How's this for a ride--a 21-speed Mongoose Scorch mountain bike. I gave up my driver's license a few years back (voluntary) and if where I need to get is within a 4-5 mile round-trip, I'll either ride or, more likely, walk pushing my little niece in a stroller. If the distance is beyond that, I usually get a lift with my brother who drives an -'03 Dodge Ram pickup, I think. I'm not 100% on the year. There's also a bus that runs by behind me, and another that runs a block or so in front of me, so I have those options, too, but I'm diabetic (T2), so the way I see it, and since I can always use a little more exercise, its "use 'em or lose 'em" as far as my legs go. Oh, and just a couple blocks from me there's this wicked cool park, part manicured greens with baseball & soccer fields (I've even seen folks out there playing cricket, on occasion), but there's also a large space that was left centered around a hill that is largely wild but which has a cool open gazebo halfway up, a bike path that runs in a figure 8 between the hill's peaks plus some narrow hiking trails. There are rabbits up there (jacks as well as cottontails), lots of ground squirrels, scrub jays, and there's some red-tailed hawks that have made their home on the southern peak. The hill, in fact most of the surrounding hills, are the left-overs from an old lava flow. About 3-7 miles below me there's a decent sized magma chamber bubbling. Last spring, we had a couple earthquake swarms that shook things up a bit, but I spent most of my life living in N. Calif within miles of the San Andreas so what the heck--none were as big as the Loma Prieta quake--that wasn't fun. Speaking of quakes and faults, though, my avatar's actually a photo I took right around Winter Solstice 1991 at Bodega Head. Where I was standing was on the Pacific Plate, while a couple yards behind me was the North American Plate--there's a spot where you can stand and straddle the plates on the San Andreas, or maybe it was a fault that branched off from the S.A. I can never remember, but I think it was the grande dame of California faults.
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