This morning’s feeding involved her crying during the feeding and then more crying when being burped and then crying and yawning while being rocked. Having reached her two-hour limit for being awake, Alice started yawning this morning around 8:45 a.m. and turning her head away from me to stare off into the distance. She was clearly tired. I promptly carried her into a dimly lit room and started to rock her, but she cried anyway. As Alice cried and screamed into my chest, I began again with the theories as to why sleep always had to begin like this for her. I began to ruminate over the parenting decisions I made. Breastfeeding, for example, takes too long and isn’t as predictable as formula; Alice must have lost so much precious sleep over cluster feeding and crying for more food while my boobs refill, and she must have lost so much alert time to feeding instead of learning – all because I wouldn’t swallow my pride and put her on formula. And perhaps she’d be a better sleeper if I took the initial hit and just let her cry it out for a week instead of the routine exchanges of crying and soothing tricks which seem to soothe me more than her.

I have a list of baby sleep training books that have been recommended, but I recoil at the idea that I have to resort to “training” my baby like I’ve trained my dog to defecate exactly two times a day. We used to be able to easily soothe her into a deep sleep, and, as predicted in Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, this changed at her six-week growth spurt and sleep became a daily battle thereafter. Her sleep patterns are emerging exactly according to the proposed scheduled in that book. But still, there is the crying. There must be a more effective strategy. Can I really continue on this path and give the current strategy a good, honest try?

And then the crying stopped, she fell asleep in my arms, and I took note of the time she spent crying: three minutes. It took three minutes to replay how her sleep and feeding pattern and my responses played out over the preceding 24 hours, philosophize over faulty parenting, propose a new strategy, and vow to be a better parent going forward. As she slept in my arms, I reflected upon how fragile new parenthood is that three minutes of crying can undermine every decision I’ve made to date. I reflected that she is only three months old, not old enough to share my own affinity for routine. I recalled that she has another month of development before she can appreciate a schedule. For now, one month doesn’t seem so distant and tomorrow, we’ll begin again.

I never thought I’d get married, much less have a kid. I’m not one of those girly women who love weddings and babies. I’ve always been somewhat of a tomboy, but more importantly, I’m a pragmatic sort of person who realized early on that it would be nearly impossible for me to find anyone that I could be happily married to. But then the impossible happened. I did meet that impossible match, the conditions were right, and we eventually married. And now, after four blissful years of married life, I’m pregnant.

Most people go through sure-footed and excited about the things that they anticipated life would bring them. I knew I would have a career, so I proceeded confidently and enthusiastically with that. But since the idea of having a kid is a recent concept in my life, I haven’t been super excited about being pregnant like most other first-time mothers. I’m not one of those baby-crazy women who bask in the attention their pregnancy brings, and as such I feel that I need much more room to find myself as a mother. It’s no surprise, then, that I do not like being pregnant. It’s not magical, and it’s not spiritual; it’s just a big pain in the ass. From people thinking that your pregnancy is public property to the annoying physical aspect of carrying around a weirdly dense mass in front of you that you are constantly aware of to this wild expectation people have that you should be glowing with happiness — it’s all just a big pain in the ass. I am almost ready to say that I’d rather just have the baby now and take care of it now than go on being pregnant for another four months.

Over the last few months, I’ve started to get used to the idea of having a kid and now wonder about what my kid’s personality is going to be like, whether it’ll be a baby who likes to be burped mid-feeding, whether it’ll be a baby who likes to be swaddled, or whether it’ll be a baby who isn’t bothered by a wet diaper. I’m a pragmatic person and as such I like to think about these things, but even more, I like to execute. For me, I think the main joy of having a kid is not having a cute baby to dress up or talk to or exercise your ideologies. I think of parenting as the practical task of raising another human being to go onto to become their own person with their own life adventures, and I think the best pathway to this is to pay attention to the kind of person your kid is and adapt your parenting accordingly. And I think this will be my main joy as a parent: the time when my kid becomes self-reliant, moves out of my house, starts calling me less frequently, and just goes on to experience life on his/her own terms.

Seeing the backlog of years worth of check marks for the things I did reminds me that no matter how miserably I failed that day, life is much more than one day and mine doesn’t look too bad.

I’m fickle when it comes to keeping up a journal, but I consistently make my check marks and record other mundane numbers. I was going through the files on my laptop last week, and the most interesting and memorable files on there were not the old email exchanges between me and Scott or the occasional journal entry, but the measurements of my life – my weight, whether I exercised that day, my check book balance, my monthly budget. My favorite part of my trail journals is that I record the distance, elevation gains, wake and sleep times, departure and arrival times, and other seemingly useless measurements — and somehow the memories are clearer with those recordings than the actual occasional journal entry I wrote.

Scott is now mocking me by saying that he’ll record the time he poos every day, but if he did and charted it across time, he could point out “Oh, there’s where I went backpacking for the first time and couldn’t poo for three days” or “there’s where I got the stomach flu and diarrhea and Jisun and I were stuck in bed the whole day holding hands and clutching our stomachs”. And then he’d be reminded about how great our marriage is because we can share that level of misery. See? Fond memories.

I bring this up because I would have liked to vote for Ron Paul in the Republican primaries. He won’t actually win, but I think the fact that he’s gotten more attention and more votes than most people initially thought he would makes a strong statement about the current state of American politics.

The truth is that none of this makes a damn difference, and Ron Paul is probably just as much of a shitty bastard politician as the next guy. If I had $500 billion maybe it would make a difference. I am overwhelmingly disheartened by American politics — by how thoroughly disconnected it appears from popular consensus, by how being a politician has become such a specialized career path that our governments are being run by people who take the shortest path possible to advance their careers, and by how arrogant and brash politicians think they can be, telling all sorts of lies in confidence that they can get away with it.

Anyway, this texting thing… For the past eight years my cell phone has been my only phone line. I cut my land line when I was a poor college student who figured out that paying $25 a month with minutes for cell phone service was costing me the same amount as having a landline and making the occasional long distance call from a regular phone. Last month, an 80-year-old woman who I deliver meals to on Saturdays managed to leave a voice message on my cell phone and tag it as an urgent message. As the ubiquitous voicemail woman informed me that the message was marked urgent, I wondered, when did the ability to tag messages as being urgent come about?

When text messaging was introduced to the mass consumer market, I received a letter from Cingular informing me that my friends can send me text messages by sending emails to a particular email address. I believe that this letter also outlined the basics of text messaging, but of course, I was only interested in my cell phone as a one-to-one mapping and replacement of my landline, so the extra information went ignored. As I signed up for online bill payments, traded my Nikon film camera for a digital one, and turned off the radio in favor of podcasts, my phone still stayed my phone.

I now get an offer about once a month from Cingular to upgrade my phone, a gentle reminder that my phone is an old hag in the business. But I like old hags. After all, I married a man who, though considered a technology expert, doesn’t even own a cell phone.

On the flip side, I have ONLY eight pounds to lose. Since September, I lost 18 pounds. All-in-all, I’ve lost roughly 40 pounds from my peak weight two years ago. And actually, I did reach my original goal of 120 pounds; I lowered it to 110 pounds when I found out that being 120 pounds still involved a mini pot-belly and a slightly bigger butt than I had hoped. The truth is that I’m 15 pounds lighter than my lowest weight in the past three years worth of weigh-ins (I keep Excel records of many mundane details about my life). And beyond the spreadsheets of data, at the heart of this New Year’s is the fact that I’m not fat anymore, and this has been the first New Year’s in a very long time that I’ve been able to say that.

First, A Warning

The Grand Canyon trails and website are saturated with warning signs telling people not to attempt to hike down to the river and back in one day, which is precisely what we plan to do. Scott and I have seen people do some very stupid things on these trails such as leaving too late in the day and not carrying any water. So I have to add the following warning: do NOT attempt this hike if you haven’t prepared properly. That means if you didn’t do the research and mapped out a sound strategy, you shouldn’t attempt this hike no matter how fit you think you are. That also means that you shouldn’t attempt this hike if you aren’t physically and trail fit to do this, keeping in mind that there is a difference between being physically fit and being trail fit and also keeping in mind that your idea of being physically fit might be quite different than the level that is required to do this hike — being able to run a 10-minute mile is not the same thing as being able to run a marathon. We found this hike to be challenging even though we’ve gone backpacking with 35-45 pounds on our backs for days at a time, oftentimes contending with the heavy elevation gains that come with hiking in the High Sierras and getting no recovery time between days. I also do craploads of physical training. I created a list of trail milestones and the time we need to hit each milestone in order to make reasonable progress. We packed supplies that would get us through a night if we found ourselves stuck in the canyon overnight.

The Plan

We got our first glimpse of the Bright Angel Trail during our road trip but were unable to hike down because we had our dog with us; there is an excellent view of the trail along the rim, west of the trailhead. The winding trail was calling us for a good challenge. It was probably a good thing we didn’t go down that day since the summer heat would have been nearly unbearable with inner canyon temperatures routinely exceeding 110 degrees. After our trip to Half Dome in October, I started to make plans for a day hike down the Grand Canyon. We were actually supposed to go down on November 4th, but due to the San Diego fires, we pushed out our target date to November 11th. As it turns out, November is an excellent time to visit the Grand Canyon: although the nights get close to freezing, the temperature is quite nice for hiking if you have the right gear and clothing for rapid body temperature changes. The low is around freezing, but the high in the inner canyon stays below 85 degrees or so.

I reserved a campsite in Mather Campground for Saturday and Sunday night. Unfortunately, all we have is our backpacking tent (a tent that barely fits two people). All dreams of a roomy tent with a regular air mattress and comforters were out, and we’d have to sleep with our backpacking gear and an extra blanket to supplement our +15-F-degree-rated sleeping bags which in actuality are NOT comfortable in +15-F-degree weather (I wonder if the sleeping bag rating really refers to the degree in which you barely avoid dying from hypothermia).

We needed to get to our campsite with at least an hour of daylight left to set up our tent and take care of any other business, so we planned to leave San Diego at 6:00 am. We arrived at our campsite at 4:15 pm Arizona time, set up the tent, ate our dinners, took our sleeping pills, and were in the tent for bed by 6:35 pm. We need to get up at 4:45 am tomorrow to take the early shuttles to the South Kaibab Trailhead, aiming for a start time of 6:30 am. We have a hard time falling asleep as a group of noisy Koreans arrive at the campground around 9:00 pm and are up until midnight laughing and leaving their car light on. I overhear that they are planning on getting up at 4:00 am and it sounds like they are trying to hike down and back up in one day as we are.

I am nervous about tomorrow. Daylight is quite short now, only about 11 hours from about 7:00 am to 5:30 pm. Also, this will be my first real canyon hike, and I am anticipating that canyon hikes involve quite a different strategy than conventional hikes. A good, injury-free and minimal impact descent is crucial; if you blow off the descent, you’ll pay for it on the ascent. I took time the evening prior to tape up my blister-prone spots. Also, a descent in darkness with headlamps can be very dangerous. For example, the Mist Trail on the way to Half Dome is nearly impossible to safely navigate down during nightfall as the granite stairs are narrow and seem to change direction suddenly and randomly, so we ascended this section before sunrise in the dark in order to guarantee us a safe descent before sunset. However, this being a canyon hike, the clock needs to be reversed; we resolved that we’d probably finish in darkness, but I didn’t want to finish too late in the day. We’re aiming to start by 6:30 am (about 30 minutes before sunrise when there is some natural light) and finish by 7:00 pm (about 1.5 hours after sunset).

The Hike

We woke up at 4:45 am to a very cold morning and were at the shuttle stop by 5:15 am. Since the buses aren’t on an exact schedule, we only know the approximate time intervals that the buses come by but don’t know when the next bus will come. Even in the very worst case, we need to be at the trailhead by 6:30 am to be on schedule, so we play it conservatively, map out the worst case, and show up at the bus stop at 5:15 am, when the buses are supposed to start running. We miss the first bus, but this allows us to have breakfast. We catch the Village Shuttle at 5:40 am and catch a break: the Kaibab Shuttle is waiting for us at the transfer station and we’re able to immediately board it. This affords us a start at 6:00 am, 30 minutes ahead of schedule.

I am hesitant to start as it is pitch black and I am unsure whether the descent will be impossible to navigate in the dark as is the case of the Mist Trail. But I am pleasantly surprised to find that the trail is quite wide and non-technical, so we are able to easily descend with our headlamps. We are a little slow to start, and there is a temptation to go fast downhill as we are routinely passed by other parties, but we keep to a steady 2.0 mph down to keep the impact on our knees and feet minimal and I use my trekking poles to bear some of the impact. As I mentioned before, if you unnecessarily stress your body here, it’ll impact your ascent two fold.

My mom once told me that you have to hike down into the canyon in order to truly appreciate the Grand Canyon. The view on the South Kaibab Trail is amazing. I think the most impressive scenery in the Grand Canyon is still from the rim. However at the rim, the Grand Canyon looks like a beautiful still painting, but as we go down into the canyon, the Grand Canyon truly comes alive. From this vantage point, I can see some of the geology up close and I can see the Grand Canyon as a living ecosystem. It feels like being able to walk through the brush strokes of a painting — a little surreal, maybe a little psychedelic even, but definitely intriguing and uplifting with the wonderment of nature.

We reach Phantom Ranch at 10:00 am, 30 minutes ahead of schedule. I prod Scott to hike another 0.5 mile to Phantom Ranch to get some lemonade and take a break there. We only manage a short 15-minute break there where we enjoy some really good lemonade. I’m not dehydrated or hot, so I can say this with a clear head: their lemonade is really, really good. We walk back to the Bright Angel campground area where Scott washes his face in the creek and we sit for another 15-minute break with deer feeding uncomfortably close to us and we see a huge mule. The Grand Canyon has many intriguing sights.

We start our ascent with an unsatisfying break at the canyon floor that didn’t involve taking off our shoes, and I worry whether we’ll pay for this mistake later. After about an hour of following the Colorado River on a frustrating series of small ascents and descents, we take a short break by a rest house and emergency phone where Scott puts on some moleskin. We start again, keeping a good pace and reaching Indian Garden at 1:05 pm. Indian Garden is another lush patch of concentrated vegetation in the canyon, and at this time of year, the leaves have turned yellow, reminding us that it is fall  even in the canyon. Although we spend 30 minutes here, resting on a bench in the shade, we still do not take off our shoes for a real rest. My feet are doing alright at this point, a remarkable feat considering that I completed 7 miles of steep downhill today.

With only 4.5 miles left to go and the possibility of finishing before sunset, we eagerly hike onwards. We reach the Three-Mile-Resthouse at 2:15 pm, making 2 mph on the uphill. We take a 15-minute break there where one guy calls someone on his cell phone while taking a break, and another group of young people talk about calories. It reminds me of how I see people on Cowles Mountain eat junk when they summit and try to justify it with their hiking. I guess I have a mouthful to say about weight loss, but that will have to wait for another day.

We reach the 1.5-Mile-Resthouse at 3:15 pm where we take another 15-minute break, again clocking 2 mph on the uphill. This is sustained speed is probably a record for us, and I am excited that we may actually finish in time to take a shower before the showers close today. The neat part of this trail is that you get a pretty good view at the winding trail you just came up.

We reach the trailhead at 4:20 pm! The weather has been great today: we’ve managed to hike most of the time either in the shade or with cloudy skies and the temperature staying below 80 degrees. Also, this hike is not a technical one; the trail is pretty straight forward, so a good strategy, physical fitness, and will power were all that was required of us today.

After

I packed in 3.5 liters and drank about 2.5 liters (plus the lemonade at Phantom Ranch). Scott packed in 4 liters, refilled one of his Nalgenes along the way, and consumed about 3 liters. I managed to get through the day with only one blister – on the toe on which I had to remove the moleskin as I had wrapped it around too tightly the night before. It rained in the Grand Canyon today. Scott and I got caught in a bit of it around dinner time, but we were in out tent by the time it rained heavier. Finally, here is a picture of the Bright Angel Trail a bit west along the rim, taken earlier this year during our road trip.

The crowd was a little bigger this year compared to last year, and they must have learned from last year that they’d do better to serve more food this time along with the beer as well as offer some water for sale, so this year’s event had many food samples from various vendors — some brewers’ restaurants and some just restaurants. Bella Pizza was really good and a welcome companion to the beer. Too bad they’re located all the way in Chula Vista. While other food samples were quite good, a lot of them were spicy, which isn’t really appropriate food for beer tasting as it kills taste buds. Also last year, they provided a sink to clean out our taster glasses (and drain out any disagreeable beer), but there was no such sink provided this year. As for the beer, this year was not as heavy on the IPAs, although Alpine’s Pure Hoppiness still made the menu. Oddly, this year’s festival featured a few sour beers. Maybe the brewers felt the need to be a little more exotic this year.

I have to preface my beer review: I like German-style lagers far more than Belgium beers or IPAs. And if you’re a microbrew fan in San Diego, you probably noticed that San Diego’s microbrew scene leans more toward IPAs than anything else. But in my view, lagers are generally a better basis for creating a beer with a crisp taste, a clean finish, and a little bit of something interesting; it’s difficult to convey subtle or not-so-subtle flavors when you have so much hoppiness that it drowns out everything else. Scott’s theory as to why microbreweries tend to focus more on IPAs and Belgium-style beers is that the big breweries — Budweiser, Miller Light, etc. — are predominately German-style lagers, and so if they want to stand out as a microbrewery and justify the $5 extra you might pay for a microbrewery’s beer, they have to try a totally different style of beer. Now, as a fan of microbrews, I believe you can produce a lager that has something interesting and worthwhile to offer. Karl Strauss, for example, produces balanced, flavorful lagers that are interesting enough to justify the extra cost. That said, here is my review:

I went for the lighter beers first and then progressively darker. First up was San Diego Brewing Co.’s Blueberry Wheat. I tried this at last year’s festival, but was luke-warm to it then probably because it was one of the last beers I tasted that night, so my taste buds were shot by then and hence, last year’s version tasted a bit like blueberry cough syrup. But this year — WOW. Scott, who liked this beer last year, has been on a scavenger hunt for blueberry beers, taking his hunt on the road all the way to a microbrewery in Maine. But nothing came close to San Diego Brewing Co’s Blueberry Wheat. Where the other microbrews only delivered a subtle flavor of blueberry, this one has a definitive and clean taste of blueberries.

Rock Bottom La Jolla’s Bumble Beer Honey Ale. This one was nothing special, and in fact, it peeved me a bit. There are a lot of microbreweries that have beers with the word “honey” it the name, but don’t deliver honey at all. This was one of those beers. At last year’s festival, they had something called Orange Honey, which was much better than this year’s honey beer. But so far as “honey beers” go, my favorite is Pizza Port’s California Honey beer, which unfortunately, I’ve never seen featured at these events.

Mission Brewery’s Helles. This was my favorite of the evening. It had a remarkably crisp taste and a very clean finish. Normally, I look for a little bit of non-beer flavor in a good beer, but this one was so crisp and so clean that it beat out the more exotic blends.

La Jolla Brewhouse’s Red Lion (Belgian Red). This one was okay by itself, but it was complemented with their meatloaf and sweet potato hash forming an excellent pairing and highlighting the beer in a way that I don’t think it would have been able to on its own.

Rock Bottom La Jolla’s Ragtop Red. Another disappointment from Rock Bottom. Their Fire Chief Red was my favorite at the Lager Festival last year, so I had expected an equally impressive red beer this time around with the Ragtop Red. Like their Bumble Beer Honey Ale, the beer was okay, but nothing special – not the rich toasted barley flavor of their Fire Chief Red.

Oggi’s Sunset Amber. This one was overly bitter. Even though I am not a fan of IPAs, I do see craft in something like Alpine’s Pure Hoppiness (which I didn’t taste this year, but tasted last year). This one didn’t leverage the hops, and instead it was just flat bitterness all around.

Ballast Point’s Rocktoberfest. This was okay, and perhaps my taste buds had had enough for the evening by this point. I really had no patience to drink beyond the first couple of impressions. At this point in the evening, I wanted to end with one of the two coffee stouts featured tonight, but instead decided that having to drain out the remaining Rocktoberfest was a sign that I really didn’t have the capacity to try anymore beers tonight. And then…

Karl Strauss’s Sour Beer. Scott decided to end his evening with one of the sour beers. This year, Karl Strauss skipped any of their beers readily available at grocery stores and instead went for their exotic beers, some of which barely constitute as beers. Their Sour Beer is REALLY sour, so it’s best left as a stand-alone desert drink. I liked it. Like many of Karl Strauss beers, this one is a bit sweet, so there was a slight sweetness mixed with the sour taste, and this sweet, almost grape taste compliments and finishes the sour taste for an interesting blend that unfolds and changes through each taste.

Brewers I didn’t try this year (mostly because I’ve tried these before): Alpine, Backstreet, Coronado, Firehouse, Gordon Biersch, Green Flash, Lightning, Pizza Port, Stone, and Alesmith. Actually, I just noticed Alesmith this year and was looking forward to giving them a taste, but then decided to strike them off my taste list after I saw the names of their beers. Judging by their beer names, their stint seemed to be a bit like Stone: going for the arrogant bastard beer enthusiasts too proud to admit that they like sweet lagers better than bitter IPAs.

When I was a kid, I had a guy in my neighborhood who would always give out toothbrushes to disappointed faces every year. He was relentless, and yet, we would always stop by his house (and I, being a nerdy kid, would actually use the toothbrush, sometimes secretly wishing I had gotten a trial size tube of Sparkling Crest toothpaste instead). Once, I went trick-or-treating with a friend, and we accidentally stumbled onto the doorstep of a second-grade teacher at our elementary school who was giving out apples instead of candy. My friend started eating the apple right away — never mind the annual stories about poisonous Halloween candy. She lived despite the budding societal fears of the times, which now infests every aspect of our lives and produce lame-o parents who take their kids to the shopping mall for Halloween.