2017.9.30. Billy Elliot - a musical

Saturday, a last minute decision. I got my ticket 3 minutes before curtain, at Newmark Theatre.

A local production by Pixie Dust. The two main kids (Billy and Michael) are from Washington. Both are great dancers. Billy, played by the 14 year old Summit Geiselman, doesn't have a good voice. The ballet teacher is very funny, she's a good singer, but her voice is also a bit harsh. All of them cultivated some sort of accent. All good actors. Stage is simple and well done. Music is melodic. Lots of chorus. Good costumes. Very enjoyable.

Only towards the end, I realized that I've seen this show before. And here it is. I must have Alzheimer's.

2017.9.29. Dolores - a documentary movie with director Peter Bratt

9/29, Friday. Mary invited me to see Dolores. The theatre was packed. Well made with historical footage and personal interviews. Music and dance weaves the scenes, because Dolores loved dance before she got involved in labor union work. Her energy and belief is contagious. Very inspirational. Si, se puedes (yes, we can)! She doesn't dwell on failure, only look ahead, and work hard for the next task. At one point, she commented money spent on spa would be a terrible waste of time. It's also amazing that all her 11 children whom were brought up by various family and community members are various times because she was always too busy, spoke highly of her and took care of her in turns when she was recovering after the NYPD beating, even though they all said it was tough growing up.

The director Peter Bratt did Q&A afterwards, which is equally informative. I had never heard of Dolores Huerta before, that shows my ignorance, as well as the male dominance of labor leadership and in general the little awareness of social activist. After Cezar Chavez died, United Farm Workers elected a male leader instead of the cofounder Dolores. Even on their website, UFW credited the founding of the organization to Cezar Chavez alone. The director commented on how hard it was to find documents on Dolores in UFW's archive, despite of her ~50 year work there. It was a couple lines here and a paragraph there, while volumes upon volumes were dedicated to other union leaders. He also mentioned briefly on other works Dolores was and is involved in, a vast scope, unable to be captured by one movie. He also carried the same energy palpable in the movie, the belief of yourself. Another surprise tonight is that, when Dolores was beaten by NYC police and hospitalized, she was introduced to a lawyer who won her the highest compensation NYPD ever paid. The lawyer was in the audience.

2017.9.23-24 Osoyoos, BC

9/23-24, an equinox weekend in Okanagan, 4~5 hours east of Greater Vancouver, just north US border. Much dryer there.

Our first stop is Othello Tunnels in Coquihalla Canyon Provincial Park in the town of Hope. This is an engineer marvel of 1915. Well worth a visit. Vertical canyon walls, swift and clear water, historic trestles. Lots of people. Last time I visited these tunnels in the summer of 2005.

Drove along Coquihalla Hwy, stopped at the summit area. Too bad, no views to be had. I hiked here once with a group of strangers many years ago. Great view once you are higher up. For now, we continued driving, until we refilled gas in West Kelowna, ~2 hours away. Should have made a stop on the road side before heading downhill towards Okanagan Lake, for a good view of the valley.

We stopped by Okanagan Lake Provincial Park outside of Summerland. Didn't go all the way down to the camping area. The lake is very large. There're multiple parks along its shore. We also stopped at a beach park called Peach Orchid Park. Further south another big lake (Skaha Lake). We made our last photo stop at Vaseux Lake before checking into the hotel at Osoyoos. Already dark.

Dinner was at Owl Pub, recommended by the front desk at the hotel. Very much enjoyed the view from the balcony. Drink is pricy (beer is $7 and cider is $8) and slow, but food is reasonably priced ($14-16). Stick with traditional dishes. We had prime rib and baked potato, steak fajita, and seared ahi salad - the first two are much better than the last one.

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The next morning we visited the spit of land in the middle of Osoyoos Lake, Haynes Point Provincial Park. It looks like a dike made on the lake. Some of the campsites have great view of the lake. Quite busy. Almost all sites were taken. Saw two park vehicles cleaning/patrolling the ground. There's a trail at the beginning of the dike (next to the shore) for birds. Probably quite marshy.

My objective of coming to Osoyoos is not water sports nor fishing, but this Spotted Lake. Overcast and gray. May have to come again in the heat of summer (when more water is evaporated so all the minerals are more concentrated, and a blue sky for better reflection) or when snow falls for different colors. I just cannot bear the thought of coming to this dry area in summer.

We spent over an hour at Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO). This turns out to be the highlight for me. On the way there, we drove by this little pond covered with bright green algae on Willowbrook Rd. If it were not ducks swimming on it, I would think it were grass mixed with mud. This could be caused by the nutrient runoff of the farm that surrounds the pond.

DRAO is open to public year round M-F 10am-5pm. Between Easter and Canadian Thanksgiving (2nd Monday of Oct), guided tours are offered on weekends on-demand. Without the guide, we would have no idea what to look at. We have to park outside, and walk half a KM to the facilities along the Synthetic Telescopes. This is to prevent the the radio wave of your car key interfere with the experiments. We saw 2 cars inside, probably older models without remote lock. Cellphones have to be turned off (airplane mode is not good enough). Yes, bring a camera. There were two guests in the visitor center when we arrived. They were here before. So today, the focus of our tour is the newly installed (~5 years ago) CHIME: Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment. After some theory and description, we were led to walk under as well as on top of the cylinders. Below are copied from the brochure handed to me:

Reflectors: four 20m * 100m parabolic cylinders made from metal mesh. Suspended to detect radio waves of 37 ~ 75cm wavelength. Each cylinder has 256 antennas x 2 polarizations, whose signals are amplified, and filtered for 400 ~ 800MHz, digitized at 800MHz sampling rate. After FFT, signals from any pair of antennas were sent to GPU for correlation calculation, then sent to storage.

Redshift range: 0.8 ~ 2.8 (7-11 billion years ago).

Baryon Acoustic Oscillations. Immediately following the Big Bang, the universe was a hot dense plasma where matter and light were tightly coupled - it was opaque. Density fluctuations gave rise to spherical waves that expanded at the speed of sound. As the universe expanded and cooled, the electrons and protons in the plasma combined to form neutral hydrogen, which is transparent and light uncoupled from the matter. This caused the sound waves to stop moving, freezing the wave structure and leaving them with a characteristic size that can be reliably calculated using statistical methods. The over-dense regions corresponding to the frozen wave-fronts became the sites of the web-like structure we see in the universe today. This phenomenon is named as BAO, and the characteristic scale of the frozen wave-fronts provides us with a standard ruler. Even though the ripples no longer grow, the BAO structure expands as space itself expands, so the measured size tells us how far away it is.

An interaction between the electron and proton in hydrogen causes the atoms to emit radio waves with 21cm wavelength (1420 MHz). The wavelength is stretched as space expands, the length of the radio waves arriving at CHIME tells us from where they came. Mapping the distribution of neutral hydrogen in the universe is equivalent of making a map of where the matter is.

CHIME receives radio waves from many different directions at once. Signals from a given direction arrive at each antenna at systematically different times. By analyzing these delay, we can form an image of an overhead north-south stripe of the sky. As the earth rotates, it scans the sky, picking the 21cm radiation.

We also visited the small control room of the little solar disc, which is just behind the visitor center. Old electronics monitoring the 10.7cm solar radio flux.

The next eye-catching thing is the 7-element array of 9m telescopes offers wide-field continuum imaging simultaneously at 408 MHz and 1420 MHz, as well as atomic hydrogen (HI) spectroscopy across 256 channels at 1420 MHz. It is particularly suited to studying the gas and plasma that lies between the stars i.e. the interstellar medium, of both the Milky Way and nearby galaxies.

Stopped by Keremeos and bought some apples. So many fruit stands here, very large and colorful. Lots of stone fruits, apples, all sorts of pumpkins and squash, some honey and jam. Not a lot of other vegetables.

Stopped by Lightening Lake of E.C.Manning Provincial Park for a snack break. Grass is a bit brown now. Again, I was here 12 years ago in summer. We stayed in the lodge and did more hikes in the area. Today, all we used at the lodge is the restrooms. Quite a lot of cars in the resort area. Drove up to Cascade Lookout for a grand view of the valley and the southern mountains (including those in US). A wooden plaque points to the mountain names, but without any picture, I still cannot identify them.

Had some fish noodle soup for dinner. Warm and tasty.

It rained the next day.

2017.9.17. Warrior Point at Sauvie Island

9/17, Sunday. Rain was in the forecast. I signed up this hike last minute (on my way back from Saturday's hike), since this one meets late (10am), and it is supposed to be an easy walk. 7 miles RT.

10 of us met at Gateway, and drove to Sauvie Island P&R. Met 2 others there. Since the trailhead parking is $10, people wasted sometime reconfigured the seating arrangement. 3 of us in our car just waited. The weather was pleasant, and we weren't in a hurry.

Severt (our hike leader) decided to hike along the beach to add some difficulty. Not much of difficulty, some down logs, but A LOT of mud. This is river, not ocean. View is certainly nicer along the waterfront. In the middle of our maneuver, I saw a side trail up to the trees, so I went and check it out. Saw a trail right there. So, I took it instead of the beach. Elizabeth from California followed me. Incidentally we were also the only 2 who carried an umbrella, and it did rain occasionally. So two of us walked the rest of the way to the light house. It's a very smooth and easy trail, lined with blackberry bushes. By picking the berries, we kept our pace slow enough so too much ahead of our group. The last bit of beach walk was in fact on the rocks, and Karla wasn't happy about it.

Our turn around point is Warrior Point. We had lunch by the lighthouse. Lots of fishing boat on the other side of the water. Light rain off and on. The old care taker's house is now locked with a gate outside, so all I could see is a chimney.

Walked back via trail. Ate more blackberries. Helen filled her container.

The drive is on good wide gravel road, among agriculture land. Many U-Pick farms. One has a lot daisy now. People come here in summer to play in the water, or in fall to pick pumpkins. This is my first time on this island.

Iveta joined our car. We are being dropped off downtown. She and Karla both live in downtown. Karla is full of stories. She complains a lot but her stories are interesting.

2017.9.16. Ape and Lava Canyons

9/16, Saturday, overcast. Rain is in the forecast starting tomorrow for a week. Time to squeeze in another longish hike before day time shortens too much. 10 of us met at Sunset TC at 7am sharp, and drove to Lava Canyon TH, about 90 miles and 2 hours away. A few of us used the composting toilet (2 total). At 9am, they weren't so bad.

We started Ape Canyon Trail first, whose trailhead is a just few hundred meters away. It's 5 mile to Loowit Trail, and shortly before that we broke out of trees. The forest trail is well maintained, smooth grade, narrow, soft and dusty, with occasional view to Mt. St. Helen. Healthy old growth. Once in the open country, the trail is rocky and more dusty. I don't know why this trail is called Ape Canyon, because you are not in a canyon. There is a crack as seen on WTA's website.

We hiked about 0.5 mile more on Loowit until we reached this spring, where I filled more water, the only water source so far. I only brought 1 litre for the day, and a couple of cans in the car. We had a snack break here, ~11am. The temperature was barely 60°F, very pleasant walking. Enough upslope and fast pace, that I worked up some sweat. Once on Loowit Trail, the view is expansive. On the way back, we had to wait for Barbara, whose old boots were giving her blisters.

Fall color was only just starting, still saw some yarrow, a couple of paintbrush, and one single dwarf lupine in bloom. Lots of vine maples. Lots of mountain bikers (may be more than hikers), so had to wait from time to time to let them go by.

Back to the car. Another toilet visit (now, it stank). Next, we hiked Lava Canyon Trail. This is a very popular, well constructed (started with a wheelchair accessible pavement and then wide boardwalk) 1 mile loop. From the suspension bridge, we went down further along the water (in & out of the canyon), for a ~5 mile lollipop. Spectacular, the water is almost blue, canyon walls are deep and vertical. I can not believer that I had never hiked here before, nor there was still so much water. On the opposite spectrum, our hike leader today, Mark, this is his 4th time here this year! He said there wasn't a lot more water in July.

After the suspension bridge, the trail gets steep and narrow at times. Just watch your step. So many waterfalls, big and small, rocks. At one point, there's a long ladder, almost vertical. Had to wait for your turn. Across from the ladder is the unmarked spur trail goes sharply to the right, and up to the "Ship". Here, we had our belated lunch, overlooking the gorge and the last two waterfalls we walked by. Much better and clear view here. There're quite a few places to get close to the tumbling water. Towards the bottom, where the rusty metal bridge is, water is wide and tepid, and canyon wall. I was happy to wash sweat off my face. Across the bridge, the trail is washed off. This side, another sign for Lava Canyon. It seems to go on and out more. But the dramatic view is over.

Back tracked to the suspension bridge. Now, we crossed it. It's a one way affair, so you have to wait for your turn. This one really bounces. In the middle of the bridge are fantastic views of the water. Now we walked on all the boardwalks, and the rock outside of the boardwalk to get closer to the blue water. Lots of people here. We met one lady who's 89!

In a couple of weeks, this should be even more rewarding when fall colors are in full swing, as well as more water.

Total ~16 miles today. My phone registered 38K steps.

2017.9.14. Spinning into Butter - a play

9/14, Thursday. Went to see Spinning Into Butter by Bag and Baggage at its new venue, the Vault Theatre. Not bad. New building. Much smaller than Venetian. A multipurpose room really, can be reconfigured into different use. This play is in a round setting, with seating on 4 sides. Not enough people to fill even 1/4 of the room. It's sad.

I enjoyed the play, and stayed afterwards to chat with the main actress (the dean) and the boy who played the rebellious Latino student.

Directed by Scott Palmer, written by Rebecca Gilman, this is a story of Sarah (the dean)'s last few months in a mostly white liberal college, which tried to handle the race issues. She helped a Latino student get a scholarship by categorizing him in a group that he doesn't want to be identified with; consoled a black student who allegedly received hate mail; facilitated a while student who formed a discussion group on racial tolerance. The dialogue between her and her colleges are more interesting to me than these incidents: witty and sarcastic. Overall, quite insightful (if not a bit exaggerated), well acted.