Camping over yonder...

Well I'm a little bit dissapointed with the font selection for the blogs...I just used all of them and I'm not satisfied with any of the choices. I think I'll pick courier because I used to watch Jim Courier play tennis when I was young...

The magnum was packed to the hilt. Pam had decided it would be best to carpool, and so we had two friend, Tim and Cathy, in the backseat joining us. They had a lot of stuff...I tried to shake off flashbacks of driving the U-Haul 600 miles down here 6 months ago while we headed down the street to the highway.

Slowly, and when I say slowly I mean, SLOWLY, we entered the mass of people heading towards Tracy on East 580. The time was 4:11. I began to wonder if all these people commute all the way into the city every single day. What a depressing thought, to have to sit in traffic and waste away precious hours out of the day. Hours that you could be spending with your wife, kids, dog, hampster, or just plain by yourself in a happy place, rather than in a car on a hot freeway. If only we had communicated better, I thought, we might have been able to get on this road 30 minutes ago and avoided some of the rush.

I manually shifted through the gears to ease the use of my brakes. The magnum almost felt a bit sluggish being settled with camping gear and 4 people but as a tradeoff it looked a little more sleek. The weight had dropped it about 7/16ths of an inch. I had hoped it would have dropped more so that I could see what some new sport springs would do to the stance but I hadn't been so lucky.

One by one we began to see cars on the side of the road. Some just seeming to be sitting there, broken down. Others had a few marks from accidents. Some people looked like they had just stopped on the side of the road because they were tired and wanted to switch drivers. Let me get one thing straight...if you're driving in California and your car is powering down the street on its own, you SHALL NOT at any time stop your car on any freeway, even if you are way over on the shoulder. People are stupid and no matter what, they will slow down, look, rubber neck, look back and slam on their brakes because they weren't paying attention. The ripple effect spreads back from that point and suddenly you've got thousands of people who just want to get out of town for a simple camping trip but are now STUCK in YOUR traffic!

The other half...

If you have been a very astute reader you may have noticed in a few posts where the author, Pam, has alluded to another person who may write a little more about this or that. Well that person would be me. I am Travis, the other half of this bay area adventures relationship. You may have seen me in a few of the pictures...you know, that strong, studly looking guy?

In any case, I've been asked to contribute to this blog for a few reasons that up until this point, I didn't really care for. This blog was created so that Pam would not have to write multiple emails to multiple people about things that we are doing, simplifying her life. Please take note, that what I said was so that Pam could reduce the amount of time spent emailing the same story to different people. So...where do I come in? Well you have to read the fine print.

This blog was created so that together, Pam and Travis can reflect together on their experiences in the bay area and share these experiences with the rest of the family.

Result = Travis feels as if he has been bullied into writing a blog about everything fun we do down here. My initial reaction is in defiance of being told what to do, which is countered by guilt trips from Pam. This is a classic example of how the idea of "compromising" (which I feel was created by women to get guys to do women things) has faltered to produce desirable results. Since I have a feeling our reading audience is primarily women, I would like to present a new model to consider.

Compromising

The problem with the whole compromising thing is that at any given time, one person is still doing something that they don't want to do. This in itself creates so many potential problems that unless the relationship is firmly bound together by the strands of love and history together, it will eventually fall apart. Too often than not the focus turns to what am I doing for you and what are you doing for me. Eventually one person will start to think that he/she is compromising more than the other, and might start cutting back. Then the other person sees this and cuts back...resentment builds and eventually an argument over putting soap in the dishwasher but not turning it on turns into, "I watch basketball with you even though I hate it, so why can't you go to knitting classes with me"?

As you may or not see, my initial reaction in defiance was more or less an attempt to not go down the compromising path and end up in knitting class hating my life.

Least common denominator

If you can remember back to the least commong denominator rule from elementary math class you will know that in order to add together two fraction, the least common denominator first needs to be found. For instance, in order to add 1/3 to 1/4 they must be converted so that the denominator is equal. Therefore, you get 4/12 added to 3/12 equalling 7/12. The least common denominator then is 12, which then allows the numerators to be added together.

Finding the least common denominator in a relationship is another story. It sometimes can be difficult but the idea is that neither party feels like they are compromising and both parties are getting what they want. Here is an example. The girl has this book called "All about us" which is basically a book of questions about this or that which calls for answers from both him and her. The girl likes it because she enjoys learning things about her partner and also the quailty time portion of it. The guy hates the book because he thinks that the questions are retarded, and that he is being forced into answering things that he would rather not. Rather than compromising and having the guy feeling like he is having to do this or else, lets try and find a least common denominator.

Girl wants: Quality time and to learn about her partner.
Guy doesn't want: lame questions that he is forced to answer.

Least common denominator is - if the girl comes up with specific questions that she is interested in knowing about her partner, then he won't feel that they are lame. So long as there is a stipulation that he does not have to answer any question he is uncomfortable with he is fine with answering them.

Applying LCD to this blog

At this point its important to resist the urge to call me a geek. All comments of this nature will be deleted before feelings are hurt.

Applying LCD to this blog is simply supplying other reasons as to why its important that I write.

First of all, writing is something that actually does interest me. I enjoy it for the most part as long as I'm not required to do it. What makes blog writing so great is that it allows for an authors voice to truly come out. This is the most important reason why I would like to contribute to this blog that I've recently just figured out. For those of you that were hoping to get a straight up, narrative about what we did over the weekend from me, all short and concise...well sorry you're out of luck. I am taking this opportunity to give you readers a window into myself, to get to know me, how I view the world, various thoughts that go through my head, and feelings as I experience life with Pam.

I hope that our least common denominator is not just writing to inform, but writing to expose ourselves to each other and our family, that you might get to know the real us.

-Travis

Car sales...

Today is August 8th, which will go down in my book of history as the day AFTER Barry Bonds surpassed Hank Aaron as the all time home run leader. The 6-2, 235lb left fielder is 43 years old. Its too bad his career and record has been tarnished by doping charges.

Nonethess today also marks the day Pam completed the transaction of her car sale. Ok you may be saying, "big deal" with a sarcastic tone, but what you should be saying is "big deal" with a very serious tone! Mobility is a very huge thing to Americans. Its in our culture to have personal vehicles and our cities are designed around the fact that every American over the age of 18 most likely has a vehicle and over 60% of households have 2 or more cars. Unfortunately for us, American society is designed around a post world war II idea of suburbia. With all the GI's coming back to the states housing was a large concern. The solution was to create small communities, outside of the city, with a pattern of houses and a couple different floor plans that are easily constructed and attractive to a particular social group. The automobile enabled this model to become true because people could then commute from the burbs to their jobs instead of having to live near them. Americans have been tied to their vehicles ever since.

So what...so what is wrong with the suburbs? Whats wrong with personal vehicles? Social segregation. As technology grows our world becomes smaller and one would think that the number of interactions becomes greater but this isn't necessarily true. I think what technology does for us, is simply enable us to communicate with anybody, anywhere in the world. Whether or not we actually do communicate with them, is another story. Because of the way our communities are setup, the only communication across social groups that we recieve is at work, politically and for our kids, at school. Without communication we cannot learn, adapt, and accept other social groups, lifestyles and cultures. I think this produces a strain on our communities, and hampers growth of cross social and cultural relationships. Our current community setups allows for easier living but hurts our culture in the long run by greatly defining the lines between people as opposed to greying them out. Everyone around me at the store, on the roads, at the gas station, serving me food...well they might as well be robots.

So we will be down to one vehicle. This will save us money and require us to increase our communication. We'll have to plan a little bit more, talk about transportation a little bit more, and possibly move outside our comfort zone a little bit from time to time as we go someplace using public transportation, or a bike, or just plain walking. In these times however, I will try my best to embrace the discomfort as an opportunity to slow down and watch the kids laughing on the playground, day dream a bit, and maybe even smile and say hi to another person as they walk by...

Bye bye Honda CRV. I've only known you for a few months. Your front seat seems like its loose and the brakes seem to have warped rotors. The hum of those all season/winter tires almost put me to sleep many times. I'll miss the sheer coolness of being able to thrown 2 bikes in the back, our camping gear and just going! Make me proud with your new owner...

-Travis

And more from the camping trip

So now almost two weeks after our camping trip my legs have gone from bruising and cuts, to now Poison Oak!!!!!!!!! Yeah about three days ago I started getting some bumps, thought they were bites, well then they spread and I when I had my yearly doctor appointment I showed her the bumps and yeap, Poison Oak!! So now it has spread, is swollen and weepy. So our plans for doing a heck of a lot this weekend have changed. Because well it itches too much to walk anywhere and be in the sun. Here are pictures of the bruises and cuts and now the Poison Oak.