Alex Dunne

We just finished another fun week at the Lair. It was so nice to unwind, see our friends, let the kids run amok, and hang out in the mountains. Here are some pics, and click thru for a special vid…

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Having kids, of course, means living through a second childhood. I get to play with Legos, play catch with a baseball, and waste time on our Wii. But I just realized that fooling myself into believing I’m a kid again is a double-edged sword. The two little squirts are now on summer break, and I’m sitting here feeling like I ought to be on summer break too. I miss the old days of summer, watching hours of game shows and re-runs of old sitcoms like Gomer Pyle, going on bike rides down to the store to buy gummi bears and comic books, and complaining to my mom that I was bored. This sums it up pretty well:

So there I am at Best Buy last night, minding my own business in the videogame section. (Did I mention I bought a Nintendo Wii for myself a month ago, and gave it to Linda to give me on Father’s Day?  She threw in Guitar Hero 3, God bless her.)  I’m quietly perusing the Nintendo games, deciding whether to buy Tony Hawk Proving Ground or Super Mario Galaxy, when I notice a guy come towards me out of the corner of my eye.  He’s taller than me by about an inch or two, wearing a Cal Bears t-shirt (a point in his favor) and shorts, and holding a video game.

“Hi, uh, this game is rated ‘M’ and the store won’t let me buy it because you have to be 18 years old,” he says, holding the game down about waist level so as not to tip off any Best Buy staffers who might be lurking around.  “I’m 16 years old. Will you buy it for me, if I give you the money? Here’s seventy dollars, it only costs sixty bucks, and you can keep the change.” He flashes a wad of twenties.

It was surreal.

I felt sorry for the guy.  When I was his age, I was trying to buy beer.  All he wanted was some software.

So I took his dough and the game, went to the checkout counter, and bought it.  We conducted the handoff at my car in the parking lot.  It actually got my adrenaline pumping  - I started wondering if it might be a sting operation. Would a swat team swarm me, or a reporter and cameraman from Dateline jump from a nearby van to get the nefarious M-game-buyer-upper on film? Nope, I got in my car, and the kid and his buddy walked away.

Hope he enjoys Metal Gear Solid 4 — I hear it rocks.

I heard a great snippet on NPR this morning on the way to work.  Every Friday, NPR broadcasts “StoryCorps”, which is usually a semi-schmaltzy piece where someone tells a relative how much they love them.  Today’s was different though, and made me laugh out loud.  It’s about Mexican immigrants who had their name American-ified…at least some of them.  On some names, it just doesn’t work.  Take a listen… (Don’t read the transcript, you have to hear the guy -click “Listen Now” at top of the NPR page.)

I’ve been watching a show called The Alaska Experiment, about 4 groups of people dropped off in the Alaskan wilderness and left to survive on their own for three months.  In a recent episode, one group decided to visit another group, about 20 miles away.  It took them 7 days to hike the distance, over glaciers, rivers, and brutal terrain. It got me thinking about some tough stuff I’ve been through. Here’s my top 5, in no particular order:

• backpacking about 20 miles one day in the Sierras (up and down peaks at high altitude with a heavy pack)
• rowing a ten mile race in a double (ass so numb afterwards that I had to be lifted out of the shell)
• running the Dipsea race (limped for a month afterwards and ended my running days)
• days of sleep deprivation during crazy college hazing rituals (amazing what you hallucinate without sleep)
• countless seat races (rowing races to determine who makes it into a boat) in 110+ degree weather in Sacramento (hello nausea, dehydration)

It’s kind of fun to remind yourself about times you’ve pushed yourself physically - kind of puts any tough times you’re going through at the moment in perspective.

An article in the WSJ yesterday discusses the effects of high gasoline prices on microeconomics - individual behavioral decisions. It’s something everyone with an automobile considers - when should I opt out of using my car for everyday driving? The Journal noted that at $4/gallon, people are already scaling back demand.

Consumers have already taken note, with U.S. gasoline demand down 0.6% this year compared with the same period in 2007, according to the Department of Energy.

The erosion in demand is likely to accelerate if gasoline prices shoot above $6, but a radical cutback in consumption will occur only if high prices weaken the U.S. economy further and contribute to increased unemployment.

So, what happens when gas hits $6/gallon? (IMO, we’re just a couple of years from that price.)  I think at that price, telecommuting and teleconferencing will hit hockeystick growth.  At a corporate level, businesses will probably be more selective when it comes to corporate travel, and will hopefully encourage virtual meetings and teleconferencing. I wonder if they’ll allow their employees more more latitude in telecommuting, too.

I don’t see why not - the technology is here today. For example, yesterday while up here in Tahoe, I took part in a three-way conference call between co-workers in San Francisco and a partner in Oregon. From my perspective, there was no drawback to being here in the mountains, nor for our partner to be in Oregon. All of us used Adobe Connect for screen sharing. It’s a no-brainer to use this technology, and in some ways, it’s faster to set up a screen sharing session between remote meeting participants than to gather a bunch of people in the same office into a meeting room and get a projector set up.

This is why you will never get me near a subway in Japan. Or is it China? Either way, nuh-uh.

Congrats to my brother-in-law, Josh, and his wife Rebecca on their first baby. We went to Marin General yesterday to say hi to the newest addition to the clan, Ilona. She is a really cute baby, and slept the whole time we were there. (Hopefully she’ll be a good sleeper just like her parents, but methinks their days of sleeping in are behind them, at least for a little while!) Our kids were born at MGH too, so the trip brought back a flood of memories. What’s more, like Linda, Bec delivered by c-section, so both families get the deluxe, extended, five-day stay in the joint! I imagine they’ll be plotting their jailbreak by about day four, just like us…

Here’s a great scene from “The Office” a couple of weeks ago — it made me laugh so hard. This is how to close the weak minded.

I was thinking today about how much I miss the Marin Renaissance Pleasure Faire. I used to think people that went to the RPF were a little weird — in high school we would refer to them as “drama freaks”. But I was off base about that. It was a blast.

The RPF used to be held every summer in Novato. It was located in a great spot, in a beautiful grass valley with huge oak trees all around. It was hotter than hades, so relaxing in a shady spot under one of the big oaks was all the rage.

Lots of people dressed up as…well, I don’t really know what they were dressed as — let’s just say they were dressed for the period. I remember overweight middle-aged guys dressed like Friar Tuck drinking mead from mugs, and women dressed in torn bodices and Elizabethan dresses pretending to be drunk, horny wenches. (If that’s what the Renaissance period was really like, I was born five centuries too late.)

There were great games like “Pelt the Privateer”, where you could pay $5 to throw 5 tomatoes at a guy who berated you in olde English. You could buy gigantic roasted turkey legs and eat lunch like Henry the Eighth. I saw real jousts on horseback, and every day there was a parade featuring the queen of England and her courtesans. Lining the streets were all sorts of little booths selling period trinkets. Oh, and there were LOTS of places to buy beer. It was kind of like Disneyland for adults.

Unfortunately, the great little valley where the RPF was held every year got developed into a subdivision and a golf course about 8 years ago. The developers chopped down 4300 huge oaks to make way for McMansions. The faire, which was financially struggling anyway, never found a great spot to settle again, and probably won’t return. Yet another part of Marin’s history is gone, I fear.

Where can I get my hands on some mead?