Old news

For the record, it's actually the 23th of September, but this back-dated post was sitting half-finished from several weeks ago, so I felt obligated to pick up where I left off.

Finally, a weekend that struck the perfect balance between busy fun and abject lethargy. It began Friday night with a "bachelor" party for my friend Paul - a former coworker with whom I applied for The Amazing Race. I use quotes only because there were as many women there as guys. And it was at a karaoke bar, which held about as much appeal for me as lap dances at a strip joint. Which is to say, none.

The main focus of the evening, since the singing kept Paul occupied, was trying to determine if one of his cute friends is gay or straight. You'd think shouldn't be a tough challenge, but even with some of the best evil minds working on it, it remains a mystery. Dumb faulty gaydar anyhow.

Saturday, I did absolutely nothing save nurse my headache, but made up for it by getting up before sunrise on Sunday, walking up Telegraph Hill to the base of Coit Tower, and waiting to meet my friends Nichole and Lea for a photo-taking date. They were late, but it was foggy anyway, so sunrise was a bust. Plus, a Pepsi commercial was being filmed there, which caught me by surprise as I walked around from the peaceful south side right into the middle of the shoot on the north side. I came around the sidewalk into the glare of lights, bustle of equipment, and all these faces looking right at me. A guy on a megaphone was saying, "Can you hear me at the top of the stairs?" and, frozen at the top of the stairs as I was, I thought for a moment he was talking to me until he said, annoyed, "No, sir, not you." At which point I ran down the steps and out of the shot they were setting up. Awkward!

So from there, we went to the Presidio to take photos in the fog, and then made our way through Dim Sum brunch to the Legion Of Honor for the Monet exhibit. But there was a huge line to get in, so we gave up. I then went to the Giants/Reds game with another friend and porked out on garlic fries and bratwurst.

And finally, back home to help the roommate load up their car with 8 tons of crap for their week at Burning Man. (Hooray! I have the apartment to myself for a few days!) Overall, a very satisfying weekend, don't you think?

Like floating questions, why?

I ended up walking home by myself this evening, and was mostly lost in thought and the music coming from my ipod. But as I turned up Columbus at the base of the Transamerica Pyramid, where the dark canyons of the Financial District suddenly give way to the open sky and building height restrictions of North Beach, I was faced with a most amazing sight.

It was marvelous. The sun had mostly set already, leaving the sky something to behold. First, there was a thin layer of gauzy cirrus in the upper atmosphere, still lit up by the sun, shimmering and pale. Much nearer to earth was a 2nd layer of clouds, rippled in long undulating pink strands across the heavens, like choppy seas of unraveled cotton candy. Below that, rolling over Russian hill was the fog, breaking up in swift-moving puffs of grey lavender. Adding to the drama, all three layers were moving at different speeds and in slightly different directions across the darkening sky to dizzying effect.

It seemed as if no one else bothered to look up or take notice, like I was enjoying my own private private show on a grand scale. The rest of the walk home I barely watched where I was going as I was staring skyward, smiling the whole way.

The Cookie Divine

Every afternoon around between about 2:30 and 4 at the office, I'll start to crash. Sometimes I'm truly tired. Sometimes I just get the munchies. Sometimes I zone out from the tedium. Sometimes I'll be in the post-lunch food-coma phase. But pretty inevitably if I'm sitting at my desk working (as opposed to running around the office flailing my arms, or sitting in a meeting. Although sometimes even sitting in a meeting...), my eyes will start to lose focus, my eyelids droop, my fingers start typing half words. And every once in a great while, my brain will helplessly slip into that limbo la-la land where it can't tell the difference between responding to an e-mail and rolling through a field of poseys while covered in peanut butter and being chased by cows mooing in cockney accents.

I'm sure you could probably argue that this is caused from too much sugar in my diet already, but on the worst of days, I find the only solution (since actual power naps are frowned upon in the office) is to get up from my desk, walk the 3 blocks to Specialty's bakery, and buy myself a warm chunk of gooey chocolatey chippy heaven. Partially this is about getting the blood flowing with a brisk walk in the fresh air. But mostly it's about the dense blood-sugar-spiking buttery heart-stoppingly delicious cookie. Seriously, the things are like crack. You can smell the bakery a block away and be rendered helpless to resist.

Specialty's, I praise and curse you.

These pages must show

Not that I claim to know his original state of mind, but David Copperfield has clearly gone insane:

Copperfield Says He Owns 'Fountain of Youth'

Can't have that upstart media-hog David Blaine stealing all the spotlight.

On the other hand, he does look like he's been around an unnaturally long time..

To the place I belong

Somewhere in my dad's basement sits a disorganized collection of slides and negatives, amongst which are pictures of my sister and me sitting on a log. Taken every August save a few, they're not terribly thrilling separately, I suppose, but when viewed in chronological order they're like a time lapse of the two of us growing up from the time we were toddlers to the time she had a toddler of her own. The photos also chronicle the changes to the place: trees growing, trees cut down, the disappearance of our fallen log (chainsawed for firewood), etc.

For as long as I can remember, my family has been visiting the same campsite up in the Snowy Range of southeast Wyoming, along the Medicine Bow River where it flows out of the woods and into a large meadow called Stillwater Park. But surprisingly, perhaps, for all the added wear and tear from countless other campers, the place remains largely as I remember it. I hadn't actually been there in 5 or 6 years, so I was glad it worked out to join the family there again. I could still practically navigate my way around in the dark, from the bowed Douglas fir at the edge of the slope towards the water to the patch of wild huckleberries near the old 4-wheeler trail, from the sentinel tree in the meadow through the knee-deep grass to the wild strawberries by the willow thicket, from the fish-cleaning rocks in the stream to the Black Forest around the first bend upstream, from the rough entrance off the road through the old clear-cut area to Little Creek. In some ways, it feels more like home than anywhere else.

Time has certainly had its way with the family, though, and the nuclear unit has sort of detonated all over the place. But despite the potential for conflama, the weekend went smoothly with my dad and his wife in their trailer tucked away amongst the trees, Mom and her boyfriend in a tent nestled behind the pop-up trailer housing my sister and her family nearer the water. Across the small dusty clearing a gaggle of cousins on my father's side had also set up camp - none of whom I had seen since Grandma's funeral 4 1/2 years ago. And I borrowed a tent from Dad which I set up in the middle distance.

So even though my tennies didn't hold up so well in the wet grass with all the rain Saturday, it was a lovely weekend. I didn't want to leave. If I could figure out how to live up there, I'd totally do it.

Oh dammit, we forgot to take another photo of Nikole and me.

I'll be what I am

So, anyhoodle. I actually had a good trip I think. I mean, despite the chaos. I could have fared much worse. I mean, I made it where I needed to go, eventually my luggage did too, there was plenty of room on my flights so I could choose window or aisle depending on my mood and even angle across 'em all to prevent my knees from being crushed by the reclining seat backs in front of me. And, weirdly, I think I'm getting past my landing anxiety.

(Landing never used to bother me, having grown up flying around in a little single-engine Cessna piloted by my Dad and all, but I never really used to think about it either. That changed on a puddle-jumper flight from DC to New Haven while I was in college. I swear the pilots forgot where they were going, because I was looking out the window thinking, "hey, that's campus clear down there... shouldn't we be...?" when suddenly the bottom dropped out from under us as we began to plummet out of the sky. Seriously, I could see Tweed Airport out my window not actually going anywhere, just getting larger and larger as we dove straight down. That was the first time I was ever terrified in an airplane. I honestly didn't think we were going to be able to pull out of the dive in time to not leave a smoking crater at the foot of the runway.)

Anyway, now it's more the people that scare me than the flight. A true sign of my burgeoning curmudgeonhood, perhaps. It began at 4:15 in the dark and cold morning when SuperShuttle picked me up. The next to get on was a wet-haired sorority sister just past her prime and looking a little worse for the wear. She smelled of stale beer, cigarettes and shampoo, and wheezed out a throaty "sure is early" to my nod of acknowledgement. I couldn't think of a single thing to say for fear of striking up an actual conversation.

Next, standing in the ridiculously long security line, drinking my bottled water so it wouldn't go to waste and surrounded by people frantically rummaging through their carry-on, was a pleasant older gentleman with a woolly cardigan and nothing but a leather satchel. Of course everyone was feeling chummy because of the unusual circumstances so he struck up a conversation, and because it's hard for me to be completely rude, I learned all about his early days with punch-card computers and the cutting edge of engineering computing technology at Stanford during the 50's-80's. Yes he was perfectly nice and harmless, but I find it difficult to waste energy connecting with strangers I'll never see again. Which is probably pathological, given the magic of being human and blah blah blah, but still, it was 6 in the fucking morning, I had just parted with my Chapstick, and all I wanted was some personal space.

Also, the beautiful broad-faced brunette woman in line behind me on the jetway, as we were waiting to have our carry-ons searched again: she couldn't stop talking about how much she needed to pee since she, too, had downed all her water before security so it wouldn't go to waste. Ok, so she built up to that revelation with some giddy chitchat about trying to decide if she should throw out her favorite Aveda/BodyShop/Sephora products or miss the flight, but hello? TMI.

I certainly can't leave out the obnoxious blond tween twins and their brute brother in front of me on one leg. I feel sure this was their first airplane experience given their level excitement and ignorance, but sadly their enthusiasm was mostly exhibited by pummeling each other, arguing loudly in ogre-speak, and slamming their seats back into my kneecaps. Also, who takes off their shoes while the plane is still at the gate and places them in the overhead compartment? Who?! It took me at least 20 minutes to adjust the overhead air properly to keep from gagging at the smell of seriously sour feet the whole flight.

Most alarmingly, though, was the big-armed guy who sat next to me en route back to Phoenix. He still had hospital tags on his wrist, and some amber iodine stains beneath his well-formed (but soul-patch adorned) chin and streaking across his clean-shaven jawline and veiny neck. I couldn't see any actual surgical signs, though he still had gauze taped on the back of his smooth hand and in the crook of his arm. He didn't actually speak to me, or show any signs he knew I existed, which was just was well - the last thing I wanted was to become Patient One, because Patient Zero had breathed on me. But he kept falling asleep with his leg in the aisle, so the flight attendant kept asking me to poke him so she could get her drink cart through. I was not thrilled at this. For all I knew, he had just escaped from the psych ward and was on the lam. I mean, who gets on a plane directly from the hospital without even taking off the wrist tags? I did relax a little later when he pulled out a paper with the header "Post-Procedure Discharge Instructions," though he could have snagged that from the nurse he strangled.

So yeah. Maybe I need a car. I like driving. By myself.

Maybe they've already won

Well, that was something. Lessons learned from my latest travels:

1. Don't fly on days that terrorist plots are thwarted causing the TSA to raise threat levels to orange;
2. Don't check baggage because it may get lost... twice;
3. Just plan on buying all new gels and liquids when reaching my destination since I can't carry it on and it'll get lost anyway if I check it;
4. When the ticket stub says "US Airways by AmericaWest for Mesa Airlines" you're asking for trouble;
5. Perhaps it's worth the extra money to fly direct;
6. Phoenix is fucking hot and anyone who chooses to live there is clearly not right in the head.

Should I be worried?

Huh. So this morning, long before I needed to be up, I started to emerge from dreamland in the quiet of the predawn morning, when my bed shuddered and the apartment rattled and I felt another earthquake. I looked at my clock and it was 5:57. This one was dinky (a mere 2.9 acccording to the USGS), but eerily reminiscent of the last one.

I'm a little alarmed for several reasons. First of all, I find it a little strange that I should have awakened a few minutes immediately prior to both of them. Not that I'm claiming psychic abilities or anything, though that would be useful. It's just disconcerting is all. Second, after going several years without feeling any earthquakes, it seems there's been a slight uptick in their frequency. And lastly, this one was directly under Berkeley, along a stretch of the Hayward fault that has been quiet for long enough that the seismologists are worried. Was this the first sign that the Hayward is going to slip? I shudder at the thought. And think I'll get to creating that little earthquake kit for the office.

Yeah yeah yeah

I was going gangbusters there for a bit, at least retroactively, but y'all's gonna hafta wait a bit longer for sumpin new. It's not that I don't have schtuff to say, because I do (how's about a Happy Birthday leonid roar out to my mom, sister, and nephew Caden, for example). But you see, things have been busy. I've been busy. And I took up reading again -- which was nice while it lasted -- so when I wasn't busy I was still occupied. And now, dear ones, I'm off for a weekend in the Wyoming woods. I'll write when I get back.