Jonathan Field - Maker of Random Stuff

The days following the Mt. Charleston expedition included more than a little pain and suffering. This was mainly from my calfs, which felt as hard as a pair of juggling pins and ached like a Charlie’s Horse whenever I flexed them more than a few degrees out of their relaxed position. I swear: walking on level ground makes you a wimp.

But the pain didn’t stop me: Sunday night Sophie flew into town. On Monday morning Sophie and I hit the title company to close our house. Then we drove up to Bryce Canyon in Utah.

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This past weekend Lisa and I got high. And it was good.

Despite having never camped before, and having argued quite passionately that she could never do such a thing, Lisa proposed we hike to the summit of Mt. Charleston this past weekend. After minimal planning, and a trip to REI, we set off on Saturday morning.

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I was just doing the facebook “Cities I’ve Visited” thing, and I can’t help noticing how much I love this planet. It’s my favorite planet by far. I want to see lots more of the planet. And the crazy inhabitants.

Everyone has seen the great Dancing Matt video, yes? And the second one? Now there is a guy who knows how to make the most of his brief little blip of awareness. I also found his presentation to be very enjoyable.

Places that rank around the top of my visit list at the moment, in no particular order: Italy, Greece, Egypt, Vietnam, India… but I’m open to whatever.

Time. Money. Working on it.

Last weekend Lisa an I hiked up to Mummy Springs on Mt. Charleston. Six miles and a 1700ft elevation change, starting at 8000ft. To my surprise the spring was partly frozen. It formed a beautiful icy waterfall with running water carving out tracks and splashing to accumulate in glassy little balls all around the base. Lovely stuff. Lisa took some pictures with her camera phone, but we wished we had brought something better.

After hiking back down through the quickly dropping temperature, we stopped at the Mt. Charleston hotel to get dinner. The restaurant serves a pretty basic American menu, but it was super tasty after the hike and the atmosphere was great — natural wood construction and a few stone fireplaces. I got a steak and salad, and we had apple pie a la mode for dessert.

I also started a second blog this week. Partly I wanted to try out Vox and partly I wanted to split off a place to post stuff that wasn’t related to me. So this here jon-a-thon.livejournal.com blog is going to focus mainly on my activities and life, which is what it has mostly done anyways, while the jfield.vox.com blog will be more random thoughts, things of a political or philosophical nature, and links to things that I found interesting.

The Las Vegas house is in escrow… hopefully the sale completes. I’m refocused on my Zappos contract work now.

I was just bouncing around on Google News and saw one of Sophie’s photos on the front page. It’ll probably disappear before you can get there, but it pointed to this article, and syndicated the same photo:

Snocap CEO on layoffs

Sure, not the most upbeat article, but I think Rusty looks good there. Very early in her business venture she took several of their corporate headshots (the ones that look good) though in all honesty she wasn’t happy enough with the results to include them in her headshot gallery.

But that’s neither here nor there… it’s just kinda cool to see her photo on Google News

[expletive deleted]ing mother[expletive deleted]ing scotus!

[expletive deleted]

I [expletive deleted].

On Friday was the opening night of Sophie’s gallery showing at the Redwood City Art Center. It was a cool night — the place got pretty crowded, there were free hors d’oeuvres and wine, and an impressive belly dancing performance.

Lots of friends stopped by, including Eric and Lauren, Wendy and Kariminder, Rachel, Matthew, Raelle, Kathy, and Mark. What a turnout! Eric brought his dad by too, and it was very cool to meet him — a super distinguished fellow.

I must point out that the poor quality of the linked pictures above is entirely the photographer’s (that would be me) fault. I was using the same top-of-the-line Canon 5D that Sophie uses for all her shoots. So that’s not where she keeps her secret sauce.

There was a nice variety of art at the show, each with a distinctive voice. The gallery instructions said to hang four pieces, which is what Sophie did… but it seemed that not many of the other artists read the instructions. One fellow had at least 20 pieces hanging. In a way it was cool because her images had a sort of relaxed look to them which went nicely with the uncluttered hanging, so I think we’d still use the less-is-more approach in the future. The four images looked absolutely great done large, but they are also on her website:

• Away
• Faded
• Serenity
• Fallen

It was fun to see folks come by and study them and talk about them, and maybe take a card. For a very first stab at something like this, I’d say it was a great success. The pieces will be hanging there for the rest of October.

After the show, we went to a decent Mexican bistro across the street. A chicken burrito was not so great, but the shrimp quesadillas and sangria were excellent.

Doesn’t a “preemptive strike” philosophy, when followed by all parties to its logical conclusion, dictate that we must all attack each other immediately?

Lisa celebrated her birthday this past weekend with an 8-species barbeque. On two grills were cooked up beef, chicken, pork, duck, lamb, buffalo, vennison, and crab. I tried everything except the Beef and Chicken, I think. Everything was pretty great. Lots of people came by and brought additions like salad, fruit, chocolate fondue, and even frosted cupcakes inside ice cream cones.

Aside from cooking large quantities of meat, another tradition on her birthday is to buy a gun. This would be only the third year of the tradition, so it’s a tradition in its infancy. Still, a bunch of us went to a gun shop in Las Vegas to check out the wares.

Gun stores are always a trip — not so much because I’m surrounded by hundreds of human-shredding machines, but more because the people there are a bit unlike those I normally meet. A choice quote from one of the store employees: “Unfortunately there hasn’t been a war on American soil in a long time”.

Despite being very nearly a pacifist, I do find guns interesting, and I enjoy target shooting. Lisa already has a 12 guage shotgun and a .38 caliber semi-automatic pistol. She went to the store thinking she would by some type of rifle.

To my great surprise, at the very upper end of her price range they had a used Romanian AK-47, a gun design which has always been a favorite of mine in a sort of mythical way.

After perusing the other options, and trying to ignore my sycophantic adoration of the Kalishnikov, she eventually decided to go ahead and buy it.

The next day we took it out to the desert along with Jared’s SKS and Lisa’s .38. Jared kindly bought about 200 rounds for the AK. We also brought a couple of pumpkins, a few bottles of soda water, and a stuffed Scooby Doo animal that Lisa won at a Carnival a couple weeks ago. Jared, Eric, Aki, Lisa, and myself were in attendance.

To note: shaken-up 2-liter soda bottles give the most dramatic reation on the first hit. One jumped at least five feet in the air. However after that they dont really react at all. At 69 cents a pop they don’t give you quite the value of a small off-season pumpkin, which reacts well when hit over and over. It’s kind of like playing Asteroids as each pumpkin fragment becomes a new target.

Scooby was surprisingly unreactive, as the bullets passed right through the fabric and styrofoam peanut stuffing. We couldn’t tell we hit him until we went right up to him. In fact there were about 20 hits (those little dots) from Lisa’s 30 round clip at what I would guess was over 30 yards.

Back at the pad, Jared (a veritable gun enthusiast) taught her how to strip, clean, and reassemble the AK. Seeing the incredible internal simplicity of the weapon, my respect for its engineering was confirmed.

Jared said that a Russian friend of his used to strip/rebuild AK’s in grade school. They had all the kids do that. After a few repetitions Lisa did very well with the process, though probably not as well as your average 80′s Russian schoolkid. Next week she plans to do it blindfolded underwater with her feet.

I wonder how often Macs and an AK have shared a table?

Lisa was an absolute crack shot with the AK. She really is a natural with an assault rifle, and seemed quite pleased with her purchase. I predict serious trouble for any home invaders. Unfortunately there hasn’t been anyone invading her home in a long time.

Thanks to Eric for taking and sharing all these pictures!