Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Bay Area Public Transportation Hike

I've never owned a car. Adam got rid of his car shortly after we moved to our current home. Luckily SF is an excellent city to be carless these days.

Just about the one and only major draw back to lacking a car is hiking. The Bay Area is wonderful for so may reasons, and one of the top o' the list reasons is the fabulous nature surrounding the cities here. Sure, there's Zipcar- and we've definitely used it for hiking- but driving 2 hours round trip for a 4 hour hike just seems... not great. Especially given that I almost always fall asleep right after a hike and leave poor Adam alone and bored behind the wheel. That's why it's always such a treat to find quality hikes entirely reachable via public transportation.

Hiking!

This week's find was a lovely hike up in the Oakland hills. Took the BART to Rockridge and then the 49B bus to Derby St & Claremont Blvd. There's an excellent collection of trails there.

The area is Claremont Canyon Regional Preserve is where we started and Strawberry Creek Canyon is where we ended. In particular we hiked the Stonewall Panoramic Trail & several fire trails.

As we were approaching the peak, we kept hearing these train noises. "Can we actually hear Amtrak from here?" we wondered. No, you can't. What you CAN hear is the super awesome Redwood Valley Railway which just so happened to be open for us on this weekday. For $3 a piece we hopped the train for a delightful ~12 min ride in the FREEZING COLD. We also forgot to stop Strava so when you check out the Strava results the flat ~2m portion in the middle is us hiking off the path, going around the train, and coming back.

Taking out the 2 miles and 30 minutes for the train trip, the hike was ~7.6 miles ~2hr 20min. Felt like a lot longer... because it was FREEZING COLD for most the hike. Be sure to check the weather and BELIEVE the reports before you head out on a hike, folks! End of the hike dropped us at the Berkeley BART.

Saturday, December 13, 2014

Keeping busy

Been doing a lot of things these days. November feels like it breezed right past and we're about to trip over the middle of December any day now. Crazy, that...

Cranky Rebecca vs The Drugs

Been keeping busy lately. More production, less consumption. A couple things in brief about consumption.

  • Birdman was great. You should go see it
  • True Detective rocked my world. You should watch it.
  • Interstellar is lame. You should avoid it.
  • Inherent Vice is great. You should go see it when it comes out, but don't expect to understand/catch half the dialog
  • Big Hero 6 is incredibly predictable but very lovely and hilarious. I laughted out loud multiple times in the theater. Also seeing animated Japan!SF was fun.
  • I think American Horror story this season is good... I bought a season pass but just can't seem to find the time to watch the last...4? episodes. I'll get to 'em... eventually.
  • I'm stalled out in the middle of In The Woods and it's blocking me from starting anything new/better. >:-/
True Detective : Shooting

In terms of production, I've been drawing a lot. Haven't tackled many backgrounds, like I'd hoped to, but I'm working on some composition/layout stuff and "coloring" in monochrome. My True Detective fan art has been fun and gotten me the most "Likes" of anything I've posted on Tumblr. Been coding a bit in my spare time, which feels nice. I think it's because of all the rain we've been getting here this winter. So easy to stay inside and draw or code when it's so shitty out.

A nice union of drawing and coding not too long ago was a Blogger page with my 4th Terminus character lineup on it. Turns out there's too many dudes to nicely put in one static image... and I've handfuls of more characters that I should sketch! Going for just a basic silhouette and minimal character features is super easy and very fun! Check out my 4th Terminus page in general incase you'd like to know more about that game I keep talking about. And here's a picture of my character around the start of last session. Good times!

Post-Fight Jaya

Am really looking forward to the long winter break. Adam and I are psyched to be just saying around town doing nothing, no joke.