Hassle with torches January 29 - February 4, 2001 how I did not kill my husband, and did not get sick on a roller coaster in Santa Cruz

Americans don't use classical chandeliers much. Instead of bunch of wires hanging from the ceiling, your apartment comes equipped with double outlets. Lower part works as you'd expect from a decent electrical outlet - plug a device in and gee whiz! it works! However, if you're uninstructed and use the upper part, you may start feeling like a rat in a highly experimental maze - sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. In the case it does not work, one checks how deep it is plugged in, turns the device on and off a few times, and finally starts turning it upside down and look all around it for some safety "gadget" (like a child-proof switch). Finally, one gives up and either arrogantly returns it as broken, or - in the worst case - asks one's husband, who has a degree and should know everything about those bloody critters that run inside the wires.

Then, your husband flips a switch on the wall and tells you that you can either have all the lights on while vacuuming the carpet, or use the lower outlet. Upper outlets are meant for torchlights that you illuminate your room with, in their dedicated places.

We used to own one torchlight, but decided to add another, for an opposite corner of the room. Drove down to OSH (Orchard Supply Hardware store) and bought one, no big deal. Murphy's law, however, applies to everything -- we were not to relish our fresh brightness -- soon we were back to one torch, as a bulb had expired in the older one. Well -- on to buy a new bulb. It lasted only a few days. Sid expertly examined the lamp and told me to buy a whole new one, for it had burnt contacts (a bulb is $4, torch is $14, we approached the point where changing another bulb did not seem effective).

On my next shopping round, I bought a whole new torchlight in a relatively large and hulking box. After I dragged it all the way home, and after it hung around our living room for about a week, Sid finally put it together, only to find it was defective; it missed parts. So we packed it in again and I made another trip (if you didn't keep counting, it's #4) to OSH the next morning.

Fortunately it is very easy to return things back here. They usually ask you if it is broken, but even if you tell them that the only issue was that the product failed to match with your skin tone, they give you back your money and take the merchandise back. Not to mention exchanging a faulty piece for a flawless one.

I put my bounty into a corner and waited for Sid. He came back from work in a good mood and told me that while I was gone in the morning, he FIXED the broken lamp before going to work , and am I glad that he did? How could I not! But I keep hoping that in the case of husbandocide, in this case, any grand jury would acquit me .

We planned outdoor climbing for Saturday (so far we only climbed at gyms here), but Alfy eventually canceled it. Thinking of exercise made us feel hungry and we drove to Mountain View to Sono Sushi. Stepping out of the car, we could feel the spring has arrived. Grass has been green for a couple of weeks already (you notice winter by occasional rain here), calves hop on the hills, and a tree in front of our windows came to blossom. Suddenly, there was spring in the air.
Hence we did not go to a gym, but right after a lunch we went for a ride. Sid wanted to show me Santa Cruz.

We did non wander very far, our first stop was an amusement park with the oldest roller coaster on the West Coast. It is all made of wood and still in operation. And because the sun was shining and the ocean smelled good and the weather invited us to do something silly, we went in.

Amusement parks usually make me uncomfortable: thick crowds pushing you around, the smell of blackened sausage filling the air, and music too loud for listening. Not so here, where I found it rather nice. There is no entrance fee, you only play for the rides, and even then you only buy a bunch of tickets 60 cents each and each attraction has a set multiple of those. We picked a roller coaster (a new one, made of steel) and after considering the state of our stomachs (full of sushi) and my sensitivity to rolling through switchbacks, we paid the exact amount for just one ride.

	Santa Cruz Boardwalk - Sid captured this air view of the amusement park before he (temporarily) suspended his flying

We both survived, I did not even upchuck at all (I was afraid I would). Then we strolled through the park and watched what we would "do later". Understand, what we would do when we'll be back in Santa Cruz -- no need to have all the fun at once... I think this park's arrangement is very humane -- especially for mothers with multiple kids, at various ages. It follows a long beach, where you can picnic, let the small, bucketoid tiddlers dig in the sand, while the older ones go off riding with bunch of tickets. It's even easy to step out of the "amusement" for a while.

However, if you're tough, Santa Cruz biggest attraction for you may be surfing. Wave after wave roll into the bay, their ordered backs running along the shore and slowly diminishing and quieting down, till they touch the beach. One could ride them for hundreds of yards, never leaving proximity of the landmass with tiny beaches, where one can rest at will. If you're new to surfing, you can hang at the very end, where the waves are gentle, if you're macho, you can move all the way to the outer point and enter the ocean in the place where waves still have full power. But there's a price to the fun... at the staircase to one of the tiny beaches, we spotted fresh flowers, and a new sticker with a number 52 indicated the updated number of victims. Still, we could see tens of black neoprene-clad characters -- and more were walking with their boards up and down a path along the shore...

Sunday, on our way to the gym -- yes, we returned the unfortunate torchlight to OSH . Climbing went according to our expectation, and if Hippo did not step with all his might on that hold, it would not have spun around with him.

Copyright © 2001-2005 by Carol & Sid Paral. All rights reserved.