Custom-made white alligator leather baseball by Comstock Heritage

by   •   Leather
 

A few years ago, one of my co-workers found out about my intriguing affinity towards collecting exotic leather goods, and once the news spread, I was referred to as the “leather guy” for a little while. But since then, because of the fact that work has substantially ramped up and I’ve been traveling a lot since the beginning of the pandemic, I haven’t really added anything new to my collection, and the hype died down.

I like my exotic leather goods to be functional. For example, I frequently wear a stingray belt because of its durability and how ef­fectively it serves as a sturdy gun belt, and I carry a stingray wallet daily (and get uncomfortable comments once in a while from people with trypophobia).

However, there is only so much of your life you can turn into high-quality leather. With all my belts, my boots, and even my office chair back at home being made of full-grain leather, I wanted to start getting creative.

 
As a young kid, I loved watching baseball. At one point, I’m pretty sure I had the entire roster of the Chicago Cubs memorized (and a majority of the Chicago White Sox too), and I would tune in to watch baseball every time a local team was playing. But just as quickly as I had gained interest in the sport, I became disinterested, and I barely watched it ever again for some mysterious reason that I still don’t know to this day.

Not too long ago, I saw some baseball highlight videos pop up in my recommendations on YouTube, and it gave me flashbacks of my childhood and got me thinking. Back then, little Adam would’ve loved to have some baseball memorabilia from his favorite baseball players. As part of my mission to do everything during adulthood that I’ve always wanted to do as a child but never had the opportunity to do, I decided that a baseball would be my next exotic leather good.

In a similar process as I did for my other leather goods, I went scouting for a leathercrafter. During my search, I found a company called Comstock Her­it­age that already had alligator leather baseballs for sale. I reached out to them and arranged a custom order.

 
Usually, baseballs have the manufacturer, a professional team, and a player’s signature engraved or debossed into the surface. Little Adam would’ve wanted a Chicago Cubs baseball, but adult Adam doesn’t care about baseball players. However, I felt like having a blank baseball would be boring, so I came up with an alternative.

Although I’m not a fan of baseball players, what I am a fan of are great leathercrafters. So, in place of the aforementioned three items, I requested them to be substituted with the company’s name, the leathercrafter’s signature, and some information detailing the creation of the baseball.

What I was going for here was, if you look at the baseball from far away, it just looks like a plain old normal baseball, but once you get closer, you realize that the leather is alligator instead of cow or horse, and the markings are relevant to the actual creation of this particular baseball, as opposed to ref­er­encing the general sport of baseball.

 
This is how the final product came out:

This ended up being exactly as I had hoped, which I think is a fairly large compliment in itself, considering how unrealistically high my standards usually are.

The density of the core feels exactly like what I’d expect from a real baseball. The stitching is flawless throughout. The grooves of the alligator skin appears to have made the debossing and ink fill process a bit more difficult, but the leathercrafter still tackled that challenge well. The texture of the gator is dynamic, and the baseball contains everything from the extra wrinkly segments to the broader and smoother panels.

With the extra customization options, as well as sales tax for being in-state, this ended up costing a little bit over US$350. If you’re interested in pur­chas­ing your own, Comstock Heritage has hand-crafted alligator baseballs listed in their online shop.

 
Going back to the note about me liking my exotic leather goods to be functional, yes, I realize that I am most likely not going to be throwing around this particular baseball and playing catch with it (… or am I?). With that being said, once I purchase a baseball display stand, I think this is going to serve as a very nice desk decoration, and I’m very satisfied with my purchase.

 
Note: I was not compensated in any manner for this review and do not plan to accept any compensation offers after-the-fact. Comstock Heritage was not provided with an opportunity to read or revise this blog post prior to publication.

 

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Hello, Aliso and Wood Canyons Wilderness Park

by   •   Hiking
 

As my days in California are (finally) coming to an end before setting back out on my road trip, I wanted to do one last interesting hike. Although I’m probably one of the most anti-California people you’ll ever meet, that’s more about the California government; everyone has to acknowledge that South­ern California in general has some pretty stunning scenery if you find the right places to visit.

After doing a bit of scouting, I decided to head to Aliso and Wood Canyons Wilderness Park. My hike started in Laguna Beach and continued on into Alisa Viejo before looping back around to the trailhead in Laguna Beach. The drive here from the company headquarters in Long Beach was pretty in­teresting and scenic, and parking was easy to find at the Top of the World Park, even on a weekend.

As expected, the beginning of the trail had vast views of the surrounding area.

My main route was through Mathis Canyon Trail, but I connected onto a different trail to check out a unique point of interest.

The trail I connected onto was Car Wreck Trail. I saw online that this trail had been named as such due to a literal car wreck at the base of the trail. After an extremely steep descent, I found the car.

It obviously has a lot of graffiti now, but it makes me wonder what the situation was surrounding the crash, and what it originally looked like before na­ture decided to absorb the vehicle as a part of itself. There isn’t a way for me to easily verify this, but based on research I did online, the crash hap­pened in the 1940s, and the car is a 1946 Dodge coupe.

After getting a good look at the car, I continued on south to Oak Grove Trail, then reconnected with Mathis Canyon Trail to return to where I started. This part of the trail had some really nice wildflowers.

I saved the best for last—even though I started at Top of the World, I didn’t actually go up to Top of the World until I was fully done with my hike, to hold it as sort of a reward for finishing. It was an amazing reward, and these photos do not do it justice at all.

The views of the ocean were surreal and dreamy. The reflection of the limitless reach of the sun’s rays made the ocean look like the void, but the op­posite—instead of black nothingness, it was a blueish-white nothingness.

In total, my hike was just over three and a half miles with about 800 feet of elevation gain, and I’m happy I picked this trail for my final hike for my stay this time around. If you’re in the area, I recommend checking it out, though if you’re scared of heights or aren’t an expert at navigating uneven rocky ter­rain but still want to see the car wreck, you are much better off taking Mathis Canyon Trail all the way down, connecting onto Oak Grove Trail, vis­iting the car wreck, then taking Mathis Canyon Trail all the way back up for a much smoother incline during your ascent.

 

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Hello, Palm Springs Air Museum

by   •   Tourism
 

After a nice hike in the sizzling hot sun, I decided to stop by the Palm Springs Air Museum for my second major tourist activity of the weekend before heading back to Orange and Los Angeles Counties.

I’ve been to a few aviation museums at this point, but I’m still not very well-versed in aircraft, so I still don’t have too much commentary to add to my photos—I mostly just snapped a photo of everything that looked nice, then picked out my favorite photos to feature here.

However, I do have some more information about my first two photos. The Air Museum obviously had general admission tickets, but it also allowed peo­ple to purchase extras called “Warbird Rides.” These were rides in aircraft ranging anywhere from US$99 for a C-47 Skytrain to US$4,995 for a T-33 Thunderbird. While I was at the museum, I was lucky enough to see someone purchase a ride on a T-6 Texan for $495.

The first photo above shows the pilot and the passenger in Heave Ho GQ 286068, and the second photo above shows the plane taking off into the sky. The rest of the photos below are just interesting things I saw at the museum.

At the end of my museum tour, I went upstairs into the library, which had some flight simulators that I tried out. I discovered that I am an absolute ex­pert at shooting bullets where enemy aircraft used to be, no matter how much I try to lead my shots…

Although I’m still nowhere near competent at aircraft, I’m starting to learn and remember things from these museums I’m visiting, and it’s always sat­is­fy­ing to see a few recurring themes across these museums that I can recall from past visits to different museums.

I always like living in the present and looking towards the future, so I would love to see some displays of modern-day commercial aircraft that I per­son­al­ly take through major airlines, so that I can learn more about the big metal tubes in which I fly thousands upon thousands of miles per year. I think it would also be pretty neat to have prototypes of advancements in aircraft technology soon to come, sort of like how other museums in other fields of study will spotlight what scientists are currently working on.

However, until then, I still appreciate taking a look at the evolution of aircraft, and seeing just how quickly things have advanced so that I can hop on a plane whenever I want for a few hundred dollars and be wherever I want to be in a matter of hours.

Continue reading →

 

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Hello, Coachella Valley Preserve

by   •   Hiking
 

After arriving back in Los Angeles from Newark, I gave myself a day of rest, then set out on another trip to the Coachella Valley. My previous visit to the Palm Springs area was great, and the hike I did at the Indian Canyons is still my favorite hike so far, so I figured it would be a nice weekend trip to head back there again.

The weather was pretty warm in California, which was a jarring difference from the New Jersey cold. The hike I selected, the Moon Country Loop via Mc­Callum Trail, had relatively low shade in the latter part of the hike, so that also made the sun feel particularly hot.

The parking situation was a bit strange here—there was an open area that looked like it was designed to be a parking lot, but the gate leading to that area was closed, so people ended up all parking on the side of Thousand Palms Canyon Road. Because it’s a Saturday, there were a lot of people out hiking, so I had to park a decent distance out from the trailhead.

 
The beginning of the trail was very tourist-friendly, with wooden bridges built over wet parts and clearly-marked dirt trails with plenty of shade.

I followed the McCallum Trail up to Simone Pond, which had remarkably clear water. A handful of people who ventured out here were having a picnic next to the water, and there also appeared to be a ranger answering tourist questions about the area.

After doing a loop around the pond, I transferred over to Moon Country and headed out into the barren desert. The first area of interest was a vista point where I was able to see an unobstructed view of the Coachella Valley Preserve. In the first photo below, you can see the palm trees surrounding Simone Pond, while the second photo shows the vegetation surrounding the McCallum Trailhead.

I continued past the vista point and hiked a fairly large circle around the desert, and was met with a zig-zagging path up a mountain, but I figured that I didn’t have enough food and water with me to continue up, and it was getting a bit too hot, so I turned around and followed the dried wash back to the trailhead.

This hike wasn’t quite as amazing as Murray Canyon, but it’s always fun seeing desert oases. There’s another hiking trail going southeast instead of north­west from the same general trailhead area that leads to Pushawalla Palms; I look forward to checking that off my hiking list as well, the next time I’m in the Coachella Valley visiting.

Continue reading →

 

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Hello, northern New Jersey

by   •   Travel
 

In early 2020, one month before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, I went to visit my aunt and cousin in New Jersey. Even though I was still traveling somewhat normally throughout the pandemic, due to my aunt’s old age, I opted not to visit again in 2021. However, with the pandemic under better control and all of us having been fully vaccinated and having received an additional booster dosage, I decided to make a visit again this year.

As you’re probably already familiar, for the sake of protecting their identities and helping them maintain their peaceful and private lifestyles, I don’t like to share photographs or information about my friends or family members unless they are already public figures. Because of this, I won’t be sharing any photos from my time with family (except for one, which you’ll see later), but I do have some photos of other stuff I did while I was in town.

 
Getting to New Jersey this time around was a bit difficult—my flight outbound from Los Angeles International Airport to Newark Liberty International Air­port was canceled due to “Winter Storm Landon.” I am putting that in quotation marks because the United States generally does not name winter storms, so I’m not even sure how this winter storm got a name, but I guess it deserves one if it made JetBlue cancel my flight.

I did end up getting as lucky as possible for someone with a canceled flight, though, because I was rebooked onto a different flight out of Los Angeles International Airport, but instead heading to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. It was obviously a bit more inconvenient, because I would have to drive a bit longer to get to northern New Jersey, and I would either have to pick between going through a toll bridge or driving through Manhattan (I ended up taking the toll bridge), but it only set me back by two hours, so I couldn’t complain that much.

In fact, this might have been a worthy trade-off. I don’t know what the passenger density situation was like in my original flight to Newark, but this flight was so sparsely populated that I was able to have an entire extra-legroom row to myself.

That made for a much more comfortable and private travel ex­perience, and it also meant I was able to get snacks and beverages from the JetBlue Pantry without needing to climb over anyone, while still having a win­dow seat to be able to take nice photos, like this one while flying over Colorado.

I obviously had to change my rental vehicle pick-up location, seeing as it was originally reserved in Newark and now I’m arriving in New Jersey. Al­though I had a guaranteed pickup truck reserved in Newark, when I transferred it over to New York City, I guess there wasn’t enough pickup truck availability, because they ended up putting me in a Volkswagen Jetta, a compact sedan.

Needless to say, that was a horrible experience, because the mirrors were so small that the vehicle had a ton of blind spots everywhere, and the height of the car was so short that it felt like everyone around me was just going to run right over me, and the engine was so weak that I felt like I could’ve sprint­ed faster than the car accelerated… but I survived.

 
During one of the days that I was on my own and wasn’t spending time with family, I met up with one of my friends who lives in the area. I was looking forward to going to Elements to try out their chef’s tasting menu, which is similar to the one I tried at Nonesuch in Oklahoma City… except apparently, Elements is closed on Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays right now—which happens to coincide perfectly with the days that I was free.

Instead, we went to Mistral, a restaurant right next door and owned by the same person. Although there was no tasting menu, there was still a nice se­lection of high-quality food options.

For our appetizer, we ordered beef tartare with cornichons, capers, and tarragon, topped with some potato chips. I usually like eating dishes with raw meat (like sushi, tartare, and blue rare steak), but this beef tartare was a bit too sour for my taste—the cornichons and capers completely overwhelmed any beef flavor that there was.

For my main entrée, I ordered a crispy whole black bass in mapo mushroom sauce topped with chilis, peanuts, and pea leaves. Although the name of the dish literally says “whole black bass” in it, for whatever reason, the true meaning of that didn’t register in my brain when I ordered it. Because of that, you can probably guess my utter appalment when the waiter brought out an entire crispy fish standing upright.

I had never eaten an entire fish like this before, and I had no idea what to do, so I asked the waiter for advice; he said that I can sort of just knock the fish over on its side and begin scraping away at it, being careful not to swallow any bones. This took a little over an hour for me to finish.

My friend decided to use both halves of her brain and ordered something much more reasonable–seared diver scallop with charred corn, peppadew pep­pers, queso fresco, and sorrel cream.

Although I would’ve preferred to have a dish that didn’t require more time to dig at it than it does to actually eat it, I’m honestly glad that I accidentally ordered this whole fish. If I had known ahead of time that I would have to strip all the meat off the fish myself, I wouldn’t have ordered it, but this was definitely an experience to add to my roster of interesting things I’ve done. … Definitely not an experience that I would ever want to have again, but still one that I’m happy I had.

 
The following day, I decided to go on a quick hiking trip. Northern New Jersey isn’t exactly the most terraneous area, but I did still manage to find a trail that had decent elevation gain, at the Sourland Mountain Preserve in Hillsborough Township.

I think the hike would’ve otherwise been fairly mundane, but because there was so much ice on the trail, it actually made it a lot more technical and fun, as I had to constantly be on the lookout as to where I could step without having another comical fall like I did a few weeks ago and get another injury.

The summit had a clearing where you could look towards New York City and see the skyline. You might be able to see it in the photo below if you bring your screen right up to your face… the buildings appear as a few pixels above the horizon.

When I returned back to where I had parked, I went past a frozen pond. Even though I grew up in the Chicagoland suburbs where it regularly gets freez­ing cold in the winter, for some reason, I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a frozen pond up-close in-person before.

After looking at it for a while, I thought I was getting vertigo, but what was actually happening was that the ice layer was slightly shifting, bending, and moving back and forth from the force of the water below. I sort of wanted to get a huge boulder and throw it into the pond to see if I can make a nice shattered ice pattern, but I decided against it.

You can’t really tell from my GPS tracker because the line is a little too thick to effectively show path overlap, but the top corner of this trail was very con­fusing, not only because the trail wasn’t that well marked, but also because there was ice and fallen leaves everywhere, so it felt like I was just ran­domly walking through thin forest.

Whenever I did think I caught a trail, I would follow it… but I ended up just walking in circles about three times before finally noticing that everything looked awfully familiar, and realizing that I should probably keep an eye on my map while trying to escape this maze.

Remember how I said earlier that I usually don’t share photos of family, but I had one exception here? This is the exception photo. This is Tinkerbell, my cousin’s dog. I believe she is a Chihuahua mix, but I’m not 100% sure what breed she is (though the likely answer is that she is just a normal, healthy, mixed breed).

After the conclusion of my five days in New Jersey, I went to refuel my rental vehicle and drop it off before flying out. I found a gas station and pulled up to a vacant pump. I swiped my credit card, but the machine rejected it. Wondering if Chase was blocking my personal credit card, I pulled out my busi­ness credit card and tried that… and the machine rejected that too. Wondering if this particular gas station only accepts debit cards, I tried swiping my debit card, but still, to no avail.

I got back my rental car and reversed to a different vacant pump. I went through the same procedure again, but all my cards got rejected again. Confused, I left the gas station and went to another one nearby.

The exact same thing happened at the other gas station too. I tried two pumps, three payment methods at each of the two pumps, and everything got de­clined. Now mildly annoyed, I decided to just use the rental car provider’s refueling service, even though it is astronomically more expensive than re­fueling myself, because I didn’t want to risk missing my flight while going from gas station to gas station trying to find one that wants my business.

I later texted my cousin and was informed that, in New Jersey, it is illegal to pump your own fuel. Apparently, I wasn’t supposed to drive up to a vacant pump and try to do it myself… I was supposed to drive up to a pump with an attendant (which I didn’t even see) and have them pump my fuel for me.

I researched this while waiting for my plane, and it’s true—New Jersey is one of only two states out of 50 in the United States that prohibits you from refueling your own vehicle, with Oregon being the other state (though that law in Oregon only applies in cities, and not in areas with a population under a certain thresh­old).

They claim that refueling gasoline yourself can be dangerous, especially for pregnant women. Well, I guess the entire rest of the country’s infants are all born with birth defects, then. They may as well just say it how it is—this inconvenience is clearly a result of political lobbying.

Apart from the refueling fiasco, this was overall a nice trip. I generally like to avoid excessively cold places, but for some reason, this wasn’t too bad—I just bundled up in a coat thicker than I usually wear, and I was able to manage fine.

I was originally planning on going to Seattle for one week immediately following my trip to New Jersey, but I decided to switch up my plans a bit due to some unexpected scheduling conflicts. Instead, I’ll be sticking around Southern California for another week and a half before setting off to continue my road trip.

Continue reading →

 

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My two months in SoCal have come to an end

by   •   General
 

Just shy of two months ago, I finished my first big loop around the United States and set up base at the Tempo headquarters in Long Beach to recover from traveling and rest up for the winter. At that time, this was the state of my travel map:

Since settling down for a bit in California, not too many interesting things have happened. Not only is it not really too viable to go out and do things in California because of the ridiculous traffic and inflated prices of anything that may require an admission ticket, but the past few months have also been ex­tremely busy as Tempo works towards closing our Series B financing round.

Hiking has been really fun throughout my road trip, but apart from going on a walk around Naples Island, finding a decent place to go on a real hike involves driving a decent distance out from Long Beach, which I wasn’t exactly the most excited to do, because trying to go anywhere in California ba­si­cally takes up your entire day.

Because of this, I decided to do one blog post as a big round-up of all the random photos and interesting events that happened while I was living in the team house, as opposed to writing half-baked blog posts for all the mundane stories I have of routine, everyday life.

 
Not too long after I arrived, the Naples Christmas Boat Parade happened. Apparently, Naples Island takes Christmas lights very seriously, and a ton of tourists show up to the island to watch mansions and boats with lights every year. I went outside and went for a walk around the canals with one of my employees, which was one of the few pleasant sightseeing experiences I had in Southern California.

If you’ve seen some of my previous food blog posts, you know that I’m a fan of trying out some of the best restaurants in each area that I visit. I’ve been eating out around Long Beach a bit with some of my employees, and one of the restaurants that we went to was called Tantalum. It was one of the more expensive restaurants that we went to, but the food quality was a bit underwhelming relative to the price.

I got the Tantalum “Kobe Beef” Burger, because I usually like getting food items named after the restaurant, as those are the entrees that best reflect the identity of the chef. The burger cost US$23.00 and had a brioche bun, butter lettuce, fontina cheese, avocado, and tobacco onions with a side of herbed fries and garlic aioli dipping sauce.

To be clear, the burger wasn’t bad, but it mostly just tasted like a premium fast food burger, which is disappointing for something at that price point. The fries were also unbelievably salty, and the salt was overwhelming the burger’s meat flavor so much that I just saved the fries for the end of my meal.

We also ordered a half dozen of Kusshi oysters on half shell around fresh lemon, with Thai basil cocktail and cucumber mignonette sauces on the side. I liked that better, so here’s a photo of the oysters.

One of the times that we were going out to get food, one of our employees peeked his head outside to ask us to get something to-go for him. I pretended to be unable to hear him and prompted him to come closer so I could understand him better. He got closer and closer, and once he was in melee range of the vehicle, I opened the door and nudged him inside. He was so focused on trying to enunciate himself so I would understand him that he sat in the vehicle in auto-pilot while he was talking.

Once he was inside, we drove off to the restaurant.

Oh also, one additional detail: he was in the process of eating a kiwi with a spoon when this happened, so he brought that along with him to the res­tau­rant. Obviously.

(He actually finished it before we arrived at the restaurant, but I was secretly hoping that he would walk inside with it in hand.)

Early in 2022, I went to pick up the CEO of Tempo from the airport after he got back from a New Year’s networking event with potential investors. At that point, he was feeling a little bit unwell, but it wasn’t anything too severe. However, his symptoms quickly got worse, and after a few days, he tested positive for COVID-19.

After learning of his infection, I also obviously assumed that I had COVID-19 as well, considering that I had picked him up from Los Angeles In­ter­na­tion­al Airport and drove him back to Long Beach for about 40 minutes in a vehicle with the windows up, and there is no way that I wasn’t ex­posed to airborne coronavirus. I was completely asymptomatic, but I still took a test to make sure… and it said I was COVID-19 negative.

I recently got a booster dose of my COVID-19 vaccine, so I don’t know if my body just killed the coronavirus as soon as it entered before it could rep­li­cate to infectious levels (if that’s even how that works), or if I’m just the luckiest person ever, but I feel like I have just been dancing around COVID-19 for the entire pandemic and somehow still staying safe.

After Tempo’s withdrawal from most esports, things have been a lot more peaceful. It’s usually needing to resolve emergency-level esports-related in­ci­dents that got me the work nickname of “firefighter,” but now that we’ve pivoted to game design and game development, there generally are not huge in­ci­dents like this anymore.

But of course, we don’t want life to get too boring. So, on a random morning, I discovered that the hot tub was roleplaying as a jackhammer, both our garages were flooded, an ear-shattering sump pump alarm was going off for two hours, one bathroom had no running water, and another bathroom had no hot water.

The plumbers took hours to get to the house. We use the garages as production studios, so that was obviously a very interesting scramble to get all the equipment out and set up sandbags so the water didn’t spread into the control room. From the photo, it may look like the flooding only happened near the grate, but I guarantee you, literally the entire garage was covered in a layer of water.

Our influencer manager recently got a new dog. He told me that he had gotten a greyhound, but for whatever reason, my brain got it mixed up with a dachshund, so when he said that he was going to bring his dog over to the house, I was literally expecting a short wiener dog with midget legs. Ob­vi­ous­ly, he brought over a real greyhound, so you can imagine how confused I was when the creature in front of me was like 8 times bigger than what I was anticipating.

His greyhound has a unique weakness: stairs. The dog loves going up the stairs, but gets terrified going down them. If you look carefully at the photo, you’ll see little squares of orange… that is cheese, which we attempted to use to bait the dog downstairs. Eventually, the dog was just stuck in that po­si­tion, and only made it down because he was carried downstairs.

Towards the end of temporarily living in Long Beach, I squeezed in a trip to my aunt and uncle’s farm house out in the mountains. Of course, like usual when I’m there, I did a photo shoot with my truck to take advantage of the nice backdrop.

I also squeezed in a hike while I was already out in the mountains, and found out that my aunt and uncle’s neighborhood is actually remarkably scenic.

I have a trip to Newark, New Jersey scheduled to visit one of my cousins and his family, and then I’ll be flying back to Los Angeles for a bit, but after this, I’m eager to get back on the road and continue traveling the country and living out of hotel rooms. For now, I’m aiming to spend a week in Las Vegas tak­ing care of errands and preparing to be gone for a while, and then heading off to the North.

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