Marian & Marco Tie The Knot

Location: Casa Real, Pleasanton, California

 

THX ILMN

seen pulling into work. that’s some company spirit.

3 Sisters Waterfalls Hike

Descanso, California

Distance: 4 miles

3 sisters falls is a great workout! For a hilarious read, check out the yelp reviews (here) and you’ll find the largest variance in experiences. Some range from “this was so easy” to “this was so intense a few guys had to get helicoptered out!”

This hike has it all, it’s part hike, part sliding, and part rock climbing. It starts out with one path but halfway through there are many routes to the falls and it becomes a mini choose-your-own adventure! Do you cross the stream or do you continue along the same side? Do you jump over to the huge rocks or do you find a safer route? Should you brush against those 3 leafed branches that look an awful lot like poison oak?

At the end is a pretty neat but kind of smaller-than-in-real-life-than-pictures waterfalls. It’s a good time to go right now just as the rains have come through a few weeks back and the springs are gushing with water. A few months later and I hear the springs dry down to a trickle.

There are portions of this hike that are so steep you really need shoes with some type of grip. That or you could resort to sliding on your butt because for those portions, you don’t really hike down, you control slide down. There’s nothing scarier than having someone behind you with that slipping sound!

When you get to the falls, the water is frigid, even if it’s pretty hot. You could attempt to slide down the waterfalls but the bottom pools are so shallow you’re really risking some broken bones. so yeah. not as fun for water as the devils punch bowl hike but still a fun workout!

There were points where I legitimately felt someone could get dangerously hurt. It’s amazing there aren’t more accidents up there but if you’re safe, know your physical boundaries, and don’t try to impress everyone insight…it’s a decent adventure.

      

It’s called 3 sisters falls for a reason and after you get to the first falls you need to do some mild rock climbing and slight more dangerous maneuvering to get to the 2nd and the 3rd. Above is the 2nd sister.

Here’s where my fear of heights really started tingling and almost got me caught in a bad position. Some guys took my phone over to the waters edge and snapped the following shot. Don’t know how people can get so close to the edge and not be afraid…crazy. The view from atop the 3rd sister.

Daylight Savings Grill Cleaning

Spring time is here so it’s time to fire up the grill. Wanted to grill a few weeks ago but when I went to opened it up, it was NASTY. I tried cleaning it myself, letting the grill slots soak in detergent for a good few hours but it was futile. This thing was grimey and carcinogenic laced. I’m not sure the previous owner ever cleaned it. I called in the pros.

Could they restore this Bully beast to it’s former glory?

San Diego BBQ Cleaners: www.sdbbqcleaners.com

Professional, fast, chill guys who did their thing and taught me a few things about the grill. Found these guys online. I noticed that having a clean, easy client experience seriously goes a long way. The owner (Blake) was working at poseidon restaurant over in del mar as a server and was doing this on the side 3 days a week until business took off. Now him and another guy who used to be the bartender at poseidon service the larger SD area. Always cool to hear guys who have the guts to go out and do their own thing. Great experience, highly recommend these guys.

Let the grilling season begin!

A Co-worker’s Farewell Gift

J’s a great guy. Ultimate frisbee enthusiast and great teammate.

A few months ago when J left for a vacation, my team decided to hook up a mouse to a really long extension to his computer. One of my coworkers made sure we didn’t use a wireless because those have register devices pop ups every once in a while (apparently he’s done this before). J and I have a half wall separating us and after J came back from his trip I wiggled the mouse. He got really tripped out and called one of the guys (who was in on it) over to see if he was seeing things at which point I stopped moving the mouse and our team had a good laugh.

Except we sort of didn’t tell him what was really happening and sort of forgot the mouse was still connected. A few days later I grabbed the wrong mouse and heard a  “what the…” followed by a “bang bang bang” as he slammed his mouse a few times on the desk. Should have stopped there…but we sort of didn’t.

It’s been a few months now, we’ve had a dozens of opportunities to stop. J’s leaving for greener pastures so as a farewell gift we revealed our mischief.

Now that we think about it, is he leaving because of us?! Oh man, we hope not. Gonna miss you J!

Heather & Hua

Location: San Gabriel, California

John, over at Simplytwo and I had a chance to work together to capture Heather and Hua’s big day. There were 2 moments that I did not capture that day that really stick in my mind and caught me off guard.

In the morning as we’re getting ready and you see the bride getting ready in the video, what you don’t see is downstairs Heather’s mom and her mom’s friends are cooking up a storm. It’s going to be a party and these ladies can cook! They’ve got the old school propane burners and woks downstairs and the smell wafts upstairs to where we were seated. It was like a mix of paradise and torture. While the bridal party headed out for the rest of the day’s festivities, Heather’s parents were enjoying their feast. Jealous!

Hua grew up with Craig (best man) here in San Diego and Craig flew in from Australia for this big day. As we sat in the hotel after the tea ceremony, Craig was talking to Hua’s parents and I happened to catch part of the conversation. I realized Craig’s speaking Spanish (Craig is Latino) and I’m thinking “wow, Hua’s parents (who are Chinese) are incredibly kind and patient” because they’re just nodding and smiling. Suddenly, Hua’s dad starts responding in super fluent Spanish too! My jaw dropped. This wasn’t slow, high school level Spanish, this was 100 mph fluency. Amazing.

Those were two of the many moments in the day that stick out in my mind. The rest of the day flew by like a blur and I’ve recreated the feeling with a focus on the moments we’ll look back and remember years from now. So enjoy…and don’t blink!

Runners Challenge: Carlsbad Half Marathon

 don’t commit to stupid things

that’s my 2013’s new year resolution. well unfortunately this commitment was made in 2012…but no more committing to stupid things! (Runners Challenge: the Triple Crown)

Skies were grey all week and threats of storms and rain dampened the excitement heading into the race for these brave runners. Various plot lines brought together this little group today.

Eugene and I were first timer half-ers, E loves to bring up that fateful day he read the Triple Crown challenge post and thought to himself “how hard could this be?” E’s a natural though and a few weeks into training he was breezing through 4-5 mile runs at 8-9 min pace times. Unfortunately 10 days before the race E’s daughter caught pnemonia and passed a little to him. Heading into the race, E was still sporting a cough…things weren’t looking good.

Stephanie had finished the nike women’s half last year up in the bay and has signed up for the Triple Crown challenge…she’s in it to win it! Last year around this time she probably would say that she would have struggled to complete 3-4 miles. Now she’s tackling not one, not two, but three 13.1 races in one calendar year. Amazing!

Patty is plain ridiculous. A last minute addition, she bought her bib off another runner on craigslist. She and I ran 5 miles last week in one of my last tune up runs and thought “this could be fun”. Patty’s the veteran of the group, having completed a full marathon before and is schedule to run the La Jolla half this year. Patty runs quite regularly but she didn’t train for this half at all. Who does this stuff for fun?!

Katie is also a running fiend. She just likes running. there’s not much more to explain there because I’d have to comprehend it to explain it, but I can’t. Ask her to run a 5K, 10K, 13.1 mi or even 26.2 with you…she’ll want to do it. Tell her they’ll hand out chocolate afterwards and she gets even more excited, which apparently, there’s a run for that too (chocolate run).

Then there’s yours truly. I went into this with some really low goals in mind; (1) finish (2) 11 min pace. that was about it. trained up to 9-10 miles and hoped adrenaline the day of would provide the rest.

Weather turned out to be pretty awesome for running, a little drizzle during the morning run but stopped just an hour before the half. The plan heading in was to up my pace each 4 miles and save enough to make a strong push at the end. Adrenaline and shot bloks do help quite a bit. Unfortunately knee and ankles began to act up at the tail end at the 11 mile mark as my form went totally out the window, stomping my way to the end. Lungs were totally fine as I crossed which means I definitely can up the pace considerably.

Great times by everyone and big thanks to Syl, Fontaine, and Bao for the hearty cheers! Knees and joints are recovering slowly today but surely. Props to Eugene for beasting it through the day!

Now with a proper baseline…is it time to set a goal for a sub 2 hr half?  don’t commit to stupid things. We’ll have to see.

la jolla half anyone?

New Year. New Blog. New Ways. New Things.

Hey guys! Happy new year again!

It’s been a while since a meaningful update has occurred and  it gives me such great pleasure to unveil this new website. My site over at kreptonic.wordpress.com is still up for now. This has been quite an incredible learning experience and there is so much more to learn.

So please have a poke around and let me know what you think! And if any of you is a wordpress/web expert, please let me know!

It also gives me immense pleasure to release my latest music video project. It’s the return to the screen for an artist. I’ll leave the introduction for him to disclose at another time.

Backstory:

I’ve been a big fan of this song for a long time now. It’s never been released (you heard it here first!) but whenever I heard that opening stanza I always imagined we’d shoot this video at an airport. Problem is that security at airports are crazy and you can’t just walk into an airport and start recording stuff.

Soundtrak and I are both from the bay area and we bump into each other on the same flights quite a few times. Every time we do we start talking about video ideas. This time flying back over xmas break we happened to be on the same flight again and this time I happened to have my gear with me. The flight was also originally delayed an hour but then moved back up to its original time so we suddenly would have some time at the tail end to shoot if this was gonna happen. 

The whole thing almost fell apart because in order to shoot it, we needed the middle seat on the plane to be empty to have a space in between us. We put a bag in between our chairs and it felt like that forrest gump moment on the bus when a person walks by and we’d have to say “seats taken”. Fortunately we didn’t have to, plane was empty enough

By the time we got to San Jose we had an empty terminal and just had a blast shooting this. I hope you all enjoy it and send Soundtrak some love…he’s itching to get back into doing music and videos. Share it around!

2013: January Works In Progress

“excited” doesn’t begin to describe the half of it. stay tuned!

Jing & Chris Tie the Knot