Stan’s Obligatory Blog

A few years ago, I went to see an exhibit at LACMA about Rene Magritte. When we were there, we saw his famous painting, “The Treachery of Images“:

Magritte is known for sort of teasing the viewer with images that can be self-contradictory, like the pipe with the caption, “This is not a pipe”.

So I thought of this last weekend when I was riding the train to downtown San Diego for the stair climb. I saw this pull into the station:

Who knew that the San Diego MTS had a surrealistic bent?

Today was a new adventure. We’ve gone to San Diego twice now for the Lung Association stair climb, and that’s been fun. But it’s been mostly an excuse for a weekend in San Diego and to visit my father. At 31 stories, the climb itself just isn’t all that hard. But this weekend was the first San Diego Towerthon. This was a stair climb up Columbia Center in San Diego. We were only going to climb up to the 25th floor, but this time, the race was to see how many times we could do that in two hours. This sounded both insane and intriguing to me. After all, back in my bike racing days, I always did better in longer races than I did in short ones. So I thought this would be an interesting experience.

The climb was early on Saturday, which made it difficult to plan to come down that morning. So I hitched a ride with some of my other stair climbing friends on Friday and spent the night at one of the guest rooms at my father’s place. In the morning, I took the bus to the trolley, and rode the train downtown. This was my first time riding the San Diego train, and it was really quite pleasant.

When I got to the building, I checked in and got changed. Then we lined up, and they sent us into the stairs. They had timing mats in the entrance and at the top, and the computer was going to time each of our climbs up the building, and we had two hours to climb, starting from the time when we first stepped on the starting line mat. When it was my turn, I started my stopwatch and headed up.

At the top, we came out in the hallway on the 25th floor. There were volunteers handing out bottles of water and towels. Then they had other volunteers operating the bank of six elevators doing a continuous shuttle from 25 down to the lobby. That worked out well, and we never had to wait more than 20-30 seconds for an elevator for the trip down. One of the elevator operators was a priest, and when he had a look at us, he reminded us that he was qualified to perform last rites, just in case any of us needed that service.

I’d planned on being conservative and taking about 6 minutes to climb the building. But that turned out to be too slow. In the end, I averaged about 5 minutes each time, and in retrospect, I think I could have gone faster. After all, look at the picture. I’m smiling. So that definitely means I could have been going faster.

In the end, I climbed the building 17 times. I was pleasantly surprised by that, since I’d thought I’d only be able to do something like 15 at the most. The stairway was very consistent, and I was able to adapt the stepping pattern I’d worked out at the Aon building last spring to find the minimum-steps method to climb. And because I went up it so many times, I was able to make a chart of it to add to my collection. Sadly, it’s pretty competitive in the over-50 age bracket, and the overall winner, with 21 climbs, was Michael, who’s in the first picture. And I was fourth in my age group. The number three guy also did 17 climbs, but he did them a little bit faster than I did, so he got the medal. But that’s all right. I still got a medal for being part of the West Coast Labels/X-GYM group, which was by far the fastest team there.

After the race was over, I met up with Kathleen and Lucinda. The drove down in my car. We went and checked into our hotel for the night, and that was when I realized that I’d developed a huge blister on my left thumb from swinging around all the left turns on the stair landings. Ow. And also, I thought it was funny that our room number was 408, which is also the exact number of floors I climbed that morning:

Climbing from 1 to 25 = 24 floors;
17 x 24 = 408

What are the odds?

The 408 floors add up to 8,602 steps. That times 7 inches per step means the total climb I did was just a bit over 5,000 feet. Yikes.

Results are here: http://www.geminitiming.com/posts/san-diego-towerthon-2/

I also made a graph of how many runners did how many climbs. The bars represent the number of people who went up N times. The far left bar is the 26 people who climbed it once. And the far right bar is Michael, who climbed it 21 times. I’m fairly pleased to be pretty far out on the tail on the right-hand side of the graph:

This week’s bike club ride was an old favorite with a new twist. We’ve done the ride to Glendora many, many times before. But this time, on the way back, we stopped off at the Dhammakaya University in Azusa to see the giant golden Buddha they have there.

The ride out was pretty uneventful. Lots of straight and flat roads. When we got there, we stopped at Classic Coffee for a bit before heading back. When we were riding through the new Rosedale development, Stewart reminded us of the giant Buddha, so we took a small detour to go see it. The people there we happy to tell us about the place, and to give us some information about meditation there. Seems like a nice place, even if it’s in kind of an odd location.

It was a nice ride.

37 miles.

On Thursday night, Kathleen and I went downtown for the monthly Art Walk again. We’ve gone several times before, and it’s usually a fun time. This is the first time we’ve made it there since March, and it was a nice night for it. It was a pleasant evening and not too chilly.

As always, when we first got there, we set off in search of the food trucks. This time, we got some wrap-things from Cheer Burger. They were quite good. And while we were waiting, we saw the manufacturers plate on the back of the truck. So now we know where food trucks come from.

After eating, we wandered around the galleries. We saw lots of things we liked, a few that we didn’t, and that’s about normal for these things. I do think that someday we will have to get one of those jellyfish-looking lighted sculptures to hang in the house. And we didn’t come home completely empty-handed. We bought one small print from an artist in one of the smaller galleries. It was an odd little drawing of an armadillo with flowers growing out of its back. It’s kind of a weird size, so I need to order a special frame to put it in.

All told, it was a fun evening.

Today’s bike club ride was another celebrity grave tour. We rode to Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills to visit the graves of Lock Martin and Liberace. They are buried in the same section of the cemetery, but they are each remembered for things that could not be more different. Everyone remembers Liberace and his piano. But Lock Martin’s signature role was one where his face could not be seen. He was the seven-foot-seven actor inside the suit, playing Gort the robot in the 1951 film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still”.

We rode there by way of Eagle Rock, through Los Feliz, and then up and over Mt Hollywood. On the way there, Stewart got a flat on Eagle Rock Blvd. This marks his second appearance in the Flat Tire Gallery.

After riding over Mt Hollywood, we turned left and rode to Forest Lawn. We stopped there for a bit to admire Liberace’s signature and piano drawing on his monument. Then we continued on to our snack stop at Priscilla’s.

The route home this time was the one that goes up and over the Linda Vista hill in Glendale. When we’re coming home from the Burbank area, there’s really no way to get back to Pasadena that doesn’t involve riding up a pretty big hill. Some are bigger than others, but there’s always a hill. This route is the middling one. The hill is bigger than the easiest way back, but nowhere near the punishing grind that some of the other routes have. So we rode up and over, and down the other side to pass the Rose Bowl. And then home on Orange Grove.

It was a pleasant ride.

45 miles.

Today was the transit of Venus, and I was ready with my small telescope and solar filter. I was home most of the day because the big oak tree in my back yard was being trimmed. That took a good part of the day, and by the time they were done, it was just about time for the show. So I set the telescope up on the driveway and settled in.

My astrophotography rig, such as it is, consists of my Canon A570 camera attached to the eyepiece of the telescope with some packing tape. It’s pretty simple, but it works. The first photo shows the Sun just before the start of the transit. The second was taken when Venus was fully in front of the Sun, which was about 30 minutes in. The other photos were just taken at random times along the way. Sunset was just after the mid-point of the transit, so the last photo was taken just about the mid-point. And of course, while I was doing this, the neighbors were stopping by to look at it, and I even had some people who just happened to be passing by stop for a look.

All told, it made for a fun afternoon. And that’s a good thing, since it won’t happen again until the year 2117.

So here’s my big oak tree, before and after the guys with chainsaws spent the day cutting and thinning. And now I have even more barbecue wood to add to all the wood I collected after the big windstorm last year.

Tuesday was a unique treat. I got a chance to go downtown to do a survey climb up the U.S. Bank Tower staircase. I’ve done this now for the Aon Center stairs, as well as the Stratosphere Tower in Las Vegas. And both of those times, I found that the published step counts they quoted for promoting the stair climbs were wrong. So this was a chance to see if the 1,500 step count for this building was right. I suspected from the start that it was not.

A few months ago, I’d emailed the organizers of the Stair Climb for Los Angeles at the downtown YMCA to see if this trip could be arranged, and they came through. I was to be at the building at 10:00 on Tuesday morning, where I would meet Whitney from the YMCA and we would climb the building and take in the stairs.

We got checked in and got little adhesive visitor name tags to wear. The guard asked us if we wanted to take the elevator up to the top and walk down to count the stairs. We just looked at him like he was crazy. I walked down a 42-story building once and swore never to do it again. So we went outside and he opened up the door next to the sidewalk and we started up from there.

It turns out that this staircase is much more consistent than I’d remembered from the races I’ve done before. Most of the building was two flights per floor, 11 steps per flight, with right-hand turns. This pattern covered something like 47 of the 73 floors.

There was no 13th floor.

Oddly enough, 2 was missing, also. When we started up from the lobby level, the first floor number we saw was 3. And at 5, it settled into the regular 11/11 pattern all the way up to 46. Then there was one weird floor, and it was back to 11/11 until 58. At that point, there was the only fire door we encountered, and it switched to left-hand turns for a short while. Then it was back to the same pattern up to the last office floor on 71. The floors were numbered up to 74, and then there was just a short two flights up to the roof door.

By about the 50th floor, my shirt was totally soaked with sweat, and my adhesive visitor tag fell off. So I picked it up and stuck it to my notepad.

When we got to the landing by the roof door, the intercom box squawked at us and asked if we were ready to come down. This was a bit creepy until we saw the video camera on the opposite wall. They were watching, and they’d seen us on the monitor. So they said the guard would meet us at 71 and we could ride down with him.

On the train home, I added up the steps. I got 1,679 1,674 as the final tally. And that night, I made up a chart of the stairway. Now I know how to attack it to climb it in the most efficient and balanced way possible. And that’s a good thing. Not only will I avoid wasting steps along the way, remembering the stepping patterns is a good distraction to avoid the “OMG! What the hell was I thinking signing up for this again!” that I always get around the 45th floor.

So now we’re ready to race.

The stair charts I’ve made are all here: http://www.1134.org/stan/Stairs

Today’s bike club ride was a trip out to the Flyaway bus terminal at Van Nuys Airport to see the giant neon sculpture by Lili Lakich there. She was the founder of the Museum of Neon Art, and she is still involved in the art scene in downtown Los Angeles. Since it’s the last Sunday of the month, it’s time for the ‘longer’ ride, and a trip to Van Nuys fit the bill nicely.

It was a good day for riding. We headed out by the most direct route across Eagle Rock and Glendale, and then took Moorpark across the Valley to Sherman Oaks. Then we turned north and picked up the Metro Orange Line bike path out to Van Nuys. Along the way there, we thought we’d found Waldo. A short ride up Woodley brought us to the airport. And yes, the piece is big. It would have looked more impressive in the dark, but it was still a nice piece.

When we were leaving the airport, I got a message from Carla that she’d gotten a flat when she was leaving home, and she was going to meet up with us along the route back. As it turned out, we found her on the Orange Line bike path on the way back. We stopped at Panera in North Hollywood for snacks.

After that, we headed home by the straightest route possible from Burbank back to Pasadena. It was a pleasant ride.

58 miles.

Today was a solar eclipse. Here in L.A., we’re too far south to see the full annular eclipse, but we still got something like 85% coverage, which was still fairly dramatic.

I got a little solar filter for my Meade 2045, which is my ‘small and portable’ scope. I set it up in front of our neighbor’s house where there was a clear view through the trees. I was even able to get some pictures by just duct-taping my little Canon A560 to the eyepiece. So the first photo shows the sun just a few minutes after first contact. The second is at maximum coverage. And the third photo shows the little crescent suns projected on our neighbor’s house by the sunlight filtering through the trees.

It was good geek fun. All the neighbors came out to look at it. And now that I have the filter, I’m ready for the transit of Venus on June 5th.