2001.05.16

To celebrate having finished finals so early in the week for once, I needed to do something (anything) that wasn't related to school, work, academics, or studying. So Nam came up with the spiffy idea of "frolicking," and to this day, I don't exactly know what it means. Anyhow, since it was such a "nice" (in other words, insanely hot) day, we trekked up to Tilden Park, waaaay up in the hills east of campus. And this is more or less what happened...

Since neither of us is that insane, we chose to drive up to Tilden. Along the way, we came across the Lawrence Hall of Science, where Nam used to work. How high was it? Well, here's a view of campus from the parking lot...if you stare closely at the center, you just might see the Campanile.

Outside the hall itself, we found a number of fun things to play with, like the larger-than-life DNA strand, and the fountain.

Elementary-school-jungle-gym-sized DNA model

And here's Nam playing around on it. Actually, I think she's motioning me to climb the thing while I was concerned that I might break it...

And finally, I conned Nam into running around in the fountain, since it was something she had wanted to do during the days when she did work there...what were they going to do now, fire her? Ha!

So after that little side trip to grab an awesome bay view, we wandered our way around Tilden Park. Initially, we followed signs leading us to a Merry-Go-Round, only to find that it was closed (on a random Wednesday evening? No way!). On the other hand, there was this freakish looking cat there that shedded like mad...

Here's Nam playing with the cat. I think it was named "Merry-go-round Max" or something like that.

And this is a picture of the cat itself sitting in an upright position. It seemed to like attention...

Following this little diversion, we wandered over to Lake Anza where there were doggies, duckies, and people swimming away. After spending some time amusing ourselves by skipping stones, we wandered around the perimeter of the entire lake...it was huge...

Here's a picture of me sitting on a rock near the water.

Here's a view of the lake as taken from the above mentioned rock...the cool thing to notice was the reflection of the sun upon the lake's waters, but I guess some of it didn't show up.

And here are two random duckies floating around the lake...

At one point, the lake reaches an "end" of sorts: as seen by the image on the left, water comes from these rocks, and flows into the lake itself. The image on the right is just the view of the lake looking the other way from this same end.

So after a complete circle around the lake (and having seen more than our fair share of teenagers smoking out and getting drunk), we ended up near this beach-like area where people could swim. There were people playing with a soccer ball in the water, there were duckies in the water, and of course, little kids! To keep myself amused, I got on the lifeguard station and began to blow bubbles.

Shortly thereafter, two kids began to chase them as if they were little cats trying to grab balls of yarn. It was amusing...

If nothing else, I learned just how hard it is to blow bubbles when under pressure to blow them. The key is to be relaxed and let it come naturally (hehehe). Also, if these childrens' parents didn't tell them to stop chasing the bubbles, I don't know if I would have made it...as it is, I was getting tired of blowing the things, but I didn't want to disappoint the little buggers....