Back at it again. Procrastinating.

I’m so behind on my writing projects that one of these days I’ll just have to suck it up and write at night at the Starbucks or just get off my ass and focus on the writing. I need to write, the plan, and make a damn dent on the project. So behind. So so behind.

Today is not one of those days that I will focus on my writing. Today is a finger tapping day. Me and my empty void, clearing my mind and honestly, I don’t think I have anything to say.

* * *

Going gray. Not naturally, but on purpose.

It seems to be a craze right now; girls are dyeing their hair gray. I saw this a few years ago when one of the Wong Fu crew dyed his hair gray, but thought really nothing of it, but then I saw it coming back with a force, now with girls.

It really struck me when I first saw my doppelganger at work with it. pvo had done it a few times and now it seems that the Hurry Curry girl did it.

It really seems like it is an Asian girl thing. Or maybe it is an all-girl thing and it just so happens that the only people that I saw doing it are Asian. I think that is more likely.

It’s a weird trend. I probably will not understand it, but that’s me not being a part of the zeitgeist and just not being cool. It is what it is.

* * *

Baking.

That’s where my focus has been. Baking bread to be exact.

Instead of doing commercial yeast baking, my thing now is using my own cultured yeast – sourdough starter, in which I named Cleofis, to help the bread rise.

I’ve been baking a lot, experiment, trying to get a confident feel of how to make bread and it definitely have been error after error.

I’ve tried rustic loaves, to baguettes, to white sandwich breads.

They all come with certain amount of success and many disappointments.

It’s very nuanced and requires a lot of time and I’m a little too impatient about it. The thing is, I don’t like the sour taste, so I want a fast rapid rise, but sometimes my apartment isn’t warm enough, so it isn’t conducive to a good rise, so I just rush it and just say fuck it and bake and it just turns out not so well.

Another thing I’m trying to learn is how to gauge my dough. I don’t know when it is too wet, too dry, or just right.

I follow the recipe, but to no avail, all the time it just seems too wet for me.

A high hydration dough is very tough to work with and I’m afraid to add more flour to it, which can throw off the consistency of the bread. The more flour, the denser the bread is.

What I learned is that the higher the hydration, the bigger the air holes are in the bread. But with higher hydrated dough, the tougher it is to form and knead the dough.

It’s a fine nuanced balance and I guess it is one of those things that just requires patience and doing and experimenting to get a good hand at it.

I honestly don’t understand why I have this high fascination with baking now, or more specifically bread baking. It just seems very random and out of nowhere.

I know I like to cook from scratch, mainly for health reasons, knowing specifically what goes into my body, but why bread?

Before, I don’t eat much bread. It isn’t a part of my diet. I’ll get bread when I want bread or if it goes well with what I’m cooking. It had never been a staple in my apartment or my diet.

But I guess I just needed something else to focus on and I think I can do it. There’s such a high learning curve to it that I’m just fascinated by it. It’s hard and challenging, and I’m guessing that is why my sudden interest in it.

I had a few successes and now it is time to be more proficient at it.

I think more than anything, that’s the biggest thing that I want to accomplish this year. Be better at baking. Have a better understanding about the whole process of baking bread and what happens when I do things this way and that way. I want to know all.

It has gotten to a point where I stopped writing to do research on videos on how to bake bread. I want to learn.

Learning and improving is key.

It’s always the first weekend back from a trip that I don’t want to do anything at all. I don’t want to meet, see, or interact with people. It’s always always the weekend of me just unwinding and being on my own.

The funny thing is that the trip would always be a solo trip and I would have been alone to begin with. It’s just funny that I would want another weekend of being alone, more so than my regular weekends.

It usually ends up being a typical weekend of me not doing anything at all and cooking if I had the motivation. But it’s a little different because whereas my typical weekends are just how it ends up being, unplanned and open to anything that comes up, if they ever do, which is rarely. These after trip first weekends are planned unwind be on my own not doing anything weekends.

That’s just how I am. I prefer being alone. I prefer being on my own, so I can unwind and decompress from everything. This weekend in particular is a definite must, given how things kind of ended the last one.

* * *

The trip.

This past weekend was my very first time exploring the majestics that was Big Sur. I’ve always driven by this beautiful place on many of my road trips along the coast but I had never spent any real time there exploring and hiking like I normally do.

It’s such a beautiful place. The bluffs along the Pacific and the crashing waves and the vast endless blueness just boggles the mind. One of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen and I finally planned to explore it.

Overall, it was a great trip. I took the coast like any sane person would, or just a person who likes to take the scenic route. I didn’t have any time constraints or any place to be. I just strolled up on Hwy 1, which was quickly becoming an old acquaintance of mine. Maybe next time, if there is a next time, I’ll take Hwy 101 and just get there quicker.

For the longest time, up until I started to do research on the trip and planning on where to hike, I believed that Big Sur was just a big National Park called Pfeiffer Burns. I was wrong. Dead wrong.

Big Sur was that region of Northern California and is composed of many little State Parks like Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, Limekiln State Park, Pfeiffer Burns State Park, and Andrew Molera State Park and many others.

I researched and researched and finally made up a list of hikes, attractions, and activities that I wanted to do. I created offline trail maps and Yelp searches for places to eat and visit. I was ready and I was off, excited to take an extended weekend away from the city, away from work, and to be alone and be one with nature.

It was definitely much needed, like an extension of my bday trip out to Sequoia National Park and being one with nature there. There’s something that is definitely calming about it.

Maybe being out in nature is one of the only times that I usually don’t have earbuds in my head, ignoring people. It’s just me, nature and the sounds of my surroundings; the wild calls of birds, the rustling of lizards, the soft whispers of the cool breeze, the calming of the crashing waves. Nature.

Now, I use to hike with my headphones on, but years ago I stopped wearing them because it was just unsafe. You need to hear the sounds around you, especially when you are out there in the woods, forests, nature, wherever you are alone, hiking, so you can hear animals. Basically I didn’t want a bear or cougar or mountain lion or rattle snake sneaking up to me and eating me or killing me. 127 put a lot of things into perspective.

That’s why I usually end up posting on Facebook what I plan on doing that day and where I’ll be, so just in case I don’t check in the next day or in the next couple of days, people have a rough general idea of where I am.

It’s considerate.

I wonder what other people think about that. I wonder if they just think that I post that to rub it in that I’m off gallivanting around having fun and rubbing it in other people’s faces. Who knows?

I got to Julia Pfeiffer around 2:30 in the afternoon and just made my way to McWay Falls. It’s a little cove just outside of the park entrance right next to the PCH. After that, that’s when I went to have fun and did a 5-mile hike. It was going great until I had to go uphill. I didn’t do any strenuous hiking in Sequoia, so this one kicked my ass. I was doing really well and then I got tired going uphill so I had to take a break. I’m going to blame that on me skipping lunch and not eating anything all day. I just didn’t have the calories to do it.

After the short rest and snacks, I was good to go. I trucked along the hike without any other issues. It was great. After Julia Pfeiffer, I did Partington Cove. It was a weird little turn off on the PCH and quite an easy little hike down.

By this time, it was close to 6pm and I still had about an hour’s drive to the hotel. For dinner I went to Cannery Row and just walked around and found a place.

One thing I noticed about Monterrey (where I stayed for the weekend) was that it was quiet. Like really quiet. Like I kept wondering, it’s Friday night, where is everyone? It was that quiet.

After dinner, I walked around some more to explore the area and then I was back to the hotel and was pretty much asleep before 11. It was a big day the next day. Lots of hiking. Lots.

Bright an early, I found a hipster coffee shop called ACME which was actually pretty damn good. Pick what you want with what kind of beans and they grind it fresh and voila, coffee. Yummy coffee.

Then started my next day, which was a very very long day, with a lot of hiking planned. It started at Andrew Molera State Park. I had the whole 8.1-mile loop planned. It took about a mile to get to the trail head and I was off. I decided to hike the ridge first and end up finishing along the Bluffs, which was opposite of what other people did. I was alone for a good part of the hike, well past the halfway mark where I was coming down from the ridge and onto the bluffs. There, as the day got closer to late morning was when I came across the many other hikers. Actually, I saw a family start from the bluffs as I was ascending the ridge. We started about the same time and they were a wee bit slower than I was.

But in the end, it was great. It was a great workout with great views and I ended up sitting at the beach for a good part of an hour. Then it was just a little over a mile stroll back to the parking lot.

Oh, the thing about this trail to the beach was that you had to cross a little stream/river before you can really start the hike. I didn’t want to go through the trouble of taking off and putting back on my socks and boots, so I just went ahead with boots on. So, I had to hike with wet socks for a good half of the trip. Eventually they dried out, but at the halfway point, when I took a rest, I wrung out them socks.

Then I went to lunch at Nepthane, which was crowded. After that, it was then off to Pfeiffer Burns Big Sur State Park. It was about 2:30 at this time and I did about two hikes here. By the time I was done, it was close to 6 and about 20+miles. I had to stop at the Big Sur Lodge for some ice cream.

Man, I was so tired. So fucking tired that day, but I felt that I could still go a few more miles.

I drove back to the hotel, took a shower and then went to the supposedly cool part of town, Alvarado St. to figure out what to have for dinner. After walking around, I couldn’t decide on anything and it was getting late as I was walking through the Fisherman’s Wharf. I just ended up picking the restaurant at the very end of the Wharf. It wasn’t great, but I was too tired to complain.

The next day was the biggest surprise. Bright and early I drove to Point Lobos State Reserve. This. THIS. It was just mind boggling beautiful. One of the most beautiful places I’ve been and it was quickly becoming one of my favorite places. The hike was more of a nature stroll than anything else. I did the full loop, hiking through the whole park, taking pictures and just taking everything in. I was surprised when I saw that I did about 10 miles here.

Next, on the agenda for the rest of the day was lunch in Carmel and then end it with Lone Cypress and 17-mile drive.

I got lunch at Carmel and got a seafood pasta. It was so fucking good and then I made the biggest mistake. Wine Tasting.

I saw that there was wine tasting in Carmel and that’s what I did. I ended up in Galvante for the first one and it was great. Great wine and had a great chat with a couple that I met there. They go wine tasting there quite often and Galvante was their favorite.

So, it was only downhill from there and it was definitely just fucking downhill from there. I went to about 5 other wineries and did tastings and for some reason, I came home with 6 bottles of wine.

And of course I drove back to the hotel. I need to be a grown up about this and have more common sense, but yeah, it was fucking stupid. I’m surprised I’m not dead yet. But, on the way back from Carmel, I threw up in the car and I’m still suffering from it. The smell. Oh fucking holy hell, the smell.

But, I got back to the hotel, cleaned up, napped for like 3 hours and then went to a bad Chinese restaurant and just fucking tried to eat and sober up. I cleaned up the car as best as I could and continued to clean it the next morning before I checked out. I made a mess of the bathroom and left a big tip.

Yeah, it was a shit show. I fucked up and I’m eating my mistake. I have to. It was all me and I’m not blaming anyone else. It was just me.

Monday, I got me some ACME coffee again and just started the drive back with the nasty disgusting smell. Overall, the drive home was uneventful and wasn’t bad. I missed the turn off the 101 to the 1 near Malibu, so I ended up taking the 101/405 back home. By that time, I didn’t care anymore.

I just wanted to get home and clean up the car.

Overall, the trip was great, except for that last afternoon. I definitely want to do it again. To explore more of Big Sur.

To my next trip.

13 years.

Well, almost 13 years. It’ll just be a few more days until the anniversary, but in a blink of an eye and poof, it is that time of the year again.

With each year, it gets easier and with the breakthrough that I had a couple of years ago, it is much easier.

I almost forgot about the day, until I thought about the planned vacation coming up and realize that I was getting out of time close to the day.

Sure, I’ll be at work on the day that my father passed away 13 years ago, but in a way, it would be a weekend where I get to spend by myself out in nature and just be.

I still remember when there were years when I know that the day was coming, or the month of May would be here and I would just get in a funky mood for the whole month. Again, things had gotten a lot easier as the years gone by, but it is still hard.

I still have father issues. Watching shows or movies or any media that shows strained relationships between a father and a son or even their kids still gets to me. I don’t think I’ll ever get over that, but that’s just me.

But it is true that it gets easier with more time. It gets easier the further you get away from it. It just gets easier and thankfully that’s where I am now at.

* * *

Distracted.

Not sure what I want to go in terms of my writing. I’m so behind on this writing project, but yet, here I am rambling and even the rambling isn’t going to go anywhere.

Not sure what is going on with me. Lack of iron? Or am I just bored and my ADHD is kicking in? I need to focus, but I don’t feel the cloudy hazy brain fog that I use to feel. So this is just a little bit different. Just a smidge.

I’m not sure what is going on, but it is something.

It isn’t my MLC. That’s over….for now. It’s definitely not that feeling. Definitely not at all.

Maybe it’ll go away.

At least I’m not having any stomach issues today. Not very bloaty or gassy. So, positive side?

Who knows?

I just need to get past the next four days of work and then I’m free for the road trip. Can’t wait.

Then it is planning the next two months of road trips and then maybe vacations for the rest of the year. I know that I have a few days saved up with no real big trips shaping up for next year, might as well try and enjoy it.

Chicago again? Maybe. Just maybe or maybe Napa again? Who knows. There are a lot of things up in the air and I’m not going to think that far ahead. I’ll just go with the flow and flow with the dough.

* * *

Blah! Today is over. Too many distractions in the mind. Bladder is being ridiculous and feeling the urge to eat and buy me some spendy banh mi and I need to go to uncle’s today.

Blah.