East Bay Bears May 2016
Category Archives: Bears
Pink Saturday 2014
Decade-old Surprises
Ten years ago Mosaab had chatted me up online, but it was brief passages over the course of a few days, and I had very little information about him at the time, so we didn’t even stay in touch, particularly as I wasn’t aware of what he looked like, nor did I have have his personal contact information to retain. By complete coincidence I encountered his profile last June and whimsically decided to drop him a line. We started communicating regularly and putting the pieces together, but to his credit, his mind is like a steel trap without the benefit of any documentation. He immediately remembered me and our conversations from almost exactly ten years ago, recognizing my face and name and this web site. To both of our amazement, I was able to find the chat logs in my archives and his memory was SPOT ON. It was excruciating, but fun, to read the logs back and discuss our ensuing lives with each other on the webcam. Not only did we laugh riotously, it almost brought me to tears on how sincere he had been to me and how indifferent I had been to someone who I didn’t think I’d meet in a million years, let alone ten. He was living in Sydney at the time, and I was living in New York. Now he’s only a few hundred miles away in Los Angeles (where I was born), so when he was up here in the Bay Area visiting his family last weekend he made sure we had some quality time together, surprising me of his quick stopover only a few hours before he serendipitously arrived. So we finally got to meet face to face (a longer wait for him inasmuch as he had known of me for far longer). Strangely enough, we also calculated that we had been in New York City at the same time when he was just a baby and I was a little kid in late 1979. That was the only time he has ever been to New York (he was born in London). He didn’t even realize that I had lived there as as a child. There are more personal details to the stories we’ve shared since we started comparing notes, but suffice to say that it was overwhelmingly sweet how it all happened, and against all odds, particularly because he had no idea I had even moved back to California until we started really communicating again.
Folsom Street Fair 2012
Lazybear 2012
Build a Bear Birthday Present from Jake
Hike to Bass Lake in Bolinas
I brought the dogs, who were exhausted, but I made sure that they had plenty of food and water. There were 47 bears who met and most of whom car pooled from the Safeway on Market Street in San Francisco. Some of us went to the San Rafael area afterwards for root beer floats at A&W.
Some of these pictures are mine and some are courtesy of the group album on Facebook.
Ran into some friends at Bearbucks
Joe Mannetti and Kirk Read, followed later by Tony Perri and Sebastien Varbero.
July 2011 Santa Cruz and Gilroy Garden Bear Weekend
Northern Coast Road Trip to Seattle
Bobby and I decided to take the dog and drive it, instead of fly, despite the high gas prices these days, and we had a great time seeing friends and family along the way. My best friend from law school and his partner hosted us in Seattle. Their two cats were kind enough not to eat Monte, and they all pretty much started getting along by the time we left.
I saw my Aunt Sharren. She’s the sweetest thing, but she wouldn’t let me take her picture! We stayed overnight at her place and did some major catching up through breakfast the next day. I hadn’t seen her since I was probably about five years old! Fortunately we chat regularly online. Our two little dogs got along surprisingly well.
The road trip back was the slow one, and it included lots of beaches, redwoods, gorges, sand dunes and lighthouses. Besides spending several days in Seattle, we made stops in Portland, Astoria, Canon Beach, Florence, Port Orford, Eureka, Orick, Fort Bragg, Mendocino, Guerneville and countless other unmarked places on Highways 101 and 1, mostly.
I split up the galleries to consist of one with people and dogs and one that consists of views and vistas.
Unfortunately it looks like the video part of my expensive Nikon 5100 is going south, as did my photography portion of the camera several months ago. I’ll see if there is a way to increase the contrast and decrease the flushed areas of sand and sky that seem to blur a lot of the details in some of the videos.