My newest acquisition

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This piece of wood is the edge of a bleacher seat from California Memorial Stadium, home of my beloved California Golden Bears. In the process of renovating and modernizing the facility, which was originally built in 1923 on top of a major earthquake fault, they tore out the wooden bleachers.  I’ve not had a chance to get back to Memorial since the renovation and retrofit, but I’m told it was done well. 

Turns out, though, that those wooden bleachers date back to the original opening of the stadium.  Wow!

The Wooden Duck, a company in Berkeley that specializes in making furniture out of reclaimed wood, managed to get its hands on the old bleachers and, from there, offer pieces for sale. They’ve done some gorgeous work, which you should check out.

My thanks in particular to TwistNHook, the proprietor and head honcho of the zany crew over at the California Golden Blogs, the best Cal sports blog on the entire Internet, including the North Korean parts. ;) He procured the bleacher piece for me, and I owe him.

I eventually plan to get a nice photograph or lithograph of Cal Memorial and frame this block with that. It will go nicely with my 1959 Rose Bowl pennant/program/ticket and my copy of the Daily Californian dated Monday, November 22, 1982 in my tiny museum of Cal memorabilia. :)

But that is my cool thing.

[Sactown] Penguin Hauling

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Why get up and go downtown at stupidly early hours of the morning on a day I don’t have to work?

To see the penguin, of course!

It’s too bad this trip was to say goodbye to Endeavor. I may have more to say about the shuttle later, but for now, it’s enough to say, I saw this.

[sactown] State Capitol Building

State Capital

So, I’ve promised a friend I would start taking pictures of Sactown to show her. It gets me out of the office at lunch — most of these will be walking distance from work — and it lets me see a bit more of the city I live in. I’ll start the series with this shot, from last Friday, of the State Capitol building here in Sacramento.

I joke Sacramento is a company town. People look at me strange until I point out that the company is the State of California, and when the state hurts, everybody hurts. And it’s been really bad times for the State of California for years. We papered over a lot of it with the housing bubble, but eventually those things come back to haunt you.

That said, I love our state capitol building, and I especially love it this time of year with the Christmas tree in front.

beauty in destruction

Smashed taillight

My kid sis was in a car wreck on Saturday. She’s got a sore neck and received a concussion in the accident, but she’ll be fine. This is the taillight of her car — it got crunched but it looks fixable. We don’t know much beyond that, but I admit that I love this shot of the aftermath of the accident. It’s strangely beautiful despite being of a smashed taillight.

The future is now

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So I got a new hard drive for Christmas.  It astounds me that something smaller than a standard paperback novel holds 1 terabyte of data.  Even more astounding, it cost less than half of the six gigabyte drive I bought in 1998.

The future is now, and it’s truly awesome.

[tftc] OMG fog

[Yet another post in my occasional series "Tales from the Commute"]

The commute was ugly today. It looked like this most of the way:Fog!

It was fun fighting that, when you couldn’t read signs until you were almost on top of them, and people disappeared into the fog way too easily.

But at the bottom of my offramp, it looked like this:
No fog

Go figure.

Too much good stuff

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I found this in the grocery store last night.

Me: I’m afraid to look at how many calories that has.

Jill: (flipping package over): Servings per package: 12. Calories: 200. Calories from fat: 90.

Me: Yeesh! That’s one-sixth of one cup per serving.

So I guess if you really like Reese’s, this might be worth it. Just keep in mind, one cup is more than half your RDA.

Have a picture of some clouds.

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I’m not feeling well lately, and I don’t have much to say today, so have a picture of some clouds taken at sunrise this morning.

Maybe I’ll feel more like talking tomorrow, although my magic 8-ball suggests that’s unlikely.

fogtown

Skyscraper in fog Fog town

The first fog of the year has come to Sacramento, shrouding the skyscrapers in mystery. I had to get to work early, so I managed to catch them in that peaceful moment when it’s not night anymore, but it’s not really day yet either. It’s perfect.

Apocalypse Sacramento

Apocalypse Sacramento

Greetings from Sacramento, where the apocalypse seems to have begun…

(No, not really. Just playing around with the solarize feature on my phone. And yes, I like that skyscraper a lot. And yes, one of these days I’ll have something substantial to say that isn’t a post with a picture.)

majestic

Skyscraper and clouds

Fiddling around this morning with the phone and discovered how to set the camera in black and white mode. I kinda like this — there’s a solemn majesty in it.

As an interesting compare and contrast, here’s a color photo of approximately the same scene I took just prior:
Skyscraper in color

Yah, I think I like the black and white one better.