Anniversary (Day 1)

Sunday is the twelfth anniversary for Kimberly & me. Since she's been doing well for a while and we've really been clicking lately, we decided to take the opportunity to have some extended anniversary fun this weekend.

Kimberly actually got things started on Friday by bringing home some surprisingly delicious deserts from Walgreens for dinner, but other than that it was our usual groceries and a cheap Friday dinner out.

But today we had plans for a nice lunch and a visit to the Oakland Museum. So, we BARTed down to 12th Street in Oakland and had lunch at Le Cheval. It was tasty VIetnamese food — shrimp rolls for an appetizer, then shrimp and mushrooms in a sizzling clay pot for our main meal. After that we walked over to the Oakland Museum, which is maybe a mile away or so. (I think in all today we walked about 4 miles, on one of the hotter days of the year so far.)

Our main goal at the museum was to see the 1968 exhibit. It was a very nicely done multimedia presentation on the era. There was a timeline for each month, then a lot of other media surrounding it, such as posters, newspapers clippings, and even a few video bits. I think Kimberly & I both fond the video montage of highlights from movies and TV shows of the era the most interesting. It included 2001, The Monkees intro, a totally ridiculous Star Trek clip where the crew is meeting space hippies, and lots more.

[It was easy to find the Star Trek episode just now by searching for "Star Trek space hippies". As I'd guessed, it was a third season episode. It was called "The Way to Eden", and shame on the exhibit people, it actually ran in 1969 (though it was perhaps made in 1968).]

Overall, an interesting exhibit.

We also saw a few other things while there.

First up was a room of protest posters (which was overseen by a pretty overzealous guard who actively blocked the door to the room at points). We discovered that we found recent posters interesting (especially those purposefully done in old styles), but the vast number of posters done in the '60s seemed boring. A totally beautiful art nouveau style poster for critical mass was my favorite.

Next up, we went to a Daniel Clowes exhibit that we'd heard about months ago. I actually ready three of his works — Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Ice Haven, and Wilson — at the time. I found the first to be puerile absurdist crap, while the second two were very interesting indie pieces. Ice Haven was particularly nice for its very non-traditional narrative structure. It was basically laid out like a series of Sunday comic strips, with each page being not just a different point of view, but also drawn in a different style.

Sad to say, the exhibit was boring. Just final pages hanging on the walls. I saw lots of people actively reading these non-sequential bits of sequential storytelling, which led me to believe it was more interesting to people who didn't read comics.

(Note to self: read David Boring, The Death-Ray, Ghost World too.)

While in the art area we skimmed through for things that interested us, as it'd been a while since either of us had been to the Oakland Museum (not since a trip with Kimberly's family, which was probably 1999 or 2000). We were both struck by a set of 15 or so cuckoo clocks on the wall, with sickles and hammers hanging from them. Kimberly just saw the sickles at first and thought it might be something about time & death. I pointed out the hammers and said I was pretty sure it was about communism.

So we went and read the name and description, and it was something like "The Inevitability" and it was indeed about communism. Which just about cracked me up, because this sculpture on how Communism was going to take over the whole world was completed in 1990. Which would be a year before the USSR fell.

It should have been closer to the comic display.  

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We picked up some dim sum and some more sweets on the way home (brownie for me, apple fritter for K.). And since then it's been a low-key night.

Kimberly napped, I fixed a flat on my bike. First real flat I've picked up since I got my new super-puncture-resistant tires. It was a very small puncture with a very slow leak, which is good and bad. On the good side, I didn't get stranded in the middle of Oakland on Wednesday night (when I presumably picked up the flat), but on the bad side I had to disassemble the tire so that I could find the flat in a sink. (The leak was too slow too hear.) And me doing work on a bike usually involves blood and grease. It took me two tries to get it back together right, but I think all's well now.

Hopefully, as I'll be biking back to to the colo on Monday as I've been playing hard-drive shuffle with one of the Skotos machines.

Tomorrow: more anniversary, with further travelling.

Anniversary (Day 2)

Today was the actual day of our anniversary, and thus we had bigger plans for the day. Glad we didn't do big things two days in a row, as I'm now pretty exhausted.

We had an early lunch of (tasty & healthy) Subway sandwiches this morning, then headed out a bit before noon. Our first destination was BART, which we took out to Embarcadero. From there we wandered through the outdoor craft sellers (where Kimberly got an expensive but attractive & unique necklace) and then through the Ferry Building a bit. My biggest memory of the Ferry Building is it sitting derelict for many years, and I hadn't seen it since it'd been renovated. VERY NICE. I'm not even a foodie, but found the foods offered inside very attractive.

However our actual goal was the 1:25 Golden Gate Ferry to Sausalito. Soon we were boarding that, after paying with our oh-so-cool Clipper cards. We sat up on the top and thus got beautiful views of the Bay all the way over. Lots of Bay Bridge and Treasure Island, then some Alcatraz and some Golden Gate off to the other side. I love water & thus I love the Bay, and it was all quite nice.

Arriving in Sausalito, we walked around the area near the ferries for a while, which is where most of the galleries are and some of the kitschy touristy places are. We went in the first gallery we saw, which had a lot of prints of work by Dr. Seuss -- a lot of it original work that doesn't show up in his books. It was very cool. There were also neat animals arranged in groups and herds and neat clockwork animals. All very pleasant (and way more than we'd pay for anything, but as I told Kimberly, we should visit galleries more, as they're like free museums).

After a bit more time in the really central downtown area, I was getting pretty sick of crowds & tourists. I hadn't remembered Sausalito being so totally and grossly overrun, but it's been a long time since I've been there. In any case, we started heading up Bridgeway away from the ferry area and I was pretty pleased to see that within a couple of blocks, all the tourists disappeared. They must rush out there, congregate in that couple of blocks and then rush back to SF for the next step in their site seeing.

Kimberly wanted to stop by the restaurant we'd chosen for dinner (and had 5 o'clock reservations at). I thought it a bit silly, since we had reservations and all, but agreed. So we looked around and we found a totally different restaurant at the address ours was supposed to be at. It turned out that the Harbor View (which we had reservations at, we thought) had gone out of business a couple of months ago and been replaced by some place called The Fisherman's Cobbler or something like that, and they'd kept the same phone number. The new restaurant had a different, more boring menu and everything was about 50% more costly. Ironically — given that it was a seafood restaurant — we felt bait-and-switched. We ended up canceling our reservations.

Fortunately, Kimberly had selected one other restaurant that she thought was a good match for our food tastes and our budget, so we headed up there, leaving downtown further and further behind — and discovered that restaurant #2 (Saylors) was closed on Sundays. Sigh.

I suggested at that point that we just play it by ear, that we could chance upon somewhere to eat in Sausalito or back in San Francisco and it'd all be good. So we opted to just enjoy our other main destination for the day: The Bay Model.

This is a water-filled working model of the whole Bay built by the Army Corps of Engineers back in the '50s. It was originally used to look at a crazy idea about damming up the north and south ends of the Bay but has since been used to figure out the results of various construction products. It was apparently in active use through 2000. I'd guess they now use computers for the same purpose.

In any case, it's still there and it's still working and it's TOTALLY COOL. You can see all the features of the Bay in shrunk down size right in front of you and how it all interrelates with each other. It gives a much more visceral overview than a map or something because it's right there, in front of you, larger (actually smaller) than life. We wandered around that for a while. I had great fun identifying the landscapes I know best from biking, from Point Pinole to the Bay Bridge or so. I also really goggled over the amazing work sketching out ALL (MANY) of the rivers and riverlets leading into the delta. A totally amazing bit of representative work.

The ranger acting as a greeter for the Bay Model had been kind enough to give us a Sausalito Visitor Map and I used that to ID what turned out to be the civic center area of Sausalito (and what was clearly the natives' downtown, as opposed to the tourist downtown a few blocks down). There were a cluster of restaurants, and though some were closed or closing we IDed a fancy Italian restaurant that we liked and ate there.

It was the Osteria Divino, which serves "Rustic Florentine cuisine". My favorite for the night was a really excellent Bruschetta, but I also had a great seafood over risotta plate and a really excellent molten chocolate cake. All terrific food, and quite worthy of an anniversary night. It was also a very pleasant restaurant. Fairly quiet, run by authentic Italians who knew a lot of their customers. Like Cheers but with pricey and superb Italian food.

We ended up eating a little earlier than planned (4:45 rather than 5:00), and by good luck that put us right on schedule to take the 6:20 Blue & Gold Ferry out of Sausalito, over to the Fisherman's Wharf area of SF. As planned we walked over to Ghiradelli square, bought some special chocolates (that'd be semi-sweet non-pareils for me) and then took a bus to BART and BART back home. (We considered the cable car, but the line seemed as outrageous as it tends to be during tourist season, so we instead ended up waiting about 20 minutes for a bus with a crazy, swearing man on it. So it goes in San Francisco.) By the time we got back home we'd walked 7 miles and been out and about for a bit more than 9 hours. I'm pretty worn out.

Overall, an excellent 12th Anniversary for us. Apparently that's silk, but it was more a public-transit anniversary for us.

PS: Tons and tons and tons of bicyclists in Sausalito, thanks mainly to the tourist-bike renters. I was very jealous. Though I also looked down on the idjuts riding down the street with their helmets hanging from their handlebars.