First handstand class

If you had any doubts before, I just wanted to say that this was a GREAT handstand class. There is actually a lot more to it than kicking your feet up into the air and hoping they stay there. Cher started us out with some gentle stretching, and then gave a lot of great pointers … Read more

Hites Cove Run

California Newt
California Newt
Hiking the first bit of Hites Cove this weekend reminded me of what a wonderful run it is -beautiful rolling terrain, with great views of the S. Fork of the Merced and, of course the wildflowers. Plus, now that it’s daylights savings, there is enough light at the end of the day that it’s possible to really get out and do things after work. Losing that extra hour of sleep goes down easier when you think of the after work activities that open up. So, today, we drove down the hill and went for a jog at Hites Cove.

It. Was. Glorious.

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Chris Polk

Imagine my surprise when I started going through my Google Alerts for Yosemite this morning, and came across an article about my old ski buddy, Chris. The headline reads, “Snowboard pro Polk remembered as happy, passionate and well dressed“. Huh? I guess Chris was boarding in the trees last Thursday, going fast, crashed into a … Read more

Wildflowers in Winter

Erik, celebrating the wildflowers
Erik, celebrating the wildflowers
Today’s the first day of Daylight’s Savings, and Tom, in his typically astute fashion, points out that it should be a National Holiday. The rate of accidents increases when the times shift because people have messed up sleep schedules. It would be much safer to have an extra day on the weekend to adapt. Plus, in this case, it gives us more of a chance to celebrate the long evening hours.

We piled a bunch of friends in to the car today and wandered down canyon to take pictures of the wildflowers. It was a gorgeously warm and sunny day, and the poppies, as everyone has been claiming, are out in force already this year. When we stopped at Hites Cove, we also saw huge clusters of blooming Popcorn flowers, Blue Dicks, Gold Fields, Shooting Stars, Baby Blue Eyes… and all the flowers that we don’t know or can’t remember. It’s an amazing display. The lupines aren’t out yet, and I always look forward to the Fairy Lanterns, so I suspect we’ll be taking more trips down there to watch the spring bloom.

When we got back to Yosemite West, it was almost shocking to see the amount of snow that was still there. Being able to drive back and forth between seasons is like getting to travel through time. Turns out, Spring is only about 5 miles from Winter, as the crow flies.

For more pics…

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25 Things

a la Facebook… Here are 25 things about me, in no particular order. It was harder to think up than I would have guessed.

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Buy-ology


I just finished listening to Buyology by Martin Lindstrom yesterday morning while I was running on the treadmill. A decent book, but this kind of book is really better to read in a paper version so that it would be easier to flip back, and look through the interesting bits again. Having gotten to poke around a friend’s Kindle, in some ways *that* would be ideal – a place to take notes and write in the margins without actually having to write in the margins.

The most interesting part of the book, for me, was the concept of using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to look inside the brain for activity in various regions, to gain some insight into the ways people are really responding to your input and how they will behave. Unfortunately for me, the science was ‘popularized’ for the book, and so I ended up having a lot of questions about methodology and the interpretation of results.

It’s a little sci-fi big-brother creepy to find out that in many cases looking directly at brain activity can be a better predictor of someone’s behavior than what that someone actually says they will do. But Martin suggests that by knowing how your brain responds to various inputs, will at least make you aware of the tricksy things that Marketers are trying to pull.

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Happy March

Previous year's poppies
Previous years poppies
We’re a couple of days into March already, but I thought I’d wish you a happy new month anyway. March is a good month. The days are getting noticably longer, daylights savings is coming up, and although it’s been rain/snowing outside the last few days, in my mind it is starting to feel like spring. The wildflowers have even started blooming down canyon already. (On his blog, local photographer, Michael Fry, has a great image of the poppies that are springing up where the Telegraph Fire burned last summer.)

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Leaning In or Leaning Back

Seth Godin is my marketing hero. The author of a dozen or so books, including “The Dip” and “All Marketers are Liars”, Seth’s books and blog have been a constant source of insight and perspective since I first started looking into his stuff. One of the concepts I picked up out of the many ideas in his book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, was this idea of leaning in or leaning back. It’s not even one of the big ideas in that book, but you never know where you’ll find something you can use.

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Winter Bears

Bear Buddies
Bear Buddies
Yosemite’s bears, like most black bears, usually settle down in the winter time and hibernate. (There’s some confusion about the term because different animals hibernate in different ways, but black bears enter a state where they don’t move around, eat, drink, urinate or defecate for many months, and according to the North American Bear Center, leading physiologists have returned to just using the word hibernate, again.) But this year, there are a couple of bears in Yosemite that seem to staying up late to explore winter, (there’s a children’s story in there somewhere) and Tom and I were lucky enough to see them a few weeks ago.

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