PS.

work is great too. more on that to come.

jake and I went to a trivia night on tuesday and a bbq tonight with co-workers.

the weather here is beautiful. 80 and sunny every day.

San FranTASTIC

so Jake and I spent this past weekend in San Francisco. 

We took the train in on Friday night to stay with Ted Lescher (Dartmouth '10 and long-jumping legend) who lives in the Castro. Soon after arriving we hitched a ride from another alum Brian Bensch who drove us over to the house of DJ Ruckus, aka Ruslan ('09), who has a great apartment (with some other recent grads) overlooking the city. We spent the rest of the night at a sailor-themed party downtown. Most of the time we were busy (accidentally) scaring people we didn't know off the dance floor with our crazy suave moves.

This is the one picture I took at the party.  That's Jake on the left. 

When we woke up Saturday afternoon, it was light out, so we went to find breakfast (/late lunch) and explore a bit. 

The Castro is an interesting scene to walk around: many restaurants with bad innuendos for names (ie. Twin Peaks, Rock Hard, The Sausage Factory, etc) and plenty of men ready to give you a wink. 

Ted lives near here. 

After a delicious feast of Huevos Rancheros (we all got the same thing), Jake and I took a trolley car downtown for the Fleet Week airshow. We met up with Nikhil Jain ('09), a friend from Ethic's Society at school, in the National Maratime park just in time to see an incredible 40min performance by the Blue Angels.

I could do that. 

After the show, Nikhil brought us to his office near the top of the tallest building in San Francisco which had amazing panoramic views of the city. Jake and I grabbed some Subway for dinner and then walked almost 4miles back to Ted's house because trolley's are the least reliable form of transport since the domestication of animals and we're too cheap (we'll call it frugal) to take a taxi. 

Saturday night we went somewhere (honestly, I have no idea where the taxi took us) and went to a bar where we didn't even have to use the new IDs that add a couple of months to our ages. Then we went to a Google party with some of Ted's co-workers and just sat around a computer googling things with about 40 other people for hours. 

This employee was unfortunately unable to attend. 

Sunday afternoon when we woke, we drove with Ted back to Palo Alto, helped him load a new bed frame (complete with "Sultan Slats") into his car and then played some tennis at Stanford until the lights shut-off. 

Total cost of the weekend: $35/ person

Total happiness: a lot  

Yosemite - Day 2

At dawn Sunday morning, we awoke, broke down the tent and stuffed down a breakfast doughnut or two. We planned on leaving immediately for Yosemite Valley, which was about 45 minutes from the Tamarack Flats campsite that we stayed at. We had just had just hopped in the car and were driving out of he campsite when an older women hobbled over to our car asking for some help. Being the helpful people we are, we agreed to give her a hand. Little did we know that this would become the theme of our day.

She said that she had hurt her arm when she was sleeping, so she told us she needed us to put some of the heavier items in her car. This was supposed to take "a few minutes" which was ok with us. Unfortunately 20 minutes later we were taking down her tent and rolling up her sleeping bag for her, but it could have been worse.

Finally we hit the road and went down to Yosemite Valley, which is kind of the ideal direction for our car. We walked around Yosemite Village for a bit and asked Ranger Barrett for a suggestion for a hike. He suggested hiking to Nevada and Vernal Falls because the torrential downpour of the previous night had increased the falls from weak trickles to fairly steady streams. We were pretty confident that two strapping young lads like us could handle a 7-8 mile hike, especially when we saw a stroller coming down the trail a few minutes into the hike. The pavement ended soon enough though and the trail got pretty steep. We passed some great lookouts which were pretty useless because of all the clouds. We reached the top of Vernal Falls and had some hiker take this picture of us.

Top of Vernal Falls
I look like a tourist.

We continued on another few miles to the top of Nevada Falls, which you can't see Nevada from.

I wish I could have seen Nevada.

Then we ate delicious lunch of turkey and cheese on onion rolls at the top of Nevada Falls. 

We could've gone higher but Farmington Tennis doesn't train you for cliffs like this.

And then we walked down.

But of course it couldn't be that easy. We took another route down and were about a mile and a half from the bottom when we saw a hike ahead of us take a spill. It was time for us to save the day again. Turns out Jared sprained an ankle, so we carried his bag/helped him get down the mountain. When we reached the bottom we  jumped on the bus, which took us back to our car which then sputtered four hours back to Palo Alto.

Overall, a pretty solid weekend.

Yosemite - Day 1

We went to Yosemite last weekend. Of the approximately 26 hours we were the it rained/hailed for 25. Fortunately half of the dry time was the first half-hour we were there, so we were able to set up our tent before the downpour began.

This is not from the REI catalog but it could be.

After the tent was set up we looked at the sky and were confident that the weather would be fine for a while, so we decided to explore the area.

Cool rock formations and Matt.

After a few minutes it started to drizzle. We weren't too concerned because we figured the rain would pass quickly, but decided to sit under a rock overhang to stay dry.

So protected.

And then the rain slowly ramped up to a full force T-storm. Rain like this hadn't occurred in months at Yosemite, so the ground couldn't absorb any of the water causing small rivers to form.  The rivers eroded surprising large amounts of the ground around us. Then, because the the storm wasn't tired yet, hail started to fall.

Natural Dippin' Dots.

Eventually the hail got softer and became rain, allowing us to sprint back to our car and dry off a little. Then we crushed our well rounded, nutritious meal of doughnuts, cheese, triscuits and beef jerky.

Then we passed out at 8:30.

The Luxury Cruiser

The Chevy Metro; one of the finest and fastest accelerating American automobiles ever manufactured. This zippy vehicle, according to Steve the rent-a-car guy, was a 2000 Metro despite an engine that is more reminiscent of a oxen pulling a wagon on the Oregon Trail than a modern car. There is nothing quite like driving a 0-60 in 13+ sec car and getting passed grandmothers squinting to distinguish the gas and brake pedals.

0-60 downhill, 0-50 up.

At least this car has some amenities like a steering wheel, a gas pedal and headlights, pretty luxurious stuff. Of course it is missing a few super-luxury features like power steering, a light up speedometer, brights that stay on without the driver holding them on. I guess we were used to driving only the finest cars, cars that didn't require us to hold our cellphones close to the speedometer at night in order for us to know how fast we were going. Of course, maybe we should be happy that our steering wheel doubles as a in car gym, giving our triceps and lats a good workout every time we change lanes. And maybe it's better to have difficult brights so we are forced to pay better attention to the dimmer road.

We're driving to Yosemite tomorrow, probably. Hopefully it's not too hilly or we might have a long hike home.

Beach Day today/ More pictures

First Day in Cali: self-timer at (Jake's) Uncle Marty's beautiful house (that we almost never left)

Jake enjoying a home-cooked feast of left-over pasta and eggs with turkey. 

"Food tastes better when you cook it"

Driving the borrowed VW bug across the Dumbarton Bridge... this is before we picked up our gangster-mobile... pictures of that to come.

An Explanation

of the title of our blog.

Two Thursdays ago we were checking out an apartment located on the southwest side of Stanford. It was occupied by a Spanish researcher named Antonio. The apartment was a little farther from the train station than the other places we were looking, so we wondered how difficult it would be to bike to the train station and downtown Palo Alto. For a second he searched his English vocabulary for the word "sweat". The search came up empty, so he responded that we would have "damp underpants" if we had to bike that far. When we made the decision to live a bit closer to town we were so excited that we would have dry underpants for the rest of the term that we decided to title our blog the way it is. Or something like that...