Daft Musings

We wanted to make sure we waited until we got our deposit back, but besides the benefits of having a nice office downtown, there was another angle to why we moved from our offices in Santa Clara. It was really an escape from a dark being whom I can’t name because it seems most of my blog hits come from obsessed egosurfers, like talent-challenged wanna-be rockers, and smug bicyclists. This particular entity has a lot of clout and power, and I’m sure he has a small army of minions just to egosurf the web for him, so I shall not mention his name. But let me just say that he’s portrayed quite amusingly by Ray Wise on the TV series Reaper.

In fact, Ray (as I shall call him, not to be confused with the actual actor), our former Santa Clara landlord, reminded Peter of Ray Wise’s character in Reaper. Since Ray had offices downtown, he came over to chat with Peter. Peter said he was very chatty and cheery, but just like Ray Wise’s character, he wasn’t about to give us a break.

The story all started when the office building our Santa Clara office was in was sold to Ray. Shortly thereafter, Peter noticed a huge $450 CAM surcharge on his rental invoice. CAM stands for Common Area Maintenance and it’s often written in so landlords can assess a charge for special maintenance needs, like fixing a broken roof. Peter called about it, and was told he was going to be assessed the $450 CAM charge until he renewed the lease a few months later. So, ok, we effectively got a 25% surcharge on our rent, without having been warned beforehand, as would normally be the case….

Peter actually didn’t see the CAM charge again until few months later, when he was due a month of rent, since he had paid for it up front as part of the lease negotiation. Surprise! All the money was gone, because instead of billing continuing CAM charges up front, Ray had applied them towards the credit Peter had. And what where these huge CAM charges paying for? The excuses were something like this:

First of all, the transfer of the property had increased the property tax, so tenants had to cover it. One of the tenants needed less space, so their space had to be redesigned. Another tenant wanted a build out. And because of all the construction, the building suddenly had to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, so all the doors had to be replaced with shorter doors, including the doors in the bathrooms. Did I mention there are no rules or restrictions on how a landlord can decide to apply CAM charges?

Not a single one of these changes was to our benefit, by the way, and in fact, it made our space worse. The upstairs bathrooms were closed for construction, so if we needed to use a bathroom, we had to go downstairs, either via the slow, hinky elevator, or down some stairs, outside the building, and then back in. Try that with a distracted four-year-old!

I used to prefer parking in the back and going up the back stairs which were closest to the office, but that became out of the question:

And after some inexplicable flooding, some torn-up pavement was never replaced. The flooding doesn’t seem to have helped the landscape either. It used to be green and flush. When we left, it all looked like this:

Most of the time, the hallway was being banged upon by construction workers, sometimes loud enough that we couldn’t talk to customers on the phone, and it looked like this:

Now, if we re-upped our lease, Ray was willing to drop the huge CAM charges (until he found another reason to attach them to the monthly rent invoice). But even Peter who’d been steeled for an increase, was shocked when Ray told him how much he wanted. It was twice as much per square foot as any of the nearby office buildings. In fact, one of the suites we’d considered renting two years before had remained empty during all the ensuing years, and the building right across the street was completely empty: they were going begging for half the rate, and Ray wanted more than even offices downtown were charging?

What was Ray thinking? Peter thinks he had bigger plans for a spiffy building that maybe someone somewhere wants: and who knows, maybe he (like the other hopeful office building owners in the area) will find that flush tenant eager to pay top dollar for their very building. But we aren’t that.

In the end, it worked out for us. Our new offices are a lot closer to home, and as you can certainly tell by my blog entries, we’re lovin’ downtown. Peter made sure to ask for a cap on the CAM charges, and he got 0% rate written into the lease. And the offices face a Catholic cathedral, so maybe, just maybe, Ray won’t be tempted to buy our building and put us in his clutches again.

Oh, and even though we had to argue about it somewhat, we got our deposit back. There’s still a key card reader we left behind in a door, but we’d rather Ray hang on to it than have to face another mysterious charge from him.

Two factors have put downtown San Jose high on our favored fun destination list this summer. Peter has an office right in the center of it, so we can drop in any time and even leave a few things behind. And we can walk to our light rail station and have fun taking a train ride there, without having to burn any increasingly-precious gasoline.

The day after Neil graduated from elementary school (and before Charybdis and Scylla started its summer session the following Monday), we headed out for one of our “Day in San Jose” adventures. As it was, we couldn’t fit in all we wanted to see.

First, we joined Peter at the farmer’s market on San Pedro Street. It’s a great farmer’s market, with a little bit for everyone, from foodie to gourmand to gourmet to urban shopper. There were booths with crafted jewelery, unique cheeses, local honeys, gourmet salts, heirloom vegetables, pastries, ethnic luncheon food, and fancy chocolates. I bought some broccoli, garlic, and strawberries. Later for lunch, I bought some samosas, since the only samosas I’d ever had were cold, gross ones in London. I had high hopes for San Jose samosas, but even heated up, they were still gross.

Discovery Park had an interactive sculpture in place, but only for a temporary time, and I really wanted to see it. From afar, it looks like a monkey carousel:

When you get up close, you could see that it was surrounded by decorative drums. To get the monkeys moving, you had to drum on the drums for several minutes, as you see Kelly doing here:

The monkeys would start circling above. At night time, you could see the strobe effect that made it look like they were leaping, but during the day time, you could get the same effect by pulling down and placing one of the monkey masks against your face. Here’s a monkey mask, not on my face:

I thought the sculpture was cool and inventive, but Neil was thoroughly creeped out by it. He thought it was like some sort of evil cultish ritual. So at his insistence, we stopped our drumming and went to the Children’s Discovery Museum.

Neil, bless him, is still imaginative enough to enjoy it, and of course, Kelly can’t get enough of it. The new temporary exhibit there was an Alice in Wonderland exhibition, and Neil delighted in playing through the Alice in Wonderland room and its doors:

and playing with the odd golf games. Kelly, meanwhile, was fully entertained just hosting a tea party with a toy tea and pies set. We finally broke away, only to find that the museum had also installed a new ball machine, which Neil took care to study and master:

We try to see a variety of museums when we spend a day downtown, so I reluctantly pulled the children away for lunch. Afterwards, we went to The Tech and found out that museum admission also includes an IMAX movie these days. Well, it was a real treat to be able to see an IMAX movie, so we watched The Alps about one man’s daring climb up the steepest face of the Eiger Mountain. After that, we barely had some time to explore the museum, before I took the children over to the downtown library, where there was a special father’s day craft and play hour in the childrens’ section.

The activity turned out to be less structured than I thought it would be: basically a few games were out for children to play, and Kelly colored in a father’s day picture with the available crayons. But it was still fun. One of the librarians noticed Neil’s interest in science and showed him the library’s science experiments section, just for kids like him. Kelly played with the letters, and I selected some books for the next weeks’ lessons. I happened to overhear some mothers speaking what sounded like French: this is, it was French, and then it would turn into something that was not French and was incomprehensible. I finally got up the courage to ask them if they were speaking French, and if so, what form of French it was. It turned out they were from Senegal, and they were speaking mostly French with some Senegalese (they called it “tribal”) phrases mixed in. Like most Anglophohes, I’d assumed the default African language was English, so it was nice to learn something new about Africa, namely that French is spoken in Senegal.

Evening was coming on by now, so we had to head home, but we felt we’d missed out on so much that we returned the following Tuesday after lessons so Neil could have more time at the Tech. This time, Peter joined Neil to see Pulse: A Stomp Odyssey in the IMAX theatre, and Kelly and I went to the Childrens’ Discovery Museum, where Kelly was fascinated by the circles section:

And the Tuesday after that, I was feeling museum deprived, so I used my nifty San Jose Art Museum membership to see the Quilt Museum, which I’d never seen. It went way beyond quilts, to my delight. It did have a selection of particularly interesting quilts, by a local quilter, who’d turned each square into a limerick or a mini-poem, and had them themed, to say, American presidents, or hats. I had thought their Beyond Knitting exhibit was about making 3D shapes with knitting, but it was more like the Art Wear exhibit I’d loved at the Legion of Honor a few years back. In brief, artists had knitted a variety of materials (yes, yarn, but also metal and plastic) into creative expressions that included stuff like a knitted Capitol building, an oil slick bird, and full body costumes. A third room had costumes from a Javanese performance piece. Last of all, there was a small display of anemones, all knitted. The museum is small, but it’s in a neat corner of downtown, surrounded by theatres, clubs and other fun things, so I think (especially thanks to my all-museum-access type membership) we’ll be back.

There’s still a lot to do and see downtown, and I look forward to more of our adventures.

It had been a long time since I’d gone to see a movie in a movie theatre, so long that the Camera Cinemas discount card (10 movies for $50) I still had had been phased out for a new one (10 movies for $60). But this month, I got back into the habit of seeing summer movies with my children. In 2005, we had one such summer, when I saw every G and PG movie that was released (all 5 of them!) We didn’t do it again, mostly because Neil isn’t so much of a movie person, and it was cheaper to spend a day in Golden Gate Park or at the beach.

But, as we all know, this year travelling anywhere is a lot more costly, and I’m personally on kind of a gas strike. Furthermore, Peter’s offices are now right downtown, three blocks away from a Camera Cinema, and Camera Cinemas is still doing its “Diaper Days” movies for young families.

On the 18th, we took advantage of the Diaper Days event to see Kung Fu Panda. It pretty much had the typical “believe in yourself” storyline, but it was a lot of fun. In particular, it had a funny, cute and unforgettable dumpling chase; a few clever twists; and a nice soundtrack. Kelly’s been doing Kung Fu Panda kung fu moves ever since, so I know it delighted her.

When I found out Kelly could still get into the movies without a ticket aside from Diaper Days, we had a special treat and all of us saw Get Smart together. I was somewhat nervous about it because it has a PG-13 rating, but Neil loved The Pink Panther with Steve Martin, and the preview for Get Smart, with another bumbling-but-clever hero had him interested in the movie.

Reviewers had put the movie down for not being true to the TV series, for which I have to quote Peter: “Are all movie reviewers crotchety 60-year-olds?” I think I’ve only seen two or three episodes of the TV show, and that only in daytime TV re-runs. It struck me as kind of dorky and not very funny then, but I didn’t know whether this new movie would be better or worse.

The movie turned out to be great. It made a brief nod to the old TV series, most notably when Maxwell Smart switches into the old suit and tries to make a getaway in the classic car (which promptly runs out of gas.) It was smart, funny, and clever and it turns a few cliches on the head: for instance, the geeks get their revenge, a fat girl triumphs over some stuck-up socialite girls, and the bad guy’s lackey gives the bad guy his comeuppance. It was a wonderful movie to watch together as a family, though Kelly cringed (and I helped her hide her eyes) during some action sequences with fighting. It was absolutely better than the TV series, which is dear only to wrinkly newspaper writers.

The Tech has also changed its admission prices so that seeing the museum now also includes admission to an IMAX movie. So I think, like 2005, this may once again be a summer of movies for our family.

Last Saturday, we had decidedly weird weather. Although it was supposed to be horrifically hot, sudden rain showers broke out twice, and some of the guests at the party we were at reported seeing lightning strikes without thunder. Since then, we’ve had so many wilderness fires in Northern California that every day has been hazy, and the air leaves us sneezing or with scratchy throats (though it’s not so bad IMHO that we have to stay indoors, as some people are doing.)

Anyway, as we came home from the party, my neighbor Amanda was out and she warned me that we were having earthquake weather. She had an uncle, she said, who was sensitive to it, and he’d put out the word to remain careful and aware for the next few weeks.

Now I know most people, including seismologists, don’t believe in earthquake weather. But it is a matter of serious lore among Californians. Those of us who experienced the 1989 earthquake and were outside that day remember how hot and still the weather was that day, and how it just set people on edge. It was just that irritation that had me on an early bus home (instead of staying after work with friends) that day, and as a result I wasn’t stranded in San Francisco that evening. But my sense is certainly skewed. I remember sensing earthquake weather in October of 2002, but nothing ever happened, and I didn’t feel anything before last year’s October quake.

It’s hard to describe earthquake weather, since it’s more of a sense than a description. As far as I know it, it’s hot, still weather, that’s somewhat odd for the season, and has animals (and even some people) out of sorts. It was Saturday’s weather, which was not predicted. Even the birds made themselves scarce, which disappointed Kelly, since she’d made a birdseed cookie and hung it up for our local finches.

Peter’s still skeptical, so he asked me to set the criteria, and I said it would have to be a quake strong enough for us to feel within the next week or two. So far, we haven’t had any such quake, so I’m putting Amanda’s prediction out here. She said her uncle had correctly predicted our October 2007 quake, as well as the Loma Prieta quake. If there’s something to earthquake weather, presumably we’ll know soon.

This month, I continued my goal to spend only $100 on gasoline for the entire month. I’d barely managed in in May, and this month I didn’t have to drop off and pick up a husband at the San Francisco airport. On the other hand, gas prices jumped (roughly averaged) from about $3.90/gallon in May to $4.48/gallon now which meant that $100 was going to buy me a lot less miles.

I was pretty hardcore in my efforts, though not yet to the extent of giving up my car altogether. While Neil’s elementary school was still in session, I took two hour walks just to pick him up and lead him home. I’ve become familiar enough with the public transportation system near me to know the frequency and even the schedule of the lines near my house. I carefully plan and schedule any driving so if it’s possible to combine errands along the same route, I do. And I’ve stayed close to home, so the longest trip I’ve taken was to the County Educational Center 11 miles away, and excursions with the kids has generally consisted of going downtown or to a local park.

Honestly, it hasn’t always been fun or easy to be on a gas strike. A heat wave hit just before Neil’s school ended, and I looked so bedraggled on the last leg home that a passer-by worried about my welfare. (I drove for the last few days, taking that as a sign that it was just too d**n hot.) Yesterday, I walked to a store and it didn’t have what I wanted, so I wasted two hours on what might normally have been a 20-minute task. Riding public transport, walking, and even biking do take up hours I would be doing something else, like, um, blogging.

However, my ascetic frugality paid off far better than I expected it to. On June 2, I bought $40 worth of gasoline at $4.18 a gallon, which seemed outrageous enough at the time. My “you need gasoline” light didn’t come on in my car until last Friday. I might be able to stretch the gasoline through the end of the month, since there are only 3 neccessary driving trips left, which at most comes to 23 miles of driving, which will consume less than a gallon of gas. Alas, I’ll fill up anyway, because I don’t want to risk being out of gas and stranded. So I can’t keep the bragging rights of only keeping to $40 in a month. But it hasn’t been that impossible to drastically reduce my gas consumption, and it’s my only weapon against the skyrocketing prices.

My Greek neighbor Marcella is a veritable goddess of the garden. Anything she plants takes root and thrives, even in placements my gardening guides and nursery advisors admonish against. In her garden, tomatoes grow in the shade, flowers bloom while all crowded into a corner together, and her trees continue to regrow and fruit no matter how severely she cuts them down in the fall. She has a tiny vineyard which is expanding itself, with no help from her; an orchard of oranges, tangerines, (two kinds of) lemons, kumquats, grapefruits and cherries; a fabulous flower farm; and a variety of plants and bushes I don’t understand, all in the space of a backyard smaller than mine. To my over-read surprise, she thinks nothing of the weeds that encroach and threaten her vegetables: heck, if she feels like it she’ll turn them into a salad.

This year, when she mentioned she needed someone to take care of her plants while she was out of town for a month, I volunteered to do it in exchange for being able to glean her garden’s copious summer produce. Normally, she uses cookies to bribe a French Lebanese neighbor who shares the inscrutable Mediterranean gardening know-how to do the job. She agreed to let me do the watering this year, but I think we’re both a bit nervous about how the plants will pull through, given my long history of plant abuse, which I’m only beginning to overcome.

This year, to my surprise, my own little vegetable garden is doing quite well. I actually ended up with a glut of pumpkin plants, though it’s really Neil’s doing, not mine. He built me a giant pumpkin-growing contraption, and to our mutual surprise, it really worked. Marcella gave me some new tomato plants from her garden, and I showed them to her as they were on the verge of dying, just like the tomato plants she’d given me the year before. She watered them once, and they’ve been thriving since. The rest of my plants, like lettuce, green onions, peppers, a watermelon plant, and a late-blooming but proliferate heirloom broccoli plant, are also growing, which is pretty good. On the other hand, I dug up some lavender plants I loathed and gave them to Marcella, but they’d been neglected so brutally for so long, and dug up with so little care, that even she couldn’t save them. I think that’s when she started to get really worried about my ability to keep her plants alive.

During the week before she left, Marcella showed me how to water her garden, but I don’t think she was comfortable trusting me with the hose. I vaguely got the idea that some plants need a lot of water every day; some plants need some water once a week; the trees need a good soaking every two weeks; and don’t soak that plant, because its pot has no hole and it will drown. Now I sneak in every day or so, grab a bunch of fruit and water everything. I feel like I’m committing a sin against nature just being there, and that the plants resent having me, instead of Marcella, doing the watering duty. The roses actually seem to be reaching out in order to scratch me up, and one exotic flower is already looking depressed. Oh, please, plants, don’t die!

In the hope of making up for any mishaps, I planted some of my extra pumpkin plants in the section where Marcella wanted to put the lavender plants, and I may move over the pumpkin growing contraption to give them an extra chance at life. And the French Lebanese woman is coming to take over from me during the last week of Marcella’s absence so all may end well, even if in a deus ex machina way. And, well, in the meantime, I’m well set with fresh oranges, tangerines, cherries, lemons,and tomatoes.

I don’t like to be a time hog when I take time off for myself, so after already indulging myself in an afternoon of magazine reading, I didn’t think I had time to check out the Zero 1 art festival. But as I was going past the art cars lined up along Plaza de Cesar Chavez, this car in particular caught my eye so I had to take a picture:

Kelly so loves riding in her wagon, and complains if we have to ride in my car instead. If she were of driving age, this is the car she’d want. That, and a fast bicycle…

There’s a lot to be said about San Jose’s relatively new library downtown, but I’ll focus this on one of the best, and the very worst. Just as context, the 8-story library located on the border between downtown San Jose and San Jose State, is a collaboration that combines both a city library and a college library. One bonus of this is that I can easily borrow the more academic books from not only San Jose State, but also other college libraries.

One of the other things I really love is the the library downtown is secretly an art museum as well. Besides the Beethoven Museum on the third floor, there’s a rotating art exhibit on the second floor. And built into the whole library are a whole lot of artsy surprises, like an Alice in Wonderland door at the back of one of the elevators, and a bathroom sink that shrinks the higher up it’s located. Despite all the exiting activities going the day I biked downtown on Saturday, I opted to spend my hours reading magazines in the library. And that’s how I discovered another artsy surprise: a 3rd floor reading nook. One of the tables was built like a bicycle:

And another was like a part of a classic car:

And I only noticed as I was leaving that Monarch butterflies were hanging from the ceiling above me. Unlike in a museum, I could sit and use the art tables, so I did.

Now on to the horrifically bad: the fact that entire sections of the library are being used as a flophouse by bums. Every few weeks, I go to get some Russian-language books for a disabled home-bound Ukrainian woman, and more often than not, Kelly comes along. While I’m selecting the books, I hear the sounds of loud snoring all around me. Last time, when I was in especially early, there was less snoring, but I saw a veritable parade of eager-eyed bums, pulling their suitcases heading to select a one of the plushy chairs that line the foreign language section. Call me paranoid, but I’m not that keen on having transients around while my 4-year-old daughter plays peek-a-boo among the stacks.

When I complained once, I was essentially told that the sleepers would be rousted if they were students, but if they were homeless, they were allowed to stay. That didn’t make any sense: so a San Jose State Student who accidentally fell asleep over a really boring text was bad, but a bum who’d been banned from a shelter for being too rowdy was just fine? A librarian friend who could be more candid finally gave me an answer that made sense. The city doesn’t condone its libraries being used to public housing; but San Jose State welcomes bums. That is the kind of stupid socialist thinking I hear about at state universities these days: those who pay for their services are scum, but the “poor and downtrodden” are welcome and wanted, no questions asked. Unfortunately, since the library is a collaboration between city and university, what is to be done about creepy snoring bums is an unresolved question.

So it’s a shame. My children love downtown, and I want them to enjoy the library’s whimsical art installations, vibrant and wide-ranging children’s section, and great selection of books. But the fact that it has so questionable characters using it as their home makes me uncomfortable about taking them there.

I was worried about creeping weight gain earlier this year, but in the past few weeks, I’ve lost all my excess weight, toned up, and been able to eat all the ice cream I wanted without repercussion: all because I’m so cheap I refuse to pay the going rate for gasoline.

Now instead of driving to and from Neil’s school in the afternoon a few days a week, I walk it most days of the week. Altogether it comes to 6 miles in 2 hours, while pulling Kelly in a Red Ryder wagon, which more often than not is also piled up with blankets, pillows, and (on the way over) Neil’s scooter, and (on the way back), Neil’s backpack and lunch box. Kelly loves the ride, Neil scoots home so he gets home faster, and I get exercise without feeling like I’m neglecting Kelly for an hour while I work out with a video.

I do have to honestly say, I’d rather be biking which (for me, on my bike) is 5 or 6 times faster than walking, and I am looking forward to Neil’s school ending, when I won’t have to trek so far. I like the results though and there is some Schadenfreude as I walk past my local gas station, where the prices sometimes rise three times a day, and have already gone past WTF levels. I think we’ll be doing more walking than usual this summer, while sticking closer to home.

Since shortly after we moved downtown, Peter has been biking to his offices downtown a few times a week via the Highway 87 Bike Path, which is paved, but mostly off-road. I’ve been intrigued by it, and I finally had a chance to bike it myself on Saturday, while Peter stayed home with the children.

Frankly, going from Peter’s descriptions of the path, and my own expectations, I was expecting something a lot worse than what I encountered. Peter described inexplicably confusing on- and off-ramps, overgrown paths, hilly sections, isolated-from-all-view sections, trucks intent on murdering bicyclists, and clueless pedestrians. That was all there, but I superimposed my mountain biking experiences on to that. In mountain biking, even the easiest trails have several 45-degree mountains that go on forever; rutted, rocky roads; fallen trees that you either have to jump over with your bike, or get off your bike and climb over (or under) while carrying your bike; slippery, narrow switchbacks; lumbering backpackers; and lanes one tire-width wide. By those expectations, the ride was amazingly easy, and it turned out Peter was emphasizing the worst of the ride just so I would be properly prepared.

The bike path ends and restarts in several residential sections, and we happen to be lucky enough to live right between two sections of the bike path. Getting onto the off-road section required a short ride across Capitol Expressway, passing the freeway onramp, and going a block further where the path picked up midway along a street via a cut in a the sidewalk.

The section between Hillsdale and the Curtner light rail station was a dream: almost level (at least by mountain biker standards!) it parallels the freeway. It started to descend, and thanks to Peter’s warning I slowed down instead of giving into the temptation to pop right out onto the street that I could coast down further downhill, I stopped and looked for traffic. According to Peter, this is the location of the murderous truck driver who roars up and down the hill to frighten the wits out of innocent bikers.

Peter had given me clear directions on how to get from this section of the bike path and on to the next, and without them, I would have assumed the bike path had ended altogether. There are no bike lanes, no signage, and you are likely to find yourself right in the middle of traffic beside (and even in between!) cars that are speeding up to get onto the freeway. As it is, you have to bike around the light rail station, under the freeway, and then follow cars towards the freeway until you find a weedy curb cut and take it in.

Peter’s not particularly fond of the section of the bike path between Curtner and Willow, in particular it runs between the CalTrain tracks and the freeway, and sometimes the curves and dips make for no or little visibility. There are also high weeds along the sides. At one point, the weeds are blocking one of the lanes in the bike path, but there was still plenty of room get around them without having to slow down. I was somewhat delighted by a crossing that lets commuters cross from the light rail station to the Cal-Train station. Peter had warned me to slow down to watch out for pedestrians (in fact I’ve done this crossing and never knew I was crossing a bike path), and I peeked into the Cal-Train station, which looked posh and empty. So I kind of liked this section because it was interesting, and sometimes fast because of the dips, but it’s probably more annoying to a bicycling commuter who just wants a ride without hassle or worry.

This portion of the trail ends in a cute Mexican neighborhood by Willow Street. It’s so cute, you really feel like pausing there for a moment to buy a soda at the little convenience store, or have some tamales at the little restaurant. Per Peter’s directions, I turned left at the chuch and biked down a row of pretty houses to the end of the road, where an entrance on the side of a gate put me on the Guadalupe River trail.

The Guadalupe River Trail is almost a maze with a lot of dead ends, but I followed Peter’s advice and just ramped up right into downtown, biked past Discovery Meadow and got onto San Carlos Street. I can’t judge on how many more people are biking instead of driving these days, but the bike rack by the Camera 12 Cinema where I parked my bike was quite popular on this Saturday morning:

Biking home was more eventful, because Peter had only described the trip up to me. I biked onto the Guadalupe River Trail early, took a wrong turn and ran into a dead end. A kindly homeless man who was bedding down under bridge (yes, a kindly homeless man!) gave me directions on how to get to the west side of the river, where the trail does not dead end. Even so, took it too far and had to bike up and around the Children’s Discovery Museum and down to cross the street across from a parking lot to pick up the section that would take me to Willow Street.

And the section around the Curtner Light Rail station was even more awful going back. Bad signage had me going up two wrong roads, until finally I found the road of the murderous truck driver (who was helpfully roaring up the road just then.) It had lots of “dead end,” “private property,” and “no trespassing” signs on it, but you still have to bike up the nasty grade covered in glass and dirt to get onto the bike path again.

Peter’s wondered who he’d call to get problems, such as the overgrown weeds, taken care of, but I told him the path is kind of a public orphan. Our local public transportation agency knows about it, and puts it on maps, but they say it belongs to the City of San Jose. The City of San Jose, on the other hand, always seems surprised to discover it has a bike path south of the Guadalupe River Trail. Personally, I’m just glad it’s there. It was fast, easy, and fun (except for the section by Curtner) to get downtown, and more rewarding in its results than mountain biking. In a way, I wish Kelly could still ride with me, so I could do it more often, but hopefully she’ll be ready for independent city biking in a few years. As it is, I think I’ll start doing the route when I can just for a fun ride and an outing downtown.