cha-CHING!

The good news is, I found a couple checks in my mailbox today, both from the U.S. Department of the Treasury. The better news is the I.R.S. caught an error in my math and determined I owe them about $250 less than I thought I did, so their refund check is even bigger than I expected. Tomorrow morning I'm going to put a grand and a half in my bank account, not counting my paycheck.

I need to check my other upcoming bills. This might be enough to let me buy an X-Box.

Call me "Thunderchaser"

This past weekend I took a long-overdue trip to the Bay area to see my friend Shaterri. Since I only push it to about 80 mph, the trip takes me six hours. I got a bit of a head start being able to take off from work, but it's real easy to lose twenty extra minutes in a drive that long. In this case it was due to bad weather, but it was beautiful bad weather.

South-central California was between a southern high-pressure region and a northern low that night. Once US Route 5 drops out of the mountains, it runs nearly flat for some two hundred fifty-odd miles. Even before I started descending the northern grade, I could see the thunderheads in the distance, lit from within every few seconds with an odd splotch of yellow or red or blue. They loomed ahead of me, growing ominously larger as the odometer clicked the mileposts by. It's difficult to put into words the sheer feeling of vastness that the clouds inspired. We were tiny little specks driving right through the middle of a stormy patch hundreds of miles wide, trapped in the thin slice between the planes of the earth and the equally flat visibility ceiling. The random flashes grew in intensity until the temporary blindness they caused was more of a safety hazard than the wetness on the road. For half an hour they came equally from all directions. Through it all, I heard thunder once. As spectacular as the lightning was, it was all cloud-to-cloud, and much too far away to hear.

Anyway, I arrive at about one in the morning and find his new house with no problems. Next chilly morning, the two of us headed to Elk Horn Slough for some paddling. It's about half-way between Monterey and Santa Cruz. The slough has a kayak rental and boat launching place, which is cool. It's also a national wildlife preservation area, which is even cooler. It's home for a variety of sea birds, harbor seals, and the incredibly endangered sea otter.

Like I said, it's chilly. Fortunately, part of the standard rental issue is a wetsuit and a nylon spray jacket; them, along with the physical exertion, made the temperature just right. Back in Seattle I'd just gotten a life jacket, so I don't know if this was due to differences in state safety laws or just how this shop chose to operate. After orientation we hit the water and made good time paddling from the docks to the slough proper. Right away we were treated to the sight of small patches of brown wiggling in the cold saltwater -- otters! We saw singles here and there, floating on their backs grooming themselves, or maybe snarfing down a nice clam lunch. One pair got closer to us than any other, probably because they were too busy playing "chase the other otter". The occasional seal nose would also pop its way out of the water and peer around, but for the most part the seals clustered in herds of several dozen lounging on the extensively muddy shores, trying to bask in the scarce sunlight.

About an hour out, we figured it was a good time to turn around. "One third out, two thirds back" was the rule delivered by both the orientation guide and one of the veteran paddlers in the group for how to divide your time, based on the realistic estimate that it typically takes twice as long to paddle against the wind as with it. (*) Only today wasn't typical. It was worse. We turned around and immediately found ourselves facing directly into a fifteen knot headwind that we hadn't really noticed at our backs up 'til now...ditto the chop it was causing. The areas around Puget Sound I'd paddled in before are sheltered, urban areas, without this sort of weather. You're never in any kind of rush unless you need to cross the shipping lanes. Today I discovered I can only paddle abot sixteen knots, tops, and certainly not for two hours straight. It was brutal to the point of frustration. Looking to the shore crawl by at a snail's pace was depressing, but you can't get out and walk because it's a federally protected sanctuary. You can't stop paddling because the wind will instantly start pushing you backwards. And you can't throw out the anchor because kayaks don't have them.

After an eternity, we rounded a bend where we could run ourselves onto a mud bank and rest, exhausted (well, I was exhausted). Stops became more and more frequent after that. We eventually needed to resort to using the tow line that the rental kayaks have just for this situation, so a fit paddler or a motorboat can tug a stupid, frail city boy back to the docks...once we found another renter who was generous enough to let us take the line off his boat, since mine was missing its. Steve, stud that he is, did most of the work from there on in.

The rest of the day was markedly less problematic. From the slough we took a long, scenic drive up the coast. For as populous a state as California is, it's still frickin' huge, and there are vast areas that are still undeveloped or used only for farmland, including a surprising amount of shoreline. We stopped in one spot and climbed down to a tiny sandy cove with scenic rock outcroppings enclosing about three-quarters of a circle around a hundred-foot, wave-carved rock mesa. Pounding surf crashed onto the rocky shore and threw up huge plumes of what looked like black silt at first but was actually seaweed. We finished the trip off with a brief visit to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk and the world-famous Richard Donnelly chocolate shop, an unassuming almost-one-man store that makes and sells some of the finest assorted chocolates this side of the Atlantic.

On Sunday we took a page from Genesis and rested. Considering I had a six-hour return drive ahead of me still, anything else would have been silly even under ideal situations.

(*) Here's a depressing aside: think of how many people you know who would insist that that rule is wrong because two doesn't go into three, and it should be "one quarter out" instead.