Watching a sunrise after a long long time

As a person who is so used to watching sunsets on the west coast over the ocean, it was odd for us to go chase a sunrise. Two weeks ago, we had to drop Jr. at SFO early in the morning. It had been a day since my gum surgery and the pain was starting to show.  Also I was on a mission to get off pain killers within a day so the 60 day Yoga challenge could continue. Taking painkillers and doing yoga is like drunk driving your body.. never ends well. 

I was also sad to see Jr. go. Not that I saw her when she was home during the last month. We had maybe a 30 minute overlap of our waking hours on a daily basis. 

San got us some help and info from a couple of friends who had recently shared snaps of Golden gate sunrises and Kirby cove views. 

managed a smile with my face still looking like an "idli paanai"! Both these are iPhone selfies .. so you can see the auto color changes..

We dropped Jr. at the airport and drove in the dark to Battery Spencer. A former military installation that apparently had canons mounted during World War times and never used. You get amazing views of the bridge from here. We were the first ones there after we used a flashlight and made our way. Within 20 minutes a dozen photographers showed up out of nowhere. It was like they knew exactly when to come and set up shop, click and disappear. It was hard to tell if they were wearing masks, so we moved out of the area.  We had been standing there for a good half hour already to enjoy the gradual brightening and once we saw the horizon light up, decided to go out and down to Kirby cove. 

We were the only ones on that road and it was probably a mile and a half walk down to the beach. This time only three other folks came to join us. We had enough gaps to put our tripods and take pictures. 

Have put the photos as a slideshow..

There were a few iPhone photos that I shared on Facebook but was waiting for a laptop and Photoshop to get the pictures from the Canon downloaded. The iPhone is good, but it auto adjusts the brightness, contrast and color to be able to "see" everything. When you take a photo of the bridge where everything else is dark because is the sun is not out yet, the pictures look like broad daylight and all the hues are gone!

It was frustrating. (you can see it in the video taken with the Phone and compare to the photos from the Canon). I had to adjust the iPhone photos to make it close to what we saw.

It is a just a question of tiem before I click a picture of me and San and the iPhone shows me a picture of Shah Rukh and Kajol instead of our faces.. so much for AI !

All said and done, the sunrise was breathtaking. We really enjoyed it and it provided me a good distraction from pain physical and emotional. 

We did check the tides for that morning and saw it was okay for 7AM. The tides have washed ashore so many people in last few months and we were warned by friends to be careful. 

We will definitely visit this place again! The Cove and beach are beautiful!

A Pongal that came and went..

Pongal was celebrated in our house three weeks ago! It just so happens that I still did not have a laptop and before we could say "pongaloo pongal" , Jr. was back to college.

So was her laptop which I was temporarily borrowing for blog posts. I am tepidly happy to say that my new Macbook Pro has arrived. Tepidly happy because it took more than a month to show up instead of the two weeks (Chip delays apparently.. which is a good thing for people in the Semiconductor business like me as prices are going up!) and the new Apple M1 chip has a lot of "compatibility issues" with things like Photoshop.. 

Had to go shop for a new Photoshop. The old DVD based installs don't work anymore with new Operating system, especially with the M1. All is well that ends well. So after spending some more time and a little money, we now have a functioning laptop that can finally recognize my external hard drives, do Photoshop and here we are.. posting about Pongal, three weeks later..

I also happened to have a double bone graft dental surgery which is still a pain in the face and have not recovered from it fully. Now that it is behind me, can blog in a happier note..

Where were we? Ah, pongal.. 

We made some delicious pongal, did a prayer and got some sun. . . 

of course there were vadais to go with the Pongal..

Then we tried a family portait.. it was a working day rush job.. but I was expected to have some "facial swelling" for a week.. so this was in anticiapation of that..

surprisingly there was no significant swelling post surgery. So we did get to take a decent family portrait just before Jr. was sent off.. they did co-operate this one for the photo on pity grounds.. so the dental surgery had one benefit at least..

There was no family and friends gathering to celebrate. Even last January, we had group gatherings to celebrate Pongal, before COVID did its thing. Hopefully by next Pongal things will be better.

Hope everyone had a good Pongal celebration. We live in surreal times.. we prayed for a better year!

Forest of Nisene Marks State park

Went to another state park, this time in Aptos. The Forest of Nisene Marks, is beautiful. This is our first time visiting this state park in Aptos.

The trails were not too steep and we covered a lot of distance fast. The path got a little too slippery and muddy at one point and we decided to turn back. We were very very close to a falls view point but safety first and that was that..

The tall trees in this park everywhere are the first things I noticed. Nothing matches the majestic redwoods towering over us!

We will definitely be making multiple visits to this one to cover the range of trails we missed! 

Here are the pictures.. 

and we also got a great photo of the two of us as a bonus..

Outside the park was bright and sunny, but the entire hike felt cold because not much sunlight filtered in. Given the cold we didn't sweat much either and it made the hike pleasant. Perfect conditions inside the park for hiking!

There was water trickling through the park but not enough to make falls.. should be amazing to revisit when there is a lot more water going through the creeks.

Loved it!