Mary and I are heading to India on Saturday for a wedding. My nephew, Nick, is getting married to Natasha in Bangalore the weekend of August 5. Actually the “wedding” is a 3 day event including many different rituals and ceremonies. I don’t know all that much about it, but Nick has posted some information here. It should be an interesting experience.

The flight to India may not be so pleasant. As usual, I waited until the last minute. I still managed to get a pretty good price, but the flight is not at all optimal. We leave San Francisco early Saturday morning (more like Friday night) on China Airlines bound for Taipei. After a few hours in Taipei we head to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We will be there for about 8 hours. Maybe we’ll have a chance to get out of the airport for some sightseeing. From there we take Malaysia Air to Bangalore.

We’ll be in Bangalore for a little over a week. Hopefully we’ll get in some day trips from there. After that we have almost 2 weeks to see more of India. We don’t have any set plans yet, but we’ll likely go to the Taj Mahal and Jaipur. We depart from New Delhi on August 20 and return to San Francisco (via Hong Kong and Taipei).

Hopefully we see a lot of awesome sites and interesting culture. I hope it’s not too hot and wet. After all, it is Monsoon Wedding season…

I’m supposed to play rollerhockey at lunch time today. This has been a nearly weekly event (sometimes twice a week) for the past couple years. I play with some old colleagues in an empty parking lot. The turn-out is pretty random, but sometimes we have some really fun games.

I’ve been wearing safety gear for a while now. Mainly to protect me from the ugly scrapes I used to get from making contact with the ground, but there have also been a couple injuries that could probably have been prevented with a little better safety equipment. So in addition to my skates and stick, I wear full shin/knee pads, elbow pads, hockey gloves and a helmet with full cage.

It’s probably going to be quite hot today so I’d better make sure I bring lots of water. And after hockey, I get to go to the gym! Yipee…

Over the Fourth of July weekend, Mary and I went to the North Coast of California to see the Redwoods (more on that to come later). On the way, we stopped in Eureka, CA for the night and had dinner at a fun little place called the Samoa Cookhouse. It’s an old lumber camp cookhouse, and they even have a bit of a logging museum (see picture in the right).

The eating area is made up of a bunch of picnic tables and chairs. Unless you have a really big group (10 or more), you will be sharing a table with other people. This is part of the fun. The food is served family style using big plates and bowls and you can get more of anything you want. However, the food is shared only within your group.

The menu is fixed for a given meal (breakfast, lunch or dinner) on a given day. When I was there they served bread (fresh baked and yummy), salad, beef barley soup, peas and corn, baked potato, fried chicken and pork steak. The fried chicken was awesome and the pork steak was sort of country style (pan fried and smotered in white gravy). They ran out of apple pie, so we had to settle for chocolate pudding. Stop there if you get a chance!