record Cal - ifornia roll

OK, so I found out about this article from November 2009 where a record-setting California roll was made by Cal students. OK, that seems funny, and had this happened when I was back in school, I'm pretty sure I would have gone to see it just because it would be funny. Hmmm, but thinking back some more, I didn't eat sushi back then, so I might not have cared after all. Who knows.

Anyway, as I was reading the article, odd thoughts popped in my head. Yeah, I can hear the comments that the peanut gallery is making in response to that.

First off, the article says they made a sushi roll. But then it says they made a California roll. The sushi snob in me doesn't consider California rolls (which I will eat on very rare occasions under very particular circumstances) to be actual sushi since there's no fish or other seafood in them. But, ok, I know that's just a personal quirk of mine.

The article then goes on to say that the students "got their hands fishy". Ummm, and how would they do that making a California roll? The article then continues with a list of the ingredients that were used to make the roll, which include 180 pounds of fish. OK, so they used fish. But that no longer makes it a California roll. A California roll is avocado, cucumber and Krab. There are a lot of variations of this, and in some places, they use actual crab rather than Krab, but then that's specified, and the roll is then given a different name. If actual fish is being used in the roll, then it's just a roll of whatever fish is being used (like a tuna roll, salmon roll, yellowtail roll, etc.). It's not even a California roll with , because I've had that before, and that's a California roll with pieces of fish layered on top. The article doesn't say what kind of fish was used, which I find a bit annoying because I want to know.

So, I don't understand why they called it a California roll. I wondered if it was because the roll was made at Cal, but when they mentioned the previous record-setting attempt in Hawaii, they also called that a California roll. I wonder what ingredients were used in that. Since it was in Hawaii, I wonder if they used Spam instead of Krab.

All these thoughts popping into my head from such a short article.

And yes, many of the comments on the article annoy me. So many people have complete misconceptions about what goes on/went on at Cal because of its history. And even when stuff happens/happened on campus, it's not like every single student participated. But that's a rant for another time. And I also object to the snarky comments about the students APPARENTLY not having anything better to do with their time. Because, you know, a couple hours on a SATURDAY afternoon are going to ruin their lives. Puh-leeze.

Golden Bear eats the Bird, chopping down Tree in process

The Big Game denotes the annual college football game between rivals California Golden Bears and Stanford Cardinals. (And no, I don't believe in spelling "Stanford" wrong. I don't really get that. Now, while I was at Cal, I did come up with an alternate name for Stanford - U.C.P.A - annexing them as the University of California at Palo Alto. And as much as I dislike USC, I don't spell their name with a dollar sign either. But I digress...) No matter how each team is doing in a particular year, this is still an important game, pretty much for bragging rights. And each team's record so far has no real bearing on the expected outcome of the game - just because one team has a much better record doesn't mean they'll win. I remember one year, Cal had something like only one or two wins, and Stanford was doing well and on the verge of going to a bowl game - but when Cal ended up beating Stanford, Stanford lost their chance to play in a bowl game. Good times.

This year, it wasn't quite the same situation. Cal had more than one or two wins, but overall, they weren't doing very well. Stanford, however, was having a decent season, and there was even talk that they had a shot at going to the Rose Bowl. Well, after Cal beat Stanford tonight by a score of 34 to 28, things are not so much coming up roses for Stanford.

Go Cal! The Axe is ours!

magical memories - themed dinner nights at Cal

This probably counts more as an "amused memory" as opposed to a true magical one, but when I was remembering and thinking about it, I did have some realizations about how habits and inclinations present then are still in evidence now. And it was pretty memorable at the time in any case.

I think I've already mentioned that when I went to Cal, I actually lived in a dorm of another college, in a nearby city. That college had one extra dorm building available, so they rented out that space to Cal since Cal was notoriously lacking in student housing. Well, that meant that the Cal students kind of congregated together, and the students from the other college congregated together, and with a few exceptions, this was also true in the dining room during meals - Cal students sat and ate with Cal students and other college students sat and ate with other college students.

Well, the college made a couple of attempts to try to get the two groups to mingle, and these manifested themselves in the form of themed dinner nights. They'd pick some unifying food topic - like Mexican, for example - and they'd decorate the dining room and have food all themed to that. They seemed to think that putting everything in a more festive mood would make everyone want to mingle more. Nope, that didn't really work.

The next time they tried this, they then handed out tickets with numbers of them. Ummm, ok, what's with that? I then found out that they were table designations - they were going to force us to mingle by telling us where we needed to sit, so that people from each of the two groups would be seated at the same table. That also meant that I and people I liked to sit with were at totally different tables.

Yeah, good luck with that.

I wasn't big on sitting at a table with people I didn't really know and also didn't have that much in common with. I was used to sitting with a number of different people at meals - not always the same people, but at least from a larger group that I knew and liked - and I liked it that way. If I got to the dining room, and none of the people I might sit with were there, I usually then just went and sat at an empty table. And really, I was in college. I wasn't a little kid anymore. I was away from home and on my own - to some degree. I didn't appreciate being told that I had to be sociable with people I didn't feel like being sociable with, and for no other reason then that someone randomly decreed it. I didn't like being forced to "make friends". So, I didn't.

A few of us weren't keen on the whole "you will sit THERE" attempt, and we noticed that some of the tables in the very back were empty, free of themed tablecloths and decorations. The dining room was never full, and there were always many more tables available than people there, so they didn't bother setting up the ones in the back. So some of us headed for those tables. And we sat together. And then when others noticed that we were doing it, they came over and sat with us as well instead of at their assigned tables, and others came by after they were done eating, just to hang out. And pretty soon, we had a group of Cal students at the bare, undecorated, ordinary tables, away from the rest of the people.

Yeah, we were rabble-rousers.

rides from strangers

The past couple of months, I've somehow gotten to thinking a lot about the whole "don't accept rides from strangers" rule that kids are usually taught. And the same goes for picking up strangers, since you never know if random person you pick up is going to be an axe murderer or, even worse, someone who thinks that WDW's Fantasmic is better than DL's Fantasmic. They tell you not to hitchhike and also not to pick up hitchhikers because it's dangerous since you don't know anything about the other person or what their intentions are. ("The Hitcher", anyone?)

I wish there was a way to figure that out, because I have found myself on several occasions wishing I could safely offer a ride to a total stranger. The last time was a couple of weeks ago when I saw an older woman, maybe in her 60s or 70s, walking along the sidewalk and carrying two grocery bags which were obviously a little heavy. I assumed she was walking home from the store. It would have been really easy for me to just stop the car and offer her a ride. I wasn't in any big hurry to get anywhere, and I figure that if she was walking, she couldn't have been going too far, so it's not like it would have been completely out of my way.

On other occasions, I've seen people waiting at a bus stop in the pouring rain or the blistering heat, and I know that for a while at least, I'm going in the same direction as the bus they're waiting for, so it would be easy just to offer them a ride - they'd be more comfortable and it's not like it would be a hardship for me or anything to give them that short ride.

But then, I remember that no matter what they might look like, I don't know anything about them, and I'm not trusting enough to just give them the benefit of the doubt. I don't know what could end up happening, and it might just be that the first 99 times it happens, nothing bad comes out of it, they're happy to have had a stranger do them a favor, and I feel good about doing something nice for a stranger. But if something were to go terribly awry the 100th time I did it, I wouldn't feel comfortable taking that chance.

And on the flip side, I think I generally don't appear to be a sinister person, so I would probably look safe to accept a ride from, but again, looks can be deceiving, and they don't know that I'm not just going to kidnap them or do something bad to them once they get in my car. Who knows, I could be one of those decoys, someone who doesn't *look* like they'd do something bad, which is precisely who you want to lure people in so you can do bad things to them.

So I was trying to figure out if there was some way to build a car so that there were safeguards built in. There would have to be a separate compartment or something for the passenger to sit in so that no funny stuff could happen. Both the driver and the passenger would have to have the ability to separate the passenger from the car, so the driver can't kidnap the passenger against his/her will, and the passenger can't refuse to leave the car if the driver wants him/her out, so maybe some kind of detachable sidecar that has some kind of mechanism for control so that even if the passenger gets all creepy, and the driver detaches the sidecar, the sidecar doesn't just go careening into traffic - it would have to be able to be steered and stopped in a reasonably short amount of time. But then, that might be expensive for the driver, because now, they need a new sidecar, which I expect would cost a bit to replace.

So every time something happens that brings this dilemma back into my head, I try to figure out a way to make it work, and so far, FAIL.


And while I've never picked up a total stranger, I will admit that I've accepted a ride from a total stranger.

When I was going to Cal, they were notorious for having limited student housing, and I didn't make it into any of the on-campus housing slots. Cal rented out a dorm in another college a city away (about a 30 minute city bus ride), so that's where a bunch of us Cal students ended up staying. The college was up a dead-end hill, and the bus stop was at the bottom of the hill, so before I had a car, I hated that uphill climb every afternoon. One particular afternoon, it was POURING RAIN. I think I had an umbrella, I can't remember, but I was getting soaked as I trudged up the hill anyway. A station wagon pulled up next to me, and a woman was in the front seat. She said she lived nearby and asked if I was going up to the college and if so, did I want a ride, because she saw me drowning in the rain and felt bad for me. The walk up the hill went past a number of houses, so I did know that it was a residential district. She looked nice and concerned, and she was driving a station wagon for goodness' sake - she totally looked like a mom with kids, though there were none in the car at that moment. I hesitated for a second, heard the warning in my head about accepting rides from strangers, but then remembered I was still getting soaked, so I thankfully accepted her offer. She drove me all the way up the hill and pretty much to the front door of the dorm entrance. I thanked her profusely, and she said she was happy to do it and drove off. Since we were heading up a dead-end road to the college, I figured it wasn't like she could just easily take off in a different direction if she had any nefarious plans to kidnap me. I was also sitting in the back seat, so she couldn't grab me and hold me, and I could pretty much just open the door and get out any time I wanted to, jumping if necessary, I suppose. All of that, plus her appearance and the car and circumstances flashed in my mind as I hesitated that second before I accepted. And obviously, everything turned out just fine. And no, I've never done that again.

But see, there are drivers and passengers who are perfectly nice people who don't have any sinister plans and who just want to offer a nice favor or who just might be the grateful recipient of a nice gesture - if only there was a sure-fire way to tell.

focussing on the positive

There are a lot of things going on right now that are making me a little crazy, a little nutty, a little worried, a little stressed, a little overwhelmed. Some of them are happening to me directly, and some of them are happening to other people but have some kind of effect on me. I know the saying goes that God doesn't give you more than you can handle, but I think He thinks my cup is bigger than I think it is, because I feel like it's just about to overflow.

None of them are MAJOR things, at least in the grand scheme of things, but many of them are a big deal to me. Some will work themselves out shortly, but others are longer-lasting things that at the moment, I don't have a glimmer of hope of figuring out or handling.

So, that's the long way of saying that I could make this a vent post or even a whiskey tango foxtrot post. But I won't, for a number of reasons: quite a number of the issues are things that I can't publish in a public forum, some of them aren't going to be solved even if I did write about them, and some of them are so complicated that I'm not even sure I could properly sort out the details enough to explain them. And then there's the overwhelming reason - no one wants to hear me rant for hours on end.

So instead, I'm going to focus on something much more positive. I've mentioned previously that I have a friend who's fighting leukemia. Well, I'm happy to report that he's gotten his bone marrow transplant, and he's out of "quarantine" (it wasn't total isolation but more like very restricted contact with people and things), and he's actually been home for about a week now. I haven't had a chance to talk to him, but I've exchanged a couple of messages with him, and he seems to be good. He even went to see the new "Harry Potter" film this morning - I teased him about not having gone to a midnight screening last night.

When he's settled a bit more, I'll see if he has some time to chat, but if nothing else, I'll see him in about 6 weeks when he comes down here for a visit, and a bunch of us are getting together for dinner to celebrate his birthday. He's been through a lot, and it's not quite over yet, but he's done so well through it all.

And, being the Cal bear that I am, I've had it ingrained in me to root against Stanford, but since it's Stanford that provided the care for him that's made him better, my stance has softened a little. I'll still be rooting against Stanford's sports teams, but I'll always be grateful to their medical facility for taking such good care of my friend.

magical memories - J's baby shower

J is one of a group of friends that I made in college. I went to Cal (aka U.C. Berkeley), but because of the student housing shortage, I stayed at a dorm off-campus which was really a dorm building for another college that rented the space out to us Cal students. J was a couple of years younger than me, so when I graduated, she was still at Cal, though she moved to an apartment with other mutual friends.

When J was graduating from Cal, she sent me an invitation to her graduation, and since I'd been making regular visits to Cal anyway, I decided I'd go. I met her parents and her sister and her boyfriend, and she had other friends who also attended her graduation. Her parents hosted a dinner after graduation at a terrific Korean restaurant (J and her family and her boyfriend are all Korean), and I think that was my first introduction to Korean food, which I really liked and still do.

When J went back east for grad school, we stayed in touch, writing letters. Yes, pre-email, at least the home version.

Some time after that, J got engaged and then was getting married in Berkeley, in a rose garden north of campus, and I accepted the invitation she sent. I had a terrific time at the wedding - her mother was dressed in traditional Korean clothing, and the groom's best man was actually a woman - decked out in tails and everything and looking great. I ended up getting lots of great pictures and made an album for them.

Again, some time later, J announced that she was pregnant, and closer to her due date, I got an invitation to her baby shower. My first thought was that I wished I could go, but I'd come home to L.A., and while J's husband's family lived in L.A., J was from Sacramento, and J and her husband had decided to live in San Francisco.

And then I thought about it some more. Why couldn't I go? It wasn't like they were living in the North Pole or another continent or even the other side of the country. They were at most a 6 1/2 to 7 hour car ride away. She was only going to have her first baby once. I was out of college and had a decent job and had started to accumulate some spending money. So I sent word to the friend throwing the shower that I would be attending.

Before I actually made any travel plans to go, though, the friend throwing the shower called me and said the shower was postponed. J was several months away from her due date, but complications in her pregnancy were arising, and she'd been put on strict bed-rest, which she was having a hard time with anyway because she's such an active and outgoing and outdoorsy person. We obviously couldn't have the shower without her, and the extra stress and people and stuff associated with a shower would not be good for her or the baby, so the decision was made to postpone the shower until after the baby was born. That would have the added benefit that we'd actually all get to see the baby.

J suffered through her bed-rest, which required quite a bit of reprimanding from her husband as she really wasn't supposed to get out of bed AT ALL, except maybe to go to the bathroom. However, eventually, she made it through, and she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Once everyone was pronounced well and healthy, plans were made for the rescheduled shower.

The shower was set for a Saturday afternoon, but it was during a time when I really couldn't take any time off work, as I'd planned to take the Friday off to drive up there. So, I decided to splurge, since I had some disposable income anyway. I decided to fly up for the day to go to the shower, which would mean I wouldn't spend any extra money on a hotel room (just the flight itself and parking at the airport and such), and I could go to the shower and not miss any days from work.

The shower was booked for something like 3pm, and I think it was at a teahouse of sorts in San Francisco - I can't remember exactly. I know it wasn't in a home or a full-fledged restaurant. I remember having finger foods, but there were also couches, and it was very homey.

I had booked a 10:30am flight, and with the hour flight, it would get me there in plenty of time. I was flying from Ontario to San Francisco. The BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit - a subway/metro system, and I'm not even sure if it's still called BART now, since it's been so long since I've been up there) had a train that went from the airport to a couple blocks away from where I needed to go. Perfect.

Since I was only going up for a couple hours, I didn't need a change of clothes. I had on a nice blouse and skirt which were dressy enough for the shower but comfortable to travel in as well. I brought the gift, but even back then, I knew I couldn't bring something wrapped, so I brought all the fixings - gift itself, gift bag, tissue paper, card - that I could assemble once I got there. So all I had with me was a purse and a tote, all as carry-on.

I got to the airport when I needed to and waited. And the flight was delayed half an hour, now not departing until 11am. No biggie for me, I'll just keep reading my book. Others scrambled to the pay phones (pre-cel days, you know) to call people who would be picking them up at the other end to tell them the change in plans.

Then another announcement - flight was delayed another hour, so now, it wasn't going to leave until noon. More panic in the airport, more phone calls to people and being upset that people would now be missing connecting flights and such. I think I was the only person not panicking. I had all kinds of time to spare.

Our flight did finally leave at noon, and I got to the San Francisco airport at about 1pm, and then I took the BART train to the San Francisco stop that I'd mapped out. Originally, I was going to have a couple hours to get something to eat, wander around, put the gift together and kill time before the shower. Because of the flight delays, I didn't have nearly the amount of time I had thought I would. I think I grabbed something to eat once I got there, and then I looked for somewhere I'd be able to put the gift together.

I walked for a bit, and eventually, I found a laundromat with nice big tables for people to fold their clothes. It wasn't very busy at all, so I settled myself at one of the tables, wrapped the gift with the tissue that I'd brought and then put it in the gift bag, wrote out the card and then put it into the bag as well. And by then, it was pretty much time to find the location of the shower.

The tea house was maybe a couple blocks from the laundromat, and when I arrived, most of the guests were already there. I don't remember details of the shower other than that J was really happy to see me and was glad that I'd been able to make it, and I enjoyed being able to meet her daughter, and J's mother spent a lot of time holding her first grandchild, and it was a lovely picture. It would have been lovelier if any of the pictures I'd taken had actually come out, but I wasn't a very good photographer back then, so most of the pictures sucked.

During the shower, I talked to the other people in attendance, and of course, questions arose about how everyone knew J, and when I mentioned that I'd gone to Cal, I was asked if I still lived locally, and I said that no, that I'd gone home to L.A. and was just in the area for the shower. They asked when I'd arrived, and I said a couple hours ago. They asked when I was leaving, and I said later that evening. Most were surprised that I had literally just come up for the day to go to the shower, and I explained the whole "too bad I can't go/wait, why can't I go?" thought process that I'd gone through. And really, the slight expense was really worth the whole trip and being able to see J and her family and the new baby.

The shower ended probably around 6pm, and I had booked a late flight to make sure I'd have plenty of time, so I think I had something like a 9pm flight. I was one of the last people to leave, and J had eventually learned about my travelling up for the shower. She thanked me for coming, and she and her husband (and of course their little baby) ended up taking me to the BART stop so that I wouldn't have to walk.

I took the BART back down to the airport, waited a bit for my flight, and made it home just fine.


J and her husband came down for the wedding when I got married, and they have two daughters now. We keep in touch mostly at Christmas time through cards/letters.


Most of what I remember from that day is just the journey itself, how relaxing it was, even with the setbacks, how much fun I had meeting everyone and just being at the shower and seeing the joy on the faces of J and her sister and her mother and everyone there. And it probably sounds stupid, but the fact that I was actually flying up for the day to attend the shower was huge. I've subsequently driven and/or flown to other cities and states to attend weddings, but this was the first time I attended an event by flying to it, and at the time, it was a big deal to me. And all worth it because I still have the picture in my mind of J's mother smiling down lovingly at her granddaughter in her arms.

magical memories - Risk all night long

Some people are computer geeks. Some people are wannabe computer geeks. And some people are inadvertent computer geek groupies. I think I'm somewhere on the spectrum between wannabe and inadvertent groupie, and I rather like being there. I don't want to be nor do I think I could actually be a real computer geek, and I don't think I purposely make an effort to be a groupie - it just ends up happening that way a lot.

When I was in high school, I dabbled a little with computers, but that was the monster machine where I learned Fortran (at least I think it was Fortran) with those computer cards that were used back in the old days. Can I tell you how much I *hated* it when the machine would screw the cards up and mix up their order, and then you'd have to sit there for hours sorting them out? Computer cards blow.

When I got to college, I then learned what *real* computers could do. For reasons that I can't remember now, I ended up joining the computer science club, but it wasn't a real club. I can't even remember if we did anything real, other than having the occasional meeting for more reasons I can't remember. There was an office that belonged to the club where you could use a computer or two and have access to some files of some sort or something like that, and to keep good standing in the club, you had to volunteer to staff the room (which really just meant being there so the door would be open, but it was the rare occasion when anyone not already in the club and therefore already with ready access came in) an hour every other week or something like that. The main reason I joined the club was because if you were part of the club, you got an account on one of the school computers. The only way you could really get an account at the time was if you were actually taking a computer class, so this was a good way of getting an account without the hassle of actually having to take a class.

Because of being in the CS club, I ended up meeting lots of people who were actually computer geeks, and it came in quite handy. They had access to all kinds of stuff, and if you were in with them, they were pretty generous about sharing. I was talking to one of the guys at one point after our college had gotten some spiffy new SUN computers, and I happened to mention that I didn't have any access to them because I only had the CS account, which couldn't be used to log into the SUNs. He was appalled that I didn't already have access to the "special accounts", so he immediately proceeded to tell me about them. Since he wasn't just a geek and a student but also had actual administrator access to the SUNs, he and some other people had created a generic login that they could pass around, and once you were logged in under the generic name, you could then change your actual name to whatever regular login name you used, so the original generic login name wasn't just logged in 400 times, but instead, you could see the list of individual people logged into the entire set of SUNs. It was pretty cool to be able to have access to the SUNs that way, and I sort of got the impression that because the computer science arena was so male-dominated, being female and at least semi-interested in and fractionally knowledgeable about computers made you automatically accepted and welcomed into that group.

Well, there was one night where the geeks decided to hold a Risk marathon, which I suppose isn't too surprising. I can't remember if the CS club I was in sponsored it or if I just knew about it because of geek friends, but while I had no intention of playing, I thought it sounded like fun, so I decided to go. I remember that it started later in the evening, maybe around 9pm or so, and it was held in one of the classrooms on campus. I had a couple friends who were also there, and there were several other people that I was acquainted with, and then a roomful of total strangers, yes, most of whom were male.

I think one of my friends was playing in a game, so I watched that game for the duration, and then when that was done, I would just randomly watch other games. There was one that was particularly fun because one guy was down to just a handful of men, and it looked like he was about to get wiped out, but amazingly enough, he managed to fight his way back and ended up winning the game. That was fun.

Somewhere in the middle there, people decided they were hungry, so they took up a collection to order pizza. Once the pizza got there, we all ate and chatted (ok, I probably ate and listened), and then as people were finishing up, they were going back to playing. And I didn't even realize what I was doing until someone I knew pointed it out to me by asking what I was doing. Everyone had been using paper plates to eat pizza, and most of them had just put the plates down on the table once they were done and wandered off to more games. Without even thinking about it or even being aware of what I was doing, I was gathering up the plates to throw them away and to tidy up. Now, I will tell you that I'm not a great housekeeper, and I'm not necessarily very neat, but I guess in that environment, with that many guys, the couple of female genes that I possess (those of you who know me know what that means - those of you who don't probably think I'm a trannie or something) actually kicked into gear on instinct. Anyway, once it was pointed out to me what I was doing, I stopped.

The marathon was supposed to go all night, I think, but I didn't stay that long. I think I left around 2am or something like that.

I initially had some misgivings about going, for a number of reasons, but I'm glad I did, because I did have a really fun time, even though I never ended up playing myself.

Since then, I've had other nights of playing Risk for hours on end. A friend of mine used to host a weekend-long party over Thanksgiving, and I'd drop in for parts of it. Risk was one of the popular games that people played, and sometimes I watched, and sometimes I played. There was one night when the two people left in the game were me and a female friend, and we were pretty much dead even on the board. We knew that if we fought it out, it would take several more hours to finish the game, and we weren't really interested. She loved ice skating and I owned Canada, and I love London and she owned Europe, so we made a treaty - she could come to Canada any time she wanted to ice skate, and I could go to London any time I wanted to shop at Harrods. Done, game over.

They started another game after that, and I left to go home since it was something like 3am. When I returned later in the morning the next day, they were still playing, though I think they were at least on a different game.

I don't have too many occasions to play Risk anymore because it *is* such a time-consuming game, but I'll never forget the first Risk marathon I went to.

magical memories - that's what friends are for

I spent my college years at the University of California at Berkeley, otherwise known as "Cal". I met a lot of people during my college years. But the relationships I remember the best and most involve four girls.

At the time that I went to Cal, they were terribly short on dorm rooms, and freshman year, I applied for but did not get into the Cal dorms. Not knowing the area, I wasn't too thrilled about having to find an apartment, so I was glad to get a letter saying that a college down the freeway in Oakland had an empty dorm building that Cal was renting, so I applied and got into there. The first year, I took a city bus between the other college and Cal's campus. It was a little weird because I lived with a bunch of Cal students but we weren't living on Cal property, so unless you had a car, you were somewhat isolated from the nightlife on campus. The express bus only ran until about 6:30pm, and if you wanted to catch a bus after that, it went the long way, through downtown Oakland, which wasn't necessarily the best ride.

I ended up discovering that I rather liked living there, and it was easy to get in because most people either wanted to live in on-campus dorms or apartments, so I didn't have to worry about where I was going to live, and I decided to stay at that college for my entire four years at Cal. I either took the bus or hitched a ride with friends until I got a car junior year.

I talked to some of the people who lived in my dorms, but I didn't necessarily have a lot of friends. Yeah, I know, big surprise. I spent a lot of my time hanging out with people in my major. But my junior year in college, I met four girls who I would end up becoming very close to.

K and J were roommates, unknown to each other before they came to Cal. K was from Oregon, and J was from Sacramento, and they just hit it off incredibly well. M(o), who was from Southern California, had a roommate of her own, and M(a) was from the Bay Area and had her own room. I had a roommate the first semester of my freshman year but decided I didn't want to deal with that anymore, so subsequent years, I paid extra to have a single room. I became good friends with the girls, and I spent a lot of time hanging out with them, in groups and individually. There was many a night when one or two would stop by my room to say hi, and we'd end up not doing homework but just chatting. There was a common lounge with a TV, which was controlled either by whomever was in the lounge first or majority rule, whichever was more vocal. Sometimes, we decided we didn't want to deal with that, so they'd come to my room, and we'd watch the little TV that I had.

My strongest memory, though, is of the five of us sitting against the wall in the hallway outside my room, and we sat there for hours one night, laughing, joking, talking. I don't think I'd ever had a group of friends like that before, and in this setting, it wasn't about being kids anymore. We were adults now, on our own to some degree. There were ups and downs, and we were supportive of each other, but mostly, we just really had a good time together.

The following year, when I was a senior, I stayed at the dorm, but the four of them decided to move into a house together, so I would stop by and visit them there.

By the time 1989 rolled around, I was back in Southern California and working. I didn't have a radio on at work, and internet access at work wasn't as prevalent as it is now. Late in the day, I got a phone call from a friend who asked me, "Didn't you used to have friends in the Bay Area?" to which I responded, "What do you mean, 'didn't I used to'?" She then told me about the earthquake that had just occurred, which would come to be called the Loma Prieta earthquake, registering a 7.1 on the Richter Scale, destroying a large portion of the Nimitz Freeway when the double-decker freeway collapsed and even causing one section of the Bay Bridge to fall from the top deck to the bottom deck. I hung up with her and managed to get a hold of my friends, who were still living in the house together. Everyone turned out to be ok, so I was thankful for that. The parents of one of the girls had driven across the Bay Bridge about an hour prior, so it was frightening to think about what could have happened.

We kept in touch over the years, and I saw some of them periodically.

K got married, and I flew out to Washington, D.C. to attend her wedding. She later moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma and had two kids. I've not met the kids, but she and her husband did graciously come out to L.A. for my wedding.

J graduated from Cal and invited me up, so I went and had a great time. Her parents threw a dinner at a local Korean restaurant, so that was my first introduction to Korean food, which I loved, and her parents and sister were the nicest people. She later got married, and I went up to Berkeley for that and then some time after that, I returned for her baby shower, postponed until after the baby was born due to complications in her pregnancy, so I was actually then able to see the baby. She and her husband later had another daughter. J and her husband also came to my wedding.

M(o) came back to Southern California after she graduated, and I saw her once or twice, but we lost touch, so I didn't invite her to my wedding.

M(a) and I remained in touch for some time. Out of the four girls, she was the one I was closest too. She was two years older than the other girls, so she was closest to my age, and she had dealt with a lot more in her life. We had a lot more in common, even dealing with some of the same problems, so we talked a lot. Her then-boyfriend lived in Los Angeles, so when she would come down to visit him, we'd usually get together for a little while. She eventually married someone else, and I went up to San Francisco for her wedding and paid another visit some time later, when her little boy was about 9 months old. Cutest little thing. Now that I think about it, he looked a lot like a current friend's nephew. She had two other children after that. She was supposed to come to my wedding, but a family emergency prevented that. We have since lost touch.

I don't know what's going on with M(o) and M(a) anymore, and my contact with K and J is solely by way of Christmas cards with catch-up letters. We're all busy with our lives, but I'll never forget the friendships that I shared with each of them during that one short year.

The Golden Bear has jaundice

So, yeah, I haven't talked about Cal football in quite some time. After a glorious stint at the number 2 spot, Cal has now sunk into the oblivion that is the normal existence for Cal football. A great 5-0 start and then 3 disastrous losses. We lost to USC, but at least we didn't get pounded. At this point, the only thing that's important is beating Stanford in the Big Game.

Bad day for Los Angeles college football teams

The world is officially upside down. Most of the talk about today's game between USC and Stanford was how much of a fight Stanford would put up and how much USC would beat them by. It was bad enough that USC was generally only leading Stanford by a small number of points for most of the game. But had *anyone* been talking about USC actually losing to Stanford? Stanford beat USC by one point - and did I mention that Stanford had blocked an extra point attempt by USC? I still can't believe it. OK, so it's not completely unthinkable since USC hasn't been the powerhouse so far this year that they were last year and the year before, and Stanford has shown more life this year than last with their new coach. But Stanford actually beating USC? At the Coliseum no less? Whodathunk?

But that's not all. UCLA was playing the winless Notre Dame, who weren't so much the Fighting Irish this year as the Sucking Irish. And Notre Dame beat UCLA handily. At the Rose Bowl.

So on a week when Cal has a bye, they will probably move from number 3 to number 2, and there's talk about Cal actually being in the national championship game.

OK, where's Allen Funt and where are the cameras?

Cal beats the Ducks!

Cal is now 5-0 in football, having just beat the Ducks today. This was one of those games that was making me nervous all week. In my four years at Cal, we were never a real team. If we won, great. If not, oh, well, we weren't really expected to. Even the year we went something like 1-40, we managed to beat Stanford that year, thus preventing them from going to a bowl game, and the season was therefore a success. So this week, it was amazingly unnerving to listen to ESPN and other sports shows and have them talk about how the most important college game this weekend is between Cal and the Ducks. What!?!?!?!?!!? We don't get included in those sorts of discussions! And what's with all the attention? I didn't think Cal was going to be able to do it. This was going to be the first real test of the season, and even though Cal was ranked higher, Oregon was expected to win. Well, the Ducks almost pulled it off, but thanks to a great job by one of the Cal players who shoved the Duck with the ball out of bounds at about the 1 yard line on their fourth down, thus saving a touchdown, Cal won. Oh, and Stanford got pounded today, which is just icing on the cake.

On the other side of the spectrum, poor, poor Notre Dame.

Watching the sports report isn't supposed to make me cry.

I'm not big on college sports in general, but being the good Cal Bear that I am, I do root for Cal in NCAA football. So far, we're 2-0. And for good measure, Stanford is 0-1, but that's only because they had a bye the second week. ;)

We had occasion to be in San Diego the first weekend that the NCAA kicked off, so when we got back to our hotel room, we turned the TV on to get the scores. (Poor, poor Michigan.)

And then they talked about Virginia Tech. Their first game was a home game, the first public event since the horrible killing spree this past April that resulted in the death of 32 people. They talked about the moment of silence and other tributes before the game to the murdered victims. And I thought of the one person whose story touched me the most.

I may not remember his name, but I'll never forget Liviu Librescu. He was a 76-year-old professor at Virginia Tech at the time of the killings, and when the killer came to his classroom, he blocked the door so that his students could escape out the windows. As Holocaust Remembrance Day was being observed in Israel, this survivor of the Holocaust did not survive the madman who took so many lives that day, but instead, Librescu sacrificed his own life to save the lives of his students. His life isn't more precious or sacred than that of any of the others who died that day, and my heart breaks for the families and friends of all 32 victims and all those who survived who will spend the rest of their lives with their memories of that horrible day.

He wasn't just a victim. He was regarded by many as a hero. That label gets tossed around a lot, but it's one of those rare times when it fits. I know that he's in a special place with God. I hope that it somehow eases the pain his family must feel at having lost him.