to change them is a little bewildering. She told me to just use middle and bottom. She then took me to what she called "the easiest trail around." I would hate can't wait to see what a harder one looks like. She yelled back at me when I was supposed to change gears, and she made me get off and walk through rocky areas. Well...tried to make me, anyway. At one point I asked her how many gears there actually were. "Just two. Middle and bottom. Now GET OFF AND WALK IT!!" I stressed her out because I was having a little trouble following orders...

There's me and the fragile bike. It had better disc brakes than my car:There may still be snow in the Sierras, but down in the Sacramento Valley the very short flowering season is almost over. I took some photos while gasping for air pausing to take in the view along the scenic trail. Here are some purple flowers. I don't know what they are, but they were pretty. (Dammit Jim, I'm a fisheries biologist, not a botanist...)
And here are some purplish-blue ones with what my friend thought were owl's clover (she's a fisheries biologist, too)
Here are some of the purple flowers next to a rock. My attempt at artsy-fartsy. You can see why I am a fisheries biologist.
Oooh, oooh, I know this one! Lupine. Darn flowers kept moving, so they came out blurry......
Any west coast field biologist can identify THIS one. Poison oak. Lots and lots of it.
And the State Flower, California poppy.
Ok, I cheated on that one. We didn't actually see those while riding. These flowers are growing in the front yard of the house about two doors down from ours.

Here is a picture of what most of the trail looked like. It is a fairly typical live oak/valley oak woodland with lots and lots of poison oak.
I didn't fall down. I didn't break the fragile bike. I did have a great time! When can we go again?

Ouch!

Warning: this is a feeling a little sorry for myself post.

Well, I finally hurt myself (not too badly) yesterday on my very last day of skiing (Andrew - I know, I know. You warned me). I had had one of the best days skiing all year. Conditions were really good (for April) and the slopes were almost completely empty, so I didn't have to worry about being run over by a snowboarder. I skied all over Heavenly Resort, starting on the California side and ending up at the bottom of the Nevada side.

I was skating forward to get on the lift, and I caught my ski on a post, and went flat on my face, landing really hard on my knees. Those same knees that hurt in general all the time, anyway.

I heard a chorus of, "Woah, Duuude. That huuurt!" from the kids running the lift and then, "DUCK!" as the chair swung around toward my head. I had seen the chair, and was wearing my helmet, so I just lay there and let it go by.

I was in pain and embarrassed and I wasn't thinking clearly. I jumped up and said I was ok. One of the guys helped me on with my ski that I hadn't realized had come off, and I caught the next chair up. As soon as I was on the chair, my right knee started to hurt badly enough that I started feeling sick, and began to wonder how I could throw up without falling off the lift. Then I felt faint, and was afraid I was going to pass out and fall off the lift, so I wove my arm through the slats in the back of the chair just in case. Luckily it was very cold yesterday, which helped. I then began to wonder what I would do if my knee didn't work when I got to the top because it REALLY hurt.

Luckily it did. Work, that is. I had a choice of skiing back down (now that I was thinking more clearly) and catching a bus over into California, or making my way back across the mountain. I decided that, since my knees both still seemed to work, and I had been having so much fun, I would ski (carefully) back. This was the shortest route. Seriously:


Almost an hour and six lifts later, I had made it back to California and my car. And more importantly, the BAR. The bartender was kind enough to make me an icepack, and I sat, ate lunch, drank a Long Island Iced Tea, took some Advils, and iced my knee for a long time. The bartender then refilled my ice, and I then drove two hours back home with the bag tied to my leg with a scarf. The bruise is coming up nicely! It should be all kinds of pretty colours soon. You can't really see the swelling in this photo...
Self portrait. Note the same red fuzzy blanket backdrop.

Falling over in the lift line is very embarrassing, but at least I didn't break anything (at least I don't think I broke anything) like our governator did when he fell over on the ski slope supposedly while standing still a couple of years ago.

Hearing loss

I found these ultrasonic ringtones on the Science Made Cool website via Tangled Bank #102 which was hosted by Further Thoughts. Wow. That was complicated. Actually, I think that ultrasonic is defined as 20kHz and above. Eight, 10, and 12kHz were almost unbearably loud. 14.1kHz was comfortable, and 14.9kHz was audible, but quiet.

Bill's daughter came in so I tested it out on her. She could only hear up to 16.7kHz.

I booted up our PC because I wasn't sure that the speakers on this laptop are very good. I could hear up to 15.8kHz with those speakers. Barely. Bill's daughter yelled from the back of the house, "Are you still messing with those ringtones?" She could hear it from two rooms and a hallway away.

My son, his girlfriend, and his friend Will wandered in on their way to San Francisco, so I used them as guinea pigs, too. My son and his girlfriend could hear up to 16.7, and his friend Will could hear up to 18.8kHz. Most of the sounds hurt Will's ears.

I am really not surprised about my obvious hearing loss. I have a really difficult time hearing people speak if there is any background noise. I blame the various bands I've played in since I was 13. Particularly because I usually sit in front of the trumpet sections (Sorry, Andrew).

I tried testing this out to see how well the other animals in the family heard it. I put the laptop on the floor between Smokey and Fang, and played all the notes. Smokey looked on, mildly interested and Fang started falling asleep. Neither one made so much as an ear twitch. One of the other cats, Alice, came over to investigate, probably more because it is fairly unusual to see me sitting on the kitchen floor than the noises.

Oh, and Bill couldn't hear ANY of them. Not even the 8kHz. I keep telling him he's getting really deaf. Now I have proof. So he's not just ignoring me! I hope.