Crumb by crumb

I have now officially caught up to the present time. I apologize for keeping any of you waiting, as I'm sure you were, with bated breath. And I'm also sorry that the wait was obviously not worth it, as none of the posts below which I have finally published have much of anything interesting to say.

In other news, let us all join hands in welcoming JenHen to this side of 33. It's not really so bad. Despite my crazy musings on the fact that if you turn 33 on its side like a smiley face :) it reminded me of the "furniture disease" my grandma used to joke about, when your chest falls into your drawers with old age. Really, if it helps any to think of it this way, we're only 1/3 of the way to 100.
I'm going to go weep now.

Also, dear Dr. Ebony, I'd love to hear all about this dream of yours. Was it produced in a vicodin-saturated haze of hallucinatory slumber? Do you really luuuuurve me?! And how are your students trying to destroy you? I bet they'd think twice if only you'd ended up with the Dr Doom titanium jaw.

Studying with the Professor

You know you've lived in San Francisco for a long time when you're in someone's apartment and casually ask "hey, what are these pills in with your weed?" wondering about the tablets while completely unfazed that there is marijuana sitting out on the coffee table in plain view of the front windows and without thinking twice about the bong tastefully decorating the sideboard beneath a picture of the grandparents.

You belong among the wildflowers

My friend Meredith moved with her perfect family to Atlanta at the beginning of the year. This makes me sad for a variety of reasons. It is particularly poignant today, because I was forced to go to Bouquets to Art without her.

It'd been sort of a tradition every year since she turned me on to it - we'd even ditched work one year for an extra-long lunch break.

Once a year, they open up the museum (it used to be at the Legion of Honor, but has moved back to the de Young, now that it has re-opened in its amazing new space) to florists and flower designer types, who then create amazing flower arrangements to match, mimic, or otherwise complement the artwork throughout the galleries. It sounds sort of silly, perhaps, but it's partly why I pay for a museum membership each year.

Alas, it's not quite the same without Mer.

And may they ever be

Among the great things about living in San Francisco is that its restaurant scene and dining opportunities are virtually unrivalled this side of NYC. It's been said that a new restaurant opens every day (which means that nearly as many close their doors). It's also been said that you could eat out at a different joint every meal and never eat at the same place twice due to the sheer number of restaurants and the fact that with the turnover, you'd forever be playing catch-up.

Of course, when faced with all these options, it can be very difficult to choose between them. Or when someone asks for recommendations, well, I gotta have some criteria for whittling down the choices. Does the neighborhood mater? How about price range? Interior lighting? Wait staff attractiveness? Type of food? Because just deciding which sushi place is tough enough, so throwing in Greek, pasta, Thai, French, Persian, seafood, dim sum, Afghani,* or any of the bazillion other possibilities makes the task nigh on impossible.

Anyhoodle, all this is to say that it was difficult for me to come up with a list of a few dining options when Erica (of the Rawlins Ericas, best friend to Joy since forever) e-mailed me to say she and Jeffery would be visiting. Which, YAY!

So where I failed, they stepped up and were able to decide on the Bambuddha Lounge as the meeting place - a funky loungy place attached to an old motel (complete with swimming pool), with asian-fusion cuisine that turns into a rockin' bar on weekends. It was not particularly rockin' this evening, but the tunes were good, the food was tasty and the company, terrific!

Despite all I've heard about Erica in the years I've known Joy, I'd only actually met her and Jeffery once, at Joy's wedding. But hanging out with them over dinner it was as though we were old friends. I love that. (And they brought me a bottle of Jeffery's wine which I can't wait to try... I love that too!)

When I try out that wine, I'll raise a glass to good friends of good friends who are now good friends. I'm so glad they got in touch!


* Ok, scratch the Afghani off the list. The best Afghani restaurant in my neighborhood is closed because a giant chunk of hillside crashed into their building a few weeks ago. Stupid landslide. Now I'm craving pumpkin lamb ravioli.

I am the harsh nemesis of all that is unclean

Laundry sucks. There's just no way around it. I think it might not be so bad if I actually had my own washer and dryer in my apartment. But having to haul it down the block and pay for it generally means that:
A) I'll wait until a mountain of dirty clothes has accumulated past the point that I can reasonably lug it up and down 3 flights of stairs;
B) I'll cram so much stuff into the crappy laundromat washer that most of my stuff probably hasn't been truly clean since I bought it.

Seriously, at $2.25 for one load in the washing machine, there's no way I'm going to just do a few socks. That washer has every sock I own, all my boxers, and most of my 300 t-shirts stuffed into. I just spent over $20 in quarters... and that was just on sheets, towels, whites and darks. I didn't even do jeans, fuzzies or the rest of my darks! And when the dryer is only 6 minutes per quarter, well half my stuff goes home damp too.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, there's always at least one wild-eyed drunkard who wants to tell me about his medical problems. And then use my detergent. Which, I guess is still better than the muttering homeless guy who didn't bother with the wash and went straight for the fluff cycle in the dryer to freshen up his crusty clothes, which he stripped out of right there in front of me and the little old Chinese lady. Either that or he put the high heat on in an attempt to kill the lice. In any case, I don't use that dryer to this day.

*shudder*

A train wreck waiting to happen

As many of you know, I walk to and from work every day, rain or shine. (Ok, I've been known to take the bus in a pinch, but seriously that happens maybe once a month, at most.) I generally walk with a super nice co-worker who lives up the street a block and a half from me and who probably considers me a very close friend. Unfortunately we have somewhat differing perceptions of the passage of time, as well, so often when we agree to meet at the park in 10 minutes, it will really be 20 before she arrives at the corner. I've been late too, certainly, but usually that's me trying to guess how long her 6 minutes is in real minutes.

Anyhoodle, walking the same route at basically the same time everyday, you can't help but come to recognize a bunch of the regular strangers on the sidewalk. There's the grumpalotapus who always scowls as he storms past, there's the make-up queen with her drawn-in eyebrows, there's the old coot who shuffles along delivering papers, the guy with with the too-tight pants. And then there's the really cute tousley-haired gentleman who's eyes meet mine whenever we pass and who returns my smile with a quick grin of his own. Mysteriously, he's been MIA for a while.

Today, however, I happened to be looking out my front window and wondering how much longer I'd need to wait when who should I spy walking past but the guy! That guy! I pondered only briefly before decided to ditch my walking buddy, grabbing my things and sprinting out the door. Curiosity had gotten the best of me - where does he work? What's he doing in front of my apartment when I usually see him downtown? But when I got outside, he'd completely disappeared. It was a flash of inspired logic that led me to my corner coffee shop across the street.

So there he was, sitting down at a table with his coffee, and yes, I ordered a mocha, despite supposedly cutting down on my caffeine. I hadn't really thought this through and couldn't just pop in and dash back out. Sadly, since he was seated already I couldn't exactly bump into him and I'm too much of a wuss to just sit down and say "hey." But I did look over as I walked past and he raised his cup and nodded with a grin.

Which meant that all day I was both giddy and annoyed with myself. I think I may have discovered my inner stalker. And now he's caffeinated.

In case there was any question

I'd lived in San Francisco for a couple of years before I noticed that a MUNI bus seemed to be crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. So one day while at the Bridge on a scenery break, I hopped on the bus and found that it climbed the hills on the other side of the Bridge and circled around at Fort Cronkite and Rodeo Beach in the Marin Headlands. It immediately became my favorite bus line, despite running hourly on Sundays only.

Without a car, and especially after Bryan moved on with his Ford Explorer, it would be long before I'd start to feel claustrophobic and have to get out of the City. So there was a period where almost every Sunday I'd hop on the bus to get recharged in the fresh air and open space in the Headlands. I've tramped all over the cliffs, explored the hilltop ruins of the abandoned batteries, clambered over stone arches to hidden tidepools, combed the gravel beaches for carnelian stones -- and all within site of the dense urban crush.

For whatever reason, it's been ages since I'd done this, so today dawned with such astounding clarity that I dropped everything and jumped on the bus with a sandwich and a bottle of water. And it was the perfect day.

In solitude I hiked a few trails through my old haunts, the hillsides blooming with electric wild irises and fields of golden poppies. Little birds twittered amongst the blossoming blackberry canes and turkey vultures turned lazy circles in the gentle breeze. The air was so clear that I could see the Farallon Islands 27 miles out at sea, the Santa Cruz Mountains to the south of the City, Mt. Diablo rising vividly to the east, and Pt. Reyes sprawling out to the north. At the end of my hike, I waded into the frigid grey waters and soaked up the warming rays of the setting sun while surfers tamed the pounding surf.

This, this is why I still live here.

It was a good day.

The Vortex

Our TV gave out last fall. I didn't even particularly like the TV, but I suppose it was a little better than our previous one... which, by the way, was a Zenith and was free. So now that the newer fancier one is kaput, the old free one is back in place (I'd held on to it since, well, it was free). But this has spurred several conversations with my roommate about getting a new one. Which would mean, naturally, a bigger and flatter HD variety.

But then, I'd have to upgrade the cable, and the Tivo, and probably the stereo. Not to mention rearranging the furniture to accommodate a widescreen, which would entail buying a new couch, naturally.

Paralyzed in the face of this mortifying domino effect, we're still watching the old-school TV I got for free... (which is sort of like riding an ox-cart on the Autobahn)

I, as I suspect many of us do, completely identify with this opinion piece.

Gung hei faat choi

Yes, kids, it's that time of year again. Specifically, the year 4704. The year of the Pig. Actually, if you're interested, the Lunar New Year began on February 18th, but the giant parade through San Francisco wasn't until last night, which I guess is appropriate given the 15-days of traditional celebrating.

And speaking of traditions, I have sort of my own going on which I think I've recounted before. Every year during the Parade, there's a Treasure Hunt put on by a former detective/history buff /film noire lover. Imagine hundreds of people frantically trying to solve clues and running off into the night on a wild pig chase though the Financial District, Chinatown and North Beach, dodging tubas, poking about in dark alleys, pushing their way through the thousands of parade spectators, trying to avoid the winding dragons and deafening firecrackers in search of answers.

It's great fun. I'd managed to participate each of the last 3 years and, wasn't about to miss out this year, though all but one of my former team members had made other plans by the time I realized it was almost too late.

But I scraped together a few friends and off we went, meandering for what felt like 5 or 7 miles over hills and around blocks, seeking such things as the "words of a wilde man" where the double-lettered name for an irrational number key to circular thinking is followed by the 2-letter name of a blood and guts TV show and 55688.193 is divided by 18562.731.*

And get this: Out of 101 teams to complete our level, we came in 12th! No prize, but still, not to shabby. Thanks Nichole, Beth, Adam, Jeff and Joel for such a fun, if exhausting, time! Next year, we're winning the cake and the glory!

* On Pier 3 is a plaque quoting Oscar Wilde: "It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city possessing all the attractions of the next world."