It's May 22, so 8-days later than the last post.
Sorry about that, (No, I'm not, not actually. Too busy living.)
​Today we took a Day-cation to visit Point Reyes National Seashore.
It was great, although some things were less than hoped for.
There was fog.
We couldn't see the North Beach, the seven-mile long beach you'll see in some of my photos.

Well, let me back up a minute.
Tucker drove part of this trip.
I think he really enjoyed it.

On the way out we stopped at Drake's Beach.
They believe this is the beach Sir Francis Drake pulled his boats up on for repairs.
He said the white cliffs reminded him of the White Cliffs of Dover.
Check out this short Youtube video.
It is mine. In fact, it is my very first video.
It starts with the lighthouse and shows most of what we did and saw today.

Anyway, we got out to Point Reyes and the fog rolled in.
Tucker still did the 313 steps, (it used to be 302,)  back up after walking down to the lighthouse itself.
(I didn't go. I'm not willing to stress my knee more than necessary right now.)
​The lighthouse is way down there so it's BELOW the fog so it can be seen farther out to sea when it matters.
​In fact, walking back up is equal to a 30-story building.

You can't even see the lighthouse down there below and behind him.
But, just so you know, that's exactly the reason it is down there instead of up here:
​So it would be below the fog and could be seen farther.

​Oh... and dinner...
I made dinner while Tucker was still at work.
In fact, as I write this, he still isn't home yet.
​I think he's really gonna like this, though.

I call it "Tuna Casserole without the Tuna".
This one has way too many noodles, although still not nearly enough for all the rest of the ingredients.
(WARNING: It ended up being gigantic. This is only one pan of this. There is 2-1/2 more pans of this overall.

Anyway, this has the noodles, (spirals?) Sweet Italian sausage, Little Smokies, (2-packs!) Mozzerella, Cheddar, celery, green peppers, Italian Seasoning, milk, cream of mushroom soup, and Cherry tomatoes, chopped in half, (definitely chopped in half!)
(*No, I'm not going to include amounts. Mine came out too big unless you were going to a church social or something. If you've made casseroles before, play it by ear. If not, look up any Tuna-type casseroles and use approximately  the same amounts.)
​
Baked for 45-minutes, removed the cover, and then 5-more minutes under the broiler.

You know what they say:

"Good shit, Maynard."

Today is May 14th.
Tucker flew out here March 15, the Ides of March, so it's been two full months today.
I think Tucker's doing great, but for his opinion you'd have to ask him.

In the first couple of weeks he did his training as a Mutuel Clerk so he could work the horse races like me.
He passed that and got his CHRB license, (California Horse Racing Board license,) and started work.
He's working at Golden Gate Fields right this minute as I write this.
(I worked at San Mateo Jockey Club, so he gets himself to work and back.)

As a Mutuel Clerk, he can work horse races anywhere in America and several other countries too, (although  he would have to get a local license, he is allowed to automatically anywhere they have Parimutuel betting.)
He now has enough days in to join the Union as soon as they do inductions again, usually July.

We went to Big Basin Redwoods State Park and visited the Redwoods.
In fact, this is the same place I took Ares and she went wading in the creek, but she wouldn't recognize it now.
​A big fire two years ago even destroyed park headquarters.
This is right across the street from where park HQ was.

Tucker got himself a second job, part time at FedEx sorting packages.
It won't last because not enough hours, but it works for now to get him started.

We got his checking and savings accounts both opened up and his FedEx job does automatic deposit as does his mutuel job, so he's packing a little bit of money away preparing for rent to come.

We got him his driver's license a couple weeks ago.
I can't let him drive my car much because my insurance doesn't cover him, but I do occasionally.
I'm a little worried though.
We have way more traffic out here than anywhere else he's been.
I mean like, within one mile we probably have more people than the entire city he came from.
Hell, in the bay area alone we probably have 3-times the population of all of Louisiana.

We went to Yosemite last week.
Got some real good pics.
I know for a fact he enjoyed that.
He asked me the other night, "Can we go to Yosemite again?"
​Of course we can, just not right now.
Here we are at the bottom of Yosemite Falls, the tallest waterfall in America and the 6th tallest in the world.

This is Tunnel View, one of the most iconic views of the park.
You can see part of El Capitan on the left, Bidalveil Falls on the right, and nothing of Half Dome in the center.

He had to play with the camera and I don't blame him a bit.
I do it all the time myself.

He  has to bus and BART, (our subway,) to work and back on his own, and he does.
In fact, he got home last night and had to go to Fremont to get a bike he decided to purchase.
(Fremont is another 20-miles south of here, plus whatever he had to do there to get to the bike, then he got it home even though it had very low tires.)
But now he'll be able to bus, BART, and bike to work when he's not working the same place I am.

We went to the Labyrinth yesterday.
It has been destroyed, as it occasionally has been in the past by kids.
​Usually the locals get out there and rebuild it, but they hadn't gotten to it yet.
​Here we are coming back from where it used to be.
It's at the Northwest corner of San Francisco at Land's End.
​You can see the Golden Gate Bridge from there.

Well, Tucker is doing quite well in my opinion.
I'm glad to have him here.
We were looking for an apartment, but my landlord bought out some other renters so he could give us his only two bedroom apt.
He likes us and doesn't want us to move if possible.
That's cool with me.
Moving is hard work.
Anyway, everybody wish Tucker well.
We're having a blast.

​Jou Baur

I should have started writing back this when he first got here, but I didn't.
Well, time to move on now.

We went to Yosemite the other day.
​We had a blast! 

Here we are at Yosemite Falls.
Tucker wants to get to the top one day.
​So do I.
I almost made it a few years ago, well about halfway up, but I had to come back down to see if I was going to get camping for the night. When someone doesn't show up they give it to someone currently present. I didn't get it so I had to drive home.

We wanted to see a lot more of the waterfalls, especially being as wet as they are right now, but things went weird right from the beginning.
We were driving over there and I had already checked, the roads in the valley were open.
But, the road into the valley wasn't.
So, we had to drive many miles out of the way just to get into the park.

Then, the very first waterfall, Bridleveil Falls, was closed off.
Looked like parking lot damage or construction, but we couldn't visit.
Wait, I'm wrong.
There were other falls before this, including one on the hwy in that was quite big, but I'm talking about the ones down in the valley itself.

​Anyway, we had lots of fun and Tucker has had his first visit to Yosemite.
Now it's time to prepare for the next.

We're definittley going again, but we'll get more prepared and so will Yosemite.

We've got some other stuff to do also.
How about Winchester House?

Oh, I bought a new domain today, just so I can grip online about the things I usually gripe about:
Obscene Greed and how it's destroying the world!

StopObsceneGreed.com

I haven't done anything with it yet, I just got it today, but I'll let you know what happens...if only I can get up the "whatever-it-takes" to make it work.

Jou Baur

I just got back the other day, about midnight Sunday.
The cruise was GREAT!
It was my first cruise, and I'd love to do another, (if I only had the money, ha ha.)

I boarded in Seattle; Holland America's, MS Amsterdam.
It holds about 1300 passengers and 300 - 400 crew members.
The first thing we did was almost 48 hours at sea to Juneau.
We had a pretty rough day that first day.
​Check out the pool video:

In Juneau I did the Mt. Roberts Tram, which goes straight up the mountain above the ship.
First however, I asked, "Where's a liquor store and a pot shop?"​
Once I got me one joint, and a couple small bottles, I wandered back through town to the Tram and went up it.
On the way through town I saw the Red Dog Saloon.

100 ml liter bottles of rum instead of 50 ml and "Gold Creek Kush" from Norther Lights.
​That was some really great tasting pot there, and quite stony.

"Bio Jesus" pot was pretty good too, although not quite as good.

In Ketchikan, I got little bottles of Vodka because they didn't have Bacardi's, and I never got to the pot shop because we had to go to do my tour, and leave soon thereafter.
But, I did get a calendar for $1.99 PLUS a FREE Inside Passage coffee cup for buying the calendar, AND a one-shot "I survived Zip Lining," flask for a buck.

As far as wild life goes, I saw a pod of Humpbacks, saw some Orca's, and caught video of one of them breaching. 
I saw Eagles, I watched a glacier calving, and I ate real good, too.
I wandered through the second-largest rainforest in the world, the Tongass, where I saw mating and dying Salmon so thick you could cross the river without getting wet.
I did the Totem Trail, where I loved the Trader Legend Pole, (which tells a tale of white traders lying,) and I even went Ziplining in Ketchikan.
I'll try to get all of this posted soon, but I wanted to get this much up.

Jou Baur

Started 8/22/2017
Posted approximately the above date:

We went to see the eclipse.
My buddy, Jerry called me up one day and asked, "Hey Jou, you want to go see the Eclipse?"
I said "Yes," really quick before he could change his mind!
Go see the Eclipse?
Hell yeah!
But it's too much for me alone.
550 miles, one-day to do it and make it to work on Tuesday.
Get off work Sunday night, meet Jerry and drive like crazy to Oregon, (10 hours to Madras,) then rest whatever extra time we had.
Watch the eclipse about 10:18 in the morning and drive like hell to get home for work the next day.
We started out figuring we could be home by about 10 pm.
It's only one extreme road trip, then recuperate.
We can do that.

Then we started hearing about traffic Armageddon so we revised our plans.
Instead of starting about 7 pm when I would get off work, I took the day off and we left about 1 pm.
We figured we'd add a couple hours to the time getting home, too.
No biggie.
We'll be ready for work on Tuesday, just like we're supposed to be.

Well, we got there about 10 - 11 pm and things were rocking.
Eclipse parties everywhere!
All the regular rooms and campsites sold out long ago, (we knew that... no problem.)
Thousands of additional campsites sold out, interesting news.
Thousands of 'Parking Spots" where you could sleep in your vehicle, ($45 -$200 night) sold out!
WOW!
This begins to sound interesting.

So we get there and find a place to park in front of a bar with a campfire going and we walk up and down town once.
Well, the three or four blocks that were the main part of downtown, anyway.
We even see these guys with a campstove and a table selling hot dogs in a parking lot.
We got to talking to them and bought a couple dogs to eat and they pointed out the building where they were parked selling their hot dogs was not a business, and was in fact even being sold.
Why don't we just park there?
We did, of course, and had one of the best seats in town about 100 yards away for the eclipse the next morning.

BUT...
The Eclipse was awesome!
Yeah, I know that word gets overused, still...
But, then it came time to leave!
​
I hit the post office, where I mailed these cool letters
with the eclipse stamps from totality on the day it happened.
Actually, within minutes of the totality!
Then we hopped in to the car and spent the next half hour driving
one block to where we could turn south towards home.
It seems like it took us an hour to get out of town... one mile.
​People would get out and wander around while waiting.
They would walk alongside their cars when they moved.
The city council had the local kids out there
handing out water to people sitting in their cars.

It took 13 hours to drive the next 107 miles!

See, there was an accident south of us in Chemault,
(thanks Google maps,) 
and every highway went through there!
People would get out and walk beside their cars at times
and every once in a while we would get a little faster for a mile or three.
We got off the highway once.
I'm a good navigator so we went exploring to get on a different highway miles away.
We ended up on dirt roads and would have connected EXCEPT
we ran into people coming from there looking for better traffic where we came from.
So we parallelled the road going south until we saw traffic jams ahead on the dirt roads we were following.
Then we got back on the same highway we left an hour ago and about 6-7 miles north of here...
And we were 4 vehicles behind a motorhome we had been 3 spaces in front of!
We spent an hour or so navigating dirt roads to gain 6-7 miles and lose 7 traffic spaces.
We just got back on the highway and stayed there.

We left Madras about 11 am in the morning and at about
1 am the next morning we hit Chemault and
there's this cop in  the street just steadily waving traffic through.
Traffic went back to normal then.
It only took about 8 more hours to get home.
​We neither one made it for work.

Finally finished and posted April 13, 2018. Jou Baur

Courtesy of Randy Cassingham of "This Is True".

Well, what with working 6-days a week, driving around the state and staying strange places every weekend for my Pari-Mutuel  work, and trying to do so many other things I haven't gotten my Half Dome video made yet.
In fact, I tried a few weeks ago to use Hit Film 4, which seemed nice but wouldn't work on my home computer where I do most of my work, (32 but vs. 64 bit.)
I spent some time trying to put together a 64 bit computer from stuff I've got laying around, but...

Today I spent most of my spare time at work trying to install and start Media Composer - First, by Avid.
It's supposed to be a decently usable version of the one they use to make real movies.
For some reason it took forever to unzip the file and that was only the start.
Part of the file didn't show up so I had to unzip it and try again.
Then, after I installed it and tried to run it, I had to reinstall the app package(?), then had to, well, never mind.
I eventually uninstalled it, (which also took forever,) with Revo Uninstaller, to make sure I got all of it.
All-in-all, I spent the better part of three hours and never managed to get it to turn on.
<SIGH>

So, I may not get this video made for several months yet, because during the next few months I have to get a friend ready for court, and get him there; I have a citation hearing for my Smog license, (you wouldn't believe the entrapment by the state,) and I have to prepare to sue my ex-storage unit over a burglary where I lost a lot of tools, (yes, I had storage insurance and the idiots played games and finally put my case in the inactive file arbitrarily without ever offering me a serious quote on almost $7,000 worth of tools.)

All on top of working 6-days a week; 4 as a Smog Tech, and 2 at my new job taking bets at the Horse Races, (I'm a Pari-Mutuel clerk.) That brings up another thing I have to prepare for... Union Induction... which was supposed to have happened July 17th! 

Which also doesn't count that I'm trying to trying to build my landlord a website for his dental lab, writing a letter to the parole board to try to get a friend out of prison, (he deserves it,) or running my different websites including this one,   www.hotspiceguy.com/, www.secondhandlife.org/, and  http://www.thepotkitchen.com/, or all the other stuff I'm trying to do all at the same time .
I haven't even had time to hike since Half Dome!

Plus, this 6-day work-week shit is wearing me out all by itself.
I'm 64-years old now and I had a great time doing Half Dome, but I don't have the infinite energy of youth anymore.
Working 6-days a week doesn't sound like much, and it's not if you're only doing a short limited time, but when it goes on and on it just breaks you down, so, it may be a while before I get this video finished and posted.

Fall is when you clean up for the year and prepare for the next.
It's summer, peak time, and I'm going to gain the ground I can for now, then tidy up a little later in the fall to prepare for next year's goals.

Therefore, I'll promise it before New Years at the latest.
In fact, I want several by New Years at the latest, including a better one than the one I made last year.

Anyway, for now, enjoy the website.
And get out and do something before you miss it all.
​See y'all along the trail.

Jou Baur

This video gives you an idea just how wet it was.
After about 100 yards I had to change socks.
(This video is also on the Half Dome 2017 hike page.)

I'm afraid I haven't gotten the photo page done, or the video, either.
It'll be a while yet.
Sorry about that but there are just so many things going on right this minute.
I just can't do everything at once, unfortunately.
Bear with me and check back in a few weeks.

Thanks, and keep on hiking,
Jou Baur