The folks at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory take some pretty amazing pictures. The most recent one shows incandescent smoke plume at Kilauea's summit crater just before dawn. It looks really alien and spacey, with the stars in the background. It's a bit big so it's under a cut.



While talking about cool pictures, a picture of mine taken pretty close to my office got short-listed to be included in the California Guide of some website called Schmap. No clue what the heck they are, but I'm kind of flattered that somebody like that picture. I remember that I did try to make it quasi-artistic, or at least with good composition and balance. Whatever. Here it is.

Yesterday we had the grandest time, especially for Alex. His school friend Tom, who is also my coworker Juliet's son, celebrated his third birthday on the Niles Canyon Railway. To say the least, Alex had the grandest time in the past month or so. It was a two-hour train ride from Sunol to Fremont and back in a red caboose that Juliet has rented. The route goes through the picturesque Niles Canyon which connects the Tri-Valley and the Bay Area and is actually the river valley of the Alameda creek.  Geologically, the Alameda creek is very interesting because between the Bay and the Tri-Valley there is a chain of hills called the Berkeley mountains that were created by the motion of the Hayward fault (one of the "branches" of the San Andreas fault), and no river runs across it except the Alameda creek because it was so ancient that while the mountains were being uplifted it continued to erode a path through it.  Yes you call me a science nerd.

When the train pulled into Fremont, we saw an old friend of ours from high school whose wedding I described in a previous post.  He and his family was visiting his parents who still live in Fremont.  We got to say hi and saw his little son.  Boy, how time flies. 

After the train ride we had a nice picnic at a nearby park. Alex was very happy to see more trains, especially a long freight train. The train cake pan that I loaned Juliet also made an appearance. It was Tom's birthday cake, which you'll see below in the picspam.

And to top that, I got to drive through the beautiful Niles Canyon twice without getting stuck behind a slow, smelly truck.  Yay!

For those of you on my flist who isn't on gratuitous_pics, I posted a series of pictures of my hometown, Mountain VIew, CA, as part of a community project. In case you're interested or curious about the place I live, you can take a look by going to

http://community.livejournal.com/gratuitous_pics/13176.html

/self pimping