Category: Berkeley

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Get On and Go

My friend Pete is down from Portland visiting his folks in San Jose. We had talked about taking a couple long rides while he’s here because this is a break week for me and he’s in training for an Ironman-length triathlon in June. The only problem: Between one thing and another, I haven’t been riding a whole lot for the last several months. So we didn’t wind up planning a ride until yesterday, when I suggested one of my favorite and not overly demanding longer rides: up to Davis from Berkeley, then back down here on the train. I had some trepidation because I haven’t spent more than a couple hours at a time in the saddle since late last year, and the riding I’ve done hasn’t been frequent. But we started out on the ride this morning, and even though I was sorer than I usually am from that ride, and I could tell I didn’t have much in my legs, it was a great ride. Beautiful day, too. It warmed up to about 70 while were on the road, and after having to battle some headwinds the first half of the ride, we enjoyed a pretty nice tailwind much of the second half.

Back here after the train ride, we had dinner and talked for a couple hours. Then Pete drove back down to San Jose. The plan now is for more riding Thursday.

Getting ready to shut down for the day, I took a look at the New York Times front page. There’s an absorbing story about Davis Phinney, the great American road racer of the 1980s and early ’90s, and his family. His wife is Connie Carpenter, one of the greatest U.S. women athletes ever. They have a 17-year-old son, Tyler, who has become a force in the world of track cycling and time trialing; the kid’s got a great shot at the Olympics. Meantime, Davis Phinney is suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

“… He fights his stiffening body just to roll over in bed because of the ravages of Parkinson’s disease, an incurable neurological disorder that attacks a body’s mobility. He leans on his son, his daughter and his wife, Connie Carpenter, a two-sport Olympian. They help butter his bread, button his shirts and open his pill bottles.”

Reading this piece reminded me once again how easy it is to take our health and abilities for granted, and how special it is to be able to climb on a bike and go.

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Ciao Quadra

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For years and years, we’ve had several old, unused computers haunting the place. Our first machines, PC clones from the late ’80s, are long gone. The oldest of the still-resident collection was our Macintosh Quadra, which had a manufacturer’s date of July 23, 1994, stamped on it. It came with a 250 MB hard drive and 8 MB of RAM, and it ran a new version of the Mac OS, System 7. It was an estimable desktop and, with memory and software upgrades and a 1 GB external hard drive, stayed in daily service through late 2000. By then other members of the family had gotten much newer Windows machines — because of the wider software choice, mainly. I eventually got a Dell laptop that weighed about 8 pounds and was faster and more modern than the Mac in about every other way and could take advantage of our new broadband Internet connection. So, just about the time Al Gore was winning the 2000 election, the Quadra was consigned to unplugged status.

And there it sat, year after year. There was stuff on it that I was sure I’d get around to transferring onto some media or other and saving for posterity. Old email and document files full of my past brilliance. Tax returns. And lots of other material I’m sure I would have pored over and pondered for hours if not weeks. But with each passing year it seemed like a more and more complicated and less and less convenient operation to hook everything back up and deal with it. Eventually the Quadra got moved out to our weather-tight but temperature-uncontrolled shed. Every time I’d see it out there I’d think about those reams of incredibly clever things, whatever they were, sitting on the hard drive. Then I’d shut the door and lock it behind me.

Today, for no other reason than it is spring break, Kate decided to clear out some of our accumulated junk. The old computers were in her way first and made their way into our dining room. The plan was to take them down to an electronics recycling place down by the freeway, but we were still concerned about any readable data on the hard drives. We weighed the merits of various ways to erase them. The recyclers wanted $30 per drive to wipe them using some powerful electromagnet. I suggested running over the computer cases with the drives in them. That idea was vetoed. I suggested putting the drives in a big bucket and submerging them in water, but even as I said that I wasn’t sure that would ruin the drives since they’re pretty tightly shut.

The method of destruction we finally hit upon was to remove the hard drives from the computers and open their cases. Simple exposure to regular Earth air in a non-clean-room environment would corrupt them. This method worked fine with the Quadra, because the manufacturer used Phillips screws to close the case (the other drives used those funny Torx-head screws).

The pictures above (click on them for larger versions) show what we found when we got the box open. It was a little hard to remember that I was looking at mass-produced merchandise; the inner workings were unexpectedly plain and beautiful in a simple, straightforward way. Then the anthropomorphizing kicked in: those few bits of machinery were intermediaries in a lot of letters, stories and explorations. Exposing that disk, and thus killing it, made me feel a little bit like a vandal.

But also relieved. I never would have retrieved anything from the Quadra, so I can cross that chore off my list. And I got off my little pang of destruction pretty quickly: I “compromised” the data on the other two hard drives we had here slamming them into a concrete patio floor a couple of times each. Then we took the whole mess down to the recyclers.

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Local Business News Flash

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Cedar Market, exclusive dealer of Ipto s Tea, has reopened after about five months of closed doors. Or “grand opened,” if the banners outside the front door are to be taken at their word. I’m not convinced the “grand” is deserved. The store looks pretty bare right now. I talked to one of the owners. He says he doesn’t know what happened to the last crew. The best-stocked part of the store tonight is the beer refrigerator. To paraphrase the Lillian Gish character in “The Night of the Hunter,” it’s a hard world for little businesses.

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Forced to Drink Beer

From my continued researches in The New York Times archives, this little snippet from October 23, 1900 (to put the item in context just a little, the country’s male voters were getting ready to re-elect William McKinley; who was running against … William Jennings Bryan, a son of Salem, Illinois, I believe; how many elections have pitted major candidates with the same first name?).

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Tomales Point

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Sunday’s family outing (posted Monday the 17th but dated the 16th, when it happened), was up to Point Reyes. A favorite destination: The Tomales Point trail, which rambles and rolls for nearly 5 miles miles from a place called Pierce Point Ranch up to the very northern tip of Point Reyes. The trail is in the middle of some of the most beautiful countryside anywhere on the West Coast. And as a bonus you’ll likely get to see the herd of tule elk that have been reintroduced up at that northern end of the point.

In attendance yesterday: the visiting contingent of Chicago Brekkes; Eamon and Sakura, who drove up from Mountain View; and the Berkeleyites. (The picture above: looking northeast across poppies and rocks to Mount St. Helena).

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Boat Ride

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On the ferry to San Francisco from Oakland today, with Kate and out-of-town Brekkes. Yes, it really was that windy.

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Guest Weather

It’s a rule of thumb, for me anyway, that whatever benign weather we might be having here, in the world capital of benign weather, will take a turn for the worse if you have guests visit. On one famous occasion in the early ’90s, most of my family came out from Chicago for Christmas. They were thinking: what a lovely break from the onset of winter. When they landed in San Francisco though, we were at the start of a historic cold snap. The temperature was in the low 20s, and puddles on the roof of the parking garage outside the terminals had frozen solid enough that you could slide across them (and at least one of us did). The disembarking Chicagoans found they had come to a California that was colder than their hometown; at least for that week, anyway.

We have guests arriving tomorrow. My sister and brother-in-law and their two kids. Since our January-early February, when we got about a foot of rain in a month, it’s been mostly dry here. And warm. Last weekend it got close to 70. Now, of course, the weather has changed. Over the last day or so, we’ve had our first real rain in weeks; this morning was the hardest rain of the winter, maybe, though the really heavy part lasted for just a few minutes. Ann and Dan and Soren and Ingrid will be here for five days; I’m hoping we get to see the sun before they get back on the plane to go back to Chicago.

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A Thought for Wednesday

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

–Douglas Adams, quoted In yesterday’s Writer’s Almanac

Not that I’m thinking about any particular deadline.

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Undergraduate Notes

A couple of things I see in class that I didn’t see the last time I was in school (I think our president then was a cardigan-wearing Georgian):

Students who spend entire lecture hours on Facebook: Not to be anachronistic. There was no such thing as Facebook when I was at Cal in 1980. There was no such thing as a laptop. There was no such thing as a wireless network. But all that stuff is here today, and I frequently find myself seated behind students who sit through lecture checking on Facebook, or maybe toggling back and forth between some online entertainment and the notes they are taking. I’ve seen one student repeatedly spend an entire 90-minute session designing some sort of graphics. One young woman spent an entire class period texting on her cellphone; in fact, I wish I could have shot video of her because she was so fast. At least I think she was texting; she might have been playing a game.

Back in the olden days, you could be in class without being there, too: you brought a book or magazine or newspaper to read, or you wrote or doodled or daydreamed or snoozed (I’ve also been impressed by how ostentatiously some of my fellow students are about sleeping in class. Maybe all the instructors understand they are overworked).

Classroom meals: One of my classes has an hourlong discussion section at 1 p.m. every Thursday afternoon. There are about 15 of us in there. One student usually brings in a big takeout meal to tuck into while we ponder the subject of the day. The graduate student instructor who leads the section has never said anything, so I guess it’s an accepted part of the culture.

Classroom swilling: In another class, there’s a very fit-looking guy who sits in the front of the room. He will punctuate the professors lectures by bringing out a plastic gallon jug of water and taking a few good long pulls on it. I’m impressed at his commitment to slake his personal drought; a gallon of water weights 8 pounds, and that’s on top of whatever else he’s bringing to class. He’s obviously serious about his thirst.

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Ipto s: Two Views

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Cedar Market, the little corner store near us, has been closed for the last few months. Until two or three years ago, it was run by a Chinese couple who seemed to do all right but clearly had modest ambitions for the business. There was nothing fancy in the place, though they always stocked a few bins of tired looking produce and even had a meat counter. But the store was mostly dark and a little bare, and the only thing I’d buy there with any regularity was an It’s It, a local product that is a species of the ice cream novelty genus of dessert items. It consists of vanilla, chocolate, mint or coffee ice cream pressed between two round graham crackers and the whole thing covered with a thin layer of chocolate. I could go for one right now.

Then the Chinese couple sold. The new owners were Indian or Pakistani — a guess based on reading the names in the liquor license record. In the first year they were in business, they put a lot of money into the place. New freezers and refrigerators, new racks, and a much upgraded product line including a full if haphazard wine and beer selection. They started selling lottery tickets, and they hung a sign out front announcing they were selling fresh sushi daily. I think it’s when I saw the Newman’s Own cookies in the store that it hit me they were really trying to cater to the fancy, upscale, organic tastes of some in the neighborhood. It was mid-October, within a couple of weeks of spotting, but not buying, the Newman’s Own cookies, that I walked over one weekday around noon and the place was closed. The next day, too. And the day after that.

They put a sign up announcing that they were remodeling and would reopen on Halloween. But unless they intended to knock the building down and start over, it looked like they had already done all the remodeling the store could take. There was never any sign of any work going on, though all the racks had been removed and the refrigerators were empty.

Halloween came and went. No remodeling, and no reopening. Soon, whoever ran the store posted a big notice from the state alcohol control agency saying their liquor license had been suspended for two weeks; checking around, I found the store had been caught in a Berkeley police sting and was busted for selling alcohol to a minor last April. Another sign appeared in the window: Reopening November 25. I looked at that, calculated that the 25th was a Sunday, and figured the store would stay closed. It did. Then in December, someone moved some racks back in, and they were filled with candy and chips. But the store stayed closed.

Two weeks ago, a new notice was hung in the window: new owners are applying to take over the store’s liquor license. On odd nights, the lights have been on inside; when someone’s there, they tape a sign on the door saying, “Sorry, closed for remodeling”; when they’re gone, they take that sign with them. Peering in the front door, it looks like there might be beer in the refrigerators. The floor racks are still filled with candy and chips, and it looks like the same stuff that showed up last fall (when’s the last time you checked the “best if consumed by” date on your M&Ms or Doritos, though?).

So our minor neighborhood institution remains on hiatus. For me, the most profound change since the owners took a powder is the disappearance of another letter on the old Lipton’s Tea sign on the window. It may have been 50 or 60 years since that sign was put up; I can’t precisely identify the era in which Lipton’s was a major magnet for corner-store shoppers. Ten years or so ago, the sign lost its “N.” Sometime later, the apostrophe absconded. Now the “L.”

I can’t say I care that much about whether the store ever opens again. But that sign; I’d like to know the Lipton’s sign is still up there, marking time.

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