shannon_a | Entries tagged with san francisco

Kimberly's mom and brother have been in town since Thursday. I didn't see them on Thursday because they were headed to bed before I was off work, and on Friday I just saw them for dinner, but today we headed out to San Francisco.

We took BART and hopped on to the F once we got into The City. It runs along the Embarcadero and would have been a nice ride other than the fact that it was entirely, totally, grossly jammed. With tourists, one guesses. On the bright side, I did get to admire the shiny new(ish) green-painted bike lanes on parts of Embarcadero. It's been a long time since I've biked out there and today's trip made me want to do so again!

We hopped off at Pier 39, which I haven't been to in huge spans of time. No great loss. But we had lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe, then Kimberly and I lazed around while the in-laws played some zombie-killing "7-D" game, then toured shops on the Pier. I took in the views of the Bay for a while, which are beautiful (except the sea lions have been missing for a week again; there were many tourists looking at the entirely empty sea lion area, with a lot of confusion on their faces!), then K. and I laid out in one of the main plazas for a while. Surprisingly pleasant.

After a brief stop in the Museum Mécanique over at Pier 45 (which sucked much less than when I went there years ago, in part because it's now actually filled with machines and people) we then went to Johnny Rocket's. This was part of food craziness: apparently the in-laws don't really eat lunch, and no one told K. and me this, so we got hungry and had to eat around noon, then hours later they had to have a little something -- which was really a full meal, but at 3pm or something. Anywho, K. and I had ice cream and stole fries at this second lunch (and ended up not eating dinner).

The trip had been slightly stressful for various reasons, so K. and I were happy to end it with a trip to Ghiradelli. She got her favorite (malted milk balls) and I got my favorite (non pareils) and we each picked up a fancy Ghiradelli chocolate bar that we hadn't seen elsewhere (mine was dark chocolate with cherries and almonds and was quite good).

Our plan was then to bus back to the Civic Center, with the hope that this would allow us to actually get seats on BART heading back to the East Bay, despite Pride events in the City this weekend. Good plan, with one problem: the bus didn't actually go to BART today due to Pride events, and so we had to hop off a few blocks early, walk through the Tenderloin and then fight with crowds of Priders. Fortunately, Pride seemed to have mainly cleaned out the scumminess of the Tenderloin, and the Pride crowds were big but not we-can't-get-through-big. And there were lots of women in bikinis, presumably because today was the dyke march. Yay, Pride.

(Generally, it was nice to see a bit of Pride, and K. and I even showed off our Straight Ally-hood with some nice rainbow shoelaces that she had. As I told her, I really need to get at least one piece of rainbow clothing of my own!)

And the BART plan paid out because we were able to sit at Civic Center and by the time we got to Embarcadero, we would not have been able to.

We've now dropped the in-laws off, and our part of the visit is over as they're leaving early in the morning. As I said, there were some stressors, but I was able to keep my Zen and not spoil the hard-won calm from my recent vacation. The only downside is that I didn't get a nice bike ride this weekend, as Friday night and today were busy and tomorrow I'll have groceries, writing, and other catch-up.

Ah well, the fourth is coming up!

Kimberly & I went to the De Young museum on Saturday. It was to see an "Art Slam", which was a slideshow of various art works -- including one great piece that she'd done.

Unfortunately, the experience was somewhat subpar. Her slide was literally first, showing before they had the window screen all the way down and before most of the audience even realized that the presentation was starting. They showed it for all of 5-10 seconds. Worse, three of her friends who'd come to see it all missed it because they were running later.

Worser, there were some people right behind us in the auditorium who constantly cheered and gushed and talked about every slide in a way that made K. (and, really, everyone else) anxious. (They were De Restless.) We had to move and then we had to leave. Kimberly's friend Jay gave us a ride home.

On the bright side, we had a nice trip out to the De Young and we had an enjoyable and decadent lunch of Andronico's sandwiches and deserts in the De Young garden before the show. And Kimberly did have a piece of art ever-so-briefly showing at De Young! It was fun to see!

Got home a lot earlier than expected, so I spent the afternoon and evening writing and editing.

Then today I biked up to Temescal and wrote and edited more. By the by, that turned out to be at the limit of my endurance as I'm still sniffling a bit from my recent (light) cold. And speaking of cold, the park was. After two hours, I headed home. It was 2.30, and I was chilled, and I decided the park was only getting colder from there. Sadly, Winter has come.

And tonight I wrote and edited more.

Total damage was about 8,000 words over Saturday and Sunday: three more D&D Classics articles (2,500 words total) and my eighth new history for Designers & Dragons: The '00s (5,500 words).

Whew!

With fatigue and sickness inundating the house, Kimberly and I haven't had that much of a chance to do fun stuff together lately, so I'd hoped we could this Labor Day weekend ... and we did!

My plan was a picnic lunch in Glen Canyon Park, which is toward the middle-to-south side of San Francisco. It looked great because it sounded pretty, we'd never been there, and it was really close to BART. We headed out there on BART a bit before noon. BART, I should note, sucked, but no surprise. It was super crowded because the idiots that run BART were still running a Sunday schedule, despite the closure of the Bay Bridge. So, it was standing room only until we were into the City. As I said, not a surprise, and the only real downside of the trip (But you just have to shake your head at BART's inability to more reasonably deal with the Bay Bridge being closed).

We got off at Glen Park Station and went to a small grocer I'd found called Canyon Market. I picked them because it looked like they had excellent sandwiches, and they did! So we picked up sandwiches (Kimberly got "House roast turkey with provolone cheese, mixed greens, tomatoes and pesto mayonnaise on house baked focaccia." and I got "Smoked Turkey served hot with applewood smoked bacon, cheddar cheese, mayonnaise and sun dried tomato spread on housemade sliced sourdough.") and macaroni chicken salad and some terrific desert, and them took them up to the Park, which was only a short distance beyond.

We did have one nasty surprise in the park, which was that all of the buildings and facilities were fenced off (and in some cases bulldozed) due to renovation that's going on through November. Fortunately, that didn't affect the rest of the Park. We ate lunch not far from those facilities at some tables that remained unfenced and found it good.

I didn't really expect to do much hiking because Kimberly has had so much trouble with fatigue, so I was quite surprised. We hiked through the whole park! And, it was a very beautiful park. Some of the lowland park was just trees with the canyon rising ever higher around us. However, as we got further in, the trees and shrubberies started to form tunnels, where foliage surrounded us on all sides. It was like secret nature paths. I loved it. It reminded me in sights and smells alike of the Ed Levine Park that I used to spend summer days at when I was young.

We climbed out of the canyon on the far side of the Park (and saw some great views from there, including clouds rushing over the far side of the Park). From there we decided to head out to the 24th & Mission BART Station, rather than just back to Glen Park. This turned out to be a longer walk that we realized, but we both enjoyed it and since we walked through the Diamond Heights, then down into Noe Valley, we got some magnificent views of The City. I'll have to go through my camera tomorrow and see if I have any good pictures. Google says we walked about 3.2 miles, a bit less than half of that from Glen Park BART to the edge of Glen Park Canyon; and a bit more than half of that from the edge of the Park down to 24th Street BART (24th Street Bart *seemed* a lot further than the walk up from Glen Park had been ... but we were more tired by then, and didn't take a lunch break in the middle).

Overall, a terrific day. We were out and about for about five hours, and it was so nice that Kimberly was able to actually do all that hiking and walking. She didn't even seem too wiped out tonight.

Tonight I finally broke down and did some writing: a first draft of the AP for my Saturday game. I wrote that at about 10, so I managed to have pure R&R over this holiday weekend for about 50 hours. Yay me! (And I wrote that first draft in about 45 minutes, and that's all I'm doing tonight.)

Tomorrow: a first draft of a review I have pending, and second drafts of both the review and the AP. I may also think about my next Mechanics & Meeples article. And reading! And ice cream! Then on Tuesday night I'll get started on the research for new company history #5 in Designers & Dragons: The '00s.

And with 25 miles of biking yesterday and 3 miles of hiking today (+1 mile or more here in Berkeley), I don't feel any need to head out Monday or Tuesday to get more exercise! (And come Wednesday I'll of course bike down to Endgame.)

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.

Kimberly & I spent the afternoon in Golden Gate Park. It was a bit of a trial getting out there as the N-Judah wasn't running (some brain surgeon though weekends in the summer would be a great time to close down the light rail out to Golden Gate Park; and the same brain surgeon didn't do *nearly* enough to get the word out, like, you know, post about it OUTSIDE the Muni area), but we managed with a different bus, and some inefficient walking back and forth and back across the park.

We picked up lunch from Andronico's. We've missed our local store as a source of occasional luxuries, but today we got to pick up excellent sandwiches, sodas, and snacks from one of their SF stores. I had a delicious turkey & avocado sandwich on Dutch Crunch, with an Adult Brownie for desert. We actually ate our lunch in the Fern Grotto, a beautiful, secluded area smack-dab in the middle of the Park, running along a little creek, deeply shadowed by ferns.

It was apparently built as part of the Aids Memorial Grove which we later visited. We were both deeply moved by the quiet, dark area, full of stones piled atop stones. As I told Kimberly, I consider the AIDs epidemic of the '80s one of the tragedies of our time. I get choked up when I hear gay men from the time talk about how almost everyone they knew died, especially when I think about the ignorant and spiteful president that we had, who tried to pretend the problem didn't exist, and thus doomed many to death through the lack of federal aid.

Our main destination for the day was the Conservatory of Flowers, which Kimberly & I had not previously visited. It's a hot house, mostly full of green plants from the tropics. Lots of orchids too, and some other flowering things, but lots of ferns and such too. I thought the main room was the neatest. It had the highest ceilings and there was a lot of stuff really towering up toward it. One of the plants there was apparently over 100 years old. There was alsoa room of aquatic plants, which sounded cooler than it was (and was quite hot & humid in actuality) and a room of "dinosaur" plants which had some bizarre plants and some silly roars and floor shaking. The building itself is an attractive Victorian, which I could see in the floor ornamentations and the colored glass. Overall, a fun hour or so. It made me think of my (deceased) Grandma Appel, who often would take me to the (extensive) botanical gardens in St. Louis when I visited.

We have memberships to the De Young, so we were able to stop in there just to see one exhibit, "The Fashion World of Jean Paul Galtier". It was extremely cool in a yes-I-watch-Project-Runway sort of way. Tons of outfits that he's designed over the last 35 years. All strange and weird in various high-fashion ways. I particularly enjoyed seeing which outfits fit in collections with which other outfits. At the same time, you could really see his overall design aesthetic — as sometimes outfits that looked like they were from the same collection were actually from totally different parts of his career. (In one area, highlighting some of his "punk" work, most of the outfits were actually mixtures of different individual pieces from different collections, which really highlighting how his aesthetic remained amidst lots of different works.) Oh, and we learned that Galtier was apparently the one to give Madonna dangerously pointed boobs.

Overall, a fun day at the Park. Discovering those sort of hidden places around the Aids Memorial Grove really made me want to learn more about the Park, so I'm going to take a look at some books when I stop by the library tomorrow.

Went to the Pride Parade today in San Francisco. Kimberly used to go quite often but hasn't been up to it for as long as we've been together, so when she felt up to going today, I told her I'd be happy to go with her.

It was the first parade of any note that I'd been to. No, not the first Pride Parade, but the first parade, period (well, if you exclude the nightly "parade" at Disneyland and doubtless something I did while in the second grade). Kimberly asked me what I thought of it later, and I told her there was less spectacle but more happy people than I'd seen in parades on TV.

One of the reasons I was happy to go was because I know that the GBLT community has traditionally been oppressed within our lifetimes, and I'm happy to show some support for it as a result. I want to show my support for equal rights, even if it's something that doesn't directly impact my life. I was also brought to tears a couple of times during the parade — such as when I saw police officers walking down the street in uniform with their (same-sex) partners and when I saw a group of people wearing Harvey Milk t-shirts. They made me reflect how far we've come.

Beyond the emotional content, the Parade was fun to watch as there was lots of exciting stuff in it, such as: a "Cheer" squad that did human pyramids and threw folks up in the air; bunches of people with huge plumages of orange, red, yellow, green, blue, and purple balloons; and dancers of all sort. It felt good to see so many politicians in the parade. There were also a couple of celebrities such as the woman who plays "Beast" in Glee and Sarah Silverman. There was a woman in the crowd very near us who was totally overcome by Silverman being in attendance. She kept screaming, "Oh My God! IT'S SARAH SILVERMAN!!!!" and other such. Amusingly, Silverman never even turned to look at our side of the street, so it could have been anyone wearing a black wig for all excited-lady and I knew.

(By the by: I totally thumbs-up the south side of street for the Parade. I was expecting to get roasted by the sun, and had sunscreen on and a hat to be ready, but instead we stayed in shade the whole time.)

I was also amused by the crowd. For one thing, no one told me that there'd be lots of attractive & scantily clad women. But it was also amusing to see people crouching atop traffic signals and on lamp posts and everywhere to get a better view of the parade. Market Street was totally transformed.

About an hour and a half after the parade started, marchers started getting erratic. Amusingly, the first time there was a really big gap, it was the police who showed up next and Kimberly suggested that it was their way of saying they always showed up late. At the next big gap, we decided we were tired of standing and so left the parade behind to eat.

This turned out to be a bit of a trick. I'd planned to use my iPhone to look up somewhere nearby, but off the parade route. I had great reception ... but I was getting almost no throughput. I had to assume that the jammed throngs were beating the hell out of the local 3G network. Fortunately, as we wandered down Market, against the rush of people, I did finally find a nearby Jack in the Box. It was about 3 blocks off of Market, and not crazy at all.

After that, we were ready to go home (though the Parade still continued with its 200 floats, cars, and marching bands). As any knowledgeable Bay Area person would, we headed up to Civic Center to get better seats on BART (rather than trying to board at the other 3 stations closer to the Bay). What we neglected was the fact that there are festivities at the Civic Center following the Parade. We got down to Market and pushed up it, and kept going slower and slower. Meanwhile, as we hit the poorer areas of Market, an increasing number of "street vendors" were trying to sell us "edibles". Based upon the wares displayed, this was code for pot brownies and doobies.

We eventually cut off Market for the last few blocks, but then we had to make a final push for the BART station it was hellaciously difficult. Even when we got to the stairs I wasn't sure we were going to make it down because the GENIUSES (TM) at BART had decided to close one of the escalators at Civic Center right in the middle of Pride. So we fought people coming up out of BART for the narrow stairs and advanced one hard-fought step at a time.

It was exhausting.

When we finally got down to the platform, we found that BART was running a train to the northern East Bay ever 10 minutes, as they had yesterday. (I hadn't even realized that I had Pride to thank for a quick train when I got stuck in Downtown Oakland yesterday afternoon.) A train arrived just two minutes later, and we collapsed into seats and had a nice ride back.

Fun event, but tiring. Both Kimberly and I ended up napping upon our return home.

On Wednesday at Endgame, Amy C. was handing about postcards about a showing of local Etsy artists at the STUDIO gallery. I knew Kimberly would like it, so I passed on the postcard to her, and we ended up going out there tonight.

The gallery was small, but very pleasant, and they had a huge amount of material from Etsy artists. There was quite a bit that we both found attractive.

Many, perhaps a majority, of the showcased items were "things you hang on walls". Amy had a few paintings variously of squids, tentacles, and cancerous growths. It was cool to see them in a gallery setting. I also quite liked some paintings done of bus routes and local streets, of all things. They were really tight shots, just showing a couple of blocks, and I thought they were pretty cool (not part of the Etsy show, apparently). The thing that Kimberly and I both liked best though were some weird mixed media pieces that were broken glass on some type of colorful background, with words forming a shape in the middle (not Etsy, and I can't find samples of them on the site, which is a pity, as it's hard to describe their attractiveness). We considered buying one, but couldn't find any whose shape and form we found universally attractive (Kimberly later said she thought they were intended as gifts, so the words were supposed to describe the giftee rather than the shape, which might have been our problem). Still, I found some dragonflies and a yellow bird pretty cool.

There was also lots of cool jewelry, which is what Kimberly was looking for the most as she's gotten several necklaces from Etsy. I found many of them quite beautiful, though I'm not much of a jewelry wearer. Still, it was nice to look at them and see the various craft. It was like an episode of Project Accessory right in front of us.

Overall, quite a nice gallery and a fun show to spend 30 or 45 minutes wandering through.

The wander to the Gallery was a bit less nice. We got off at Powell BART and walked about 1.5 miles to the west side of Nob Hill, where the gallery is located (and thankfully not really on the hill, though it was slightly uphill there). On the way there were two or three blocks were suddenly half the businesses were closed and every three feet there was a homeless person slumped against a wall.

So we decided to avoid that bad area by instead returning to Civic Center BART. The 1-4 blocks north of the Civic Center turned out to be even worse, full of drunkies and druggies lurching about. Ugh.

Anyway, we made it there and back safely, but I'm often amazed how the entire tenor of San Francisco can change in a block.

Afterward, back in Berkeley, there was eating out (Chaat Cafe) and grocery shopping (Trader Joe's), but we're now nearly passed out back at home. Turns out 3+ miles of walking (+ biking before & after), half of it slightly uphill, plus a long, slow passage through a gallery in the middle, is more than either of us are used to. So, tired.

No gaming tomorrow. So, relaxation.

I am old.

I shall give up comics and biking and gaming and learn to like beer, champagne, and football. And Masterpiece Theatre.

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

So today was the big four-oh. I don't usually do much for my birthday, but with today being such a notable event and it happening to fall on a Saturday, I decided to go out of my way to do something fun.

So Kimberly & I braved the rain and public transit to head out to the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

There actually wasn't a lot to be braved, as the rain was pretty light all day. The public transit did take some courage though, as hopping onto the 30 near Montgomery we found the most jammed bus I've ever been on. Wall to wall people and it just kept getting more and more crowded ... until we thankfully came to Chinatown a few blocks over and things cleared out. Whew.

I hadn't been to the Palace of Fine Arts or the Exploratium in a long, long time. I'm guessing 20+ years. I'd forgotten how absolutely gorgeous the Palace is. Beautiful architecture and beautiful landscaping alike. If it weren't raining throughout the day, I would definitely have liked to lounge around the park and read and just enjoy the world.

Anyway, into the Exploratorium it was, to get out of the rain. I put on new (dry) socks for the first time in the day.

We kind of wandered, looking at most exhibits, but not necessarily every one. We started out working through electricity and magnets, which was fun. There are a surprising number of exhibits that tell you to shock yourself with light charges. One of them was based entirely on static electricity and I as read how you should shock yourself for the third or so time, Kimberly said, "... if you're a masochist!"

Beyond that was a giant moving pendulum like table [picture I took] which people use to make spiroograph-like drawings. We watched that for several minutes as a dad made drawings with his kids. It was very cool to see them slowly develop.

(Lots of kids at the Exploratorium, of course, but almost all were really well behaved, and there were so many good parents there, really connecting and communicating with their kids.)

Biology was next, and we skimmed that because it wasn't interesting, then sound, which we skimmed because it's all booth based and people tend to sit around the booths and you can't look over their shoulders.

Downstairs, Kimberly left me as she was scienced out. (We were at least an hour into the trip by then.) So I went through optical illusions and vision and social stuff on my own. My other coolest exhibit (the first being that spiro-table) was back here.

It was really simple: two different people sat opposite each other, each with a tray of the same six simple colored geometric shapes. A screen blocked view between the two. One of the people laid out the shapes on his tray, then tried to describe to the other person what he'd done. At the end they compared. It was fascinating being able to watch omnisciently from the side to see exactly where communication went wrong. I think there's a game in there somewhere (though Space Alert already exists as a game that's almost entirely based around miscommunication).

From there I moved through lots more things involving shapes and I'm not quite sure what else. Clearly I was fading by this point. I eventually returned to Kimberly and we headed out, with a visit by the store on the way out. (Not to buy anything, but because many of the toys and stuff they sell there are as fascinating as exhibits. And I was shocked to see Forbidden Island there; good going to that publisher, getting their game into science museums.)

Before I leave behind the Exploratorium, I should note that I really appreciate the occasional touches of classic stuff in there like scary angels [picture I took], thanks I presume to the location at the Palace of Fine Arts. I think that'll be missed when they move to a new location.

Lots more of the course of the day, but nothing else as "big".

We walked about two miles east along the coast (nice despite the continuing rain), enjoying views of Alcatraz and Fort Mason along the way before coming to Ghiradelli Square. Here, Kimberly & I treated ourselves to some birthday chocolate. I got semi-sweet non-pareils, a Ghiradelli treat that I've never seen except in Ghiradelli stores (from them; I can also remember non-pareils at K-Mart or something). I probably hadn't had any in a couple of decades, but they were still great.

We bussed back to BART, then BARTed back to Ashby. On the way home from Ashby BART we stopped by Berkeley Bowl to pick up birthday cakes (because we needed more sweets, clearly) and something tasty for dinner.

I got a very tasty sandwich, which I ate while we watched The Dark Knight tonight.

And that was the birthday day.

Tired now, but looking forward to some reading.

Kimberly and I went into The City today to see the Masters of Venice exhibit of art at the de Young Museum.

Sadly, it was a disappointment. I knew from the start that the Renaissance art style wasn't one that particularly interested me. What I didn't know was that the exhibit was going to be almost entirely dull portraits. There was painting after painting of men sitting there, looking bored. Some of them had black beards, some had white beards, some had dark brown beards, and some had gray beards. From what we could see, there were no red beards nor blue beards. One man had a tiny head, atop a corpulent body. There were some women, though in lesser numbers. They mostly looked angry. A couple looked stoned.

I didn't feel like the exhibit was particularly well put together either. There were numerous large prints pasted up on the walls, taking up space where you'd have expected to see art. Kimberly though there was more text than usual, which I'm not convinced of; what I did find that there was considerably more boring text which did nothing to illuminate the artwork and little to illuminate the society.

I'm not sad I saw the exhibit, because that sort of thing is always somewhat enlightening. I just wish it'd been any good.

(Part of the problem, I see now, is how badly the de Young Museum misrepresents the exhibit on their page. Out of 12 pieces of art they preview there, 5 of them are non-portraits, 2 of the portraits were the rare more active ones, and the other 5 are all so cropped that you don't see the monotony of black backgrounds behind stiffly posed portraits that we saw in the first couple of halls of the exhibit, and scattered around afterward.)

We did see two other smaller exhibits while we were there.

One was one that Kimberly had wanted to see, which was photographs of creepy dolls and masks. I was pretty meh about it. Many of the photographs were indeed creepy (though artist Ralph Meatyard swore they weren't intended to be macabre), but I didn't find that they were that creative. It was more like, "Stand in front of a fence with this creepy mask on." (Unless he manufactured the masks himself; then there was indeed creativity in the process. I'm not convinced he did, however.) Kimberly and I did enjoy ourselves mocking the artwork, and I think she found it more interesting than I.

The other was one I wanted to see about mixed-medium small-edition sculptures put out by a workshop called Gemini G.E.L. starting in '69. Their first piece, a lithograph in molded plastic of a car was, I thought, breath-taking. Exactly the sort of pop art I was hoping to see. There were also a number of mixed medium faces by Roy Lichenstein, which were somewhat abstract and made of neat die cutting with various materials, that I though were very cool. And then there were some lead bas reliefs which I found less exciting because there was almost no contrast. But this exhibit was the highlight of the day for me (and fortunately the last thing we saw, after the disappointing "Masters of Venice").

The other highlight of the day was doubtless lunch in the Music Concourse between de Young and the Academy of Sciences, eating tasty Andronico's sandwiches (as there's an Andronico's still in business a few blocks from GG Park) and watching children constantly almost climb into a dry fountain that has, according to various sources, somewhere between 75 cents and five dollars in change within. Meanwhile, flocks of sea gulls watched us. Signs said not to feed the pigeons, but didn't mention the gulls at all. We opted not to feed them anyway.

And that was a day in San Francisco. Upon arriving home, we ate dinner and then were each so tired that we collapsed asleep for a few hours ...

Went into San Francisco today to go to the Castro Theatre to see the Sing-A-Long Sound of Music. I've seen the movie before, but I was surprised by how good it actually is. Beautiful landscapes, great directing, moving story lines. And Julie Andrews is amazingly beautiful in the movie.

The Sing-a-Long portion was also fun. I always find music very cathartic and singing together in a large group even more so. I joined in for most of the songs, and thankfully had a big bottle of water with me, to keep my voice fresh. There were some silly props handed out at the door, which were mostly cards to hold up at various times. I didn't have any interest in trying to sort through the bag of props during the movie, and so planned to ignore them, and then lost track of the bag to no great lost. There was also a little popper, which would have been fun. They were meant for The Kiss, but some were fired off at various times. They added nice dramatic underlines to various events. Then The Kiss finally came, the air filled with pops, and you could see little electric sparks all around the hall, which was pretty cool.

So, all around, a good experience, but ... oh, so tiring.

We left the house at 10.40, got home around 6.30. We were actually at the Castro for a bit more than 4 hours and it was just jammed with people, which increased the tired-ness quotient even more.

We also had pretty rotten transit both ways. We had to carefully plan, because BART is so inadequate on Sundays, running trains to SF only every 20 minutes. Then we found the train just jammed. This was the case on all the BARTs we took. Heading toward Market Street, it was clearly brainwashed consumers heading off to do their mandatory Christmas shopping, and heading down the peninsula from there, it was tourists going to SFO.

(I'm now going to be a lot more reluctant to go into the City on a weekend in December.)

Things were made worse at our "timed" transit at MacArthur because we ended up waiting on the platform for 15 minutes, because BART wasn't even keeping to their ridiculously pitiful Sunday schedule. And then on MUNI ... our train kept getting stuck just before it got into stations, waiting long minutes and then pulling up the last 5 feet.

As I said, rotten transit, even for the Bay Area.

Also, we had a so-so lunch experience. We went to the Carl's Jr at Civic Center, which we've gone to a few times this year because Kimberly got some coupons from her mom, and we found bad customer service, too many homeless people being allowed to run rampant in the restaurant, and real confusion at how to apply a coupon. All things we'd seen when we went there for dinner the two other times, but not to the same extent. I think that'll be our last visit to that Carl's Jr, since it seems more inclined to cater to the bums of Market than to us.

The bad transit and so-so lunch added some stress to the day, and have left me more tired than I otherwise would have been, but it fortunately didn't spoil the movie-going-and-singing experience. I'm pretty much ready to collapse now, though. (And so that history article I was supposed to edit tonight will just have to wait until tomorrow night.)

So it turns out the Occupy event that Kimberly & I ran into in San Francisco on Friday night was them trying to stop the lighting of the Christmas tree at Union square. I kid you not. They were also trying to stop people from Christmas shopping by screeching about materialism. Later in the evening, one of the demonstrators apparently got into fisticuffs with Santa, pummeling his red-capped head into the ground, shouting, "The elves are the 99%" while children squalled, "Mommy, is Santa dead!?"

OK, maybe I made up that bit about the Santa fight, but generally I am astounded by how tone-deaf the Occupy movement has become. I mean, stopping people from Christmas shopping, that's the type of shit you talk about in a coffee house in Berkeley when you're passing your third joint of the evening around, just before you start talking about how the troops should hug it out with the Afghanis. I generally agree with the complaints about how the Christmas holidays centers on giving people stuff they don't necessarily want, but, dude, OCCUPY HAS BECOME THE GRINCH!!

Yeah, that's going to look good in the headlines.

(Actually, the headlines were even more pathetic, because the occupiers didn't even get near the Christmas Tree because there were like 17 of them and hundreds of seasonally-spirited shoppers and arboreal admirers.)

The rest of the weekend was relatively quiet. I decided to go down to EndGame for board gaming on Saturday and played Carson City, which was an excellent choice as it's a little longer than I usually manage on Wednesday night. I played horribly, but still had fun.

Overall, after four days of a fair amount of relaxation, I'll say: whew.

Back to work today and back to groceries (we still continue with Thanksgiving leftovers, but I wanted some avocado, some roma tomatoes, and some chips to go with my remaining turkey sandwiches).

This evening, I finished reading Game of Cages, the second Twenty Palaces novel by Harry Connolly. Chris H. at Endgame suggested the series a few months ago, and it quickly became one of the group of urban fantasies that I like and consider successful. I read a lot of different urban fantasy series several years ago, but nowadays there's only 3.5 that I actively like.

The first was Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, but her writing went to crap several books in, so she's the .5. I stopped reading the series after it had already been embarrassing for several books.

The second is, of course, Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden. Wizard & Detective. Best urban fantasy EV-ARR, and still going strong 13 books in.

The third is Mike Carey's Felix Castor series. Exorcist. Totally creepy unlike any of the others, but it took me a couple of books to really love it. By book #3 or 4 I was sold however.

And Harry Connolly's Twenty Palaces was my most recent find. It's about active monster hunters and is pretty totally unique. The second book wasn't as strong as the first, because it lost some of the investigative elements, but it was still a real page-turner. And now I've just learned the series has been cancelled. Dammit. I have one more book to read, but hear it ends on a cliffhanger. Sigh. I'll probably read it anyway ...

So I guess that'll drop me back to only two urban fantasy series I consider worth reading ...

I should probably try Kim Harrison and Kelley Armstrong again sometime. I got four books into each of those series, but neither was spectacular enough for me to read more (though I hear the fifth Armstrong is the best to that date). On the other hand they weren't as bad as some of the others (like Sookie Stackhouse; sorry True Blood fans) ...

Yesterday, we had a pretty typical Appelcline Thanksgiving. We picked up food at Andronico's (turkey breast, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, green beans, various rolls) and then cooked them in the late afternoon. In the meantime we marathoned a TV show, in this case the first episodes of Friday Night Lights. (Though in our middle age, "marathon" means we watched a whole three episodes of it.) The food was good, though not as good as it has been, as Andronico's has been on a downward slope for years. Friday Night Lights proved interesting in its view of as strange and obsessive culture. Very nice characterization too.

There was also game playing, reading, and reading aloud. A kicked-back and relaxed day.

Today was our second annual Museum Day. We went out to the Palace of the Legion of Honor to see "Pissarro's People", an exhibit containing the art of impressionist Camille Pissarro.

I've grown increasingly fond of impressionists over our exhibits from the last year, but at the same time I was expecting this to be less impressive because of its focus on people. And, that was to some extent true. In particularly there was half-a-room dedicated to peoples in markets which all looked like chaotic mishmashes.

However, many of the Pissarro's were nice. I quite like many pictures he drew of his wife and children. Some were pencil drawings, some charcoal, and many were fully painted. A picture of one of his sons working in his studio was my favorite for the name, partially due to its composition, partially due to its uniqueness. There were also a number of great paintings of people working in gardens and fields, which showed off Pissarro's strengths as a landscape artist.

It was nice to get to see some more impressionism.

While at the Palace we also looked at a smaller exhibit showing artwork of San Francisco. This included paintings, drawings, and photographs. It had quite a number of attractive pieces, including some somewhat abstract pictures of the city, and some neat paintings and drawings taken of bridges in various forms of construction.

And then we looked at a small exhibit of illustrated books which was dull.

But overall, a successful day at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and now we've got memberships again to see some stuff over the next year. There's something going on at the De Young that Kimberly wants to see, and we'll probably doing that over my Christmas break. (I love having bigger outings be when I have more time.)

We got off our bus back from the Palace near Union Square and saw police all over, as well as Occupy protestors (one of which had an Occupy Oakland poster, apparently because he took a wrong turn at Albuquerque). It was a mess, but we were able to push through crowds to make it down to BART and (eventually) home.

Tired, and I'm probably done gallivanting for the (long) weekend, though I'm still considering some board gaming at Endgame tomorrow.

There was no Saturday gaming today and Kimberly's usual plans were cancelled too, so we planned to go out to San Francisco. We headed out after lunch and took BART to 24th & Mission. I needed some new shoes (because I walk through the soles of all my shoes), which I got quickly a few blocks from BART, and then we headed southward with the intent of touring the murals of the Mission District.

Our first stop was Precita Eyes which has maps of most of the murals and told us where we should go. We picked up a map and then spent the next few hours walking up and down 24th and over to nearby streets. I thought the most impressive stop was a playground on 24th which had murals on the walls of the surrounding buildings that delineated the playground. But, it was actually the mosaics that attracted me more. There was a beautiful waterfall mosaic on one wall and a totally awesome snake covered in mosaic tiles that ran through the ground:

As I told Kimberly, we should do the Mosaic Walking Tour instead, some time. If there is one.

But there were murals aplenty as well. We probably saw 30-40 total, some good, some bad, some recent, some 40 years old, some monotone, some colorful. It was well worth the trip and we still only saws a fraction of the murals in the area. Here was one I took a picture of. I liked the flaming angel (right). Kimberly was amused by the angry fish (left):

It was a surprisingly hot day in San Francisco, and after a few hours walking around we were tired enough to quit with the walking and instead BART to our next stop, and the main goal of our San Francisco trip: the San Francisco Main Library. Kimberly wanted to get a library card, so she could check out eBooks. I got one too, because maybe it'll be of use at some point.

While at the library, I decided to explore the whole building, because I like wandering around and looking at different library buildings. It's an impressive 6-story building right in the middle of downtown San Francisco. It makes great use of its location, which big windows along lots of the outside walls showing terrific views. Though there was some neat views of City Hall and such, this one amused me the most, because the sign you can see through the window was really only visible from the library:

It's not entirely visible at this resolution, but it's an ad for a nearby Subway for hungry library patrons.

The inside of the library has great views too, because it's all built around an atrium, which is a six-story shaft that drops straight through the building. It's wonderful and airy and awe-inspiring.

One interesting bit while I wandered around: I kept hearing screaming whenever I neared the atrium. I figured it was kids being brats, but Kimberly (who was resting on the 3rd floor) later told it was a woman who'd locked herself in a bathroom and then started screaming when library staff tried to extract her. Weird.

I also browsed the books a bit, and thought the library's fiction collection was very good (maybe as much as 2x the Berkeley main for general fiction, but more comparable numbers for individual genres) and that its graphic novel collection was very inadequate (almost all manga, with classics like Sandman and Watchmen not showing up at all). However, its non-fiction was totally awe-inspiring, especially in individual categories that had special rooms set aside, like eco studies, gay studies, etc.

After that we headed over to Carl's Jr. for dinner (mainly because Kimberly's mom had sent us a coupon book, which allowed us to get two dinners for about $9 total). The guys at the counter were somewhat befuddled for coupons which I've found to be increasingly the case in the modern day. Also weird..

And then we went home. I'm pretty physically exhausted, which I hope will let me get to bed earlier than usual tonight. Because we still haven't gotten groceries for the week, and I'd like to before lunch tomorrow.

The Turkey Day. After heading over to Andronico's in the morning to get the rest of our Thanksgiving fixings, Kimberly and I decided that it was such a beautiful (if cold) day that we'd bike down to Point Isabel to watch the dogs. So, we did, and there were fewer dogs than usual, but that gave Kimberly and me more time to voice the inner thoughts of the dogs and their owners--cracking up as we did--without anyone being close enough to be offended.

The funniest was a marmalade cocker spaniel who lunged at each of Kimberly and me at different times, growling fiercely, for no reason. Later its owner tried to wash it and she was sorta dumb, 'cause when it kept twisting and turning and retreating whenever it got wet, she didn't grab it by the collar. So by the time she was done, K. and I decided that she'd washed its feet.

Afterward we catsat I's cat Caruso a bit, reading him a chapter of Harry Dresden as we did. He was freaking out a lot, and we finally figured it was because he was locked inside (him usually being an indoor-outdoor feline), but we didn't find out until we got home that I. thought he was OK going out again. So, he had to suffer staying indoor overnight, and apparently he mainly crossed his little kitty legs 'cause he didn't like using the indoor catbox for somereason.

Finally, when we got home we cooked up a ham and then had that and much Andronico's fixing (mashed potato, gravy, green beans, cranberry + crescent rolls which were not Andronico's fixing) before calling it a day.

Today. Our builders were back out going at the garage this morning. They've been told by our architect about what to do for new foundation work (and will be charging us a ridiculously small amount to do so). During the morning they were going at tree roots. I don't know how much further they got, because K. and I headed out at around 12.30. So, we'll be surprised to see what's happened to our garage in the morning.

Our first stop was more catsitting for Caruso. We chatted with him a bit, then opened his door for him to get out and poof he was gone. We read Dresden in solitude for about twenty minutes more. Then it was into The City.

The main purpose of the trip was to see the Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Gauguin exhibit at the De Young. It's the second of two special exhibits that the De Young is having in from the Museum of Orsay. There were lots of beautiful pieces. The most stunning was Van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhone which K. and I gazed at for long moments. I was somewhat disappointed that there was less than a full room of Van Gogh, but I happily devoured everything they had.

The rest of the exhibit was very nice. There were several other artists that I quite liked, but so many names went by that I lost them. What I found very intriguing was how many art styles quickly came out of impressionism in the late 1800s and early 1900s: pointillism, divisionism, cubism, synthetism, symbolism. Whew. It was really cool to see the evolution of these styles. Between the previous "birth of impressionism" exhibit and this "post-impressionism" exhibit, I really feel like we've gotten a wonderful course on the rapidly changing art forms of about a century ago.

Funniest art of the day was this Gauguin, which was labeled "Self Portrait with Yellow Christ". We decided that if they were being so literal, maybe it should be "Self Portrait with Yellow Christ and Red Sheep". Then we went to the next next piece and were amused to read that critics thought the red dog it contained was confusing. So, lots of red. Coloring was actually an important part of Gauguin's synthetism, which simplified color to evoke emotion, but though I liked some Gauguin, the more it got simplified, the less I liked it.

And that was it for the day. Well, you know, we got home after that.

(And I was just very disappointed to learn that ACT is greedily using their upcoming "Tales of the City" musical to drive subscription sales without making it available to the general public. Bad capitalists! No San Francisco cookie! Maybe we'll remember to try and get tickets next year when they choose to make them available to us churls.)

But nonetheless, a good day in San Francisco. And a good two days of holiday. Now back to work! There are adventures to prep and history articles to edit!

Our summer of museums continued today when Kimberly and I went out to the Palace of the Legion of Honor to see, "Impressionist Paris", the first of two shows they're doing to complement the two major impressionist shows being held at the De Young Museum.

This one offered a broader view of Paris and of the artistic side of it during the era of the impressionists. The exhibit was composed of ten rooms, each with its own theme. One covered magazine art of the time, another Paris in 1871 during the the of "The Commune", another the group portfolios that were published, etc.

Though not as viscerally exciting as "The Birth of Impressionism" show at the De Young, this one offered an intriguing overview of the era, really doing a lot to detail the times and where the artists were coming from. I've really enjoyed the increasing understanding I've gained of impressionism and the world that surrounded it in the late 1800s. Overall, the exhibit contained a lot of art that I'd generally classify as "interesting", but also a number of pieces that I loved.

First, I was surprised by a number of etchings and black-and-white drawings by impressionists, something I hadn't really seen before. It was quite interesting to see some of the impressionist techniques--most showing off water or steam, in the much shorter hand of black-and-white work.

Second, I loved a piece that showed a garden scene with some people lounging under a bright-red umbrella with green ferns behind them. It looked entirely and vibrantly realistic, but you saw a lot of the play of light and shadow that you see in impressionist work, with light shining through both the umbrella and the ferns and shadows playing across those ferns too. Totally gorgeous. It took me a while to come up with the name, but it's "Afternoon in the Cluny Garden Paris 1889" by Charles Curran. (The online pictures I've seen don't do the vibrancy of the original justice.)

Third, I really enjoyed a pointillist piece done by Georges Seurat showing the Eiffel Tower. I'd love to see more of his work.

Fourth, we saw four of Henri Riviere's 36 Views of the Eiffel Tower. Besides being amazing snapshots in time (they largely showed the Tower under construction), they also were pretty amazing blends of Japanese art of the period and impressionism. I hope we get to see more like that in the Palace's next pseudo-impressionist show, which is on Japanese art in the impressionist period. (Again, those photos I linked to just don't do justice to the originals which had much more color.)

Among other things we learned today: artists in pre-Impressionist Paris drew lots of dogs and artists in post-Impressionist Paris drew lots of cats. Who knew?

While at the museum, Kimberly and I both went to see some of our favorites in their permanent collection--and also were disappointed. Kimberly wanted to see some water lillies (which are out traveling) and some Rodin (which had apparently been on loan from Stanford when she saw it previously), while I wanted to see a Dali they used to have. Dunno where that went. In any case, we skimmed through some of the Palace's more modern art, including their impressionist room.

We also spent a while out in the grassy area out in front of the museum. We had lunch there, and then later sat a while before we went home. Each time we read a bit of our current Louise Erdrich book too, The Beet Queen.

A beautiful area with gorgeous views of the Golden Gate & bridge. Much enjoyment was had by all.

And now, we're both tired. Shock.