Steph’s mom’s birthday was Friday so we went out to eat with them. Rangoon Ruby had amazing food. Everything was delicious except for te pad Thai which was ok. They are going to be taking a few trips soon to Fiji and Myanmar. They also gave us all the apples off their tree which we made into cider for reracking our cider babies.
Tina two others and I played dragon pets and I was great fun. I bit off more than I could chew with three pets early on. One escaped when I got too many angry food aspects. I wasn’t good at budgeting for those purposes. Tina got first by a lot and I got a close second.
For Steph’s birthday dinner we went to Chez Panisse. This restaurant was the first to really do farm to table, and it showed. The food was amazing and incredibly fresh. There were 4 tasty courses, and Steph got some amazing vegetarian substitutes, that were just as good as the meat dishes. We also were able to take a tour of the kitchen and freezers. They had some pretty neat equipment. The only thing I didn’t like was the candied grapefruit peel. It was very bitter and sour, which I didn’t care for.
We had a really good hike out, in the morning it was sunny, but as the day got later and we approached the coast it got overcast and foggy, which for hiking was great.
There were any complications, and when we got the bottom we cleaned up some, then got on the road. Steph drove, which was really nice, since I was super tired and don’t think I would have been good to pay attention. We decided to go get some pho at Pho Vi Hoa, which was delicious. I really enjoyed the trip, and would certainly do it again.
The kitties were happy when I got home.
From our camping site at Barlow flats it was another 3 miles to the hot springs. We decided to not pack up and drag everything to the hot springs but instead took just day gear and left the rest at Barlow flats. The hike to the springs was gorgeous and the last bit was crossing over a stream several times. When we got there the springs only had one occupant and we chatted with him for a while.
There are four pools, upper, middle, lower, and small. Other two hottest were the middle and small, then came the upper and then the lower. Flew spent most of our time in the middle pool, which could fit about 6 comfortably. An hour after we got there a group of 10 showed up and we chatted with them for a bit. Steph and I finished off the cider, and had a very relaxing time. More people started showing up as we left and the pools were pretty full by that time. The hike back wasn’t bad and we had a good dinner at camp.
Steph and got on the road about 1:30 and made it to Big Sur Station at around 4pm. we waited there for about 30 min and then Joe and Chad got there.
We set out as we were getting shower on daylight. The hike was beautiful, but the first part was a grueling uphill with no forgiveness.
It was dusk as we came to the first campground, terrace creek. We decided to push on for another hour or so in the dark to make it to the next campground, Barlow flats, two miles further down the way.
When we got there it was pitch black. The people who had made it there before us were nice enough to show us to an empty camp spot. I took a bath in the creek, Then we set up and hung out with some of the other hikers. There was wiskey, scotch, sake, wine, beer, cider, and weed going around. Everyone was sharing their plenty but I stuck to just a little cider. We decided to call it a night a little early since everyone was so tired.
Tina, Erik, Chris, and I played a game of pets. Chris and blocked Tina and Erik out of the pets in the middle. Even though it was looking like I would win I lost one point on poop making Chris the winner by a half point.
Steph and I went to Eliot’s place to watch a documentary and have dinner. We took over some berries we got at the farmer’s market. The food was delicious and the documentary made us think. We then had an interesting discussion on the topic of the documentary; the ownership of exotic animals as pets. The documentary focused on a man who had 5 lions, and all the troubles he had to go through with them, and all the things they had to go through being owned by him. The lions had the much shorter end of the stick, as they were kept in really tight confinement.
The major questions that the film brought up were, what animals are ok to keep, and why?
One reason that was discussed is that the animals could be dangerous to humans, like venomous snakes, and large predators. This one I don’t think is significant due to the very low number of people that are killed or injured each year by pets. This isn’t being insensitive about those people getting hurt, but there are a number of reasons I don’t find this significant. One is that the death rate from exotic pets is less than that for dogs. Dogs kill 25,000 people per year estimated, with lions coming in at 100. The next reason is that most of the people who die from these exotic pets are the ones assuming the risk of owning them. That is a little bit of Darwinism at work. The last, and most important, is that the death and injury rate from exotic pets is so much lower than that of other forms of preventable injury and death that the returns on addressing it as an issue simply aren’t there. We have bigger fish to fry.
The second issue they bring up is the environmental factors. The people who don’t properly contain their pets and the people that “free” their exotic pets can create large problems around invasive species. The boa constrictor in the Everglades is a great example of this. They have started breeding in the wild and now are all over the Everglades. This is a major problem and one that would have to be addressed at a large systematic level.
The third issue, is one of animal rights. This is to say that animals should have a certain minimum level of care and freedom. Lions should not live in a horse trailer for 6 months. They need significantly more space than that. Animals should also not be left alone for long periods of time. When done to humans this treatment is called solitary confinement and is looked at as a form of torture or punishment. This is one of the reasons that I have 2 cats as pets, instead of just one. Many shelters are also moving towards not allowing single pet adoptions. With exotic pets there is another level of care that sometimes must be given so that the pet can have a healthy life, and this requires specialized knowledge or training (can be attained from google usually but the effort must be put in).
The fourth that is touched on is the legality and certification issue. Dogs require tags, but lions and wolves don’t. This is just that there are no laws regarding lion ownership, but it would be much easier to do a categorical list of animals that require certifications. E.g. animals that have an expected full grown weight of over 10 pounds must be registered as pets, then keep a list of animal weights when full grown. This works much better now that we have the internet and databases.
I look forward to going to the documentary night again.
Riley came over and we tried out the Oculus on Steph’s computer. We first tried it on my PC laptop, but it wouldn’t work there. Each time we tried to start it there would be a blue screen of death. So on steph’s desktop we got it working, tried a few of the example situations, and then we got it to work with Halflife 2. This didn’t go as well as expected, as many of the aspects of the game caused a sick feeling. We couldn’t really go more than 5 minutes at a stretch without getting a little sick, and after a total of maybe 15 minutes we couldn’t take any more of it. I really liked the experience, but I just couldn’t handle it. The parts where you sit in one place and look around were really nice, and didn’t cause a sick feeling, but so many parts of the expected game experience didn’t work. These include turning, jumping, crouching, falling, sitting, strafing, stairs, and just moving in general. It will take a lot to get something like this to be mass market feasible.
It's an Exciting World 