On Sunday, I was downtown with Summer, David, and Sim, when we got to talking about spending vs. being thrifty about hair, clothes, etc. We went to Idoru downtown, where I shopped for expensive jeans. Alas, no jeans there were perfect, but this only prepared me for an amazing experience at Gloss, a denim bar up north at Briargate. I went Monday with Ford and Angela, who could bear to spend less than half an hour in this wondrous store, for unknown reasons (probably relating to money?). You know it’s a denim *bar* as opposed to just a *store* when there is a mirrored stage, and they offer you a beverage (like salons do) while shopping. A dozen plus pairs of jeans later, the girl working there and I, using mad teamwork, had narrowed it down to two pairs too good to turn down. What a great inaugural designer jeans experience.

Last night, between the point at which I came home, realized Ford was asleep, and followed suit shortly after (i.e. at midnight), I had some sort of craving for bubble tea and translating. Unfortunately, 11pm was not the time to indulge this craving, so I waited patiently for tonight. I did my research and ended up downtown at the Coffee & Tea Zone (new favorite place). I couldn’t help drinking a large portion of my green tea bubble tea before taking this picture… so good…

Hung out there for a while and translated manga. It was glorious. A group of teenagers came in ~9pm, and were very loud and obnoxious. One of the kids in the group kept saying, “I’ve never had tea!!” Ummm….how can you never have had tea?!? He didn’t mean he’d never had *bubble* tea, just ANY KIND OF TEA. ?????? Weeeeird.

Anyway, just thought I’d let you know, if you thought you were stuck mountain biking, rock climbing, or hiking in this town, there is still hope. You can spend ridiculous amounts of money on pants and consume delicious beverages as a healthy alternative!

By nightfall we made it to the sand dunes, and found an unoccupied campsite. After setting up camp, we went out to the dunes — miles and miles of sand. Pretend you are looking at mountains. Except no, they’re now made of sand. That’s what it was like and it was AWESOME. We saw the moon rise, and by moonlight we hiked the sand, the four of us literally the only people out.

We didn’t make it quite to the summit dune, but got to the top of a fairly tall one (certainly 500+ feet) by walking on ridges mostly, and Casey+Dale doing a lot of waiting for me to catch up. Everything was all lit up by the moon, great shadows, but unfortunately no pictures — please just add this to your to-do list: sand dunes, full moon, midnight. We didn’t have any sleds or cardboard to sled down the sand either, so once we topped out, we just ran down the steep slope, essentially tumbling down. Dale and Casey had run down to Angela and from where I was standing, they were tiny specks. Then, I ran down to them, and they ran down again until they were tiny specks. This repeated again, at which point we were finally down to the dune foothills. I couldn’t even believe how far we had climbed up, based on how long running down took. Crazy. Definitely the coolest thing I have seen in Colorado so far.

This morning, we went out again to the dunes, but not to hike them (way too hot+sunny+crowded). Instead we played in the river that is created by melting snow off the nearby mountains:

Sand dunes, you can see the people hiking up:

Diverting the course of the river. Curiously, this also diverted the course of the tourists, who wanted to be in the water.

Dam[n] maintenance!

Next we saw the nearby Zapata falls. Seeing the actual falls would have required more climbing on wet rock than I was prepared for, so my photos are a little insufficient. Sorry.

Shoes of my companions, walking through to see the falls.

The last place we visited was Bishop Castle, which is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. So basically this dude decided to build a castle all by himself, and all he does is build it and have tons of tourists showing up.

View from one of the towers:

The signs say “enter at your own risk” for a reason… don’t fall down.

Also, since it’s all unfinished, you get random ladders hanging off stuff, bridges that drop off:

It was crowded:

Seriously dude, wtf.

The venue — mid-sized, not too crowded. Ate a very salty pretzel here… yum.

Leslie Feist has a great voice. The set list was mainly from her most recent album, The Reminder. The concert t-shirt I bought matches the opening of the show, which looked like this:

Most songs live were done in a fairly similar way to the album versions, with the exception of a rather extended and excellent rendition of 1234.

It was interesting to hear her talk about her music, which she did almost as much as make jokes about being Canadian… I feel like most songs are about love changing as you grow up. However, based on her comments, her life (and all of ours) are movies, and she is writing the soundtrack. For example, she told a story: you are tearing it up on the dance floor as My Moon My Man is playing. Following that, the guy you’re dancing with takes you up on the roof. As you’re walking up, “The Limit to Your Love” is playing. There was a third song for when, six months later, you still haven’t told the guy how you feel about him, *really*.

Anyway, total sweetness. Ben Folds style forced-audience-harmonization was also involved. Here’s some of My Moon My Man:

Friday Joey had to work so I took the Caltrain over to Palo Alto, and spent the morning exploring Stanford. There were swarms of Japanese tourists everywhere, so I listened in, and went on a tour (in english). Being the seasoned college tourist (on both sides — tourist and guide) that I am, this tour left much to be desired. My tour guide was up to your standard tour-guide quality, but the tour itself was light on the concrete examples and heavy on the Stanford pride. I.e. she was very enthusiastic (just like every tour guide at every school) but I wanted to see a classroom, a dining hall, a library, a dorm, or at least go *into* a building besides the church. At least they did a good job showing off the fact that we were in sunny California by never going inside.

Palm Drive:

One of those college brochure kind of shots (+trashcan):

Hoover tower:

View from tower:

In Palo Alto I walked around, looked in stores, ate lunch, and came upon a substantial iPhone 2.0 line. I did not attempt to buy an iPhone, but I saw some successful shoppers up and down University Avenue.

The rest of Friday was spent going to San Francisco for dinner. We found a good place in chinatown and ordered way too much food. San Francisco was pretty great, and in general it was refreshing once again to come upon street corners where two different groups of people were speaking different languages that I didn’t understand. That situation is hard to come by in Colorado.

After dinner we visited a couple famous San Francisco places — Lombard St., Union Square:

And the Golden Gate Bridge, where it was extremely cold and windy, but there was a convenient rock on which to perch my camera:

Saturday morning we went to the Computer History Museum which had some pretty crazy stuff. The Babbage Difference Engine was extremely sweet, and looked extremely difficult to operate (not to mention how difficult it was to actually build, etc.)

The rest of Saturday was spent going first to Half Moon Bay, buying organic fruits on the way, and shopping at a really cute yarn store (acquired some good wool), and then heading down the coast on Highway 1 past Santa Cruz to find a beach. On the way we stopped at Pigeon Point Lighthouse:

We eventually found Sunset Beach, which was nice, relatively empty, or so it seemed at first.. until a giant army of birds showed up. First there was just one bird:

But that was merely the harbinger of the other million:

So, a more Hitchcockian sunset than anticipated…

So an excellent weekend in Pacific time, but I have now returned to Mountain.

The colors have no meaning, but the big red “C” shape is “RULES” if it’s hard to tell.

And, John Mayer wouldn’t normally be deserving of his own category, but I have been enduring peer pressure in the past few days to like him, due to the fact that he is one of the headliners at the Mile High Music Festival. Unfortunately, I listened to him today and felt like killing myself.

In this summer’s drama, based on the Yuu Watase manga of the same name, 絶対彼氏(Zettai Kareshi — Absolute Boyfriend), Riko (Aibu Saki) gets essentially tricked into a trial of the company Kronos Heaven’s robot, designed to be the perfect boyfriend of the customer. Riko selects physical and personality attributes for this boyfriend-to-be — apparently her ideal boyfriend looks exactly like Hayami Mokomichi — and a few days later a large box shows up in her apartment.

At first Riko is creeped out and annoyed at this robot following her around everywhere, and saying awkward things like, “Hi, nice to meet you. I’m Riko’s ideal boyfriend. I love Riko!” causing interesting conflicts at work and in Riko’s social life (especially when Riko’s “friend” Mika falls for robot-boy). Of course Riko attempts to keep the fact that he is a robot secret, and only those closest to her eventually discover the truth.

This picture is misleading, because Hayami Mokomichi never actually looks like a robot in the show, but here it is nonetheless:

The subplot is that Riko really wants to be a pastry chef, and eventually earns the chance to go to Paris to study, along with other (human) love interest Soshi (Mizushima Hiro), who has to fight for attention with a robot for 11 episodes:

This was by far the best role I’ve ever seen Mizushima Hiro in — his character was well-developed in his outward coolness, stemming from his dissatisfaction in the direction his family’s company was going, and his undying, but subtle, and not overly persistent devotion to Riko. He also took rejection rather well, given the odd circumstance of finding out that *your* dreamgirl has just turned you down for a robot.

Throughout the show, Riko struggles with her own feelings towards Naito (the name she gives to robot-boy) — she wants to feel unattached, but somehow can’t bring herself to give him up in any of the situations where he may be taken away from her.

Naito himself is also an interesting character. Being essentially a beta-version of a robot boyfriend, he is certainly not bug-free. He doesn’t have very good battery life (and has to recharge every night in the bathroom), he often overheats, and is programmed so well to love and protect Riko that he puts himself in a lot of danger, which can be seen as a positive or a negative attribute. His architect, Namikiri-san, often shows up to do maintenance or fix a bug, and is himself shocked at certain things — like when his hard drive is wiped, and yet he still remembers Riko, or does other things that were certainly not programmed into him — a lot of machine learning was going on anyway, with new words that aren’t in his internal dictionary, but emotional growth was certainly also going on.

However, interestingly, the show didn’t take the robotic emotion thing too far. The characters essentially treat him like a human (even though, as stated many times throughout the show, he was “just an appliance”). They don’t even really remark about the potential breakthrough in robotics that’s going on here (besides the architect, Namikiri-san, of course). Without being too silly or too serious, the robot character was important for what he was worth, but not the complete center of attention, or the real hero, which would be Soshi of course. Zettai Kareshi was cute and well-done, and totally avoided falling into its potential Pinocchio slump — definitely worth watching.

Belayer below!

Topped out on the climb, and this was my view.

Haven’t fallen to my death yet. Still alive and kicking, standing on a ridge well enough to take cell phone pictures of myself.

All climbing equipment, courtesy of Summer.

Victory!

Thanks to the instruction and support of a huge chunk of firmware!!

Red Rocks is the most amazing concert venue — beautiful, and great acoustics. We experienced ~2 minutes of rain but otherwise the weather was amazing.

Looking back on the path up to the amphitheatre.

We got there super early and parking was easy. 3 rows away from the amphitheatre.

Line to get in.

Trading post where we bought Red Rocks tshirts before the concert.

Tour buses.

Inside, finding seats.

First up were The National. I was familiar with a few of their songs from the radio, and they were even better live. Good use of some trumpets in a few songs, and violins in others… excellent, but essentially no one was there and it seemed that very few people knew who The National were.

Red Rocks begins to fill up…

Waiting… as beer goes on around us.

Modest Mouse was up next. We wished they played a longer setlist and that the audience would pay more attention to them, but everyone was extremely busy getting alcohol. They did play Dashboard, which was nice, but that was the only major hit in the set.

Then R.E.M. showed up!! Yaaay!!!

Everyone who comes to Red Rocks complains about the altitude (no oxygen -> harder to sing), but Michael Stipe seemed to be doing alright.

After a few songs, Michael Stipe said, “Who here has twitter?” and Ford and I got extremely excited. Then he essentially retracted his statement, “No, I’ll talk about that after about 5 more songs.” So I was waiting for something about twitter, but instead he was asking about that to see if people had been twittering/received text messages about the Obama nomination. The audience’s reaction was more mixed than I expected, but at least the majority was certainly cheering with Michael Stipe. They played a set of politically themed songs. During one, the lyrics went up on the screens behind them:

WHY?

Megaphone!

The set list had a lot of songs from their most recent album, Accelerate. I think most people in the audience weren’t very familiar with this album since it’s so new, and not as good as their older stuff, but it definitely a few good songs. I had listened to that album in preparation, so seeing those songs live was pretty cool, and then the classic R.E.M. songs were of course awesome.

Also, R.E.M. did a good job of interacting with the audience. Michael Stipe spent a while talking to us at the end of the concert, pointing out various audience members he could see, and commenting on them. The best one was, “Hey, guy with your shirt off — put it back on — I like The Cure too!”

Here was the end of the concert, and this was how everyone felt:

But then they came back, and played Losing My Religion!!!

(And a few other songs)

But I know what you really want is not to read about R.E.M. — you want to hear them. So here is Hollow Man: