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Indian Cove, Joshua Tree
We wake up slowly in our tent, groggy from the late night drive. It’s good to be back at Indian Cove, though, for the first time since our wedding. We are in campsite #7 with Ann’s parents, right below Dark Shadows Rock, so after breakfast I wander up and rig a toprope on it. We…
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Performance: The Felici Trio
I’m amazed to learn that these musicians are based here in the eastern Sierras, in Mammoth Lakes. It may have to do with being starved for good music, but my jaw dropped several times during this performance. Brian Schuldt on cello and Rebecca Hang on violin both played expertly as far as I could tell,…
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Movie: Saving Grace
A fine British film. It does give in to the excesses inherent in the subject at times. I’m guessing it was inspired by the American film Homegrown, and if it doesn’t quite live up, it has fun trying.
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Great Falls Basin
On our way home from Wildrose Canyon we stop at Great Falls Basin to get a couple of climbs in. The air there smells a bit like cat urine, an odor we have noted before in the desert after recent rain. This time we connect the odor to a particular plant that flourishes in the…
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Wildrose Peak
It is one of those mornings when Ann and I both want to do the same thing, then proceed to frustrate each other’s attempts to do it. The proposal is to drive to Wildrose Canyon and hike up Wildrose Peak. It’s Ann’s idea, but she doesn’t want to be pressured to do it. I like…
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Wagon Wheel
It’s the first daytime Wagonwheel session I’ve attended for a while. Curtis is the only one there at the proposed 11 am. I roll in at 11:30, then Ted, Randy, and Greg show up. I feel kind of unmotivated, but warm up anyway. Soon I’ve done a problem on the Big Loaf that I’ve only…
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Movie: The Hours
A stark look at several characters throughout the 20th century dealing with depression and insanity, contemplating whether suicide is justfied when life has become unendurable. Although the movie’s message comes through clearly, the story line and the role of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway in the screenplay can be confusing, especially if like me you…
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Movie: Offret (The Sacrifice)
A dense, strange, stilted Swedish movie that follows some high-bred characters as they grapple with isolation after the onset of world war III. Its philosophical monologues and symbolic characters seem to have potential, which kept us watching. Either they never panned out, or didn’t seem worth the effort to follow. In the end it felt…
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Telescope Peak
When the alarm goes off at 4 am, I have no clue what we’re in for. We throw breakfast, lunch, and gear together in a blur and are in the car by 5 when we discover the car windows are iced and the defroster doesn’t work. Not the sort of thing we noticed while the…
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Memory Fault
I’m collecting errors on a new platform! This is from Mac OS X 10.3. I’ve gotten the debugger up and am far enough to see that the error happens when the program tries to create a big (512k) chunk of shared memory. Smaller chunks work. In 10.2 I had upped the shared memory from 4MB…