Army, and Mission Peak hiking

This week I am on orders for the Army Reserve and I've begun my annual training. I am in Dublin, CA for the next couple weeks.

Yesterday I starting in on a bandwidth-measuring project (using MRTG) to gather some information and I had a couple issues getting all the required packages loaded for it to run. (It now appears to be working as I wished for.) In the morning I called my family to see how how things were going and how Jason was going about his day. Then in the afternoon a Army collegue and I hiked up to Mission Peak (which is part of the nature preserves within East Bay Regional Parks. The peak is about 2517 feet above sea level.

It took us an hour and 15 minutes to get to the monument at the top of the peak. The view out there is great and you can actually see much of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley from the summit.

I hadn't an opportunity to any sort of hiking since leaving active duty army in 1995 so this was a good deal to do. It was an enjoyable experince to go up to the top and get a work out at the same time. It might be something I should factor into my time off whenever I get some. In addition, I got so see some really nice plant

life that I hadn't seen in a long while, such as this California Poppy.

In addition to the trees and flowers, I happened upon a real-live rattlesnake on the way down. I was back on my way down the trail to go to return home and this snake was laying smack-dab in the middle of the path. I managed to not get bit or attacked, but also got to see the snake slither away a bit into the grass, prepare to lunge (as in a prelude to an attack), and hear the distinctive rattle sound the reptile makes. Check this out....

Ahhh...Nature.

Bubbles everywhere

Jason was outside today in the backyard and he was having a blast with the soap bubbles we got to blow around the yard. Here are photos of the fun.

Quakes and BBQ-ing

On an important note, Baja California (BC) experienced an earth quake this afternoon that was of a pretty significant magnitude. However given our location well inside the Central Valley of California, we did not feel any of it during the reported time it took place. (The hyperlink above goes to a Wikipedia image for a visual reference to the location of BC.) So all is well and nothing here was affected to what we can tell. (I was at the store at the time getting garden hardware and did not notice anything out of the ordinary.)

This weekend was a quiet Easter holiday. I got the backyard lawn mowed and tended to. And to top it all off we got to use the gas BBQ today. So I cooked up some chicken, hotdogs and Bocaburger (faux, non-meat,) patties. (No, no cooked Easter eggs or chocolate Easter bunnies!)

While on that subject...Jason got to do an Easter egg hunt today in the living room and he had a pretty good time of it. We have a few pictures of the Easter basket we put out for him and staged, as well as Jason going throughout the living room till all the eggs were revealed. Later i will gather those and post them here. But in all, it was a really great weekend.