PROOF!

And then she turned me into a newt....

Bam Bam in San Fran

LEFT: Health 2.0. As if 1.0 was so good it deserved a sequel...

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After watching the Sox resume their pull towards the World Series with Boston natives Scott, Chris, and about 200 of my new closest friends in the San Diego "Red Sox" bar, I pulled a long, hungover drive from SD to SF though the central valley. Once I got through LA after a brief breakfast catch-up with Jan in North County, and a lunch catch-up with Pasadena Jon, it was a beautiful drive....mountains, interspersed with long, flat, speedlimitless stretches. Me and my Hyundai, tooling on down the highway.

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I had a full week in San Fran. First, a couple of days working with some buds helping get their early stage software company off the ground. Then, a couple of days at a conference known as Health 2.0, a bit of a different spin on health, targeted more at the consumer side of things. Yup, 17 months away, and not a thing has changed in the health game. Big change HAS to come...

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I was lucky enough to hookup with a bunch of friends throughout the week; Deb and Ed in their beautiful bayside digs, along with their crew...Michael, Leslie, Nick, Jason, and my old MEDE buddy henry. I also got to hang with St. Louis Don, Mike of the Lake District, Philly Paul, SD Ahmed, Ed and Anne, and a bunch of others. Great to get back in the swing of things and networking full throttle again.

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And, surprisingly, USAir was late again....

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"Back to Snowville" Lumpy out

California Dreamin'

TOP: My old buddy Scott, in the highly unusual position of sitting on his roof deck, overlooking the ocean, drinking a cold one.

2nd: Jeff and Kathryn, the future olive oil barrons

3rd: Lumpy hanging at the Santa Monica Pier. Joanna is behind him, but her toothpick frame is obscured by his girth

4th: Little Gia, my favorite kid in the Montini household, at the point in time the picture was taken. Great kid; great future

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Following the solar show, I spent a few days hanging with some of my SD friends. Joanna, my hiking and cycling buddy, Dewey and Sharon, the land barons of LA county, Jeff and Kathryn, future olive oil barons (look for Nichol's olive oil, coming to a store near you), schmoozer extraordinaire the Big O, the wonderful Montini family (incredible how big their girls have gotten!), Tony, another hiking buddy, and Sam and Chris down in Ocean Beach. Most of them were kind enough to open their houses to me for overnighters (or multi-nighters in the case of Tony and Scott) to keep both my lodging costs and my DUI legal fees down. I really appreciated the assistance and support. On next to San Francisco, to checkout the Health Care scene.

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"Blessed to have such good friends" Lumpy out

Let The Sun Shine, Let The Sun Shine In

TOP: An innovative "solar parking lot" array, Cools the cars, plus generated energy. Coupled with electric vehicle charging stations.

2nd A "utility solar array" composed of thousands of mirrors focused on a single cell

3rd: A full electric fleet SUV in use at UCSD. No emissions, equivalent of 100+ mpg

4th: Another utility array, sitting atop a public reservoir. Great use of land space
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Well, I'm off an running on my first "job search" trip. This trip is to sunny CA, where I'm doing a renewable energy conference in San Diego, and a Health conference in San Francisco. I've decided to look at 3 fields, renewable energy (solar and wind), health care (hospital and payer), and alternative transportation (hybrid vehicles and components). As I've looked at the market, I think these are 3 of the 4 fields primed to both take off and transform over the next 1-2 decades of my working life. (The 4th being genomics, but I think that's a few years out yet so I'm going to defer for right now).

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The solar show was incredible. I'd done a wind show a short while back, and it was maybe a thousand attendees, and few utilities. The solar show was just the opposite...500 companies, 18,000 attendees, big companies (SHARP, utilities, Kyocera) and joe's solar installation contracting. Many varieties of technologies...fat cell, thin cell, concentrated, mirrors, steam engines, just a whole variety of interesting things. I was fortunate enough to get to meet a slew of players across the industry, and they both educated and energized me about the possibilities of solar. And, this with oil touching $150/barrel, has to be a good alternative.

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"Sunchine" Lumpy out

Back To The Mines

Well, it's November now, and time to go back to the mines; our sabbatical is now ended. It's been an incredible year. We visited 10 countries, nearly 40 states (and now up to 49 in total, with just alaska to go), hiked Mt Kilimanjaro, kayaked a chunk of the Hudson River, biked from Mexico to Canada, and visited with scores of friends and relatives all over the country. And, on a sour note, we both watched our mom's pass on from this world, into whatever comes next.
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We feel deeply blessed that we've had this opportunity at this stage of our lives, while we still have our health, our sanity (although some would question mine, well, and maybe Kathy's for staying with me!), and our spirit of adventure.
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As our usual model, I'll start job hunting first, then Kathy will join in after I lock something down. This could be a most interesting run; the worst economic situation in our lifetime, being off work and out of circulation for 17 months, and the upcoming holidays which is traditionally a horrible hiring period anyways. But, we made our plans, and Q4 '08 was when we planned to head back "on-grid", so here we go. Should be a wild ride, and I'll keep everyone abreast of how things move along.
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If anyone has an opportunity, or an introduction to an opportunity, please contact me. I can do a broad range of things; COO, CIO, Program Management, Product Management, Marketing, Sales, Rainmaking, and Operations to name a few. I can be stationary or mobile, a permanent employee or a consultant, and can travel or relocate anywhere the situation requires. Contact me at GMALumpy@gmail.com if we have reason to connect jobwise.
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"Off and running" Lumpy out

They call it Youk-her

TOP: In one of the only "boys games" of the night, Eric, Koz, and Zach surprisingly wait on Joel "Roadrunner" Salatino to pick a suit. Following in Koz's footsteps, note the reverse yamulka. Zach at least wears a cap to cover his

BOTTOM: Gill, confused yet again, declares BINGO

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Well, it was a cold, snowy weekend in Ra-cha-cha, but we were able to sneak in a round of euchre. Well, sneak in, if your idea of sneaking is 20 cars congesting the street.We had our largest game to date, 23 players and over 30 people in attendance (for the purposes of declaring 30, I'm counting children as people).

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It was a really fun evening, capped off by Fran's homemade carmel apple cheesecake, 10 bottles of wine, 2 cases of beer, and about 2 gallons of my homemade chili. To say the least, I suspect some people slept with the fan on that night!

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Following the euchre game, the games continued with a roaring round of pinochle until 2 am. At that point, with me face down on the table, we declared victory and called it a night. Sunday at noon when we awoke, Aunt Kathy's chocolate chip pancakes were hot on the table. She's such an early riser....

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Final Results:

69 Tim - 1st
67 Koz - 2nd
64 Rick - 3rd
62 Gary - 4th
61 Eric - 5th
60 Tom/Laraine, Zach/JanK, Will (proof that euchre skill is genetic) - 6th
59 KathyA/Joel, Gill, 9th
53 Judy/maryO - 11th
52 Margaret/Carl - 12th
48 Sid - 13th
46 Bob - 14th
45 Fran - 15th
44 Pam/CathyV - 16th

Too high, Too far, Too fast

TOP: View downvalley towards Mineral King

MIDDLE: Franklin Lake from south (lower) flank

BOTTOM: Franklin Lake from Franklin Pass

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We started off from Mineral King midday, hours later than planned, with packs way heavier than hoped for. But, we had pepperoni and cheese!

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The hike up to Franklin Lake was not difficult technically, but the altitude, lateness of the start (read: heat, even at this altitude), pack weight, and lack of vertical acclimation combined to kick our butts. We got up to stark but beautiful Franklin lake (~ 10,500 ft) just before nightfall. We were tuckered out, bob had a significant migrane underway (maybe altitude induced), and we still had to make camp and eat. Also, I think we were all very dehydrated courtesy of the heat and altitude. We setup tents, and bob immediately crashed out for the evening. Tony and I made some dinner, and then likewise totally crashed out.

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Nighttime at this altitude in this mountain crevice was unexpectantly tough. It got down into the low 30's (or maybe high 20's). Our water bottles froze up solid in our tents, and it was a very restless night. On top of that, was concern about all the fresh bear scat we had seen on the hike up, and the imposing clouds. Not one of the best nights I've ever had out in the wilderness.

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We awoke the next morning frozen and stiff, still dehydrated, and low on energy. We just could not get over how much the first day had totalled us. Some other hikers had setup a camp nearby, and we chatted with them for a bit. Turns out that our mileage workup was off, and that the 4 miles we had planned on was actually 6 miles. This is not a good thing, as our workplan for the trip was tough as it was, and if we were off mileage, then we were not going to make it.

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We ate breakfast, packed up, and headed up the long, sweeping switchbacks towards Franklin Pass. This was another 2,000 feet of vertical, and we had it calculated at ~ 2 miles. After several hours of hiking through excruciating pea gravel terrain, we finally summited, and ran into some experienced local hikers. They informed us that it was ~ 3.5 miles we had just climbed, and that the 7 miles of downhill that we had planned for the rest of the day was really more like 10 miles. And, there was little chance that we would get there before nightfall; not the news you want to hear when you're totally demoralized already.

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We had a good lunch and discussed out options. Given that the routing was so far off (a long story, but it is what it is), we decided that we could not take a chance trying to get to our planned evening stopover. And, that was the only water source for the rest of the day, so we had to make it there or have water risk. We also reviewed the remainder of the Whitney assault plan; given the new, accurate distances, we no longer felt that we could make the mountain, summit, and return in the remaining 6 days that we had available. We discussed just doing some day hikes from Franklin Lake, but, frankly, we just didn't have the heart anymore.

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The one thing that did interest us however was margaritas. So, we packed back to Franklin Lake for another cold evening, a massive buffet breakfast to reload our energy (and take down some pack weight) and then back to Mineral King the next day. Along the way we saw even more piles of fresh bear scat, and came upon a herd of mule deer who were not the least bit spooked by us. We were able to walk up to within 10 yards of the deer, and probably could have even petted them if we want to (bad form to touch wild animals, so we deferred). We made it down the hill, did yet another long, brutal drive down to visalia, and spent the rest of the evening with burritos and margaritas. Ah, life is good.

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Although we're relatively experienced hikers, for whatever reason this trip we did mostly everything wrong. Maybe it was because we were cocky after last year's adventure; maybe because it was at the end of a great season of outdoors adventures. In any case, much like "you don't beat the river", "you don't beat the mountain". For posterity, some things we did wrong:

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- too much vertical too fast (100 feet to 8,000 feet driving in 4 hours, then hiking another 2,500 feet over the next 4 hours, then another 2,000 feet 8 hours later)

- no acclimation days. Flatlanders can't go to 12k+ feet at full speed. And if your try, a diamox the first day or two probably wouldn't be a bad idea.

- too much packweight. We wanted to go in under 50lbs, but probably went in closer to 70lbs

- too complicated a menu. Need to be able to make most everything with just water added, and just a jetboil stove to minimize weight

- Have to find a way to reduce cycle time for dining and cleanup. One person has to go fill water containers immediately upon arrival...time consuming, and it holds up meals waiting on water. Plus, want to accelerate drinking to minimize dehydration.

- we used a 4-5 litre water platypus instead of small bags for our water pumps. Worked great, and I'd definitely take a couple in the future. Much less effort, easier to carry.

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"You don't beat the mountain" Lumpy out