Mary Panttaja

The sign out front says Bed and Breakfast, but its called 414 Hotel. I found it by buying the Rough Guide to New York City to find out what they recommended in the less expensive range of hotels. Looking at reviews of other cheap hotels on line was very disconcerting—raves and awful pictures of mold giving conflicted and confusing images. But the 414 Hotel was listed in the Rough Guide as the best of the cheap hotels. (Cheap is not a good word for this place; it’s too clean, nice, and elegant for that.)

It has been created from two townhouses that have a little garden patio between them, where you can sit in the evening or morning air. The rooms are nice, modern decor (even a gigantic flat screen tv on the wall), full baths. Service is excellent. The only down-side, really is the dark gray covering the walls in the hallways.

It’s a west-side style neighborhood (sensible, since it is on the west side) though a little more business-like than the cozy upper west side. The block is lined with trees and homes, and the next block has an array of restaurants. It was only a three block walk back from our play last night, which is a dream after a long night at the theatre.

We will try to stay here often, though they seem to be pretty booked in advance.

We got a bit of exercise this morning, walking from midtown to Chelsea for a meeting (about 2. 5 miles). We are also having coffee later with our nephew, Andrew, who works for TPM Media as an associate editor for this important political blog.

PS. We are sitting at an outside table in the Chelsea district (southern end of Manhattan) on a beautiful summer-like morning, not too hot yet. The restaurant is called Pastis. Jim has his network working and we’re both working on our blogs. What a way to work, eh? LM

Or not. In the air, on a bus, now on a train from Newark to NYC for a day of meetings. What started out as a light trip has filled pretty much up to the brim: a morning meeting, a required trip to Roberto’s (purveyor of fine saxaphones and Jim’s current favorite sax shop), an afternoon meeting and then “Moon for the Misbegotten” with Kevin Spacey, Eve Best (up for a Tony), and Colm Meaney. Tomorrow, two more meetings and a train to Boston. The weekend is also filling with a social schedule—partly adopted from our daughter, Erin.

This is theatre month. For folks who live in the country we tally up a lot of theatre, mostly in one week when the entire family goes to Ashland, Oregon for the Oregon Shakepseare Festival (usually 6-8 plays in 4-5 days). Unknown by most people, half of the OSF productions are modern plays written by modern playwrights. We have a relatively serious relationship to theater in the family and everyone takes it quite to heart. Luckily my son’s wife and my daughter’s boyfriend are also into the theatre experience so everyone shows up. Nowadays someone has to hang out during each play to watch the babies, but that is also a coveted opportunity.

So adding MFTM in NYC to June is a kind of warmup. It starts at 7PM which must be for some reason—and we hope to be able to sleep in a bit tomorrow.

We are trying out a new, inexpensive hotel in midtown this trip. Hotels in NYC have priced themselves out of any sense of reasonableness—though as long as folks pay the price, I guess it’s fine. I love spending time in the city, but it’s hard to justify a $600 per night room. We’ll see how this place goes—I’m excited to find something reasonable ($200). I finally figured out how to really find a good cheap hotel (anything under $350 per night—we bought the Rough Guide to NYC—the book European travelers use to find their way around—it was a big help. All the web sites promoted the same hotels and advertised low rates that never panned out. So we’ll find out how 414 Hotel turns out. I’m very hopeful.

Crossing under the Hudson River. The day looks to be beautiful, not too hot or muggy. And not raining.

Cycling our new “daily” loop the other day, an entire blog evolved in my head. (It’s that or a single song that pumps along with the peddles—I try to remember to chant, but often other things seem to happen on their own.) The loop runs to Geyserville on a tiny back road (actually Highway 128) and then back on a larger local road. 18 miles or so. Quite a bit of composing time—so my next “tool” is a recording device.

Here is my attempt to recreate the original—more thoughts on our proclivity to measure ourselves, which often means to rate ourselves against others (or even ourselves on another day). Why do we do this? So we can award ourselves with feeling good? Or punish ourselves by feeling bad? “We’re better than that” or “Look how truly sucky we are.”

The Trap

The first thing to notice is that the process itself is a trap. You are trapping yourself into a particular measurement of success. If you can measure it, it has limited scope. It’s about a simplistic measurable element of the whole: the weight, the time, the revenue, the count of customers. It is inherently not the whole thing—only a minor reflection of one element of what you are doing.

Now these measurable elements (the revenue, for example) are useful measures in their limited niche—used for precisely what they mean, but no more. They can be used to measure our skill level (how well we sell) or single facets of complex behaviors and their results. Since we learned to measure things we have used that information to evolve. This is good, useful, and challenging. Especially when we really know who we are—then careful measurement of our progress on our path can be a useful tool. But we need to remember, that the things we can measure are not usually the whole story—there are things in our lives, important things, that cannot be measured, but must be experienced and evaluated through our subjective experience.

Missing The Updraft

Last May, when I walked up (it is always up) the trail into Macchu Picchu, I really experienced how I could screw up my moment to moment life by comparing myself to others—even inadvertently.

The walking trail into Macchu Picchu is very difficult for regular folks: up over three passes, 14, 13, and 12,000 ft, with some radical descents in between. If you are lucky you’ve spent a few days in Cusco at 10,000 feet, which helps because the trail starts at 8,000. You are walking with several hundred other people scattered on the trail—the government controls the daily total—some of whom are locals (porters and guides) and do this every day. We never seriously compare ourselves to them—we can grant ourselves that leeway. But my experience was that almost every other person on the trail was stronger than I was. And walked faster than I ever do. Sometimes, it seems they walked faster than I can imagine.

As people would pass me I would find myself picking up some of their speed, unconsciously trying to keep up. I would subtly measure the difference in our speed, and my lack of capability was hard for my ego to absorb, and it would try to “pick up the pace.” Then, if I happened to walk by someone going slower that myself (a very rare occurance), I would “pick up the pace” suddenly feeling good about being stronger than someone else. Every time I walked faster I got into trouble—I would have to stop and catch my breath and recover.

What’s the problem? The problem is that when I did this I was not running my own race; I was not working with my own capacities; I was defining the challenge using someone else’s game plan. In the old fable of the hare and tortoise, it wasn’t the tortoise’s slowness that brought success, but that the tortoise executed its own game plan, ran its own race. This is how we get the most from ourselves and our organizations. And we can’t do anything more than to maximize our own capacities in the moment. So I could never walk up that mountain any faster than my capacities last May; that was all I had to work with. And to maximize my success, I had to walk my own speed, execute my own plan which acknowledged my capabilities, talents, skills, and motivations.

Choosing Our Own Manuevers

This means that we have to maneuver in our own updraft. The maneuvers we choose must be our own. They cannot be adopted from someone else—they are in a different updraft, with different skills, knowledge, and capacities. Adopting someone else’s maneuver can be a recipe for disaster—like walking too fast for your heart. Or using a particular flight plan that is working for “those guys over there” when in reality they are in a different air current than you are, not to mention that they are in a different aircraft.

The skill of getting stronger and more successful is always about knowing your own capacities and working your own plan—never about measuring yourself against someone else.

End of trip wrap-up notes:

• Saturday in Mammoth Lakes was still cold. The promised warm-up didn’t happen until Sunday as we were leaving. We rode the gondola up to the top of the ski mountain—13 Degrees and 20-30 mile an hour winds. A very beautiful place, Mammoth, though I’m not sure I’d want to be here when the ski crowds are here. (They are still skiing here now; Jim says their target closed date is usually July 4.)
• We waited all day for the temperatures to climb, and finally did our bike ride at 46 degrees. One time when the only thing you want to do is ride uphill (to keep warm.)
• Sunday, we drove to Coloma (essentially a state park) in the foothills (the place where Sutter first found gold in the Sierras) assuming that we surely could get some warmer weather there. And we were right. Didn’t quite know why Jim picked Coloma, but when I chatted up a man at the local market (whose only fresh vegetables were onions and potatoes) about his really cool play boat (kayaks designed for free-style white water kayaking; tiny—like 4.5-5 feet long) we found out that there was a great kayak store here. I never know how Jim knows these things. (Yeah, right.) But we biked over to Lotus and tried on some boats. (Just checking to see how many parenthetical ideas are percolating in here.)
• We are at the Coloma Resort which is a campground with cabins and a mile of frontage on the American River. The also run the Coloma Outdoor Discovery School, which does rafting, ropes courses, kayaking, and swimming camps for kids. It seems like really great location with the river and the State Park right here. (They could lose the braying goat though.)
• The temperature range for the trip: 13 to 106. Only precip was snow. And sand, if you count the sandstorm—still finding piles of sand inside the equipment. �

So now we’re on the way home. We’ve a lot of notes for improving the camper set up; top on the list is to figure out how to run the computers offline.

(I’ll post a note later if I manage to insert pictures into these travel logs.)

It’s gently snowing here again this morning. It is supposed to be warmer and sunny. Well, we’ll see. Slept fine because we have 110 electricity and ran the little electric heater pointed at our bed all night. Not sure what we are going to do today—biking in the snow might be a little dicey for us. It’s started to sit on the pavement.

Research seems to say that my MacBook Pro computer cannot be run off of DC power except on airplanes. Even though I bought an official Apple 12 volt cable for my machine. The issue is supposedly about the mag-safe connector. This would be a real downer and lead to much more troublesome solutions (like generators). Not that we’ve got the solar thing to work yet. There are some hacks posted, so we’ll see.

Jim and I are working on some collaboration tools. After some research (not extensive) we are setting up shared calendars and notebooks on Google. I haven’t been able to make Google Apps work yet. We’ll see how these work for us. We’re looking for something really light-weight and easy.

PS. It’s really snowing here. My goodness.

Well, it was too hot in Death Valley—and then there was the sand storm. So we thought to leave and head north up 395. (The 4 day dearth of power for my computer was another deciding factor—though we found one booth in the cafe at Furnace Creek that had an outlet. We were able to snag it once.)

Turns out that the weather has shifted out from under us and it is a delightful 78 in Death Valley today and in Mammoth it has been lightly snowing all morning and into the afternoon. It has just stopped as I type. Okay, the sun is partly out, but it’s in the forties and snow and light sleet have been the norm so far. It should improve tomorrow.

Meanwhile, we have enjoyed having power the last day.  (We stayed last night in Bishop, and would have stayed but they had a full booking of campers for the weekend—two swap sales and the second weekend of the trout fishing season.) I have posted several times and caught up on some email. I’m also researching if it is at all possible to power my computer with solar. (Seems like maybe not—that’s grim.) Jim has been catching up on something.

Hopefully we’ll get out on a bike ride though we’ll really have to bundle up.

(I’ll add links when I have better connectivity.)
Jim grew up in the desert and we both tolerate/like heat so we come as often as we can. The last time we were in Death Valley was the one trip we ever took with Jonathan and not Erin. (She stayed to work at school that summer.) He had been ill with a mono-like virus most of the summer and we were car camping around in an easy fashion—on our way to or from the Las Vegas waterslide park.

• Most interesting fact for me at Scotty’s Castle was that Bessie, the woman of the house, was in the first freshman class at Stanford University and then transfered to Cornell where she met Albert Johnson. That was pre-1900. The Howard’s were Puritans.
• In a serious wind and sandstorm the popup trailer feels a little vulnerable so we opted to protect it by shutting it down and getting a room. Baths, air conditioning, and power to charge my computer were other benefits; though the swimming pool didn’t look so glamorous in 60 mile per hour winds. Trouble is that in a big windstorm, power is an iffy thing. Off and on, and off again.
• We don’t have the power thing figured out. We can keep the camper battery charged with the solar panel, but the regulator we have never thinks it has any extra for the computers—-a problem we need to solve. But we have to figure out whether our battery is weak-hearted, or the controller is overly cautious, or what. That’s an important ingredient in our being able to be offline—power independence. The campsites that are not powered are SO much better and to our liking. And we know how to take care of all of our needs except the power for the electronics. We have been short of connectivity in some of our campsites; Death Valley is general free of cell service as best we can tell. So that is another challenge, but not as limiting to continued work as the lack of power for the computers.
• I realize how important the ever-present-keyboard has come to my flow of work. When things are coming I really need the keyboard (and, of course, its computer) to be working and its become hard for me to cope with the flow of ideas without it. So the power thing is really crucial.
• I did find some new material, locations, and experiences for John and Sarah while they were here. Their experiences here are a crucial turning point and now I can make them more real. Noted in a paper notebook though.

Cycling Notes

• Monday rode from Lone Pine Campground to Movie Flats in The Alabama Hills. 10 minutes. Rode around Movie Flats for about 30 minutes in the sand and gravel. Then road back up to camp–90 minutes. For all the world, it looks relatively moderate. I was crushed-tired and close to needing a rescue. (Last half mile included leg cramps and a spontaeous asthma attack.)
• A Swedish traveler stopped to admire our bikes and turned us on the Magura Brakes—easier to work for the extra long downhills that European mountain cycling requires. Also these desert, basin and range rides.
• Today, Wednesday, rode up a similar but not so steep grade to Zabriski Point—an hour up and 15 minutes back. Much easier—today we went from -200 feet sea level. Monday we were at 6000 feet. Aha!
• Wind is at least as much trouble as hills. Together they are a formidable foe.
• At Furnace Creek (lowest spot in the Western Hemisphere) morning low today was 80 degrees but it didn’t get to 90 until after 10, leaving a good four hours of riding time if we wanted. Evenings are either too hot or too windy.

Sitting on a ridge after dinner (maple schezwan pork with garlic green beans and salad; Seghesio Zin). We still need to wash the dishes but the ambiance of the sunset is hard to pass up. The sun has dropped behind Mount Whitney and we are watching the shadows climb up the Inyo Mountains.

We are between The Alabama Hills and Mount Whitney Portal. We visited Lone Pine today. (I want to call it a village because it’s small, but village sounds like a corner in Vermont, and doesn’t fit our hot, raggedly, dusty small towns.) We hiked up part of the Mount Whitney trail—just a little to get a taste. It feels good to be able and confident about taking off on a trail from 8400 feet and head up. It wasn’t very steep, an easy trail. And everyone else there was more able—a common problem when you get off the beaten track—but we headed up an hour and then back down. Trouble with my knee—the muscles seemed to want to freeze up. But all good.

We are here in the Alabama Hills (named by miners who were Confederate sympathizers after a war ship) because, through a weird adjustment in time and space in my storyline, I needed somewhere John and Sarah could camp in March. So we ended up in this desert. The Alabama Hills have been the site of numerous film projects. A very strange and unearthly place of rock formations and desert chapparal.

The moon is up and I guess we’ll have a full one before we leave the desert. Tomorrow we hope to take a run up to Bishop and see the Galen Rowell studio, Mountain Light. He was an inspiring artist/adventurer who really seem to have caught his updraft. I am in the midst of the retrospective book they published after he and his wife died in the plane crash.

The mountains are a gentle fading pink against a wispy cloud cover—dark is coming. The quail are ‘chawaka- ing’ in the brush.

Saturday April 28th

Driving across the central valley on our way to the desert:

• As we come down the hill from Altamont pass, the flatness of the land before you is abrubt. Out of the winding curving coastal range—the horizontalness impresses itself upon you.
• 92 degreees
• The western reaches of the San Joaquin valley are so desperately dry. It’s only the end of May and I am very sure that no grass has grown here this year. It must be last year’s scrapings —brown and gray and dusty. The rolling hills are shorn close like old grey stubble.
• 94 degrees
• A small stand of young steers stare up from their fence line at the hill before them. They are sure they are lost for in the heat there is no shade, no visible water, and nothing possible for them to eat. A forlorn mystery hangs about them. What are they doing here?
• 96 degrees
• The vineyards and the almond orchards are startling in this dessert, verdant green, water oozing from the pipes that drain the giant canal along which the highway runs.
• 98 degrees
• A black and dead almond orchard of formerly full-grown trees— thousands of trees—despair, all hope lost—clearly someone has just shut off the valve of their artificial life’s blood and they are not fit to live in the place without it.
• 10 miles down the road someone is planting new baby almond trees; the meaninglessness of pipes and ownership and regulations.
• The aqueduct has little roaps with buoys across as it passes beneath the freeway: don’t swim beyond this point. Could you float it into Los Angeles. Though the turbines, of course.
• A mirage appears to the east—a vast lake of water and rushes.
• 100 degrees—only April 28th
• Someone is planting nopales along the fence—they, at least, look like they belong here.
• Kern County Line: chamisa (a desert shrub) appears along the roadside; dust devils stack up on the horizon— or maybe a line of tractors plowing five mile long waterlesss rows of dust.

Good news. It’s a beautiful, organized dustdevel swirled into a lean tower…not a truck or a tractor or a car.

The is such a strange place. If you brought immigrants from the east coast here instead of to Palo Alto or Monterey or San Diego, they would never dream of moving to California. No wonder Jim’s family kept moving west until they hit the ocean. �

So, we’re traveling. And working. A little. Sitting now with a cup of coffee in a little cafe in Lone Pine.

We both got in two hours yesterday while driving. (Okay, one of us works while the other drives.) I’m writing. Jim’s researching. Carrying your network with you is a dream. Though last night at Lake Isabella we didn’t have any cell coverage. That was okay though, because we spent two hours yesterday in traffic backups because of serious accidents—so we barely got in a bike ride before the sun set. Cooked dinner and off to bed. Not a lot of extra time to work.

So this week’s postings are a test to see what can be accomplished while traveling. The next post was written while driving yesterday as well as a post for Catching the Updraft! which includes illustrations. (CTU is also now linked to the domain updrafting.com. “Updrafting” has much higher specificity in the search engines.)

Heading up the Whitney Portal Road to camp—maybe up there a couple of days and might not have cell service. I guess that’s the test.