I saw a lot of the sidewalk today

Normally I’m proud to hold my head high as I walk around. I could never understand the people I saw with their eyes on the ground, missing all the beautiful things to be seen around them.

Today I got two rejection letters for jobs I had applied to recently. Rejection letters that told me these potential employers weren’t even interested in having me in for an interview. One of these positions I was unequivocally qualified for and excited about. This is pretty shitty on a normal day, but today is my birthday. Now, my birthday has never meant that much to me; I really don’t expect much of anything except some tasty food and maybe some beer with friends. But I tried hard to shake a lingering funk all morning, only to be kicked while I was down. People are suffering far worse fates than I, and I’ll get over this soon. But, man I feel like garbage.

I left work early because I could barely hold it together, much less concentrate on anything. I walked home all 3 miles and 700 ft. up with my eyes on the sidewalk, hoping I could wait until I got home to let the tears fall. I probably missed a lot of beautiful things.

Meet the Parents!

Almost four months to the day after I left Boston to leisurely cross the country to my new home here in San Francisco, my parents arrived for a week-long visit. Just as I had never been to California prior to my initial visit to the Bay Area last May, my parents had never made it out here before November. And I must say, they did it in style! After visiting with my ailing grandmother in Phoenix, they hopped in their Chevy HHR rental and set forth toward the California coast.

The "roller skate" as my parents called it.

My parents have traveled quite a bit over the years, and they were adamant about planning interesting trips over summer vacations when I was growing up. Though we mostly traveled within the northeast (excursions to Arizona, D.C., and North Carolina being the exceptions), I got to see amazing places like Acadia National Park, Québec City, and Toronto. Prior to moving to California, I hadn’t lived further west of Ithaca, NY and hadn’t regularly visited any place west of Monroe, MI (David’s hometown), still squarely within the Eastern Time Zone. There was nothing minor about my move to San Francisco, and that sentiment was expressed loud and clear by my parents, too. So, when they planned their trip out west, I was undeniably excited to show off my new home.

Ken and Janet drove from Phoenix to just north of LA in one day and proceeded up the coast to Carmel the next day, and then on to San Francisco the next for an entire week. While I hadn’t spent more than a few days with my parents since my senior year of college, it was so great to host them in our cozy apartment in the trees. Though I must say, they were certainly NOT treated to the true SF experience; their visit was virtually fog free (though on our way back up the coast from Half Moon Bay, we essentially watched fog form right at the shore) and parking was a cinch wherever we went (free parking at Fisherman’s Wharf and Ghiradelli Square!?!?).

What follows are selected photos from their stay, taken almost exclusively by my dad on his iPod. Enjoy meeting the parents!

Dad, I, and Alcatraz

Mom enjoying her tasting at Moshin Vineyards on the Russian River.

Enjoying the redwoods at Big Basin Redwoods State Park.

Mom and I tossing back the vino at Savannah-Chanelle Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

The crew enjoys a night out gently rocking on the bay at Forbes Island restaurant, courtesy of my ridiculously generous colleagues from the MIT Libraries.

A fun trip to the Charles Schulz museum in Santa Rosa.

We can play, too!

Everyone Needs a Weekend Like Mine

(Oops, this post was started almost two three weeks ago (yep, that was corrected, again), and left for dead like the blog. Well, no, that’s not going to happen, so here goes…)

Oh, hi there, blog! Yeah, I’m not proud that I’ve neglected you for a few months, but suddenly working 50+ hours a week and the ridiculous holiday season put blogging on the back burner. Truth be told, I wasn’t too thrilled with anything I had written to date, anyway. While this wasn’t meant to be a true writing project and more of a diversion while I was unemployed and exploring my new environs, I’ve wanted to share the cool parts of my new life with my family and friends. But I’ve been neglecting the other feelings that have risen to the surface with this major life change.

It’s undeniable that San Francisco is an amazing city, and that the entire Bay Area and beyond is fantastically beautiful and packed with all kinds of things to do, particularly for one who enjoys eating and drinking as much as I do. And there are tremendously gregarious people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and reconnecting with, from the Librarian in Black and The Pinakes, two amazingly smart and talented librarians who are also charming as hell and enjoy good beer, to a long-lost high school friend whose warm heart made it easy to let us pick up where we had left off over 10 years prior. Even though my current job is only temporary, all of my colleagues have been so welcoming, helpful, and friendly toward someone as out of sorts as I am, stumbling about in a new city without a clue as to what the next step in my life will be.

So, you’d think that with all that’s positive, I’d be loving my new life here in the Bay Area. Well, that’s not entirely the case. Truth be told, I miss the Boston area tremendously. Don’t get me wrong, a snowless winter (indeed, a winter when the daytime temps are mostly in the 60s) is a wonderful thing, but there are my many dear friends that I miss terribly, not to mention the first job I didn’t want to leave at the MIT Libraries (although it should be noted that through the kindness of many, I have been working part-time remotely for MIT since November, and will continue through at least June; a tremendous help for our bank account not to mention an excellent way to stay connected to the academic library world). And I can’t forget my parents, who visited California for the first time ever back in November, and spent a week exploring San Francisco with me and David. Though I wasn’t very good about visiting with them when they lived less than an hour away, it’s strange to now have them so far away. Finally, I can’t express how much I miss playing with my talented friends in the Metropolitan Wind Symphony.

So, what’s the point of all this blabbering? And what the hell does the title of this post mean, anyway? Well, I have good days and bad here, but my weekend two three weeks ago was the best and most relaxing in a long time, packed with great cooking, sightseeing, and some much-deserved rest.

On Saturday, we somehow managed to sleep in despite the stompy upstairs neighbors. The sun was shining and we had no agenda, so we set sail for the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, which I had witnessed in both its Tuesday and Thursday incarnations, but never in its most grandiose Saturday digs. A bit overwhelming, we still managed to find some gems, especially the Rancho Gordo heirloom bean stand, and the Roli Roti truck/stand, and its famous porchetta sandwich, notorious for producing ridiculously long lines.

You know you want to stuff this in your maw.

After a return trip on the N-Judah and a hike up our mighty hill, David and I quickly regathered ourselves and set off for the San Francisco Botanical Garden, a tiny urban oasis in the middle of a gigantic urban green space, bigger even than New York’s Central Park. The garden contains plant species from all over the world, though it boasts an impressive collection of native Californian flora. Without further ado, some of the more bizarre examples from our romp:

This is responsible for the entire Bay Area smelling amazing, yet I still don't know exactly what it is.

What IS this? It was like a grass tree.

January in San Francisco. A little fall, a little spring. But hardly a trace of winter.

This silly tree grows cones ON ITS TRUNK.

Our Sunday brought us up the lovely Marin County coast, where we hiked up Mt. Wittenberg on the eastern edge of the Point Reyes National Seashore. While the sun didn’t shine as brightly as the day before, David and I scaled the hills high above the ocean and dove back into Douglas fir forests. As with most of our physical pursuits, be they a bike ride, hike, or particularly sweaty yoga class, we like to reward ourselves with something to shovel in our faces. And with our proximity to lovely Tomales Bay, it was only natural that we should suck down some oysters:

Sadly, only the grisly remains could be photographed.

So as I wrap up this rambling post, I’m about to embark upon a hopefully restful and recuperative weekend of wining and dining in Sonoma County following a week of sketchy sleep. I can’t make a resolution to blog on a schedule, but I do promise to be here more in the coming months. By the way, if you’re reading this, I probably want you to come visit. Think about it!

Hikey Hike: Rodeo Beach

Friends! This last week has been a whirlwind. I simultaneously got rejected from a full-time job for which I had interviewed marvelously while paperwork flourished for a temporary job here in San Francisco that I am positively itching to start. Add to that an offer for more part-time work picking up odds-and-ends projects for MIT and the imminent arrival of my parents for their first ever trip to San Francisco California, and I’m a wacky ball of nerves, excitement, disappointment, and sleeplessness. So, while there’s nothing coherent to write, there are a whole lot of photos to share from one of the best hikes I’ve taken during my “extended vacation.”

I’m still getting used to the landscapes of the Bay Area. Gone are the rugged granite hills of New England, covered in hemlock, pine, oak, and maple. Here are huge hills dotted with nothing but scrubby coastal brush and dried grasses that are green for only a couple months of the year following the rainy winter season. OR, there are hills covered in giant second and third growth redwoods. The differences over just a mile are incredible. I stumbled upon one of the most interesting juxtapositions yet this past weekend on a bike ride in Marin County. There along Tomales Bay, an extended cove resembling a mountain lake far more than a Pacific inlet, grew agave, perhaps even blue agave, the origin of delicious, delicious tequila, found mostly in dry, desert regions.

So, without further ado: a barrage of photos from a weekday hike on one of the most gorgeous October days in the Bay Area. Rodeo Beach is a perfect little bit of coastline just north of the Golden Gate (yes, it has nothing to do with the bridge or its color). As in the last post, I stumbled upon a Nike missile site, the radar location for SF-88, though the buildings at this location were in a little better shape than the last.

The hike began along the lagoon where I spotted this cormorant.

Scrubby hills

Looking back toward home

Mt. Tamalpais emerges. I shall conquer you someday!

The Pacific and points north

A look to the south

:-)

Raven friends at Hill 88

A colossal fungus among us

Another raven friend

Built into the hills

The last leg

 

 

 

Hikey Hike: Sweeney Ridge

I’m WAY behind on my hike posts, so without much further ado, I present to you photos from my jaunt to Sweeney Ridge, which stradles the bay city of San Bruno and the ocean city of Pacifica. I found this hike again on the fantastic, if dated, Bay Area Hiker website. This particular hike intrigued me with its proximity to the city for sure, but also by its location almost on top of the San Andreas Fault (apologies for linking to a website that may actually make your eyes bleed). It was a sunny Friday and I had nowhere to be, so to the trails I went!

For the most part, this trail was actually a paved road, but with no vehicular access. Paved or not, this hike went straight uphill. A good portion of the path overlooked the San Francisco International Airport (which actually resides in a netherland on the San Francisco Bay somewhere between San Bruno and Millbrae). And aside from a lot of scrubby hillside brush, there wasn’t a whole lot to look at in terms of landscape. However, the ridge is located in the dead center of the San Francisco Peninsula, and was high enough so that when I got to the top, I could easily look out on both the bay and the ocean.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the hike was the unexpected discovery of the abandoned Nike Missile Site SF-51C, a Cold War relic crumbling after nearly 40 years of abandonment. I knew nothing of Nike Missile sites before moving to the Bay Area, and realizing that one defunct site sat no more than 1/4 mile away from my bed left me wanting to know more. (Yes, there are more Nike site explorations to come!)

So, here come some photos!

I suppose they don't want vehicles coming through...

The first few hundred feet of the trail look out on San Andreas Lake, a reservoir sitting on top of the fault line.

South San Francisco, or "South City", is in a different county from the actual city, and is tiny in comparison. It is, however, as the hill says, industrial.

The Pacific

A sprig of life in the decaying Nike missile buildings.

The road back out. This part of California is covered in scrubby, brown hills (which are green and flowery sometime around February, I’m told) with one or two trees perched sillily at the top.

Alarm Clocks

(Oh, dear blog. I have indeed forsaken thee. And not for a lack of fodder, no. True laziness is at the root of this horrible neglect. This post has been spinning around my head for weeks now, and I’m sure I’ve lost the thoughts that made it cohesive in its original state, but I’m going to attempt to recreate it.)

I almost threw out my clock radio when I moved. It was getting a little too easy to pitch the excess crap in our apartment back in Boston since we knew we were downsizing and we had limited space in our POD. Not that the clock was crap, but it was old. And not old as in “my laptop isn’t even three years old and it won’t stay charged for more than 40 minutes” (because, readers, this is my current sad fate), but almost 25 years old! A quarter century! I can’t believe I can even measure a chunk of my life as such, but there you go. It did still work fine, and had seen me through a huge part of my life. I couldn’t part ways with it just yet.

My grandparents gave me my little cream-colored clock radio for Christmas when I was around eight years old. It was my very first radio and the first thing I did was dutifully tune it to 1030 AM to match the rest of the radios in the house. Back in the day, WBZ Radio was a curious mix of popular talk shows and top 40 “adult contemporary.” Along with Maynard in the Morning, you could get a good dose of Bruce Hornsby and the Range or perhaps Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine, and end your evening with David Brudnoy. This was really all I knew about radio at the time; I hadn’t yet discovered what FM was all about. But when I did, I became a pop music junkie. WZOU was my station of choice (anyone who used to listen HAS to listen to the clip, which includes a classic MVP Sports commercial), and the music I heard ushered in a grim period of spending all my paper route money (yup!) on cassette singles. More than once, my mom had to institute a “moratorium” on my poor music purchasing habits.

As I got older, I bought fancier stereo systems, so my little clock radio functioned more as just an alarm clock. Like any teenager, I became well-acquainted with the snooze button, created extra large on this particular model so as to be found more readily by flailing, half-asleep adolescent arms. So well-acquainted, in fact, that most mornings, after a grace allowance of two nine-minute snoozes, my dear mother would barge into my room, turn on the light, and retreat, leaving me squirming in the sudden and unwelcome exposure, knowing that this was the only way to rouse me from my warm bed.

Yeah, that's a Chia Head.

My trusty clock followed me to upstate New York for college (see it buried up there?) where its use paled in comparison to the multi-hour long snooze sessions in which my dear roommate Mickey would occasionally regularly indulge. And then it followed me back to Boston for the next ten years, regularly dueling with David’s alarm and often set ten to twelve minutes ahead of the real time in an effort to trick me into not being late for work. Now, it’s living its golden years on the west coast. And the funny thing about all this? There are many other wake up calls that have been doing a fine job at rousing me much earlier than desired. For instance, just about like clockwork, at 7:30 each weekday morning, tiny yet LOUD running footsteps race by underneath my bedroom window. I haven’t yet had the energy to pull myself up to look at what this daily hurry is, but it has awaken me quite reliably for at least the last two months.  And let’s not forget the stompity-stompy neighbors upstairs, who must have some genetic disposition to carrying ALL THEIR WEIGHT in their heels. The grumpy old men ravens are a near constant source of noise as well.

The good news is that I’ll be starting work soon, and I’m planning on bringing my trusted friend out of retirement to shock me straight out of bed and onto my bike saddle to get my butt to work by 8AM. That is, if the wild beasts of the hills of San Francisco don’t wake me first.

 

If I feed you eye candy…

…perhaps you’ll forgive me for not posting anything in almost a week (Cassandra, you’re putting me to SHAME!). Here are a few shots from the Redwood Regional Park, where I explored on an amazingly sunny day a few weeks ago…in the East Bay. I descended my usual foggy hill of doom to take a test run over to St. Mary’s College, where I would interview the next week. As usual, the sun burst out from behind the wall of fog a mere mile or so from home, and shined brilliantly as I ventured over the Bay Bridge. The amazing thing about this gigantic park is that it resides squarely within the borders of the city of Oakland, yet it feels like one is miles away. Again, these photos were taken with my phone, so they aren’t the crispest, but I think they do some justice to how lovely my new home is.