Dave

Last week a coworker mentioned she was going to a Dave Matthews Band (DMB) concert next Friday. I gasped, Dave? Here? Next week? Oh, well it must be looong sold out by now, and we don't have the money to blow on tickets. Au contraire! Tickets, she informed me, were still available by the plenty on Craigslist and strangely, even cheaper than their original cost. So, in typically shady fashion, we met a guy on a street corner that night and the deal was done.

Then came the concert. The stadium was hidden in a desert valley with suburbia ringing us on the hills above. We had invested in the cheapo lawn seats of course, so you can imagine our surprise when an official came up and asked us if we'd like to exchange our tickets for seats below! We agreed, and found our new seats, about 5 feet in front of the lawn from whence we'd come! A little disappointed, we spotted 3-4 rows of empty seats in the middle of the arena and made our way there. The opening act played, and then there was the customary 45min of twiddling thumbs waiting for the main act to get out of their dressing rooms. Suddenly the seats around us began to fill up - quickly! Before long the only seats free in our section were the three beside ours. Then as I sat crossing my fingers and toes that no one else would approach, a couple started making their way down our isle. And since there were no seats to the right of us, we had a suspicion that they were eyeing ours! As they stooped down to count the seats approaching ours, I starting picking up my things, sure that we were headed back to our original seats (now long taken by others)... then as they looked up at us and the guy began to mouth the words "I think we have those..." the lights miraculously shut off and Dave's guitar rang out in a long loud riff causing the crowd to erupt in cheers, and our dethroners to abandon their claim to our seats and take the ones beside ours. There was not a free seat around. The rest of the concert proceeded in Dave's usual fabulous style, complete with guest guitarist Tim Reynolds.

(sorry, I have no photos for this post as cameras, drinks, food and other necessities were banned from the arena in the hopes that you would fork over the millions of dollars that the stadium wanted you to pay to purchase them inside)

The secret to SoCal seclusion

Another hectic week gone by as Brent and I tackle our various workloads at IRC.


Mine is particularly hectic at the moment as I'm down to my last week at the organisation and only finished my last focus group today! I'm 70% done my data analysis for the interviews I conducted, I haven't even started the data analysis of the focus groups and haven't written so much as an outline for the final report I'd like to write (did I mention I only have 7 days left?)! Nevertheless, my efforts seem to be getting noticed as my supervisor talks with increasing frequency of getting me back at IRC when I'm done at IPJ. The most promising of these plans is to have me head up a domestic violence prevention program at IRC, which would be fantastic (provided of course, that we could get funding... I sense more volunteer grant writing as a precursor!). And since there are no guarantees about my dream job at IPJ materialising soon after I finish my Peace Writer position, IRC could be a good place to work in the interim.


Brent on the other hand is well into the refugee assistance agencies' busiest time of year! To top off a ridiculous work load his case managers have been falling sick, requesting time off (especially our Muslim coworkers who would all like to be off for some or most of Ramadan next month), volunteers are leaving to go back to school, and there's some staff shifting, which has had him interviewing internal candidates- always a hard job. He also has a speech to prepare for a statewide resettlement conference in LA on the relatively obscure Bhutanese refugees, a group that his IRC office doesn't even serve! A task that he is understandably nervous about undertaking.


So, this past weekend we decided to give ourselves a mini-break before we can escape this mayhem for the tranquility of Vermont next week. We decided on a 5 mile hike in Torrey Pines state park. What we hadn't factored in was the bane of San Diego's scenic outings- people. And where there are people in SoCal, there are cars. Lots and lots of cars! The parking lots were full. The overflow parking lots were full. The sides of the road were blocked off as no-parking. After circling full lots, getting stuck in the gridlock of everyone else looking for parking spots, and turning back and forth looking for parking lots/roads/or a free ditch on divided highways, we said to heck with it and started heading back. Then we saw a little turnoff that said "glider port" and a huge, almost empty PARKING LOT! We made the turn and found ourselves on a 300ft cliff over the Pacific ocean. At first we were distracted by the paragliders suspended a few meters from us, but at the bottom of the cliffs lay the real treasure - a beautifully secluded, relatively unpopulated, pristine, sandy beach!


The next obstacle was how to scale the cliffs down to the grail below. After nearly venturing down the horizontal cliff, we asked some paragliders and were directed to the slightly less treacherous (but nevertheless cordoned off) eroding, switchback path. We made our way down the 300 ft decent, thinking this must be the key to keeping a beach semi-private in San Diego. As we finally reached the sand, however, we realised there was another factor drawing people away from or to, Black's beach: a relatively prevalent disregard for clothing.



From 2yrs to 82yrs, frolickers sunbathed, swam, surfed or strolled; a few in suits but most in their birthday suits (nothing in between it seemed). Unfortunately, while the beach had a few hundred beach bums (excuse the pun - it was Brent's), we only saw 4 women. There might have been more down the more populated "gay" end of the beach, but where we plunked our towel it was mainly us and a lot of 40-80yr old men. I have to say though, spending an afternoon around nudity makes you remember that the human body is a very natural thing, and it was nice to see so many people comfortable in their skin.



I tried to snap some photos, but it took 4 hours for me to get a shot that didn't catch any bare bottoms (or any other bits), so as to not give the subjects of my photo the wrong idea.




Hope you're all well. Brent and I are really looking forward to seeing many of you in Vermont next week, though I'm still sad that I'm not able to see all my friends who are home in Victoria at the moment. At least Lindsay (and maybe mom?) will be coming to see us when we get back! In the meantime, we've got a Dave Matthews concert on Friday night, and our 4 year anniversary together tomorrow to celebrate.















Thinking of you all,

Jen and Brent

Close encounters of the shark kind

A few days before we left for San Diego there was a shark attack reported off the SoCal coast (there are more great white attacks off the Cali coast than anywhere else on earth - 70+ over the last 5 decades, compared to around 40 off Australia and South Africa - however, the majority of these occur in a triangle from just north of San Fransisco to Monterrey and are not deadly- the sharks are just "curious" apparently... [most] humans don't have enough fat to be worth eating. Unfortunately, this attack was fatal). As soon as my parents heard they immediately banned us from swimming, surfing, or walking within 20ft of the ocean in our new home. Luckily, by the time they came to visit and saw that the ocean here is as beautiful and rejuvenating as anywhere else, their staunch opposition faded to a more reasonable level of general parental warning.

So, I hope they will read this post till the end before phoning us in a panic asking if we're in one piece, or booking the next emergency flight south.

Yesterday Brent and I got to swim with Leopard sharks. We had bought some snorkeling gear Friday night as our attempt at snorkeling last weekend had been thwarted by a lack of available rentals in La Jolla. La Jolla cove (pictured right) is a tiny cove in San Diego's swankiest neighbourhood, and part of a protected marine park, making it a prime snorkeling destination - hopefully now a regular pastime of ours.

We set off early yesterday morning to make it there in time to snag the most valuable resource of all - a parking spot. As soon as we got into the crowded cove, we could see why it was so popular. At shin-deep there were already schools of tropical fish - iridescent striped, fluorescent orange and silver-blue with bright aquamarine "eyes" on their tales. We swam out to get away from the crowd, but the visibility got worse and the fish disappeared. We kept swimming deeper, along the steep cliffs where pelicans seem to spend the day, hoping to find a more remote cove to explore. However, when we saw a group of young seals on the shore a few meters away I decided we should give them some room, remembering the aggressive warnings of the massive sea-lions off Trial Island when our kayaks would venture too close to the moms and pups. I was not in the mood to encounter a 500lb over-protective papa seal ramming us in the water!

We were crossing the large bay in I-don't-want-to-imagine-how-deep water, and were just about to turn back when an old man swimming towards us stopped to ask if we were strong swimmers. Um, generally speaking, sure...? He recommended we keep swimming the remaining 3/4 of a mile across the bay to the shallow shores in front of a swanky restaurant where a once a year phenomenon had arrived early - hundreds of Leopard sharks had arrived in the bay for who-knows-what. They are 4-5 ft long and harmless to humans, so a real diving/snorkeling treat. So, we hunkered down and started a looong front crawl through big swells trying to keep our heads up to watch for big seaweed beds and the throngs of inexperienced recreational kayakers transversing the bay.
As we finally approached the opposite shore, it struck us that at some point soon we would have to put our heads back in the water, and that we would likely come face to face with a shark. This of course was a bad time to realise we were terrified of what we had come all this way to see. So, we tried to calm ourselves, stay steady in the now crashing waves and look down into the shallow water. The visibility was still poor, but as the water was only about 6ft deep we could see the bottom clearly. It only took us a second before a large brown-black mottled shape snaked underneath us. Then another...and another. Coming three or four at a time, the 4-5ft long sharks would swim deftly along the bottom, only occasionally rolling over to reveal their silver-white bellies. They took no notice of us as long as we stayed still. However, this meant going with the rise and fall of the huge swells above, which brought us from our birds-eye view of the Leopard sharks, to descend rapidly to within a foot of rubbing our bellies on their dorsal fins!

After we'd had our voyeur's fill, the chilly water and proximity to noon convinced us to get out and walk the mile back to the cove rather than turn around and repeat the swim. Walking in a bikini (me), swim trunks (B), barefoot and carrying snorkeling gear, alongside La Jolla's exclusive, multi-million dollar real estate and highways turned out to be a bit of a sight for the locals. Though they were often more interested in from where we'd appeared than how we were attired.

Well that's all for me. Another weekend has flown by with too-little rest, and the Sunday night bustle of getting lunches and gym bags ready for 5:45am is already upon us.

Hope you're all well, and for those of you (Erika, Aiden, Tim? and Cat) who are heading to Victoria for a bit this month, I wish I was there to see you.

Buenos noches,

Jen

p.s. this photo shows you the bay we swam across. The cove is out of the frame in the lower right side of the photo, and the sharks were along the shore by the buildings in the upper left part of the photo.