Declan's Blog

We have an 18 year old boy! How’d that happen?

Mom got up and made apple pancakes. Dad got out the camera. 😉

Last night, Saturday, July 21, sometime between 9:50 and 10:50 pm, an unknown car hit our son’s green 1998 Honda CR-V, which was parked on the south side of the 13000 block of Sparren Ave. This is in Penasquitos.

They scraped the left rear side bumper, twisted the rear axle, and left a large part of their car behind on the road. They left skirting, tire guards, and some type of blower from the engine in addition to lots of plastic and glass on the road just behind and ahead of the Honda. There was no one in or near the Honda at the time of the accident, so, thankfully, there were no injuries to anyone we are aware of.

A white Mazda hatchback was seen in the immediate area soon after the hit and run was discovered. The Mazda was weaving across lanes and dividers along Carmel Mtn. Road, and passed the group looking at the Honda’s damage on Sparren, narrowly missing the bystanders. That group heard the flap of a flat tire as it passed. No license plate was taken, but a good samaritan had been following the car at a distance when he noticed the driver’s erratic behavior and stopped to give the make and model information to police in case that was the car that had caused the damage to the Honda.

Even if this Mazda did not cause the damage to our Honda, the driver was obviously impaired and needs to be questioned.

PLEASE call the San Diego Police Department’s non emergency number, 858-484-3154, if you have any information about a white Mazda hatchback (or any car) with fresh damage and missing parts on the front passenger side, or information about the hit and run on Saturday night. Please also feel free to distribute this to anyone else who may have information.

Thank you!!!!

Elaine, Declan, and Nathan Fleming

Click here for more pictures of the car.

Elaine and I tried out a new restaurant neighborhood tonight called Jasmine Cafe.  It’s a Persian and Mediterranean Cafe.  They were offering a Valentines Day special for two, charging $44.99 for a wide variety of their fare.  Bottom line, the food was excellent!

We started with a Lentil Soup, which was tasty.  Next came a dish of appetizers, including hummus, babaghanooj, cashk bedamjoon, musto khiyar, filafel, and dolma (Man, the spell checker HATES those words!).  These were all fantastic, especially the babaghanooj.  I really don’t like eggplant, so I wasn’t expecting to like it.  It was smoky, garlicky, and full of subtle flavors.  The dollop of olive oil on top didn’t hurt either.  The other spreads were great, as was the yogurt based dip in the middle.  The dolmas and filafels were nothing to blog about (did you catch that subtle modernization of “to write home about?”  Clever, eh?), but the high quality of the rest of the plate does more than forgive that.

The main dish was a selection of Shrimp Kabob, Chicken Kabob, and Beef/Lamb Shawerma.  Again, we loved all of them.  The shrimp was a little salty for Elaine, but I liked the way the flavor permeated the whole shrimp.  And anything that slows Elaine down around shrimp is a blessing.  I think I got 2.  That’s a record.  Yep, she likes shrimp.

The chicken was soft, moist and had a great lemony flavor.  The beef/lamb (I bet that’s a funny looking animal) was very nice.  I’m a big lamb fan, and I asked if they had just a lamb version, but no.  Anyway, it was still good and had a nice lamby flavor.

On the plate was a lump of white stuff.  We asked what it was – whipped garlic with lemon and olive oil.  Really neat mix of flavors and texture.  It went well with a fork full of their nice basmati rice.

We finished the meal with a nice baklava.  Not too sweet and garnished with pistachios.

I love it when I find a new place with good food, especially unique dishes.  I really recommend the place and hope it gets enough traffic to keep it around.

Their web site sucks, but shows the address:

13185-3 Black Mountain Road
San Diego, CA  92129

This is the Vons shopping center in Rancho Penasquitos.

December’s a pretty busy month at our house. Nathan’s (the boy) birthday is on the 5th, Elaine’s (the wife) is on the 16th, then there’s Christmas soon after. Because the wife handles most of the shopping around here, I’m just on the hook for her birthday and Christmas gifts. Yes, it’s a little inconsiderate for her birthday to be so close to Christmas, but I can’t blame her for that. I blame her parents.

Anyway, somewhere near the beginning of December, I normally log on to Amazon, check the wife’s wish list, add a few things, and, bada bing, I’m done. All I need to do is collect boxes as they come in and decide which things I’ll give the wife for her birthday and which I’ll save for Christmas. There’s a whole other story about brow beating Erin (the daughter) into doing the wrapping for me, but I’ll save that, or get her to blog it.

So, I fire off my order on December 3rd, and within a week three big boxes show up addresses to me from Amazon. Now, we’re a Midwest family who transplaned to San Diego. At this time of year, there are boxes coming in every day. Since I outsource the mundane business of mail to the wife, I just had the boxes piled up under my desk, planning to select her birthday booty the evening before the 16th. The wife is a crossword freak and had added:

“Excalibur The NY Times Deluxe Touch Screen Crossword Puzzle”
Excalibur Electronics; Video Game

to her Wish List. I ordered that, and, since I wanted to look like I put SOME effort into the process, I added:

“Wordplay”
Chris Astoyan; DVD

a (very entertaining! who knew?!?) movie about crossword freaks. I imagined her delight upon opening TWO birthday presents, ONE of them a non-Wish List SURPRISE, and ANOTHER that’s also on-theme! (And not just a Starbucks card. “Here, you LIKE coffee. Right?”)

So, the evening of the 15th comes and I go hide in my office and pop open the three big boxes, in search of the two crossword related items. Three boxes. Three items. WHAT? There were eleven items in total that I’d ordered for the two occasions. Oh man, I’m screwed… Thankfully, the crossword video game was one of the three, but my masterwork, the accompanying DVD, was not here. In fact, the only items that had shown up were the ones Amazon offered through third parties. All of the other stuff, DVDs and books, Amazon stock and trade, were missing. I quickly looked through my email for the Amazon Order confirmation and was stunned to finally notice this:

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Our hosts:

Gabe show his power move:

Looks like he’s boring Elaine to sleep…

TJ, between poses:

We even got a special appearance by Nathan!

Erin’s got a power move too:

Click here for more pictures.

Here are the wedding weekend pictures (medium size):

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3


Here’s a link to Sue’s Hardy’s pictures.

Here’s a link to Matt Hardy’s pictures.

It was so nice seeing old faces and meeting new ones!

I’d like to get everyone’s pictures into one big collection online.  Please mail me at declan@declan.net and we’ll figure out the best way to get your stuff to me.  I can also make DVD or CD copies of the big originals for people if they’d like.

UPDATE

I’m slowly loading the full size, high quality images to Flickr.  Click here to see my sets of pictures.  Look for the ones with “HQ” in the title.  So, if you like one of the pictures and want to make a print for yourself, grab a high quality copy.

Ok, downloading a picture can be a bit convoluted, but it works.

For example, go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigdpix/sets/72157594150754780/ and click
on a picture.  At the top of the picture are some icons, pick the “All Sizes” one.  Then select “Original”.  This will show the biggest image.  There will be a link called “Download the Original size.”  Click that and you can save the image to your disk.

UPDATE to the UPDATE

Sue has pointed out a flaw in my directions!

None of the icons show up on top of the pictures, unless you have a Yahoo account (Yahoo owns Flickr).  I was automatically logged in, so it just worked for me.

So, if you want the instructions above to work so you can download the files, Sign up for a free account from the link on the picture page.  Sorry, it’s a bit of a pain to do this, but it then lets you get to more functions.

I wanted to make a map of the ride that uses real GPS data and would work with just a web browser and not require Google Earth.

Check this out:

http://www.declan.net/wp-content/gpx_loader.html

This uses Google maps with an overlay of the route we took. The data comes from a rider’s GPS device, so it is very accurate.

All of the roads we took are marked and you can zoom and pan over the whole ride. Click on Satellite view or Hybrid to get a neat view of some of the terrain.

For me, this was the hardest day. We’re all sore from three days of riding, and the prospect of sitting in a bike again all day just was not a thrill. But ya gotta do what ya gotta do…

Here’s how today started:

And it went on like that for 15 miles, with a killer headwind, for 4 hours. Headwinds are just nasty. They kept our forward pace to 3-5 miles per hour and just wore us out. We kept hearing that the turn on to Route 78 would put the wind more at our backs, so that kept us going.

I don’t have many pictures from this leg of the race as I was too miserable to take any, my battery on the little camera had died, and Elaine was out wandering the desert taking pictures of flora and fauna:

That’s another ocotillo in bloom. Here’s a teddy bear cactus:

Here’s our team of riders on that day:

Erin’s apparently flashing some sort of gang sign. Make a note to look into elementary school gang activity… Hailley’s dad, Damon, joined us this day and we all stuck together for most of the rest of the ride. Here we cross the San Diego County Line:

Erin and I stop to soak up the view of the nuclear devestation the Carrizo Badlands:

By the time we got to lunch, Erin was still in good spirits:

And I was about done:

But there’s nothing like a dry, white sandwich to perk me back up:

I LOVE what that helmet does to my hair. I’d wear it everyday if it would fit into the headroom of the car.

Our next destination was Agua Caliente, which is Spanish for “Crowded Pool”:

We’d taken so long getting across the desert that the pool was just about to close when we arrived. Erin said, “Oh yeah, this is just about the best 5 minutes of my life.” I think she was being sarcastic, but she’s very subtle, like her dad, so it was hard to tell…

Then it was back on the bikes for a few more miles to Vallecito:

Which apparently has a stagecoach house museum thing, which Elaine thought to take pictures of and which I didn’t even notice because I was so tired I wanted to die:

Elaine got a neat shot of the sunset and an ocotillo:

I’m sure someone has a picture of Plaster City. This is my main memory of that day, riding in the blistering heat (95-100F) and avoiding the huge drywall trucks coming and going to the factory there.

For more pictures from Day 4, click here.

Fox News was at the beach when we arrived. Here’s the link:

Video – http://video.fox6.com/launcher/160364

Wednesday was designed to be an easy day to rest up from the 54 miles the day before, and get us ready for the trek across the desert on Thursday.

The Imperial Valley is flat and lush, lined with irrigation ditches. Most of the fields we passed by were for making hay:

Here is a chase team who cheered us on for the whole ride. They had the greatest energy!

We got to El Centro pretty quickly, and I got some pictures of its beauty:

Ok, there’s not much in El Centro… But, they do have a pool! Our Pit Boss, Gary, is a Navy Seal or something, and he broke us onto the El Centro Navy Air Facility to use the pool. It was tough cutting the barbed wire and drugging the dogs, and I’m sure the guards we subdued will all be just fine. Thankfully, once you penetrate the perimeter of the base, they let you take pictures:

This plane has its engine removed, or I would have taken it for a spin.

Here are Hailey, Divia, and Erin:

Erin has fun in the pool, and Divia gives me the stinkeye for yelling at her all the time:

CANNONBALL!

These poor people didn’t know what hit them. It was like Caddy Day at the pool in “Caddyshack.” Minus the Baby Ruth.

Here’s where the parents hung out, under the awning, or in the hot tub in the back of the picture. I spent some time there myself. When I told Erin that I met one of her friends’ Dads in the hot tub, her reply was, “That’s awkward. You met some guy in a hot tub.” If you know me at all, I never let anything go, so “awkward” was the watchword for the rest of the trip. Erin’s still not talking to me…

After a few hours at the pool, we had about 5 miles of easy riding to the next school to camp. Or to park my bike then get a ride to the El Centro Ramada. I believe I’ve made my feelings about camping known….

We did hang around the school for quite a while, because they have a merry-go-round. I remember we had these torture implementations on the play ground when I was a kid, but they have been banned for a long time. I guess country kids are just tougher, or more expendable. I went to take a picture of Erin on the ride, and she said, “I can’t look up or I’ll barf!!!” Good times!

We had dinner, settled the bikes in with the Blackmans, then walked to the campfire. As I passed through the dining area, I sniffed the distinctive odor of clay chips, and, sure enough, there was a Texas Holdem poker game about to start. I firmly lectured the group of men about to play about the immorality of cards, then noticed they had a spot open. While Elaine and Erin went to the campfire, I almost went bust, then fought back to about double my original chip stack. Elaine walked back from the campfire and said she’d wait in the car, so I kept going All In to bust out and get to a real bed at the Ramada. Sadly, I kept winning, so eventually I gave my chips to a guy who had already been busted out. It was almost the perfect poker game. I didn’t lose, and all night I had the hope that I won! I didn’t. John went all in on a straight, and lost to a flush. At least that’s the story I got from all the guys the next day… 🙂

Click here for more pictures from Day 3.