FWP #2: You wouldn't wash your boots in the coffee they serve here

You'd think there was a market in the USA for coffee which doesn't taste like ash and ground insects ... but no.

I've watched Portlandia, all of it, and it suggests the place is run by a cabal of barristas, but I couldn't find one. The only place I could find downtown was a choclatier who offered me 'eXspresso'.

I nearly got into a fist fight with the barrista in MOMA's sculpture garden, when I could smell the milk burning during her cappucino steaming ... from 20 feet away!

I have avoided Starbucks 'pumpkin flavoured' coffee in SF (unsure where to put the scare quotes in "starbucks pumpkin flavoured coffee.")

But now I think I've seen everything, in San Marcos. I watched the barrista try to charge the head from a grinder that clearly hasn't been cleaned since it left the factory ... It kinda chugged and wheezed. I saw him hold both the head and the tamper in his hands, and apply basically no force, just enough to pat the surface down. I saw him let half the shot pour into the trough ... Called him on that, he insisted it was normal (and after I tasted the product, I have to agree with him that was the right place for it). After all this indignity I saw him lovingly ladle an ocean of froth over the resultant ash water.

What the hell is going on? He told me, when I quietly took him aside to ask, that he knows he's supposed to tamp the charge down with considerable force, but it hurt his wrist. I am speechless.

Settling in, so of course I buy some camping/hiking gear.

Settling into San Marcos / San Diego.  Just dropped a bundle at REI (US camping co-op) on a new pack Osprey Atmos 65 (http://www.ospreypacks.com/en/product/mens/atmos_65) for roughly the same price as you'd get them in Oz.  I also bought a water filter, another katydyn hiker, because I envisage myself doing some overnighters here when it gets cooler.

The place is a savannah.  So dry.  I got a 3l hydration pack and another 1l Nalgene, just because I think I'll need 5l here where I could get away with 2l in around Sydney.  The sun is hotter here, too, presumably Sydney's *far* higher humidity filters some of it out.  I may actually need sunscreen for the first time since I was a kid, and maybe even a hat.

I'm considering one of two possibe day hikes tomorrow (which will be Sunday here):

Mt Woodson, which is reputed to be a bit hard: http://alltrails.com/trail/us/california/mt-woodson-via-lake-poway-trail
or
Hollenbeck Canyon, which is a walk in the park http://www.everytrail.com/guide/hollenbeck-canyon

I'll probably go for the wimpy one, and tell myself I've got to leave something for a challenge, or I need to acclimatise more.

There's a national park not too far from here, Cleveland National Forest, which looks to be nice, and has some wildernessy areas. I'll aim to do that soonish, as an overnighter.

The good thing about this place is that you really don't need a tent.  It rains about twice a year (though like the song says, man it pours) so if you can avoid those two days, a fly is all you need.  There's not much vegetation, certainly nothing like Sydney bush, so you can pack your stuff outside the pack, which is why I'm OK with going down to 65l pack.

The specific challenges here are that it's a savannah.  It's *so* dry, makes Sydney look lush.  Additional risk elements are mountain lions and rattlesnakes.  I'm a bit worried about the former - they apparently do attack and maul people, but the latter just sound like tiger snakes with neon advertising signs.

After Cleveland, I really have a hankering to do some of the deserts, maybe here http://www.nps.gov/jotr/index.htm ... despite the fact U2 did an album named for the vegetation (Eno probably produced it, so that's ok.)

First World Problem: SSN entails I-94

So to work here I have to have a Social Security Number, and to get that I have to have an I-94, which states I'm permitted to work, according to customs and immigration and homeland defence.  Apparently I was supposed to keep that little bit of paper the customs guy stamped after he'd finished trying to trick me into incriminating myself.  This, after a 15hr flight.  Meh.

I asked for help from my stylish and accomplished NYC immigration lawyer friend, who told me it was very important to DSS that I have the control number from the I-94.  Bad news.  Searched every bag, every pocket, couldn't find it.  Remembered ... dimly ... a sign saying you could retrieve it from the net, probably why I tossed it.

A scant 10m before my DSS interview I tried this, only to run out of data on my AT&T mobile.  Argh.  5m of talking to a solicitous but useless headphone-spacing unit at AT&T CustomoService, $5 buys me 100Mb.  Find the I-94, stagger into the DSS office just as the final call comes up for my number.  The Security Guard waves me through, because I was so nice and smiley and obviously inept, two hours earlier when I got my wait-in-line ticket.

I get to the interview window, the DSS officer looks at my phone screen, sees the I-94 and declares that's all cool, but he needs it printed.

Rush to nearest Kinko's about 1.75miles away, buy a self-service card (there's $10 I'll never see again) use google cloud print to get it to the Kinko's office, get delivery code, type it into the printer after inserting my card, and it stops ... out of paper.  Over to the desk, help one of their customers (an old codger) connect to the local free wifi with his ipad, tell the desk jockey his printer's out of paper (why didn't it tell him itself?)  Print 4 lovely colour copies of the aforesaid web page.

Back to DSS, back to Window 7 (I asked for Linux, but they didn't know what I was talking about) hand the printed web page to him, noting to self that he could have called it up himself using information from my passport, visa and admission stamp, just like I did.  He writes down the number, same number as was on my mobile phone screen ... then he HANDS ME BACK THE FUCKING PAPER.

Lest I'm unclear here ... all he needed was the tracking number.  He could see it on a web page, he could have used HTTPS to get the same web page from his own government, but no ... he had to COPY IT off a piece of paper for it to be considered valid.

Now, I realise there are people starving in the world, and there are wars and emergent diseases, and there are places where cholera is only a sip away, but all of those are just additional symptoms of the deadly contagion circling our globe: unrestrained stupidity.

Birds here are small

Today I saw a local corvid hiding in a tree making a chittering sound I took to be a warning, as a red tailed hawk circled, hunting. Later, I saw a blackbird and heard it sing, not in the dead of night though. General observation: they are all much smaller than I expected, smaller than their equivalents in Oz. I surmise this is due to the prevalence of placental predators here.

And hummingbirds ... Like little moths on amphetamine, clicking to one another like microbats.

Carlsbad and Oceanside

Nice Places. Some pretty googie signage, some pink triffids, a quaint harbour, and a reproduction bell which is considered an artefact of historical importance.

It's completely multifunctional!

"I really enjoy forgetting. When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don't notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is." (True Stories)

SoCal day 4

Driving in SoCal. It's a bit like Doug Stanhope says , shit here just works. A lot of the smarts are built into infrastructure, relieving you of the need to think too much. Of course this can have downside (electing Forrest Gump to office as an example) but there is no denying the comfort in living on autopilot.

In Oz, a 10-lane highway would be littered with glass, but I begin to ascribe that to design. Part of the poor design of Sydney roads is due to geographical constraint - it being a settlement of heavily dissected sandstone, where here it's flatter. Partly though it's just institutional laziness.

It's amusing to see what happens here when the city grid system meets a hill. They just go up and over, where we would definitely go for the contour, and fuck the system.

I haven't yet formed an opinion as to which approach yields more real amenity, but as a hiker I tend toward geography over system. Time will tell.

SoCal Day 3

All the People drive on an odd side of the road, which takes some getting used to.  Following a very clever suggestion, I have stuck a brightly cloured object on the windscreen at extreme left to remind me that is where the curb should be.  I'm looking for a suitable doll to be the god of the curb in the shrine dedicated to keeping me out of incoming traffic (whence the title of this blog.)

The food is nice, there are public bubblers with freshly squeezed OJ on every street corner, everything comes with optional hot sauce, which is lovely.  The coffee is, however, UNSPEAKABLE.  It is like someone mixed International Roast with dog shit.  Possibly it's a green initiative to recycle dog shit, or a clever marketing plan to make money from same.

I have a bolt hole, a beach head, a little place in between big roads which is forever Oz.  It's a cheap hotel, not pretty but pretty good value.  I wander outside to smoke and catch the cooling breeze from South West, where the ocean is, and watch crows fleeing to the mountains in the East.  It is a topsy turvy place.  The 'burbs at night are no place at all.

On the upside ... So much stuff is so cheap. I have resolved to tip at least 25% since I learnt waitresses get paid $2.70 per hour, barely enough to pay for their transport to work. I think of it as an appearance fee in the drama entitled "Please get me something to eat, and stop being so damned bubbly and solicitous."

Margueritas, $2 each.  I could get used to that.

At night, the earthquakes come.

Only A pissweak one, admittedly, 1.6, but only a km or two from where I am sitting.  I thought it was someone walking in my room.  Then I noticed some old cracks in the balcony, thought about it a sec, and googled.  Sure enough!  On a possibly unrelated topic, drove past a nuclear power plant on the way here ... Sitting on the ocean shore ... At the end of a spur which (to my untrained eye) looked like it could even have been a fault line.

I guess The Big One will be like Disneyland comes to you.  Two minutes of abject terror, and then you get to line up for refreshments.  Oh well, at least I can carry my survival kit everywhere without feeling completely silly.
Colin