Happy Holidays!

Good will towards men, etc. The holiday season has had the desired effect--I've lost track of the days and have a seemingly endless supply of chocolate and jellybeans to hand. Lovely. I felt only vaguely guilty when I went to the gym yesterday and spent 50 minutes squeezing a weird spiky ball between my thighs (it was Hello Kitty pink, folks, which made it almost palatable) and realised I would instantly undo all of my good work with the gobbling of just two chocolate coins.
We spent Christmas with my brother and family after catching a Christmas Eve performance of the Nutcracker. Love that ballet, and I don't care how ubiquitous/cheesy it may be. The music is beautiful, the costumes are beautiful, and I have been watching the SF Ballet do it since I was 5. So there.
Other Christmas season highlights:
* Admiring the giant swan in the window of Marc Jacobs on Fillmore St. Bizarre fun.
* A quick burger and bloody Mary at Harry's after picking up some fabu gifts. I love giving good gift.
* My third-ever manicure. I finally broke down and went to the little nail studio across the road that I have been spying on for the past year. I picked a pale pink polish called Bubble Bath.
* The twinkly snowflake lights on the side of the Sak's building. So pretty.
* A verrrry strong Margarita in the Carnelian Room, at the top of the Bank of America building. The view is gorgeous--the bay and city laid out for you as if you were a despot. I felt teary, jubilant, nostalgic, and slightly giddy all at once.
After bidding adieu to the family the day after Christmad we headed to Carmel, a cutesy little seaside village that has turned into a caricature of itself. Dad lived there and practiced medicine when he first moved to the US. Every shop smells like vanilla cupcakes. And it costs $9 to do the 17-Mile Drive made famous by the Pebble Beach golf course and US Open. And if that weren't enough to turn you off, the first ever Thomas Kincaid gallery opened in Carmel 15 years ago. If you're not familar with him, he's the most collected living artist today. He depicts ideal chocolate box-style cottages and village scenes and is known for his technique with light--everything looks all twinkly and elf-like. He designed a whole housing sub-division in my birth city, Vallejo. He makes me feel nauseous but I couldn't stop myself from diving into his gallery and having a giggle. If Santa had known about that, I'm pretty sure I would have been left off the sleigh route. Ah well.

Sentimentality alert

Feeling nostalgic today. And sick. I have been sick all week--nasty flu-ey congestion and fuzzy head--and nostalgic for about three weeks. We finally made a firm decision about our future--we're heading back to New Zealand next year. I resigned from my job yesterday and that's all folks. I'm glad we have a plan of sorts because I am the original girl with a plan. If I'm not heading somewhere with some objective in mind I am pretty miserable. So that's good. But I love living in San Francisco. It's a childhood dream come true and while I always knew it was temporary I guess I figured it would be a more longterm move than it's turned out to be. We have been here a year. We flew into New York on September 1, 2006 and we moved into our chilly wee apartment last December. So we've experienced all the seasons here and watched our neighbors gorgeously OTT decorations change from St Patrick's elves to Easter bunnies and eggs, to summer flowers, to Halloween ghouls, to Thanksgiving cones of plenty, to Christmas wreaths--and all of it wonderfully American in scale.
Today is cold but sunny. I had to drop Tim off for his Saturday business class and then drove home along California St, past the Bank of America building (tallest in the city, home to our money manager), past two cable cars, past the Fairmont Hotel and Tonga Bar where we have yet to go, past Grace Cathedral where we attended an ANZAC service, past Fillmore St where I do so much of my window shopping and we do our laundry, past the Jewish Community Center where I work out, and finally past our block with its Edwardian apartment buildings and fancy home shops. It is all so pretty.
* * * *
Enough bellyaching--we went to the Dickens Fair last weekend. The Cow Palace, a huge South SF venue for bullriding competitions and monster truck shows, was transformed into ye olde London. Or, I should say, the area where they keep the cattle and such for the big shows was transformed into ye olde London. The big domed Palace itself was a happy place for me as a child. My family used to go for the bullriding and equestrian shows thanks to Dad's country boy roots. My favorite part was intermission when we would eat Mom's egg salad sandwiches while the rodeo clown entertained us. He had huge overalls and tiny dogs would emerge from his pant legs to jump through hoops. I think there may have been a tiny spider monkey too, or that could be a 7-year-old's embellishment. In any case, it was cool fun.
So last Sunday we went to the animal area, where 25 years ago I admired blueblood horses, and it was packed with costumed folks and jewellery stalls and food places, and more costumed folk doing skits and singing bawdy songs. We watched the Irish and Scottish dancers for a while and ate some fried oysters and tried on some hats (a Robin Hood cap for T and a floral wreath for me) and headed home.

We had a moment

So I’m seriously starting to wonder if I have an executive-style ulcer cos my stomach has been misbehaving for a couple months now. It seems so 80s and unoriginal. I don’t even have a briefcase, and I don’t feel that stressed. But I have always been good at compartmentalizing and I think that’s my problem now. Nothing in our lives is feeling settled and stable and rather than meet this interesting challenge head on in an adult manner, I choose to deal with it on a sub-conscious level as I sit on the express bus and watch that one lady who applies her eye makeup as we skid down the hills towards the city—eyeliner, mascara, shadow, highlighter the works—and suffer the physical consequences of a burny tum and a bedtime that crawls ever forward. Soon I’ll be going nigh-nighs at 7.30pm.
Anyway, none of this means we’re not having a good time. We finally went to the Fillmore last week. It was tres funky—dark red walls with gold trim, chandeliers, opera boxes, and lots of pissed people in their 40s acting in the irresponsible way they hope their children won’t. There was one woman who fell on the floor and had to be helped up before the main act even bounced onto stage in their ruffled shirts and brocade jackets. It was the Waterboys, who Tim adores. I love Whole of the Moon and Fisherman’s Blues, so I was happy when they played those, and was deeply impressed with the brocade jacketed one’s fiddle playing, but I could have done without the dirty, skunky drunks.
I think that when you get to a certain age, and it varies from person to person, you simply can’t get away with public displays of drunkenness and general out-of-it-ness. Everyone around just resents you.
***
Oh-bama! Mayor Hunky was re-elected, which was no great surprise given his opponents were like cartoon characters, but he’s old hat now. I have a new crush—Senator Hunky from Illinois. We waited in line for an hour and half to see Obama at his SF rally on Wednesday. It seemed for a while that we weren’t going to get in at all because there were just two doors to the auditorium set up with metal detectors and there were over 6,000 people trying to squeeze in there. Just before 9pm everything stopped—the line halted, more police turned up, everything went quiet, and then whoop, whoop, the motorcade burst onto Polk St. We could see Obama sitting in the back of his Cherokee, waving, and then it stopped and he got out and I had my first-ever moment of celebrity worship. He conducted his own energy. As if he’d just jumped out of God’s pocket. It was extremely exciting. He’d been told we were the tail-end folks who might be foiled by the metal detectors and made an impromptu speech about closing Guantanamo and ending the war and other stuff that didn’t sink in because I was jumping up and down and trying to keep my eyes on him at all moments. He was just 10 feet away from us, and some of his energy clearly leapt across the crowd and into the tops of our heads because after he got back in his SUV and the secret service guys folded themselves back into shape (they did not seem happy about the unexpected pit stop) we joined the crowd who surged for the doors. The line unraveled like yarn—that someone had thrown acid on—and although some people tried to stay in formation, it was futile. We ended up getting ushered in a side door with no metal detector and no-one to check our tickets. We could have been very dangerous, I suppose, but like everyone else there that night we felt like Barack-stars.

Another one checked off

When I was 7 my life ambitions were as follows:
* Become super-duper speller.
* Adopt a shelter puppy.
* Aquire a Barbie townhouse.
* Coax my mother into the baking habit.
* Convince someone to build me a tree house.
* Pass beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
* Learn to ride a bike already.
* Live in one place always like the Brady Bunch.
* I also, as I have mentioned before, wanted to become a singing secretary named either Linda or Stephanie, or perhaps both.
Few of these things have come to pass. I did eventually learn to ride my brother’s yellow banana-seated Schwinn (I will never forget looking behind me to see that Dad had let go and I was on my own. I immediately toppled over and felt such a sense of betrayal). I did acquire a shelter puppy, which didn’t turn out too well. I created a grand imaginary treehouse with many rooms including a reading niche and gourmet kitchen.
And then, guess what folks?
Yar! We went sailing on Saturday and it was lovely. We cruised beneath both spans of the Bay Bridge, down to SoMa and the AT and T ballpark, along the downtown waterfront past the ferry building and Coit Tower, skimming past Fisherman’s Wharf and Alcatraz. And I got to pass underneath the Golden Gate.

The Iceman cometh

I feel guilty because I know the result of the France-NZ World Cup rugby game and the three men watching it in the next room do not. I don’t actually care except for the fact that this will plunge a small nation into a period of mourning, which is so counterproductive and lame I can’t bear it. Also, it will plunge my husband into a period of mourning which I would rather do without. At least he and the others had the joy of watching the Aussies get defeated first. There was fist-pumping and joy-jumping when that happened. Also lots of “shut up Gregans” and the delicious schadenfraude of knowing that was Georgie’s last game and, bum, it was dreadful.
This is Fleet Week in San Frantastic and there were air shows today and yesterday to celebrate. I felt quite sick yesterday watching four little biplanes puttering around the bay, barrel rolling and diving and tipping their wings. They would shoot straight up into the ether and keep going until it looked as if they were still and would surely stall, then barrel roll and head back down to earth. Amazing. Especially cool with the backdrop of Alcatraz, the TransAmerica building, Coit Tower, and a Bay full of sailboats. We sat at Inspiration Point, in the Presidio, with a bunch of neighbors, munching cashews and marveling. Today we went up on the apartment roof to watch the Blue Angels, a Navy sextuplet of Top Gun-style pilots who whizzed over downtown for 30 minutes or so. It was quite thrilling, and it was me who jumped up and down and clapped a few times—especially when they sliced through the sky just above our building. It was almost enough to make me feel patriotic. I have never been a particularly patriotic person—for NZ or the US—because, I think, of the shifting sands of my childhood. But seeing clever citizens doing cool stuff only made possible by the dedication of their government to building big, noisy, expensive stuff, well it makes a girl flutter.

Hillary

We went to Hillary Clinton’s rally in Oakland yesterday. It was exciting to see a little piece of history unfolding before us but she pushed our patience by making us stand in the street for two hours—with 14,000 other people—while one California politician after another made speeches and a gospel choir sang, I think, five songs.
There was an exciting few minutes when Mayor Hunky stormed on to the stage and shared a couple Bible verses (it’s worth noting that this is a man who slept with his best friend’s wife and when he got caught immediately went to rehab). I still think he’s dishy, though. A lot of people think he’ll be Governor of California before too long.
When Hill came on the crowd perked up but I still got the feeling a lot of the folks were fans of Bill and were making do with Hill cos they’re nostalgic for the mid to late-90s, when the US had low unemployment, cheaper gas, and we weren’t embroiled in a sticky oil war.
***
Coming home on the bus tonight I was victim to a sleazy jostler. I have experienced a number of these guys now. They use the movement of the bus as an excuse to lean against you, getting right into your space and lingering there without invitation. It is the perfect social crime—it takes you a while to figure out what they’re up to, no-one else really notices, and you feel prim and fairly ridiculous saying anything to the jostler. So these guys get away with it. Tonight’s guy stunk of cigarettes and BO. He kept checking his watch, really leaning down to see the face, and I noticed he had thick yellow fingernails, quite long, and a silver rose ring on one finger.
After he lurched off the bus, another creepy guy sat next to me. He wasn’t a jostler but he smelled like rotting peaches.

SoCal Sunday

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Tiring. I am especially tired today because I got up at 4am. This is not the sort of thing I tolerate well, being hamster-like in my personal habits and requiring large quantities of sleep and food, and, naturally, getting bitey if something comes between me and the sleep and/or food.
I was in LA this weekend and for once it was beautiful down there; the sky was blue, not the color of dirty snow. The air was crisp with the first hint of the winter to come and it was warm, but not too warm--I could drink a frappucino without getting cold, but I didn’t sweat while walking down the footpath. Ideal temperature. My visit had two purposes: 1. Visit my brother who was in a motorcycle accident and is in hospital feeling pretty miserable. 2. Interview a Kiwi celebrity for Next magazine. If you want to know who, you have to read the mag. (Note the shameless promotion, Brenda.)
Pulling off the two aspects of the visit required driving long distances on LA freeways in a borrowed black Jeep Cherokee, which was pretty terrifying/funny. To begin with I was nervous about taking up so much space, but I tell ya, sitting up high and looking like a badass is a tremendous advantage when everyone around you is driving as if they were escaping from an avalanche.
In the end, though, totally worth it. Caught up with the family, did my job, saw the Hollywood sign, paid a small fortune for empty carbs and coffee. I feel so American today.

Itchy and scratchy

Vodka had to go to the animal hospital today. I noticed this morning when I cleaned out the hams’ cages that he had a horrible big scab on his tummy, and that he had lost fur under his neck and on his legs. He was also scratching like mad. It happened so quickly; he was fine a few days ago, nothing amiss, although I must admit that, given his bitey behaviour when we was a teen ham, I am always careful when I handle him and don’t often see his tummy. I did some quick online research and learned that he might have mites—very contagious and devilishly difficult to get rid of—which sounded like a real treat. I considered going to the pet store for some anti-mite spray, but the poor little dude was damaging himself with his scratching and biting.
So Tim rang a couple of vets until he found an animal hospital with experience treating “pocket pets,” as Voddy’s kind are known in the biz, and we were told to arrive any time after 3.30pm, when the doctor with expertise treating rodents and reptiles would be in.
We got there at 4pm, having first driven to 9th Street instead of 9th Avenue, to learn that the reptile/rodent man was stuck in traffic. It took an hour for him to arrive during which time a swarm of children crowded round Vodka’s cage and demanded to see him (he was tucked up in a wad of toilet paper trying to pretend he was roaming the Siberian steppes) and played a game of opening and shutting the surgery door over and over. Finally, a family with two sick dwarf hamsters—chocolate colored ones who’d gone off their food—went in to see the doctor. Soon it became apparent that at least one of them was a goner. Well, we couldn’t help but form that impression when the older boy came out of the exam room saying, “He’s going to kill Twinkie. I don’t know why Mom’s crying. Hamsters only cost $3. We can buy more.”
Another hour had passed.
A girl with two bottle-cap sized turtles disappeared into the exam room. Outside, a guy with headphones and a floppy blue sun hat started to dance on the footpath in front of a shiny green pick up truck, admiring his reflection. He really got into it. He had no shame whatsoever. After 10 minutes or so he sat down with a flourish, opened a book and read aloud as if making a speech, say a State of the Union address, to a crowd of thousands. A homeless guy wearing an eye patch and pushing a shopping cart full of plastic bags, and boxes, and goodness knows what, trundled past. He parked his trolley, chatted with the dancer/orator, clapped him on the back and yelled a bit. Pulled out a harmonica and began to play. At which point Tippy Toes Blue Hat began to dance again. I am not making any of this up.
Another hour had passed.
Finally, it was our turn. Vodka was weighed—he is a hefty 49 grams—and examined. The vet pulled off the horrible scab and invited us to touch it. It looked like cheese and felt like that old-fashioned almond icing that ends up on Christmas cakes. He turned the lights off and shone a UV light on Voddy’s tum to check for ringworm, which, he explained, glows apple green. It did. He took a skin scraping and checked the sample for mites under a microscope. All clear. And then he cleaned out the cheesy abscess behind the scab which, it turned out, was like nothing he’d ever seen. It went on and on, so deep that when he reached the end of the cheese he could see through Vodka’s skin to his liver. “You could stick a pencil eraser up there,” he said. “Now you have a little kangaroo hamster.”
Another hour-and-a-half had passed.
So Vodka is fine. He has a big hole in his tummy which I have to keep an eye on in case food and other debris gets stuck up there. I have to clean it out with an ear swab every month or so. And for the next week I have to spread vaginal cream on his chest and under his arms to deal with the itchy ringworm.
As soon as we got home he jumped into his wheel, his favorite spot in the world, and hunkered down for some quiet time. I am willing to bet money he was supersonically screaming at Lime: "They poked a hole in my tummy and now I have to wear lady cream. What the f***!"

The surreal world

There’s a woman on television shouting at a group of investment advisors. “What are the financials?” she shrieks. “It’s been a sharp week for the market. Is it still possible to invest in stocks without losing money?” Given that the men are portfolio managers, it seems rather a waste of time.
She is one of CNN’s many Sexy Presenters, the ones who wear heavy Sophia Loren-style eyeliner, spill cleavage, and look as if they are about to bite your shoulder. When I lived in the US in the early 90s the CNN ladies were iron maidens, wrapped tight as bandages in jewel-toned blazers (red! green! royal blue!), their earlobes stretched by the weight of their shield-like gold clip-on earrings. They gave the impression that they were always tired, that after they deconstructed Clinton’s first 100 days in office they were off to a kindergarten open house, and then a cocktail party at the hubby’s office. I’m not for a moment suggesting that you can’t be both attractive and authoritative but I felt a fondness for the battle-mommies that I don’t feel for these lush chicks who waft across the screen in Manolo Blahniks and bed hair.

***

It was a bad morning in the Montgomery BART station on Friday. The man with no legs who usually panhandles up on the street corner had taken the elevator down into the station and positioned his wheelchair right by the exit, so commuters had to pass his outstretched hand to get to work. The drunk guy who is usually asleep on the tiled floor, a brown-bagged bottle in hand, had propped himself up against the wall and was gazing into the middle distance. I can’t figure out how old he is—his hair is mostly grey, he’s lost a lot of teeth, his skin is red and leathery, and his circulation looks very poor indeed given his purple feet, but he could be in his late 40s. The punk cowboy—cherry red mohawk, motorcycle boots, studded leather pants, studded leather vest, fleshy bare arms—who often performs in my station of a morning stood across from the drunk guy strumming his guitar and singing Johnny Cash. “Because you’re mine, I walk the line...” It was a surreal scene, and hard to dismiss.

***

Craigslist has been good to us. For those of you who are unfamiliar, it’s like a giant newspaper classifieds section, except it’s online, free, and offers a ton more stuff. We found our apartment on Craigslist, I got my job through Craigslist, and now we’ve made our first purchase through Craigslist. Craig, by the way, is a San Francisco guy who made millions when he sold his site, and still manages it. There are hundreds of Craigs in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. It makes you sick.
Anyhoo, Crowded House is playing in Oakland at the end of next month and Tim was determined to go. I too was keen, but felt a bit conflicted about it because I had been given the job of procuring tickets to their earlier concert at a winery down south and…didn’t. Was in dog box for several days. But I redeemed myself by stumbling on the aforementioned tickets on Craigslist. I emailed the seller and sent my cell number, which made me feel all nervous cos what if the seller was a psychopath, or direct marketer or something? Didn’t hear a peep for days and thought the tickets must be gone and I would have to move to the dog box permanently. But, luck shone on me yesterday, cos the seller, a softspoken man named Peter, rang and said the tickets were still available. I could have them but would need to drive to a supermarket in San Ramon (40 minutes away) to get them because he didn’t want to send them through the mail and would not accept a cheque from me. Pain in the butt. However, we were already at SFO dropping off our friend Steve (Hi Yvette!) so figured we may as well take a tiki tour of the East Bay and get tickets at the same time. We arrived, cash in hand, at Nob Hill Foods in San Ramon—hot as Hades and a nasty shock after the mild cool in SF—and met a boy-man holding a white envelope. It was Peter, not scary or weird at all. He’d won the tickets in a radio competition and his good fortune became our good fortune: he gave us the tickets for $50 a pop, significantly less than the going rate. Thank you, Craig.

It's all about the quality squirrels

I've been working on the Berkeley campus for more than three months and have finally strayed beyond the fringes of my office building by taking an official campus tour. First interesting note: the bright-eyed students who lead the tours have to walk backwards the whole time, so they can maintain eye contact and pepper guests with witty bon mots about the Blues. So I learned a lot of useless trivia, which I love, and got to watch three guys dressed in blue and yellow sportswear trying not to trip over their feet for over an hour. Fab-u-lous.
There was a lot of blah-blah Free Speech Movement, blah-blah biggest university library west of the Mississippi, blah-blah Pac-10, blah-blah Go Bears. And then there was the interesting stuff.
Best trivia snippets:
* The highest point on campus is a belltower; bones belonging to the natural history museum are stored in the tower because it maintains a near-constant temperature.
* The campus squirrels have been voted America's friendliest.
* A fountain on campus memorialises a homeless dog named Ludwig who scraped together a living by begging food from students and loved to play in the water. After his death, mourning students did the right thing and named the fountain for him, thereby claiming another honor for the campus--only American uni campus to have a fountain named for a dog. Go Bears!
* And, best of all, Berkeley has produced 20 living Nobel Prize winners, seven of whom still work on campus. Each of these seven has a car park labeled NL, for Nobel Laureate. I have seen them with my own eyesies. Apparently there have been instances when more than seven of the Nobel guys have been on campus for a function and some have gone without carparks.
While the tour did not have the desired effect, I guess, which was to make me feel misty about my association with the university (Go Bears!) it did make me think about my own alma mater and how badly I blew it. I had the grades to get into Berkeley and lived an hour away, but I chose to go study in Salt Lake City, where it snows and coffee is considered a racy stimulant and if you're not Mormon you're not worth much of anybody's time. Strangest choice of my life. And I don't recall any squirrels on that campus. Certainly not chubby, chattery, elfin comics like the ones at Berkeley.

I could not bring sexy back

My sampling of group exercise classes at my gym continued last night with a humiliating foray into Dance Fusion. This is advertised in the class schedule as a nice primer, appropriate for all skill levels, and less intense than the other dance classes. Lies. Damned lies. What it was was an hour of the most nauseating, cringe-inducing moves from a Britney Spears/Justin Timberlake video repeated over and over and over again. There was the hip grind, the flirty head snap, the hip hop kick, the Flashdance spin, the Michael Jackson Thriller-style groove walking, and the Flashdance super-fast running in place. She's a maniac, maniac on the floor. And she's dancing like she's never danced before. Well, that's for danged sure.
The instructor, as charming and flamboyantly sweaty as you could want, told us to "Have fun with it, ladies. Mix it up" but there was not a lot of joy to be found in that room. It felt like an audition for some terrible reality TV show, and the other dancers were determined to make the cut. They leapt and snapped and kicked their way into a frenzy. I meanwhile, hugged the back wall, half a beat behind the music and on the verge of nervous tears, my teeth drawn back over my lips like a pissy hamster.
And they call this sort of activity healthy.

You don't think it's, uh, you know?

So a weird thing happened on the way back from the movies last night. We went down to the Kabuki Theatre in Japan Town (five minutes from the apartment) to see Once, this cute little Irish film about a Dublin busker who falls for a girl from the Czech Republic who sells roses on the street. It was a lovely wee film; I recommend it.
But that is not the point of this story. The point is that on the way home we turned from Sutter Street into Presidio Street, just near the lot where Muni rests the city buses between shifts, and we passed this pale, long, rumpled lumpy thing lying in the road. It looked exactly like a body. It looked exactly like the body of a homeless person sleeping in a blanket in the middle lane.
"What was that?" I asked.
"I dunno. Whaddya think?" said Tim
"It doesn't look good," I said.
"No. Should we stop?"
"I think so."
"Yeah," said Tim, pulling over and parking.
A lady in a Beemer station wagon pulled up beside us. "Do you think that's, um, you know?" she asked, pointing back at the lump. "It's a bit short," she said, "for, uh, you know. But we should call someone." She pawed through her handbag and patted the passenger seat. "Do you have a phone?" she said. "I can't find mine."
"Have you got your phone on you?" Tim asked, turning towards me, possibly the least likely person in a three-block radius to have a cellphone, given my passionate loathing for them and the alacrity with which I lose mine and let the battery run down.
"Nup."
"I'll go have a look," said Tim, jumping out of the car. He walked back to the lump while the Beemer lady and I looked at each other and made worried faces.
"It looks a bit short for, uh, you know," she repeated.
"Yeah." I craned my neck to see Tim's reaction as he neared the lump. I thought I'd be able to sense if it was, uh, you know. But I couldn't. I twisted in my seat. I didn't think to remove my seat belt. It felt like 10 minutes, but it was probably two. Tim returned.
"Well?" I asked.
"I dunno. I called out, but nothing happened. There's a fire station up there." He pointed past the nose of our car, towards the corner. "I'm going to go tell them."
He took off in the dark; I watched until I couldn't see him any longer.
Two more cars passed the lump, slowed and stopped. Car doors opened. Three people gathered next to the lump. They yelled. They kicked the lump. It bounced into the air. They kicked as a group, three figures kicking in unison, and kicked it right to the curb.
Huh.
Meanwhile, Tim had returned from the fire station and jogged back to where the lump had been, to talk to the kickers. And then I heard a BLOOP emanating from the fire station. I turned and saw a red glow. BLOOP-BLOOP-GRURRRR. And then, like a bad joke, a fire engine eased out of the fire station, lights revolving, siren wailing, and drove a block towards us.
Beemer lady and I looked at each other. "I'm out of here," she said, accelerating towards the stoplight.
Tim and I watched the fire engine come to a stop near the kickers. BLOOP!
"It was a pillow," said Tim. "A big pillow."
"Nooo!" I said.
"Yeah."
And we laughed and laughed.

Oh, dear, I feel faint

I’m back at work, slugging it out with the tissue box and my own squeaky sinuses. My mystery illness has been a real time-sucker, not to mention being generally uncomfortable and inconvenient. I just about fell asleep on the train to work this morning—and that’s after more than eight hours sleep last night, a nap yesterday afternoon, and two sick days last week. What more does my body want? Revenge for too many years eating crackers and cheese for dinner, methinks.
Anyway, it was a nice weekend, mostly, except for when I was in bed with a headache. We went to the SF Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning and rubbed shoulders with the organic, wealthy set and their color-coordinated adora-tots. The market is quite the trendy spot to grab a coffee and wander around getting a tan—yes, the sun was out and it was gooood.
The food is beautiful, eminently displayable, the sort of thing that you’d see in a still life by one of the Dutch masters, capturing every drop of dew on a pear leaf, the glassy texture of the fresh cheese. Most of it we couldn’t really afford. I mean, we could buy cheese for $27 a slab and cured salmon for $75 a shrink-wrapped packet, but then how would we pay the rent? (And wouldn’t you know it, in the middle of my mystery illness the rent check was due and I forgot all about it; the landlords’ suspicions about us have now been confirmed.) So we were a bit choosy, plumping for a sourdough loaf that cost just a bit more than it would at Trader Joe’s, our kinda pirate-themed supermarket, and cherries for a mere $5 a pound, and peaches for $3.75 a pound. And doughnut muffins, which were a deal, actually, at $1.15 a piece, and an innovation I can get behind. Basically, they are doughnut dough rolled in sugar and baked in a muffin pan to avoid the deep fry fat of a traditional doughnut. And yet, they still taste exactly as doughnut-y as you’d want. It’s a neat trick.
And with that, I’m all tired and schlumpy. Damn mystery illness.

On the road, part two

Just woke up after a car nap. I love a good car nap and today is perfect—sunny and warm, a long drive home, and scenery that is lovely but repetitive, so I don’t feel I’m missing too much if I close my eyes. I have the laptop across my knees and one of Tim’s sweatshirts hanging in the window to reduce glare, so I am highway-blogging, which is not particularly glam, but better than sitting here eating jelly worms. There is a dwindling bag of jelly worms nesting between our seats.
After yesterday’s stroll round the picture-perfect Ferndale, we had lunch at Applebee’s, a rather good chain restaurant, not like anything in NZ, really. Tim, with his love of a bargain and a good honest feed, has developed a passion for Applebee’s and its celebrity chef, Tyler Somebody, who is often on the box talking up his latest flavor combos, such as chicken with salsa, which don’t sound particularly clever, and certainly not new, but taste fantastic all the same. There isn’t one in the city, so we keep an eye out as we drive new highways. Our first Applebee’s was in Kentucky. Yesterday, we hit the one in Eureka and it was just as good—and practically identical in appearance; the décor is Americana, with lots of road signs and pictures of Cadillacs and football helmets and such. Tim had a quesadilla burger with rosemary-parmesan fries; I had the Caesar salad topped with crispy garlic prawns. Could have fed a horse comfortably. And cheap as chips.
After that, we took a walk in the woods, getting up close and personal with more redwoods. I scared myself silly with thoughts of bears after a mysterious noise, a low, drawn-out keening, went unexplained. It was all very beautiful but I couldn’t wait to get back to the car. And then we drove to Fort Bragg, scene of one of my great childhood disappointments.
When I was about 11, one of my best friends from John Swett Elementary in Martinez, a girl I had managed to keep in touch with during a two-year stint in NZ, spent the weekend with my family. We drove up to Fort Bragg, a former military outpost, now white trash hangout (I’m horrid, I know), and caught the Skunk Train, an old steam engine that meanders through the redwoods to another nothing-much town, Willits. Dad was really excited about the train, and he had talked about it enough that I was too. Sadly, Alyson, a skinny blonde girl who often wore lavender jeans, which I thought were the coolest, was cold and miserable and unimpressed with all options laid before her. Basically, she was bored, which is about as bad as it got for middle class pre-teens in the 1980s. She didn’t like the train, she didn’t like the chile served in Styrofoam cups we ate at a pitstop along the way, she hated our charmless hotel, and she didn’t like my parents either. The years between 10 and 15 were particularly unattractive for me, so I suspect my clothes were pretty lame, and my hair dull, and my music taste dorky. Meanwhile, Alyson had the lavender jeans and a walkman. By the end of the weekend we were no longer friends. When we got home, I cried and cried.
Fort Bragg hasn’t improved much in 21 years. We ate pizza and went to bed.

On the road

It’s Memorial Day weekend, I get Monday off, and it’s time we saw more of the state, so we packed up the car and hit Highway 101, headed north to redwood country. It’s incredibly beautiful up here, all misty and primeval, with these gigantic trees, older than Jesus, standing guard over the deer and black bears. (We’ve seen deer; no bears.) Some are 2400 years old, and even the “small” guys lining the highway are 400 to 600 years old.
Some snapshots of our weekend thus far:
* We paid $5 to drive through a giant redwood called the Chandelier, although actually it was more of a candelabra. I jumped out of the car and walked through the trunk, tapping the “ceiling” on my way, so I could photograph Tim driving through, with his head hanging out the window like a puppy.
* I was sitting on a smooth log, eating a Crunch ice cream bar when a little girl squeezed on beside me.
“Look at my ice cream,” she said, pushing her multi-colored, stripy lump of little-girl heaven under my nose.
“Wow, that looks great,” I replied.
“Look at my tongue.” She poked out her red and blue tongue.
“Cool.”
At this point her parents showed up, mom holding a very new baby wrapped in a yellow blanket, and my friend was led away. Clearly, the baby had messed up her sweet deal at home and she was looking for attention anywhere she could get it.
* Stopped the car to walk into the Chimney redwood, with a trunk hollowed by a long-ago fire. This tree has its own electrics and a guest book.
* Drove down the Avenue of Giants, 30-odd miles of, um, giant redwoods. Gorgeousness, but we had to stop before we got to the end because there had been a mudslide that the highway patrol had not bothered to signpost before we were practically upon it.
* Ferndale, USA. This is a teeny Victorian town which, rather than being a preserved under glass like a dead butterfly, is a living community that just happens to have great buildings. There is a diner with a long, wooden counter at which a local cop was drinking coffee when I peeked through the window; bank with box-office style booths for each teller; all kinds of candy shoppes, and antiques shops and a blacksmith's, all beautifully maintained and some decked out in red, white and blue bunting in honor of Memorial Day; and a miniature pink house built in 1995 as a fundraiser for maintaining some of the Victorian beauties in the main street, which was adorable except for the dog doodie on the tiny front porch. Oh, and there just happened to be a parade on as we drove into town, with a French horn and all the trimmings.
* Reading the local paper at our blandy-bland motel over muffins and crapola coffee, we learned that “Izzy” Osbourne and the AC/DC chicks’ tribute band, Thundherstruck, were on their way to Humboldt County. As were Joan Jett and the Black Hearts. Sadly, I think it was the real Joan Jett. Oh how the mighty have fallen, rather like ancient redwoods. . .

State of Blah

I’m feeling a bit tired and pathetic today, just draggy and blah. It’s a hangover from yesterday’s draggy blahness, which came out of nowhere. I think this job is stressing me out more than I realized. We went to Baker Beach, site of the cow painting, unrolled our little $1.99 grass mats, and scattered pieces of the NYT around ourselves (in a manner reminiscent to the hamsters' behaviour with nesting materials--are we taking on pet-like characteristics and, if so, have we turned into one of those sad childless couples who treat their golden labs like toddlers?) And I, after reading about how people with disabilities these days are getting on with "normal" lives, and to hell with those who might stare (right on, I say; they illustrated the story with a photograph of the amputee contestant from The Amazing Race, Sarah, dancing at a club) turned over and fell asleep. I woke up with grass mat marks pressed into my right cheek and a craving for sweets. We satisifed the craving at a German bakery run by Chinese people in Clement St, which is SF's second, smaller Chinatown. We go there a lot. I got a slice of mocha cake. And then we went home and I fell asleep on the sofa before giving in and going to bed. At 9.30pm. Am I living the big city life, or what?
In my defense, we had a busy Saturday, what with meeting the cow painting artist and all. Also, we got up before 7am to help out with the food drive at Tim's church, something we've managed just three times since we've been here. It's actually fun. There are some tough old ladies who try to sneak extra food--not because they're any hungrier than anyone else but because they can--and I actually slapped away a woman's hands when she tried to take two extra yellow squash. That sounds mean in black and white, but it wasn't. She knew she was pushing it, and I think she respected me for staying on the ball. One old guy had dressed up for the occasion, including a hat, and told Tim he used to have a job that was "clean". We think he meant he worked in an office.
Speaking of people in bad situations, I saw a man going through a rubbish bin for food as I walked to work this morning. This is not an unusual occurrence. There are people who stand outside Starbucks, watching you gulp back lattes and holding out their empty cups. There are a couple of men who sleep on the grass right near my office, are often still sleeping there when I pass. There are people who sleep under freeway overpasses, next to the train lines--I see them arranging their bedrolls from the train. The fact that none of this is unusual is what bothers me. So when I am mopey and tired and blah, it makes me feel like a jerk.

Art patrons

Tim and I share few interests—we have an embarrassing passion for The Amazing Race; inhale chip and dip whenever we have the opportunity, therefore must ration ourselves, or suffer malnutrition; love reading and writing (though not the same stuff); and derive tremendous enjoyment from teasing each other. And that’s about it. So when we stumbled on a painting—a grown-up, put-it-on-the-wall and admire-it-for-the rest-of-your-life painting—we both absolutely loved while poking around Bodega village, where Hitchcock’s The Birds was filmed dontcha know, we bought it. Even though our budget didn’t really support it at the time. (It should be noted here that we did get a beautiful painting from Tim’s sisters and their families when we got married, but it’s in New Zealand, with our house and barbecue and the rest of our adult lives.)
In our California painting, two cows stand on Baker’s Beach, with a spectacular view of the Golden Gate and Marin headlands. One is a fresian, and the other is that reddy brown and white sort of cow, the one that looks like wet clay. Both cows are beautifully rendered, would look completely at home on the walls of a great ranching home, but the killer part as far as we’re concerned is the striped beach ball that hangs in the air between them, as if one of the ladies has just nosed it towards the other, and both are trying to look nonchalant for fear of losing their cool. Once you’ve spent a few minutes looking at this scene, drinking in the loopiness, you notice a black cow (Angus?) in the background, thundering up the beach to join the game. The whole thing is surreal and lovely. We swallowed our anxieties and whipped out the credit card, feeling confident we had bought the best thing in the gallery.
That was four months ago and today we returned to Bodega to attend a reception for the painter. We were a bit nervous to meet her, given how much we love the painting and how cool we’d imagined she must be. I was expecting, lord knows why, a woman with a husky voice, lavender hair and shiny black boots with the laces undone. I didn’t realize this is who I expected until we met the artist and she turned out to be quite ordinary, with an embroidered waistcoat (I have a weird hang-up about these), and little interest in talking to us, her patrons. We were miffed, I tell you. She even, at one point, took a huge step back towards the wall, positioning herself in front of another of her paintings, a well-endowed mermaid hugging two sea otters, but that didn’t stop us from sidling back into her space and talking at her some more. We so wanted to make a connection with her. Sad, huh? To heap disappointment upon disappointment, the gallery owner served Chablis in the smallest disposable cups I have ever seen—literally not much bigger than a cough syrup measure. So when “our” artist turned away from us again—crying out and practically jumping into the lap of a man she knew to escape us—there was nothing left for us but to get back in the car and drive back to San Francisco, an hour south.

Feeling hot, hot, hot

I’m a summer baby—was born in California, in summer, during a heat wave for pity’s sake, and have always been one for warm weather hobbies: give me a choice and I’ll always plump for a BBQ, a swim, and an ice block over an afternoon on the ski slopes and an evening sipping cocoa by a fireplace. But this is ridiculous.
This morning I woke up hot, an amazing occurrence given that our apartment has until now acted exactly like an icebox with polished wooden floors and cheap plastic blinds. I was warm on the bus, I was warm on the train, and I was warm walking to my office. The moment I stepped across the threshold and flicked on the lights, I was pitched right over the I’m-coping-with-this-just-fine line into tropical territory. Opening the windows and fanning myself with a copy of the new issue (which looks great, BTW) did not help much at all. Even sending an intern downtown to buy a fan hasn’t solved it, although the thing is gyrating madly just to my right. I am now so hot I am literally sticking to my seat, which is not pretty given the thin skirt I wore to work today.
So this is the start of summer. I can state with some confidence that we have probably seen the last rain of the season and I will not need my coat again until November. I am thrilled about this, and would do a little celebratory cha-cha, but I’m too danged hot.

Kicking butt

It really is a year for unexpected experiences. I saw my first karate belt exam yesterday, and loved it! I didn't have high hopes, cos it seemed like it would be a long, drawn-out affair (which it was) and the only person I really wanted to see was my 17-year-old American niece, who was going for her black belt. But it was fascinating, watching people who had worked literally years for their five minutes in front of the big judge and either blew it from an overdose of nerves, or triumphed in spite of themselves. The students ranged from adora-tots in too-big suits to reeeally intense guys who, I sensed, might not have had much else going on in their lives--pure speculation, but I had three hours in which to entertain myself until our girl came out. Anyway, she was great: precise, clean movements, and when she got kicked in the stomach in the sparring section of the test, it made her mad enough to get aggressive in a black belt-appropriate way. So she got her belt. It's worth noting that earlier she had sat her SAT exams (for entrance to university) and later was going to her junior prom. She'd gone in for a pedi which she scratched doing kicks etc.
What's the deal with overachieving teens? I admire them--my other nieces, the NZ ones, are similarly confident wee powerhouses--but it sure makes you feel like a potato. I was a supremely unmotivated, lazy, miserable teen. I didn't want to do homework, or play sports, or develop any kind of useful/diverting hobbies. My favorite thing was to sit around with a book--well, that hasn't changed--and my second favorite thing was to make fun of striving girls who had better things to do with their time. I was militantly anti resume-shoring activities like volunteering at old folks' homes, or doing Duke of Edinburgh stages, or getting good at languages or musical instruments. Mostly, I thought the kids who were really into that stuff weren't exactly genuine--that they were ticking boxes that would prove useful later when they were job-hunting, and that their clubbiness was all about networking, which given that I went to boarding school is not actually far from the truth, I'd wager.
Anyway, I'm glad adolescence doesn't last more than seven years cos it's a bitch.
Today has been hot. We packed books, sunscreen, the New York Times, etc and headed for Chrissy Field, where there is a lovely beach, and sat in the sun reading, drinking lots of water, and meeting new dogs. A teeny poodle came up to say hello and her fur felt like cornsilk. I could have popped her in my pocket and run away with her.

Carcinogenic clothing and too much cake

We had cake for dinner -- a brick of carrot cake for me and a doorstop of chocolate for Tim -- and now we're sitting in front of the telly clutching our tums and complaining about feeling sick. It's been that kind of weekend -- self indulgent and spur-of-the-moment, the way you imagine you'll run your adult life when you're about nine years old.
Yesterday we poked around downtown and picked up some bargains (a new work-appropriate top and jacket for me, a couple of t-shirts for Tim; oddly there was a countertop sign at the shop warning that the State of California felt it important that we know cancer-causing substances were present...), ate Thai noodles for lunch, walked through Chinatown (where I insisted on stopping at the pet shop where we got Vodka and Lime, so I could observe the behavior of the other Dwarf hamsters and therefore deduce what in tarnation is wrong with our moody little boogers) and ended up in North Beach, the Italian part of SF, where we ate blood orange and mojito flavored gelato in the sun. As far as the hams were concerned, there was nothing to see. An exhausted mummy ham lay on her side, shielding a cluster of adorable babies the size of lima beans. Too young for behavioral issues.
Then we caught a bus home and blobbed in front of a Doris Day film in which she traveled to the Bahamas with Cary Grant, which should have been just dreamy, except they weren't married. Not very Doris Day of her.
Today we returned to North Beach to eat toasted focaccia sandwiches at a cigar shop/cafe that no longer sells cigars, walked and walked and walked, and saw the fabled parrots of Telegraph Hill, squabbling as we nosed around other people's gardens and sat for a while on a parrot-watching bench just off a path leading to Coit Tower. It was so appealingly bohemian. Someone's dragged a parking meter up there.
Then to top it off, we celebrated Tim's Washington Post piece by eating appalling quantities of cake at the top of the Macy's building at Union Square. My nine-year-old self would be have been delighted.