…or a cube of beef fat into a big, hot pan, followed by thin, delicate slices of well-marbled beef. Then comes the vegetables, tofu, mushrooms, scallions and yam noodles. Toss on some sake, mirin, shoyu, dashi and sugar and let simmer until the meat is just done and the veggies are tender. Scoop up on to a bowl full of rice, dip a morsel in raw egg and enjoy.
This dish is best enjoyed with a cold beer, with feet under a hot kotatsu table and a good movie.
Sukiyaki on a cold, dark night reminds me of living on Awajishima with Justin. Max and Mina, I will have to cook for you when we next meet…
I used to listen to Pandora 40 hours a week, only when I was working. I’d turn it down low and keep it running until I clocked out. When they started limiting their free subscription to 40 hours per month, things started to go downhill. I had stopped listening to Pandora until relatively recently, only to find that now advertisements are wedged, frequently and conspicuously, between tracks are distracting and make the listening experience less-than-optimal. I guess it’s better than local radio, but then again almost any city has better radio than Monterey.
I much prefer Last.fm to Pandora. Once in a great while, there is an advertisement and they don’t seem to have the same negative effect on my listening experience as Pandora. The interface is also more appealing–it looks cooler and gives me more information that I want in a format that makes Pandora look bland. This is my new go-to-station.
Lately, I’ve also enjoyed listening to 8tracks–it’s cool to hear a “mix tape” that someone has put together. It makes me nostalgic for tapes that family, friends and strangers used to commonly share.
Another site that I’m currently checking out is Stereo Mood. From the little I’ve used it, I’ve enjoyed the eclectic mix of music that is strung together by, well, the mood of the tracks. The juxtaposition of genres united by emotive themes seems to work pretty well.
There are some other sites that I’ve listened to, and I’m sure new ones will come to my attention and pop up along the way. I’m just glad that I can listen to a variety of interesting music without having to blindly take a chance on buying CDs that I may or may not like, nor do I have to depend on knowing people who are really into discovering and sharing new music. Now I can be lazy and let the internet bring an interesting variety to me, as I do other things that I want to do as I listen to selections that have been assembled by another person or an algorithm. I like the internet.
When I worked for ECC in Osaka, a company that was one of the larger companies that provided English instruction in schools and in the private sector, I occasionally did voice acting for their manuals. It is very possible that in some classroom or study area that Japanese people are listening to my voice, trying to imitate my accent. Scary thought.
Today, I got a request from my friend Luke asking me to record the following:
This is a script students are doing for a play and they need American voices.
Can you help and make a recording???
I would SUPER appreciate man!!!
A: Where is the Jap?
B: I heard an explosion over there.
C: Be careful.
A/B: Yeah…
A: Hey! Look!
B: Freeze! I’ll shoot him.
C No, don’t shoot.
B: Why!? He is Japanese.
C: Look he surrendered.
A: But it might be a trap!
C: No, he has already lost his fighting will.
B: Yeah…
Your motivation is that this Japanese villager was about to commit suicide by blowing them all to pieces and couldn’t go through with it. Eventually surrendering.
So I roped Mika to play the part of “C”. Here’s what we came up with. Now that I’ve started to accumulate a portfolio as a voice actor, I’m expecting the offers for lucrative opportunities to come rolling in. Any second now… luke_script
It turns out that there are a lot of camp sites available in the Fort Ross area of the California coastline, and the beginning of September during the mid-week is an ideal time to get a place to yourself. We returned to a place that had yielded some pretty good results on a previous trip at Stillwater Cove, in Sonoma:
As with most of our trips, we tried to find new spots that people were less likely to access, as we found out that one cove over from the main beaches was much more productive than the well-picked-over waters closer to the road-side parking. Recently, we’ve been seeing more and more people who don’t seem to be very comfortable in the water diving for the snails. Luckily for us, we are a bit more comfortable scrambling down areas that are not as accessible, going for longer swims and able to dive a bit deeper.
Here’s a picture of the cliff we went over–this is not easy to scramble down so we usually end up chucking our gear over the edge first, though we’re still wearing 20 pounds of weight and 7mm wetsuits:
This is what it looks like going down. The rock was rotten sandstone, and it was not easy to climb down, and thus there should be plenty of abalone…
Here’s a video of the entry into the water:
In this particular spot was apparently perfect for prickly sea urchins (which we were very careful to avoid, but if you like uni this is the spot!) and though we saw two abalone, they were both nowhere near legal size and crammed into deep, well-concealed crevices. On another trip, we had discovered that the channel between a group of rocks jutting out of the ocean and point on land was super-productive, however it is only safe to go in on the calmest of days. This day, though there were no huge waves, was not doable, so we had to dive the spot that everyone else goes to pick their abalone. Notice that this descent is easier, but still requires a rope to get down to the bottom when in full diving gear:
In order to find decent sized abalone, not just ones that were barely of legal size, we swam further out into areas where the surge was stronger and where the water was deeper. Luckily, this spot was nice and sunny, so we saw things like this (usually, it is cold and foggy which makes you appreciate the warm and sunny days):
Here’s an abalone, in situ:
The Tyrannosaurus Rex of echinoderms, the sultan of sea stars: the mighty sunflower star
Abalone and a giant green anemone:
Smaller, orange anemones:
And we had a visitor as well:
Once that was said and done, we found a spot about 30 feet down under a submarine ledge with a number of decent sized abalone:
It took me a while to select three to pull, as thirty feet is about as far as I can comfortably and safely dive right now. This is an improvement of the first time I went, when going down 15 feet was really challenging. Here’s a shot of me at the bottom. The yellow line is attached to my ab bar and gauge one one side, with my MacGuyver’d float (made out of two children’s PFD’s, rope, zip ties and a carabiner) 30 something feet at the other side:
…and at the surface, putting one away:
Here’s a shot on land. You have to tag the abalone right away once you get on your boat or come onto land, otherwise you potentially face a stiff charge:
Unfortunately, Heather didn’t bring her abalone card with her, but luckily for us, this meant that she could play around with Mika’s new Canon Powershot D10, which is rated to go down to 10m.
I don’t have any pictures of our campsite, but you’ll have to take my word for it when I tell you that it’s worth getting out there in the off-season. The sites are well-maintained, there seems to be a lot of areas to go hiking, diving and fishing, and if you pick the right site, you can end your dive with a nice hot shower!
There it is, swimming an endless circle, the last of its group. Hard to imagine how such a large, shiny animal can suddenly mute into the endless blue backdrop, but when it happens only a keen eye can pull it out of shadows. Where giant tuna once were, a massive bait ball now dominates the seascape–perhaps more fitting now than ever as their race to extinction is hastened by nets and oil slicks.
If you have the time, go and see the Outer Bay before it goes away for a year. Though it will return, it is quite possible that it won’t be the same exhibit.
I am sometimes astounded by where my mind wanders when it is disengaged from the body.
I have a deep abrasion that is taking a long time to heal (since I’m in the water 5/7 days a week), on the back of my right hand, and so my father gave me a special oil to apply to it to speed up the healing process. I dreamed that I put it on, and right away, the surrounding skin rose as the scab sunk into the tissue, first forming a volcano-like cone, and then the surrounding tissue folded around the scab, making a pod. It didn’t heal completely, but seemed like it was healing. In the light of the morning, the scab kind of looks like it did in the dream: it’s sunken into my hand, without the pod.
Another dream had a movie-like quality. I was being introduced to some children in Thailand, and ushered onto a bus by the principal, who told me that we were going to a very bad school. Many kids had crazy colored hair, some curly, some straight, and they were being pretty rambunctious. We ended up going to a graduation ceremony, and as the principal was giving a speech, my view floated above the crowd to the very back of the field where a boy took a sheet off a balloon.
The giant balloon rose, pushing a kite that fell off at about 100 feet, and caught the wind, and the attention of the crowd. An irate principal jumped off the stage and started to chase the kid. The kid almost made it to the gate in the back to safety, but the principal caught him and threw him fifty feet in the air on top of a pole.
The kid jumped off the pole, and it looked like he was going to die, but the principal caught him, and tried to throw him up the pole again, but his aim was way off and he ended up in the pond across from the gate and splashed down on a couple of ducks who were eating a wet salad with forks off of a plate. The male duck contemplated his splashed salad before jumping in to save the kid.
And then, just as things were getting really strange, the alarm went off, and now I have to go to work.
I can’t wait to have strange dreams like this again…
For a few month, I will be teaching kids (8-13) to surface SCUBA dive in the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Great Tide Pool, through the Underwater Explorers program.
Of all of the positions I’ve held at the Aquarium, this one is by far the most fun, flexible, and provides the best opportunity to get young people interested in learning more about nature and the ocean, and ultimately to be the next generation of scientists, policy makers, educators, and stewards of our natural resources.
The program is pretty amazing in that it allows kids to bypass lengthy training courses, and to get in the Bay immediately. They get a short orientation talk, put a $2k dry suit right on top of their street clothes, don hoods, gloves, booties, masks, and SCUBA equipment, and start exploring in under 30 minutes from the start of the program.
Many kids are nervous when they first step into the water, but once they start seeing the fish, sea stars, anemonies, chitons, crabs, algae, and other organisms, most of them become fearless. It usually only takes a few minutes of coaching until the kids are able to balance in the water and get into the swing of swimming with all of the gear on.
I try to get my students to experience as much stuff as possible. I have them feel the rough-velvety mantle of a gumboot chiton on their face, eat some giant kelp (and explain that algin and keragenin are common emulsifiers that they can find in many foods and toothpastes), to feel gently prod an anemone, to catch crabs, to feed monkeyface eels, and to explore all of the things in the Great Tide Pool. By connecting these things to their everyday lives and experiences, we are helping these kids to understand and ultimately fall in love with the ocean and with nature at large.
It’s awesome to hear a kid say that they want to become a marine biologist, that they now want to go SCUBA diving as soon as they are old enough, that they can’t wait to learn more about the oceans, that they want to stay in the water forever, and that they’re no longer scared of the water or the things that lay in them.
In 30 minutes, you can accomplish a lot. It’s not just the students that benefit from the program, it’s also the parents. They are so happy to see their kids learning, having fun, conquering their fears, and doing what they love to do, or in many cases doing what they wish they could have done when they were kids (or just something they wish they could do period). I can see the instructors growing as well, as students, as educators, and as individuals. Everyone wins in the end.
We send them home with a log book in which they record the conditions of the GTP, mark off what animals they saw, and recall other things that they experienced. In addition, all participants get a cup of hot cocoa. The program is simply a win-win experience for everyone involved.
