UC Davis College Rating

I love college towns. I think they are the best type of towns. I think it's the combination of the energy that students bring to a place along with anchor of a campus and the the types of businesses that typically surround colleges. As a deli and pizza guy, college towns suit my palate.

In San Diego we lived about 2 miles from San Diego State. While I don't consider big cities like San Diego to be college towns, we did live near enough to the campus where it did feel a bit like a college town. I loved driving through campus, seeing the kids on their skateboards, and telling Carly that Sig Ep was throwing down that night with a double kegger (which was probably true). SDSU has a reputation as a bit of a party school and in all the years we lived nearby it seemed to make sense. There were times that I found myself jealous of the young and beautiful college kids having the time of their lives.

Now we live in Davis, which is also a college town. Technically we live adjacent to campus, but it's about a mile to where the academic and residential buildings are. It's more of a college town that reminds me of Ann Arbor with the big tree lined streets and the campus integrated into the city. But the students here couldn't be any more different than those of Michigan or San Diego State. 

During what would be considered welcome week Carly and I were out in downtown Davis just blocks from campus and their was nary a stumbling student anywhere. We were on the South U equivalent of Davis and it was kind of dead. I couldn't believe it. Then a few weeks ago my buddy Dave came to visit and we went to a Aggie Football game. We were tailgating a bit in front of the stadium and watching the students arrive. It was a night game, and having been to a few college football night games I was expecting a shitshow. On the contrary. We didn't see a single student that looked even a little inebriated. I've yet to see a yard littered with solo cups. For shame.

The students here also dress very differently than those of SDSU. On the SDSU campus the kids looked so fucking cool, and the all had the bodies to back it up. Here in Davis it's a lot of unwarranted midriff that no one wants to see and guys with t-shirts tucked into cuffed jeans. I don't get it at all. Sober and poorly dressed is no way to go through college.

Now this blog at one time had a feature where I rated colleges on 4 key areas. It's been awhile since I've done one, but I think I'm ready to rank UC Davis.

Campus layout:
The UC Davis Campus is actually pretty good. It flows nicely into the the downtown and the students all ride bikes. The buildings are mostly postwar architecture and not very classically collegiate. Rating: B+

Student Population:
Total nerds. Rating: D

Night Life: 
I've seen zero evidence of any house parties. Frats seem small and not very wild. Off campus bars mostly cater to townies. Rating: D

Food, Stadium, Bus System, Other:
Food is fine. Big international student population means a good variety of restaurants, mostly cheap, nothing that I'd consider a "must try". Great bus system with the old London double-deckers. Stadium is decent for a FCS team. Tailgate scene was marginal, but again... FCS. Rating B-

OVERALL RATING: C+

Coronavirus Part 7

5 months ago I checked-in on COVID-19 and it's impact on my life. Since that time, things went totally back to normal... briefly. By June the county I live in was down to an average daily new cases in the high-teens. Not bad for a county with nearly 500,000 people in it. However we've become plagued by the new, and more contagious, Delta Variant. As a result we're now seeing around 150 daily cases.

This is a major setback in the end-game of the pandemic, and one that could have possibly been avoided if more of my countrymen choose to get vaccinated. But alas, now we're back hearing about overflowing ICUs and spiking cases. This is incredibly frustrating, as there is a solution at hand, but for whatever reason many people are refusing to embrace it.

The good news is that for our family, it still hasn't been very impactful. Most everyone we see has been smart enough to get vaccinated, so we feel relatively safe around most folks. Our biggest worry is for our kids who are still too young to be vaccinated. They will start school/daycare in a few weeks and it's looking like that may be right in the middle of what is being called the 4th wave of cases. Even if we catch a breakthrough infection it appears that the sickness will be very mild compared to if we were unvaccinated, so our worries really revolve around our kids.

Life on the ranch continues with somewhat minimal interaction besides my wife's family and a few close friends. I did take a work trip to DC and then went to a wedding last week. Besides the masks, it was the most "normal" the world felt to me in 18 months. I didn't fret about getting COVID while I was gone, but I did get tested once I got home just to be safe. I think I'll really feel better once our kids can get vaccinated, but that may still be a ways off since they're so young. The good thing about our kids being so young is that I doubt they'll have any recollection of this whole pandemic, but can still tell their grandkids in 70 years that they lived through it, which will be kind of cool for them. But really they'll have to check their great-granddad's blog to get the true first-hand account of it.

At this point I predict COVID will still be a pandemic at least for another 6 months. More employers may make the vaccine mandatory which will help, but until we can get significantly more of the population vaccinated (including school aged kids) I think COVID will be with us at least through the holidays.

A Hypothetical

A question I recently posed myself:

Could I beat an Olympic marathoner if I were to run it as a relay-race with unlimited clones of myself.

A first blush, surely I could sprint a short distance above a Olympic marathon pace, so given enough clones and short enough segments certainly I would win. But I must also factor in the slow-downs of handing off the baton, and there is where it gets interesting.

The current world record of a marathon is right around 2 hours, or 7,200 seconds (run by someone my age btw). That's about a 4:30 minute (273 seconds) mile pace. At first I figured I could sprint a 1/4 mile at a Olympic marathon pace, but I'm realistically questioning that I could run the 400 meters in 68 seconds. The Alaska state high school 400 record (assuming Alaskans are the slowest runners) is 50 seconds. So I'm thinking it would take more than 102 clones of me to win the race.

A marathon is 42,200 meters. If instead I broke it into 100 meters sections that might give me a better chance. The Olympic pace is ~17 seconds per 100 meters. Ugh. The Alaska state high school record for the 100 meter dash is 11 seconds. I bet I could run it in 14 or 15 seconds. But how much time would I lose in the baton hand-offs? I'm assuming only a second or two, which would make it a very close race.

Anything shorter than 100 meters, I thought the hand-offs would slow me (us?) down too much, anything longer I'm not sure I could keep the pace. So I think me and 421 clones of myself could run a pretty close race against an Olympic marathoner.

There are two take-aways here. One, Olympic marathoners are absolute freaks who are running twenty-six consecutive 4:30 miles. Two, it's amazing how two humans could be so disparate at something like running. How can one human's body be so much more adapt through genetics and training at something as universal as running? It blows my mind that I would have trouble running 100 meters as the same pace an Olympic marathoner runs 26 miles.

Coronavirus Part 6

My last coronavirus post was back in mid-October, in that post I predicted that we were still 6 months away from widely available vaccines. I'll give myself a point for that prediction.

In my second coronavirus post I wrote about my debate on whether to call it COVID-19 or Coronavirus and wondered which name would ultimately go down as the commonly used name. It turns out COVID was the winner, but I'm keeping the naming convention in these post titles, but I'll start calling it COVID in the post itself.

Today marks the one year anniversary of the day everything shut down. In the past year 530K Americans have died of COVID, which equates to about 1 death per minute. The good news is that it's the beginning of the end. Three vaccines are available today and they appear to be effective against even the more contagious variants of COVID that have popped up. Cases are way down and about 20% of Californians have been vaccinated. When things opened back up in the summer and the fall it felt too soon but now it feels like it's the right time. There are only 10-20 new cases a day in our county with 220,000 residents. 

As for us, Carly and I have both been vaccinated. Nearly all of the adults in her family near us have been too. Last weekend for my birthday we were able to have what would seem to be a pretty normal birthday party with us all sharing pizza and brownies & ice-cream. I'm now thinking about getting my first real haircut in over a year, though I still regret cutting off my mullet.

There is talk of being able to send the kids back to school soon, and we've started planning a trip to meet up with some friends on the Oregon coast for 4th of July on the assumption that all the adults will likely be vaccinated by then. We're still keeping our social interactions to a minimum but have started to think about opening the aperture (like for a haircut). While I'm excited to get back out to public places, if I've learned anything from the past year it's that I'm a bit of a homebody these days - especially with small children.

It's hard to say when we'll finally be able to declare victory over COVID. That's probably a ways away until kids can be vaccinated, but even then I'm sure there will be pockets of cases in the news for a long time to come. It'll be interesting to see what the long term impact of this will be on American society. Part of me thinks things will spring back to normal and people will carry on as they always have, but I also wonder if this will result in some major changes in how we value in-person events and activities like traveling to weddings or attending work conferences. Only time will tell.

Birthday Post #11

I really only care about social media 1 day a year. Just one day each year I indulge my vanity by counting how many people wish me happy birthday by text, e-mail and various social media sites. Well this year, that one day just happens to be the same day as National Unplugging Day, where you are supposed to put down the phone and not wish your favorite blogger happy birthday. What a cruel irony.

Despite the unplugging day, I still had pretty good birthday numbers, so thanks everyone for ignoring national unplugging day just so you could wish me happy birthday. On to the chart:

I wasn't expecting a full Rachel Morgan meter or a Ray Smith, but I was a bit surprised I didn't get called Fartface after getting one 7 of the last 8 years.  Everything else seems pretty much in-line with what I would expect.

Thanks again for the true friends of the blog who continue to wish me a happy birthday just for the stats.

Do Pizza Chains Veer Male?

As most fans of the blog know, I like pizza. 

Tonight I was getting into a 1/2 and 1/2 BBQ Chicken/Tuscan Chicken pie from a local chain out here called Mary's Pizza Shack when I realized how rare it was to see a pizza chain with a feminine name.

So I looked up the Wikipedia page on US Pizza chains and went through the 50 pizza chains with more than 50 locations. To my bemusement there are 12 pizza chains with "male" names, 38 with ungendered names, and exactly 0 with "female" names.

If it was just an Italian name I wasn't immediately sure of (Imo's pizza, Saprino's Pizzeria, Monical's Pizza) I gave it a pass.

Here are the 12 that were for sure male:

Hunt Brothers Pizza

Little Caesars *(While I knew Caesar is a dude, I also relied on the fact that the mascot has substantial chest hair)

Papa John's Pizza

Papa Murphy's

Marco's Pizza

Chuck E. Cheese

Godfather's Pizza

Hungry Howie's Pizza

Mountain Mike's Pizza

Peter Piper Pizza

Papa Gino's

Lou Malnati's Pizzeria

It got me thinking if there were other food types that were as gendered. It seems that baking mixes are mostly female (Sarah Lee, Betty Crocker), but you also have Duncan Hines and (while missing genitalia) the Pillsbury Doughboy. Given the large number of pizza chains, I would argue that pizza brands are more heavily associated with male names than any other foodtype brands.

I wonder why that is. Essentially making pizza is more akin to baking (with it's host of female brands) than anything else. So why are there no large female pizza chains? Is it some Italian heritage where the men make the pizza and that's held over for a century in the minds of the public that would scoff at the idea of eating a pizza with a women's name on the box? Are more dudes working in pizzerias and therefore more likely to start their own chain of pizzerias?

Who really knows, but I can tell you Mary's Pizza Shack was excellent, and I'd say it's second best of the 8 "male" pizza places on the list that I've tried.

 

Movin' to the country

After 7 fantastic years in San Diego we decided to move to Davis, CA. We loved living in San Diego where we had a wonderful house in a wonderful neighborhood. But with 2 kids we were starting to outgrow our house and after 9 months of teleworking I was able to convince my bosses that I could do my job remotely. So we decided to sell our house and move.

It really was a bit of a perfect situation. Carly and her brother co-own the property she grew up on, and her brother's family was living in the house (the one she grew up in), but they had decided to move into town, and so the house was available for us to live in. So a few days after they moved out, we moved in. 

The new view from my office

We're now living on 29 acres just a few miles south of Davis and we're planning to spend the rest of our lives here. The property has a horse stable and an orchard with lots of fruit and nut trees. There are 4 barns and plenty of old cars and trucks on the property that I'm dying to get back into working order. But with so many projects and so little time, I'm not sure when I'll be able to do any of them. We also have dreams of building a new house that suits us on the property and possibly starting a wedding venue on the site someday (we had our wedding here).

It was a dream that was a long time coming to move back here. There is a sense of security knowing that you're where you want to be long term. In San Diego we always had in the back of our minds that we would eventually sell our house and so many things we did were for the impact to the "resale value". But it's freeing to know that anything we do here, we do for ourselves and not a potential buyer.

Carly collecting pecans out in the Orchard

Blogging might be light in the future (happy 14th b-day to the blog btw) with the amount of work we need to do, but it feels like were finally chasing a dream we've had and that feeling is terrifically breathtaking. It's hard to describe the feeling of looking out across a big field and knowing that it's yours and the only limitation that you have is your imagination and willingness to work hard to make it what you want it to be.