Pop and I went up Mission Peak on a beautiful January morning. We took the “normal” path up the Hidden Valley trail then cut across Hidden Valley on the Grove Trail to Horse Heaven Trail to get to the peak. That’s definitely the best way up and down.
http://www.ebparks.org/files/Mission_Peak_map.pdf

We took Horse Heaven trail to the bottom, and the last 2/3 was a killer. It’s VERY steep after Hidden Valley.

Photos from the hike:

I firmly believe people are well intentioned.  We really want to be good and do the right thing.  One thing that helps to guide us through life are our beliefs:  Who is in charge?  What does this all mean?  Why are we here?

It is a faith in our own answers to these questions that guides us through decisions in what to do with our life.  It also acts as a filter on our experiences that colors our perception of those experiences.  We’re stubborn creatures, and we’re particularly good at attributing the cause of an event to make it fit within our personal faith structure.

• “Haitians made a pact with the devil, therefore there was a giant earthquake there.”
• “You insulted a man last month so Karma is paying you back with financial woes.”
• “I helped an old woman cross the street, so God is rewarding me with this job promotion.”
• “We prayed that the police would find that girl, and they did.  Prayer works!”

A particularly interesting faith-based behavior I’ve taken note of lately is that of the last example — prayer.  I can fully get behind the “let’s stay on the righteous path” or “rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub” kind of prayer, but I have issues with prayer whose intent is to actually affect change in the world.  This hits the point of the title of this post — do practitioners of this type of prayer really think that God is a democracy?

For example, I have a friend who was traveling.  She asked her friends on Facebook to pray for a safe flight.

Really?  So without your friends begging for your safe passage over the Pacific, God would smoteth that 757 deep into thine salty waters in a ball of hellfire?  Do rational people actually believe that this is how their all powerful God works?

Another example is praying for a diseased person to be well again.  I’m all for lending support to people or families going through difficult times, and donating to organizations who are advancing the science of wellness.  But again — without your votes of prayer, God will decide that not enough people care about this sick person’s well being and let them wither away in a hospital bed?  Or that now more than ten people have gathered in a circle in a church basement, joined hands, and asked for the sick to be healed (visual: blue beams of light emanating from each person’s head rising to the heavens in a majestic column of Want), so he is now obligated to banish the tumor from the sick person’s brain.  Really?

If there is an all powerful supreme being sitting on a cloud somewhere with angels brushing his golden beard, I think the last thing he will do is to run his universe as an episode of American Idol, with only the most voted-on causes moving on to the next round and everything else getting booted from the show.

Please let me know in the comments if I have completely missed a crucial point in understanding this phenomenon.

Divide By Six

This one is simple, but I’m surprised that not enough people know it.  My tip secret to divide the bill total by six.

Others use shortcuts like “twice tax”, but that works out to over 18% now.  Still a decent baseline to round up or down from.  Another shortcut is “divide by ten then add half again”.  Divide by six is equivalent to 16.6%.  Let’s do a few tests to see what is easiest…

The bill is $24.52.  Divide by six gives you $4 pretty quickly.  Divide by ten and half again is $2.45 then what’s half of that … ok $1.20.  $2.45 + $1.20 is $3.65.  That was a lot more work!

The bill is $125.  Divide by six gives you “Around $20 or $21″.  Divide by ten and half again is $12.50 plus $6.25, that gets us close to $19.  But how much more effort was that?

Credit Card Whole Dollars

WTF is up with people who do all this subtraction when calculating a tip so that the total charged to their credit card is a whole dollar amount?  I mean really people — what are you trying to accomplish?  Do you keep a running total in your head — to the nearest PENNY — of your credit card?  Then the poor server has to do all kinds of penny-precise math and finding of small change on account of your obsession with zeroes.  REALLY!

Photos available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thenobot/sets/72157622954200256/

0035-CRW_1580, originally uploaded by thenobot.

Some pictures from Thanksgiving weekend 2009.