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SJ
Last week I was in San Jose to visit my dad, accompanied by loyal Rondo. I apologize if I'm not terribly social when I'm up there: when it's a family visit, that's what I'm pretty much focused on. One thing I miss in the BArea by living in hell Los Angeles is the brisk autumn weather and the colors of the trees in the fall. In L.A. they don't so much change color as capitulate, turn brown and fall off the trees.
The middle picture of the above image is from one of the daily morning hikes that I take with my brother-in-law when I'm up there. He walks with a group of fascinatingly diverse individuals (mostly ethnic and mostly from the tech industry) who are all several decades older than I. The walk/hike usually consists of a four-mile loop up a steep neighborhood hill and back down again. The pace is brisk (about 3+ mph) and all of them kick my ass endurance-wise. Here's another shot of the rewards of a dawn hike (I'm used to later evening walks, but these were wonderful!).
On weekends, they take longer hikes into the nearby mountains. The forests here are a mix of deciduous and pine or redwood. Rondo loved them (but he'd better not get used to dawn foreys!).
Crawling through the thick, wet leaf-litter were a number of newts. They said that sometimes the trails were covered with them (mating season). I'm not sure what species they were , but they were fairly large (6-8"long) and of a color I'd never seen before (I'm probably misremembering salamanders, tho').
Speaking of critters: My sister's family kept a stick-bug as a pet for quite a while (2.5+ years). Amazingly, just before the ancient stickbug died, she gave birth to a number of offspring despite the lack of a mate. Apparently stickbugs are parthenogenic and, if there are no males around, can have a clutch of females. I'm not sure if they're destructive, but they are rather cute and innocuous creatures.
The middle picture of the above image is from one of the daily morning hikes that I take with my brother-in-law when I'm up there. He walks with a group of fascinatingly diverse individuals (mostly ethnic and mostly from the tech industry) who are all several decades older than I. The walk/hike usually consists of a four-mile loop up a steep neighborhood hill and back down again. The pace is brisk (about 3+ mph) and all of them kick my ass endurance-wise. Here's another shot of the rewards of a dawn hike (I'm used to later evening walks, but these were wonderful!).
On weekends, they take longer hikes into the nearby mountains. The forests here are a mix of deciduous and pine or redwood. Rondo loved them (but he'd better not get used to dawn foreys!).
Crawling through the thick, wet leaf-litter were a number of newts. They said that sometimes the trails were covered with them (mating season). I'm not sure what species they were , but they were fairly large (6-8"long) and of a color I'd never seen before (I'm probably misremembering salamanders, tho').
Speaking of critters: My sister's family kept a stick-bug as a pet for quite a while (2.5+ years). Amazingly, just before the ancient stickbug died, she gave birth to a number of offspring despite the lack of a mate. Apparently stickbugs are parthenogenic and, if there are no males around, can have a clutch of females. I'm not sure if they're destructive, but they are rather cute and innocuous creatures.
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