hike pics III

yet again!



more B&W.


awesome fun-gi


me n jesse at the awesome fun-gi

More Cali Pix - Dedicated to Bean

this goes out to the bean, who sent us some autumn. it's taken at least 2 days to get used to the cold here. i've been shivering a lot.... there's autumn everywhere - brown leaves falling and cold nights. bring on the bon-fires!



liz looking cute.



more river pics - an awesome chill spot.



Davenport beach, just north of santa cruz. we played with siltstone for quite some time

California Dankness - Forresty Goodness

So, after flying all night, we headed straight to a 2 day back-country camping/hiking weekend in big basin state park. awesome! the forrest floor was very wet. coastal redwoods are really tall. it's hard to catch their size..... the two days back country were a much needed break from civilized life.


a river near our campground




liz on top of da mountain



me n jesse on top of da mountain

Billy's Requested Scary Pic

Billy wanted this one - got machette?



afraid??

Turkey, hummous, and mamosa

so, we're in the middle of cooking liz's french onion soup cooking frenzy up at billy's place. this turkey day has turned out to be very interesting. we're doing the traditional hawaiian 'imu' cooking (traditionally a pig but today, turkey) in a pit in the yard. we spent the morning chopping down bananna tree's and collecting ti leaves for the steaming of the turkey. then we've been working on other strange things like french onion soup, hommous & pita, and other not-pilgrimish stuff.

Goin to California

Instead of taking a christmas break, Liz and I are taking a turkey-break, starting in 33 hours. I can't wait to get out into the mountains! See you guys mid-december.



Santa Cruz from the space station. Everybody wave at Jesse!!

BJJ Tournament

Saturday was the 'Hawaii Brazilian Jiu Jitsu State Championships', or at least that's what the flyer that our club put out says. A ton of people showed up. 250 competitors where the biggest ever before was 150. It was huge and way way too long but a lot of fun. We started with a crowd of several hundred at 9am, but by 930pm when my second set of matches started, there were about a hundred people sticking around. There are two types of match (divisions). "Gi" and "No Gi" A Gi is a uniform so either you're wearing it or not. This makes quite a difference because the gi is a heavy material with lots of sneaky places to grab and choke people with.... a lot like a suit. Anyways, when you're only wearing shorts it's a lot harder to hang on to somebody and pin them down. Here's a shot of the crowd at 10am during the kids rules-clinic.




I entered both divisions as a middle weight (162-174) at 168. There were ~10 guys in the "Gi" division so there were 4 fights to win. In the semi-finals I was against a really good MMA/No-Gi guy, Mike, who caught me in a knee-bar after ~3min. But, knee-bars were illegal in our match (dangerous) and the ref called it back. I ended up winning in points at the last second. I ended up in the finals against somebody from my school and since you don't fight a guy from the same school, we shared 1st/2nd. The guy was good (Gil) and usually beats me in class so I don't think I would have won gold but Gil didn't want it when I offered so we split it. It felt like a bit of an anti-climax since Mike got the knee-bar really good (we do those in class). It was against the rules and I won fairly, but some part of me thinks he should have won it. The knee-bar was damn smooth. I got to his back standing up, but as I tried to take him down he got my leg. Perfect defense.




The "No-Gi" set had only 8 guys but I liked that one a bit better. The climax was the finals against Rick (HMC?). He was really good at standup. He got a hold of my knee twice. The first time he picked me up and took me down, but the second time I pushed him to the side and took his back. On the way down I got lucky and sunk in a choke. He held on for 15 seconds!!!! It was an awesome feeling.





I'll have video's of some of the fights up at www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~dmh/ by this afternoon if anyone's curious.

it's 4am and i can't sleep, so i thought i would post some astronaut-photos. theres a very cool collection of pics taken from orbit that show some really unique perspectives on the planet. http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/EFS/ here's a few that i've grabbed.



here's where i work - haleakala, maui. if you zoom in to the triangle of clouds, you can see a white spec along a rift zone (line of circles). i use one of those.




da big ailan. i'll be there thurs-mon. liz is stuck in the kona side desert watching other people work to make sure that they don't do stupid things or cheat on their contract. it's a very interesting part of her job. if you don't send somebody to watch workers do what you hired them to do, it won't get done right and you'll be stuck with the bill because suing them is more costly than just eating it and hiring somebody else. so, she's on the top left side of the picure, counting how many times people pound the dirt that will become the dirt under houses.




honolulu, oahu. U. H. is the cluster of buildings right in the center, to the left of one of the ridges (brown fingers). diamond head (leahi) is in the bottom right, next to waikiki. the tourists flock to the little strip of white in the bottom of the pic.




ayers rock - a 1km tall rock in the middle of the australian desert has become a speck on this pic....




thanks to china's growing oil habit, and general environmental disregard in emulation of the rest of us, here's a nice stream of crap headed towards hawaii. interestingly enough, there's a species of tree on kauai that relies heavily on potassium from the gobi desert that is carried from chinas deep interior all the way here, along with plenty of that other junk. i've got another shot of an african dust storm that was making it's way across the atlantic somewhere....




the mountain in En-Zed that stood out the most. awesome hike!




the En-Zed thermal/volcanic area taupo/rotorua - we spent a ton of time there and i think got some of the best night pics ever. check out liz's NZ posts - she's been writing up a day-by-day travel log....