Clearly I am not going to succeed in posting every day this year. I managed to do it four years in a row and even posted (and ran) every day in November when we went to Spain. The funny thing is that this year I just keep... forgetting. Ah well.

Here's a photo from a hike we took a few weeks ago. We've been hiking a lot this year (since neither of us has been biking much, so we have big multi-hour gaps of time to fill on weekends) and recently trod for the first time on Mt. Burdell, a smallish peak up in northern Marin County. It definitely felt like an adventure even though we could still see the city from where we stood next to the adorable summit marker. We've been hiking and running mostly on the same trails for 12 years, and while we love the old classics, it has been great to discover some new ones.

Me: What do you want for Hanukkah?

Him: I want the Giants to win the World Series. And I got that. So there's nothing you can get me that will make me any happier.

Me: :\

Just for the record, Amazon thinks that women want perfume, jewelry, UGG boots and chick flick DVDs, while men want grilling accessories, expensive watches, and poker-night gear. What universe are they living in?

I am thinking of making a gift guide for my workplace and it includes things like really nice (and durable, practical, comfy) SmartWool socks and sweaters, a cool knife and folding cutting-board set, YakTrax, great water bottles (I think you can never have too many; Dave begs to differ) and travel mugs, snowshoes, extremely portable coffee makers, the latest headlamps and bike lights (which are amazing!), ski lift tickets, extremely functional luggage, and useful camera accessories.

I'd like to think that these are things that help create great experiences... they're not just stuff. Nothing against jewelry, but I think Amazon could encourage us to be a little more adventurous.

This month of non-stop blogging is turning into a 2010 adventure recap, so I guess I'll go chronologically. In May we visited Carmel for the first time. We've been to Monterey and Pacific Grove many times, but for whatever reason Dave and I had never actually been in Carmel.

We were there to attend a wedding. Not just any wedding, but a cowboy-themed Jewish vegetarian wedding on a cattle ranch in Carmel Valley. The wedding was fantastic and memorable, and we returned to our hotel slightly sunburned and smelling of wood smoke, with wonderful klezmer, bluegrass and traditional Celtic music looping through our heads. Let's just say the band was a versatile crew.

Some of the best trips we've taken in the past ten years were for weddings. I shudder to think that I might never have gone to Hawaii (!!!) if not for a wedding. A wedding took us to Mendocino for the first time. And we even had a blast exploring Columbus, which we certainly would not have had the opportunity to do if friends had not gotten married there.

It makes me wonder how Dave and I would choose to get married if we were doing it now. Back in 1997 (again: !!!) we didn't have strong opinions about what our wedding would be like; we just wanted to get married and have fun. Now I can imagine a dozen different scenarios involving tropical islands, mountaintops, grassy meadows, nightclubs, redwood groves, intimate bistros and beaches. Any one of them would be great.

Not that I have any regrets about our great little wedding in a grand old house in Chicago's Gold Coast. It just feels like it was so long ago, I can hardly remember any details. Of course the details don't really matter -- it's the 13+ years of wedded bliss that count, right?

But if I were to do it again, I'd definitely hire a klezmer/bluegrass/Irish band.

In April we made an impromptu weekend trip to the mountains. We'd been wanting to check out Sorensen's Resort since driving past it years ago, so we called them up and were lucky to get a reasonable last-minute reservation, as ski season had just ended, but it was still too snowy to do much else.

And did we luck out! There was still about six feet of snow on the ground, but daytime temperatures were in the 60s. Perfect for snowshoeing... in shorts and t-shirts. It was heavenly. And a little surreal.

Sorensen's is a cluster of cozy cabins surrounding an excellent restaurant nestled into the beautiful, peaceful Hope Valley south of Lake Tahoe. It's off the beaten path, but close enough to Tahoe that you can drop into "town" for dinner, groceries or whatever. At night, it feels like it's a million miles from anywhere. In the summer, it's a great area for cycling or hiking. (We'd stayed nearby in Markleeville for bike racing the previous two summers.)

We did a little hiking, a little showshoeing, and a lot of eating. I got a massage and we baked ourselves in the wood-fired Finnish sauna. Like, literally, I don't remember the temperature inside, but I remember thinking it was about 30 degrees hotter than the sauna at the gym.

And then on the way home, we stopped at a VFW hall in a little unincorporated town in Calaveras County to visit a memorial marker that has my grandma's name on it... and Dave got bitten on the calf by a crazy pit bull. But maybe that's a story for another day.

The Giants just won the World Series, it's close to midnight, and I'm listening to the SF police scanner on SomaFM. What it sounds like is mild mayhem. The police on the radio are describing riotlike situations in pretty calm voices. This is weird. They are talking about storefronts being broken into, streets covered in broken glass, officers being pelted with full alcohol bottles. It doesn't sound like the situation is at all under control.

Speaking of situations, I haven't blogged since Dec. 1 of last year. I miss it, but my energies have been directed elsewhere. So will I try to blog every day this November, as I have for the past several years? We'll see. Will I follow a theme? Maybe it will be orange, in honor of the Giants' Orange October. Or maybe not. Will I remember how to use Movable Type after a year elbow-deep in Wordpress? TBD.

This is a fun bunch of flickr photos: Don't litter.

I did my final November run tonight after work. It was a beautiful night for a run, with a full moon that gleamed on the water like a Love Boat backdrop. I enjoy nighttime running much, much more than early-morning running. Especially since when I run at night, it's at cool, flat Crissy Field, with sparkling views of the Bay and bridge, whereas when I run in the morning, I finish every run with an uphill slog and, honestly, it's the morning. I'd rather be in bed.

Tomorrow I will sleep in, and I won't feel bad about it. But after work, I dunno, I might just head to a spin class or something. It would be weird not to do something.

Our plane from Chicago landed at SFO at 11pm last night, almost an hour ahead of schedule. Good thing, because by the time we got out of the terminal we had just a few minutes to spare before the final BART train of the evening pulled into the airport station. And we caught the second-to-last bus from our BART stop in the city to our street.

Including BART and bus fare, the round trip to the airport and back cost us $40, which is just a little less than a shuttle van would have cost. This year BART added an additional $2.50 surcharge to the regular train fare into the airport, a charge I find annoying and baffling. Shouldn't they be encouraging people to take public transit to the airport? For shorter trips, this fare increase would definitely be an incentive to drive to the airport for most people, especially if they are traveling with more than 2 people. If three people are paying $60 round-trip on public transit, it would be cheaper to park in long-term or off-site parking for three or four days and avoid the hassle of schlepping luggage around on public transit, missing a bus, etc.

Even worse, airport employees have to pay the surcharge just to get to work and back.

And: my brand-new Translink fare card didn't work the way it's supposed to. Although the bus driver was nice about it and didn't make me pay cash when my card failed me.

On the bright side, I hardly ever fly anywhere anymore, so I won't have to worry my little head about this stuff for a good long while.

After today, I have two days of running left in November. I'm pretty tired of running every day. I feel OK and don't have any pain or injuries, but the rice krispies in my knees are snap-crackle-popping more than ever. It would really gross you out if you could hear it. I also discovered a disconcerting lump on my ankle. It's in a spot where I had some mild pain over the summer. The pain went away long ago but now I have this bump which I only noticed because I happened to scratch the same spot. My guess is that it has been there for a while. At any rate, I'm looking forward to taking a day off of running. I might even get back on a bike!

It's beautiful, and I've walked and driven by many times, but I have never gone inside.

We drove by today on our traditional post-Thanksgiving pilgrimage: we visit family on the North Shore, then drive along the lake down to Evanston to see what has changed since our undergrad years at Northwestern. It's always quite different, and generally the changes are good. But one thing we were delighted to notice this time was that Kafein, a favorite college hangout of ours, was still there. They haven't even changed the very 90s-looking awning.

Along the way I wondered how baffled and entertained our 20-year-old selves would have been to see our 30-something-year-old selves trying to figure out the satellite radio and navigation in our borrowed car. I'm pretty sure our minds would have been blown.

A couple of months ago I spent a morning on a local trail pulling out what felt like tons of blackberry vines. I became really good at telling the difference between the native variety and the invasive Himalayan kind. Right now I wish I could tell you conclusively which type is pictured in this photo, but all I can really say is that it's probably Himalayan, because there's so much more of the invasive species than of the native. Which is pretty much true of anything, right? Like our Eurpoean ancestors who thrived here and crowded out the indigenous inhabitants of the land.

While I wish their arrival hadn't come at such a high cost to the natives, I am grateful to the inventors of our national eating day, having just consumed enough delicious food to keep me going for a week. Happy Thanksgiving to all!

My run today was two miles out in a completely straight line into a headwind, two miles back with a tailwind. Completely boring, but on a nice suburban parkway path. This is why I left Chicago: the winter is pretty when there's snow on the ground, but for the remaing five months between fall and summer it's just various shades of gray, brown, and bleh. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I just prefer the million shades of green we get all winter in California.

Today we left behind this gorgeous, clear, sunny fall day and flew into gray, rainy Chicago. I love it here in Chicago, I even love visiting out here in the suburbs, but I do wish the weather were either much better or much colder. I love running in the cold! Right now, it's basically the same temperature as it is back home, just wetter. I'm crossing my fingers that it will improve in time for me to burn off a bunch of calories Thursday morning.

Right before I took this photo, this paddleboarder caught a huge wave coming around Fort Point. And then he just turned around and paddled right back out. I was in awe. Of the paddling, the surfing, and the guts to do both right under the bridge. That spot always looks kinda crazy, with currents swirling in all directions. And certain people who shall remain nameless, people who swim in the murky, freezing bay waters every week during the summer, believe that getting within reach of the shadow of the bridge is practically like asking to get eaten by a large carnivorous sea creature with giant pointy teeth. Those creatures don't come into the Bay, but supposedly they like to hang out just outside it. (Insert shark movie music here.) (Oh, I said it! Shark!) (duh-duh! duh-duh!)

When I took this photo Dave and I were both spinning around on a merry-go-round in a deserted playground. I kept telling him to spin the thing faster. I regretted it when we finally stopped the thing and stepped off.

Or maybe what I regretted was the giant Czech beer I had had earlier that night. Either way, when I look at this photo I feel like my head is still spinning.