Nostalgic for Those Awkward Prepubescent Years

My Junior High School Years weren't easy.  I was one of the biggest nerds in school and got in my only fight at Cabrillo Junior High School.  Until I grew tall between eighth and ninth grade, lots of people picked on me because I was quiet, shy and polite...not traits valued by teenagers in general.

My sister was often coerced to take Billy and my awkward self to the Wagon Wheel skating rink not far from our house.  Mom would drop us off in the parking lot, and she would have instant baby sitting for more than a few hours as we went around and around the wooden rink.  I actually got pretty good at skating and at times won my age group race...usually the prize was a free ticket for a large fountain drink.

One of my favorite things at the skating rink was the one pinball machine in the place...Pinball Wizard.    Yes, this was patterned after the song by the Who.  I was often begging quarters off of everyone to play the game.  I soon learned that my sister was always good for a few quarters because if there was something illicit going on she would be involved and I would hear about it.  This always provided the perfect opportunity to extort a dollar or two from her.

There was something addictive about the game, I think I deposited a year's worth of college tuition into the little slot over the course of a few summers.  Video Games are just fine but for me, the visceral component of pinball can't be beat.  The bells, clicks, and clacks of a machine rattling off no more joy than a few tens of thousands of points is worth the quarter.

Last week, we went to the Pacific Coast Pinball Museum in Alameda.  A fascinating look at pinball through the ages.  For the low, low price of $15, one can easily spend three hours trying out each of the multitude of games.

Pacific Coast Pinball Museum in Alameda

A mid 1940's Scantily Clad Cinderella Pinball Game.  Scandalous!

Rusty reacquainting himself with the flippers.  

Awesome that the score to beat is 1,000.  As the games became more sophisticated, the scores became higher.  Now with electronic scoring, a free play doesn't happen until 7 million points are accrued.  

Little silver cigarette trays on these early games...ah, times have changed.  

The graphics on this mid 1960's game is excellent...Not the Beatles rather the Bootles...lovin' it.  

Five rooms of row upon row of pinball games.  

And...here it is...Pinball Wizard...talk about a blast from the past, I was trying to figure out a way to get this in the back of my car! 

A look of sheer joy as I master Pinball Wizard once again!  (I'm hoping the score is blurred out of this picture...not so good.). 

Yosiell and Rusty wasting away a perfectly good afternoon on pinball!  we finally surfaced three hours later with bleary eyes and smiles on our faces.  

The Comet...an 80's game with Nancy and Ronald in the front car...I've seen this game lots but never realized who the front passengers were...

If in the area, just give a call and I'm happy to hit the arcade with you!  Good times, people, good times!

Speaking of nostalgia, recently we took a ride to Cafe Gratitude for  Vegan lunch, and on the way back stopped off in Berkeley to do a little bit of vinyl shopping.  Yes, some people still sell vinyl albums...and even more foolish people like us buy vinyl albums.  

Like pinball, vinyl is attractive to me not just for the sound quality, but because playing an album was a process...and involved a degree of intentionality.  iTunes is a wonderful thing, but when we are buying individual songs instead of whole albums, the whole artistry of compiling an album is lost.  Listening to an album should be a journey that the artist and the producer want to take one on.  So, that is the end of my crotchety old man rant for the day.  

Cafe Gratitude

Feeling the Peace, Contentment, and Sanctimony of eating a cruelty free lunch. 

Yosiell not convinced that actually was lunch...

Rasputin Records..nothing like pawing through a bunch of bins for some favorites.  

By the way, although I did lose all of my photos, music and documents with the loss of my hard drive, my music is pretty much returned through the magic of "The Cloud" and many of the lost photos were downloaded from Rusty's computer to mine.  Your smiling faces are once again on my hard drive...and the documents?  Well, cest la vie. 

Coming up?  Spring and Summer adventures galore, I hope!

Cleansing...

March in like a lion indeed!  The wind and rain have found our doorstep as I bundle up with a hot tea and write this post.  It's a good day for reflection and a good day to wax poetically about life, the universe and the messages both are sending my way.  The word du jour is cleanse people, either by choice or by circumstance.

About two weeks ago, I dropped my computer and my hard drive went kaput.  The Apple Genius Bar replaced my hard drive, but couldn't recover the data.  A highly rated data  recovery place in Berkeley wasn't able to recover my multiple years of pictures, music and documents.  My last back up date was 2011, so this is the part where everyone reminds me I should've been backing up on an external hard drive more often and shakes their head with little to no sympathy.  Sadly, it seems all is lost.  I guess my only regret are the years of picture collected from various people and locations (mostly people that I have met, loved and/or lossed).

Minus that drawback, I'm taking this as a sign to clean out the clutter, to cleanse the mind, body and spirit. It's a harsh way for the universe to send this message, but ,"Message received madame universe, message received."

To that end, our household has decided to follow in the footsteps of Mechelle, our groovy NC Yoga Instructor friend, and participate in a Vegan cleanse.  Today is only day five, but I do feel a little bit better, hungry all of the time, but better.  Really more energy.  And isn't it just better for the planet to eat this way? (By the way, the amount of smugness one can muster while on this cleanse is an incredible high).

That seems to take care of mind and body, and I'm thinking of taking out the sage stick for a cleanse of the spirit.  Really to me, releasing all of the stress, guilt and anguish in one's life is good for the spirit.  I have a tendency to find spiritual relief when surrounded by nature and got a good nature fix last weekend.

The sun peeked out for all of last Saturday, producing one of those perfect California seventy degree winter days with incredible blue skies and fresh air all around.  I rushed out of here to hit the grocery store sandwich bar, and get me some vitals for a long hike.

Many people are aware of Alcatraz Island in the bay, but not everyone is aware of Angel Island, a beautiful state park just a ferry ride away.  The plan?  Take the ferry from Jack London Square in Oakland to Angel Island.  I walked up to the Oakland Ferry stop to see a sign that announces no weekend ferry service during the winter months...a quick ride from west Oakland BART to the Embarcadero, before realizing that the ferry actually only leaves once a day for Angel Island from Pier 41...ugggggg, this adventure has now become a quest.  Weekend service on Muni is spotty at best, so I hoofed the mile and a half along the Embarcadero in record time.  One friend on Facebook characterized this as perseverance, although Julie probably more accurately characterized it as, "Stubborn".  Truth, sister Julie, truth!

Pier 39 Sea Lions.  The playful Irish setters of the sea.  

Americans love to queue up don't we.  Waiting for the ferry at Pier 41.  

I did make the ferry with plenty of time for an over priced Chai Latte on the pier.  The ride out to Angel Island was beautiful, cruising by the Golden Gate Bridge, passing Alcatraz, and waving at ships in the bay.   Angel Island is the home to 13 miles of trails, a few campsites, and Immigration Station, a little known Ellis Island of the West.

The hike to the top of Livermore Mountain, the highest point on the island, was worth the huffing, puffing and wheezing as one can survey the incredible beauty of the entire bay from this vantage point.  It seems everyone has their own favorite bay views, but this one shoots to the top of my list of favorites.

Wooded trail...spirit renewed!

Bay Bridge view, one of five bridges viewed from Mt. Livermore.  

Panoramic view from the highest point on Angel Island.  

There she is...

After a brief respite to let my quivering legs to solidify, I walked over to Immigration Station.  This part of the island, in the early part of the 20th century, was a weigh station for those wishing to emigrate to the US.  Although many were here just a few days, Chinese Immigrants were here for months and some even for years.  During this time period our immigration laws were meant to exclude Chinese Immigrants as much as possible, thus the hold up. 

Many occupants took to writing about their frustration and despair through carvings on the walls as a sort of graffiti poetry.  These carvings were painted over many times, but many survived the subsequent years.  Very beautiful and a little bit haunting in this setting.  

The barracks were crowded with bunks stacked three high and each person in close proximity to the next.  

There is only one ferry back to SF after this trip.  Unfortunately, it stops in Tiburon to pick up all the young SF straight crowd that ferried over for brunch and decided to make it a multiple-martini day.  The boat suddenly became a meat market for straight people.  Although it was fun watching a young skinny yuppie male on the hunt use incredibly awful pick up repertoire and get shot down multiple times, I wasn't in the mood for the open bar cruise ship party atmosphere suddenly established.  Luckily we were on top outside deck of the ferry and the skimpy dresses the young women were sporting really couldn't handle the SF late afternoon chill.  As soon as the drunken ladies left, the testosterone addled young males were soon to follow.  Straight people mating rituals are so complicated...

The entire point is that I am making efforts to cleanse mind, body and spirit...I may even get out the sage stick at this point.


Just a few weekends ago, Rusty was sick with the flu so Yosiell and I managed a bike ride along the Alameda shoreline.  One point of the ride is a bird sanctuary so we stopped to take a few photos...

Birds in flight.

the sanctuary was really hopping for February! 

The City from Alameda.

Biking in California, one always finds beautiful surprises.

As this cleanse continues, I'm at least grateful much of my life is chronicled in these posts.  Our histories help inform our futures, and my history is so filled with rich characters and awesome adventures, I would hate to totally lose all that.

So gentle readers, I can lament the loss of so much lately but at some point I guess we all need to hit the reset button and move forward.  I'm thinking that's the message the universe is sending...