A Good Relaxing Weekend

Had a good, relaxing weekend. I kicked things off by taking off work a few hours early on Friday. It's amazing what a difference starting the weekend at 2pm can make. 

Kimberly and I wandered out in the rain to pick up some pizza Friday night. I've learned that if I take a few Lactaid, I can eat pizza without getting sick, and so I've had two totally wonderful pizzas in the last month or two from Papa John's. Not something that I really plan to eat often, because it's sooo rich and fatty after not really having it for years, but very tasty for a few times.

Other than that, I mostly bummed around Friday and Saturday. I did a lot of reading, but I've also been working on and off on my next article for the Designers & Dragons column, which is about D&D comics and (as is often the case) is going much longer than expected. I think it'll actually end up being two columns, as it was already 2000 words when I counted it, a few hours of work ago.

We did get groceries on Saturday night too, where I was thrilled that Safeway had Avocados marked down from $2.99 to $.77. And they looked good, if still pretty unripe. I picked up four, and it looks like they should start getting ripe for lunch tomorrow.

Ah, yes, my life is exciting.

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Today, the sun came out and it was wonderfully bright and  warm, so I decided to go out for lunch, followed by a bike ride. I wandered through North Berkeley and Albany on streets that I wasn't familiar with and saw lots of beautiful houses and noted what a difference it makes to have a really beautiful window at the front of your house. I joined the Greenway at Gilman and rode it north for a while.

The Greenway is going to be under construction in various places for the next three years, which is a bit bleh, but at the moment there are only about four blocks that are unavailable, the northmost and southmost blocks in Albany. Those should be finished by February and September (!), with the middle ones going under construction some time in there. Then El Cerrito is going to be doing construction on their parts of the Greenway through 2014, but they say they'll never have two consecutive blocks out of commission at the same time.

This is all thanks to required seismic retrofitting for BART, but the good news is that El Cerrito has secured $500,000 to improve the Greenway as it's rebuilt. Right now El Cerrito has separate bike and pedestrian paths, but for some reason half the pedestrians insist on walking slowly down the bike path. Accepting that people are jerks, El Cerrito is redoing the path to reflect its usage, and so as the path gets redone it's going to be made into a 14-foot wide combined used path (hopefully marked off with separate pedestrian and bike lanes). Since the current bike path is maybe 8-foot wide and used by pedestrians anyway, this should be a big improvement.

I haven't seen any word that Albany is taking advantage of the retrofitting, alas.

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From the Greenway, I slid down through Albany, out to Point Isabel, and then took a ride I hadn't take for a while: out across the saltmarshes, and then all the way around the long southern arm of the Richmond Inner Harbor. Beautiful ride, and much of the path around the southern arm of the harbor seemed to have been recently repaved, which made it even cooler.

When I got out to my furthest distance from home, I found a park bench and sat down. From there I could see the whole baylet lying south of the Harbor, past Point Isabel and the Albany Bulb and Cesar Chavez Park all the way to Emeryville. I enjoyed that for a while, read at the seaside for a while, then rode home, taking the Bay Trail all the way back to the Pedestrian Bridge in Berkeley.

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Golden Gate Fields still hasn't done the Bay Trail extension they promised. And the Fields still stink.

The work being done rebricking the approach east of the Pedestrian Bridge still is incomplete.

Some things never change apparently.

Nice ride though.