shannon_a | Entries tagged with california

The Oakland Airport sucks.

I mean, the Hawaiian desk is good enough, but at TSA they jam us into the normal line despite our TSAPre status, which puts us in the queue with the potentially unvaccinated masses. I have to tell one woman to pull her mask up over her nose.

The gate area is even worse. The first place we sit down we immediately have to move because we realize the woman next to us is a mask scofflaw. She quickly gets her water out as we're commenting on her while we leave, to pretend like she's drinking. (She's not.)

We eventually sit down in the corner next to the next gate, which is at least six feet from anyone. But it soon becomes obvious that of the six people sitting next to us, three of them aren't wearing masks at all (one of them nurses a coffee that must be cold by now to pretend that she has a reason for not masking; another sucks on a lollipop for an hour for similar reasons) and the other three can't get their masks over their noses. That's a 0 for 6 ratio. Most or all of them are little brats in their 20s or so. All of them are the low quality sort of tourist that we've mostly been getting on the islands since the pandemic: people too selfish to care about anyone else ... and too stupid to understand that they're putting themselves in danger of long-term disability.

The intercom constantly blares: "A Federal Mandate Requiring Masks Remains in Effect." Crappy tourists don't care.

Meanwhile, our federally mandated sobbing baby for any flight of 4 hours or more is already sobbing. We're pretty sure he'll be far from us on the actual plane though.

So, yesterday, that was our last day in the Bay Area. I lounged around in the morning, lunching on another sandwich from Safeway, my last chance to eat good bread (Dutch Crunch again).

Then I went out to Lafayette to meet up with C. and M. and have a nice hike. We walked around the Lafayette Reservoir by the low, paved path, which I don't think I'd done before. (I'd previously walked around the high, dirt path, which would have been a high, mud path yesterday.)

We had good conversation and it was great to see them both in person. Apparently I'm the fifth person that M. has seen since in the flesh since the pandemic, so I feel privileged. I also picked up supplies for Blockchain Commons work when I get back to Hawaii, saving us the problem of transport.

I got home in the late afternoon and then after I'd seen Kimberly off to dinner with a friend picked up a Wendy's that I'd been craving the whole time we were here (mainly because I wanted a baked potato; I should pick up some potatoes to bake at home again).

And that was yesterday.

We board first not just because of Kimberly's leg, but also because we have first-class tickets.

When I went to check in yesterday morning, Hawaiian offered them to me as $429 upgrades, which is much more reasonable than the $650 of a few days prior, which would almost have been the cost of new tickets.

I don't usually have much interest in splashing out for that type of luxury, but this was all about not getting COVID, or at least doing our best not to by ensuring we don't have a seatmate, because the seats are two-to-a-side in First Class, rather than three-to-a-side. (It would have been cheaper to just buy an extra ticket to monopolize our row, but airlines insist on filling empty seats if they can.)

It turns out that we likely wouldn't have had a seatmate because the plane is maybe half full, which had been kinda my guess, flying on New Year's Eve, but so it goes. We have a luxurious flight and definitely much lower concern about COVID because there's no one in our row all the way across and no one in front of us, because we got the first row (it's what was available, though it turns out that there are unsold seats in the third and fourth rows too).

Our flight is an hour late getting off. No problem: we had a lazy morning at the AirBnB. Oh, I was slightly nervous about the thousands of flights that have been getting cancelled, but I looked at how Hawaiian was doing while we were lazing and discovered they'd cancelled all of 27 flights yesterday, 25 of them interisland, which is nothing. Compare that to Alaska, our other potential carrier (Never again United! Never, ever Southwest!), who is literally begging people to reschedule their trips to after January 3rd if they're "non-essential". So, yeah, hopefully no problem.

And there isn't. We learned the delay was due to the crew getting in after midnight last night, so they needed their eight hours of sleep before they were legal to fly again. I'm a big supporter of pilots being awake.

We have a "mechanical" issue before we take off, but it's just another 15 minutes delay or so. I get the impression that they called someone and were told it was OK to fly despite whatever was going on. (If you're reading this: we survived.)

They try to dump booze on us while everyone else is boarding, which might have been a fine idea for luxury two years ago, but there's no way I'm going to have my mask off while the unwashed masses mill through the plane; however, I gladly accept a Mai Tai once we're in the air.

It's actually just my second alcoholic drink since the pandemic started, and the previous one was at Angelines a few days earlier. On Kauai, I'm always the driver if Kimberly and I go out to eat, and I wouldn't be safe after one drink from how little I indulge. So, I'm taking advantage of this now while I can.

First class is nice. Maybe not $878 nice, but nice. (Not dying from COVID is $878 nice, and we'll just leave that unfortunate fact on the floor: that by paying money we're less likely to succumb to a potentially debilitating or even fatal disease.)

But we have a brunch not long after we get going that's actually quite good. Delicious sausages, potato-vegetable cakes, fresh (actually fresh) fruit, a croissant. Best food I've had on an airline possibly forever. (I say possibly because CA used miles to fly me first class to Gen Con once, but I don't really remember the cuisine other than the fact that they started cooking chocolate chip cookies in an oven as we took off, and the smell was heavenly. Sadly, no such baking of cookies this time around)

Other than that, plenty of leg room, no one jamming their seat into my face, and a single attentive flight attendant and a single mostly unused bathroom for the ten or so of us.

Something I wasn't previously aware of: whenever a pilot comes out of the now-secured cabin to go to the bathroom, the attendants barricade the front section with a drink cart.

My dad is kind enough to pick us up at the airport. There is also grabbing of Taco Bell on the way home.

I'd originally considered if I was going to run out to Costco in the evening, to replenish our stores, but after getting in about an hour late, there's just no way.

We certainly have enough frozen and canned to get us through a few days. (In fact, I should pull some bagels out of the freezer.)

When I'm coming up the stairs as we get home, Lucy is meowing and meowing and meowing at Kimberly, who is at the front door. She then runs after my dad when he heads downstairs briefly and then is back mewing at us. Poor kitty has clearly been lonely, but it's also great to see that she became friends with my dad.

(I was really worried about her, leaving her alone without any sisters to torment, but my dad was very kind and gave her some real time and attention while we were gone!)

She has barely left me since.

Since we've gotten home, it's been eating, watching TV, reading and napping. Still on vacation it seems.

And it is pouring rain. Yowza! We got very lucky in California that our week of rain was just drizzle here and there. But it's all here.

Hopefully this will stifle the excessive and obsessive fireworks (really: LOUD EXPLOSIONS) of Kauai, but if so that may just mean they sputter out over the next week.

And course we also come home to a huge COVID outbreak. Thousands of cases on the islands every day, hundreds on Kauai. New records every day.

My dad notes that even though hospitalizations are down, per case, the number of cases are WAY UP, which isn't good for our hospitals remaining stable.

And this obviously means that I'm not starting in on gaming this coming week (or month) as I'd hoped. Sigh, the pandemic continues.

It was great visiting family and friends in California. It's great getting home.

Something that has surprised me since we've been in California is the idea of preemptive COVID testing. I've had three different people note they'd recently tested negative when I arrived at gatherings, one of them mentioning that he tested before every gathering.

Probably good public health, sure, but totally alien to the Hawaiian experience of the pandemic.

This morning, we had no lunch plans because we'd had to cancel with my sister due to a cold running through their family, so I ran out to Boston Market to get us some lunch. (This Air B&B is really nicely located.)

I got a chicken on ciabatta sandwich, and it was really tasty, in part because the bread was so good. That made me remember how the Safeway sandwich I got to take up to Panoramic Hill also had great (Dutch Crunch) bread. I swear there is *no* good bread on Kauai. It's all soft and tasteless, no matter claims it's a French Roll or Sourdough, or whatever. So that's a nice change of pace.

Here at the Air B&B I'm reminded of how cold tap water gets in winter. Yowtch! That's something I haven't missed living in Kauai.

After lunch I went for a walk up to Lake Temescal.

It was a common destination for me for a number of years, I'd often bike up there after work and/or on weekends. It's where I wrote most of the original batch of product histories for DnDClassics.com, many of them on cold, gray, threatening days in December 2011 and January 2012 (I think!). It's where I finished reading A Dance with Dragons, discovered that it was entirely incomplete and non-conclusive, realized I might have to wait six more years to see those plots completed (ha!), but didn't throw it across the room because I wasn't in a room.

I didn't expect to ever return to Lake Temescal, out of all the places I might see in the Bay Area, because it's kind of isolated, up above Rockridge without much nearby ... but we're right here in Rockridge, so it's just a mile and a half above our Air B&B.

The walk up was slightly grueling. I'd forgotten how steep Broadway Terrace is at places.

I enjoyed seeing the lake and the park again, though not for *too* long, because it was cold. (We're having a notable cold snap in the Bay Area, and I'm thrilled to discover that my cold resistance hasn't been eaten away by two years in the tropics.)

And then hiked back down on Broadway enjoying the views of the Golden Gate and San Francisco as I did.

I swung by Trader Joe's on the way back to pick up some tasty treats for Kimberly and myself.

Outside I was accosted by another petition-signing beggar, again not wearing a mask. I yelled at her to back off when she started advancing on me, and told her she should wear that mask she had around her neck if she wanted people to actually sign, but she was too busy begging me for signatures to listen.

In the evening we had a dinner date than a gaming date with Michael and Katherine, which was nice all around. We got to enjoy La Mediterranee, another favorite restaurant, and we got to play a third game of Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra (which Mike deftly won).

Good company, and a good penultimate day in Berkeley.

It'd be nice to have some friends like that in Hawaii.

I finished up one Christmas book, Forged, today, and started in on a new one, A History of What Comes Next. I've done a lot of reading on the trip, and that's been nice because I've kind of fallen out of the reading habit during our years in Hawaii. It feels like there's never time. Hopefully this reading habit will stick.

Tomorrow is our last full day: a bit more friend seeing and hiking planned and some simple food before we fly on Friday.

(Lucy! We're coming home!)

So Christmas was great. We played lots of games (More Boomerang; my Bay Area Christmas acquisition, Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra; and Dixit), we watched another movie (The Trial of the Chicago 7, and at the end I was surprised and pleased to see it was by Aaron Sorkin). I got to take Joy out on a walk on the loop with my mom (and Zeke). We ate lots of good food (a shrimp dinner, a ham dinner, pancakes and crescent rolls and eggs and bacon for various breakfasts).

It was good family time, with family that we hadn't seen in two years. Hopefully, never that long again.

Unfortunately, we didn't see Jason and Lisa and their family. There were supposed to come over Christmas afternoon, but little J. has been quite sick and though he seemed to be getting better, L. was getting sick by Christmas.

So, it was a little kid disease, and thus not likely a threat to us, but if there was any chance that we got sick in the current environment, we could end up (1) not being able to see anyone while in California; (2) maybe be denied boarding on our plane home; and (3) almost definitely have to quarantine for 10 days when we got home because we couldn't answer the Safe Travels questionnaire properly.

So we very sadly said that we probably shouldn't get together with them even if J. and L. were both well enough to do so. (This hard decision was made easier by the fact that we'll probably see them all in February in Oahu, unless the pandemic gets even worse again.)

I haven't written much about Zeke. He's mom's new pup. And he's soexcitedandeverythingisamazingandyou'reapersonI'veneverseenandcanIlikeyouandcanIjumponyouandisn'tlifegreat. He's very friendly, very happy to interact with people, very clumsy, pretty big, and made me flinch frequently when he came charging at me across the couch.

A real sweetheart. Glad that we got to see him as a pup.

Meanwhile, I've been getting daily updates on my Lucy kit from my dad. He's been kind enough to go over to our house and give her wet food every day and also spend some time with her because she truly has no companions now. He sends us pictures and reports every day, in part because he's paranoid about forgetting to do so, because he did that once on our first trip to Oahu, back in the summer of 2020.

She seems to be doing well, being increasingly friendly with him, which is great, because I've been worried about how lonely she might be. So, fingers cross that she's not too upset before we head home.

But the reports are a weird crossover of Hawaii life and California life. But at the moment we kind of are too.

Our three days in San Martin ended today with Bob taking us north. We'd negotiated for him to take us to the new Berryessa BART station, that I'd thought I could use to visit D. & M. during our last year in the Bay Area, but ended up opening last summer, a year and a half late.

We had Google Maps plot out directions to the BART station, and somehow it took us into the parking lot of the Flea Market, which is the worst wrong directions I've ever seen from Google Maps (except maybe some times it pointed me at private roads).

Anyway, we eventually made it to BART. The Berryessa station looks about the same as most other raised BART stations, but I thought the other new station, in Milpitas, was nice when we went through. Some nice and distinctive tile work (or painting or something) on the columns.

BART was a horrific cesspool.

Which is very funny, because as we waited for the train I was telling Kimberly how much quieter and less stressful I often found taking BART rather than driving that hour in a car.

But It was getting bad in the last few years I was here, in large part because they were getting worse and worse about keeping the homeless off the trains, and so I could regularly expect about one homeless in each car at some point during the ride, sometimes very sick, sometimes very threatening, some very smelly. Yes, I understand their need for shelter, but BART isn't doing anyone favors by putting the rest of their ridership in danger. It's their job to keep riders safe, not to house the homeless.

During the ride from Berryessa to Rockridge there were maybe half-a-dozen homeless in our car at various times. They were more than half-a-dozen people either not wearing masks or wearing them as chinstraps. One of the unmasked was a young man who screamed into his phone the whole time (fortunately pointing his spittle-spewing mouth away from us). Another was a black man who literally chased an unmasked white man out of the car, shouting at him the whole time, and then as he strode back afterward was mumbling how he was going to kill a white guy sometime.

There is clearly no one maintaining order on BART any more, whether because of the pandemic or because of staffing problems or just the slow deterioration from what I saw two years ago. It's dangerous physically and healthwise. I'm not even sure it should be running because it felt like a moving asylum with COVID on top.

Bleh.

(Taking BART again tomorrow into Pleasant Hill. Hoping Rockridge to Pleasant Hill isn't as bad, but actually one of the most threatening homeless encounters I ever had was at the Pleasant Hill BART station, I think, definitely something on that side of the hills.)

Arriving in Rockridge, it was a half-mile walk up to our Air B&B, which I did despite the sprinkling rain. I made it hauling suitcase, backpack, and box now half-full of Christmas presents. That was the most strenuous part of our travel in some ways. (But calling for an Uber and waiting for a half-mile trip just seemed like so much more work.) I told Kimberly we're definitely grabbing an Uber to the airport, rather than walking back to BART (with me hauling all our luggage, which had been the other option, but Kimberly was certainly just humoring me when I mentioned it as an option).

The Air B&B seems nice. It's unfortunately a second-floor place, which is a problem for Kimberly who still can't get around on her foot. I have no idea what it was originally, though it's clearly old (somewhere in the first half of the 20th century), and the bottom is now storage.

Relatively spacious, though with some tight corners for Kimberly's scooter. Warm. We'll see how it sleeps: that's always the question with an Air B&B, as I've had more than one with loud squeaking doors that woke me up and at least a few with loud banging on the ceiling from people walking around. I have good hopes for this one, especially since Kimberly and I just figured out how to deal with the loud bathroom door.

Tonight was my first day of meeting with gamers, but I expect I'll write on all the gaming tomorrow, as it's getting late and I need to spaz down.

Endgame announced today that they were closing. We've just got seven Wednesdays of board gaming left.

I looked through my blogs and discovered that I started gaming at Endgame toward the end of 2004. That means that I've been there almost every Wednesday night for 14 years, or through about 30% of my life. I estimate that I've played somewhere in the range of 1,000 to 2,000 games there. I met great people, some of whom I still game with and many more of whom have moved on. I've got to play hundreds of games from other peoples' collections there. I've enjoyed parties and tried to avoid buying things at auctions. I've run entire roleplaying campaigns there.

I made the contacts that resulted in the second, much more successful publication of Designers & Dragons.

I know my story is far from the only one like that.

Obviously, my severance from Endgame was inevitable, since Kimberly and I are leaving the Bay Area. But I've lost out on my last 50 or so games there, with the friends I've made over the last decade and a half, and I've lost my gaming home base when I come back to visit (and everyone staying in the Bay Area has lost much more).

The election was on Tuesday, and it was somewhat disappointing. But that was primarily due to the southeast where Democrats really underperformed. They'll still pickup about 35 House seats and lose 2 or 3 Senate seats, which is just slightly low of the median of reliable analytic sites like 538.

But, we were hoping for more. We were hoping that the polls were oversampling conservatives after the embarrassment of 2016. We were hoping the blue wave, which did crest over Washing D.C. really would be a blue tsunami.

And that disappointment has given the idiots in the media the ability to roll out the newest nefarious instance of bothsidism: the Democrats won the House but the Republicans retained the Senate. I mean, it's a particularly shitty frame, because even in the Senate the Democrats won far more seats than the Republicans did (more than 2x as much, it seems likely), they just had more to defend.

But that shitty frame has corrupted the coverage and given Trump and his sociopaths the cover they need to keep doing horrible things while claiming the people are with them. (They're not.)

There's going to be another reckoning in 2020. (Unless Pence and his cohorts 25th Trump as soon as he's more than halfway through his term. That's what I'd do if I was a soulless manipulator intent on climbing the ladder of political power.)

And I am sick of constantly smelling smoke. I feel filthy.

It's another fire up north, and a particular horrible one from the reports. Huge damage to structures, some people dead, lots displaced. But the Bay Area is impacted too. The air was crap yesterday and today the sun went orange again. It's just like last October, when we had the horrible Napa fires.

It does seem like these constant huge fires are another result of the climate change that Trump and his pet GOP continue to deny. And that's another reason I'm happy to move to Hawaii (though it's looking like hurricanes are becoming more common there; we're just f***ed all over this world).

Today we got the first of what's being called an El Nino storm. The weather wizards say, "There's tropical moisture in it". Hence, it was driven our way by El Nino. We get two types of storms here in the Bay Area: the Alaskan storms, which suck; and the tropical storms, which can be quite wet and don't suck unless you mind getting soaked.

Today's storm was mostly drizzle or light rain, but it's supposed to be followed by a second one tomorrow that they're claiming will drop an inch of rain in three hours. So, El Nino is coming. (Though sadly it sounds like the strongest of the rain may occur while I'm sleeping, since it's supposed to come in at about 3am.)

It's nice to see what's looking like the beginning of the end of the drought here in California. It's sort of amazing how heavy the drought sits upon us, given how little it affects our lives. (Here at least; not so much in some of the less civilized parts of California, where they've flat out run out of water, because they don't have the municipal heft that we do ... which is why cities are good.) Anywho, after a few years of drought, dry months seem like punishment, and rain seems like a great victory. The ebbing rivers, ponds, and lakes are all depressing, and rain becomes joyous.

Give us a month, though. If rain really does pummel us throughout January and February, as the El Nino forecasts suggest is most likely, people will be pretty sick of it by then.

We are staying in the House on the Hill, and it is trying to kill us.

I suppose I should back up a moment. Yesterday morning, my dad and Mary picked up Kimberly and me and whisked us off to Placerville for my sister Melody's wedding. I enjoyed Californian landscapes and conversations with my dad on the ~2.5 hour trip while Mary and Kimberly mostly slept. We had some hijinks in Sacramento where I pointed out that the highway exits had finally started using the "Exit" numbers, and my dad thought I meant we should exit the highway right away, and so we ended up touring through some very nice areas of Sacramento west of the American River. Thanks to my iPhone, we nonetheless made it to a Denny's in Sacramento without too much trouble.

Finally arriving in Placerville just before 2pm, we found the house that my dad and Mary had rented for us four, Melody, and her fiancé Jared. It seemed immediately attractive from the outside, a relatively modern house in a brown California landscape with some nice windows high up showing off a master bedroom (for use by the bride & groom). Walking inside we were similarly impressed with a living room with twenty-foot high ceilings and nice windows at both floor level and loft level.

But we didn't know the house was going to try and kill us.

The main problem is neglect. It hasn't gone too far yet, but you can see the house has been on the rental market for a couple of years without receiving a lot of care. The coffee table is getting banged up, some of the blinds don't work right, and one of the toilet paper holders is broken. A fan wobbles dangerously if you turn it on. A zip line running down the hillside out back doesn't work, in part because it needs oil (or something) and in part because there's no way to get up on it anymore. We think a tree house might have once provided that path, as it's mentioned in the two-year-old hand-written house rules sheet, but we found the remnants of the treehouse in a pile of plywood and nails.

However, you can also see how the owners went cheap when they converted to rental. The living room, the master bedroom, and the sub master bedroom are built out nicely, but once you get to the other bedrooms, it looks they were decorated on a severe budget. For example, the bedroom that Kimberly and I chose has a stool instead of a bedside table and the two beds in it are just a mattress, (optional) bedspring, and metal frame. Worse (and this was the really horrible part) the two beds in the room both squeaked loudly if you moved the least bit. Kimberly and I actually slept on separate beds because I was pretty sure I'd be woken up when she shifted around. So, that was the first way the house tried to kill us.

It also looks to me like our bedroom was once an office or something; one of the beds abuts the window so that the curtains don't close right (which got me an eyeful of sun this morning), and the closet has also been converted so that there's no easy way to hang stuff (and especially not long stuff). What's up with that?

In addition, some of the work in the house has a do-it-yourself feel to it. The fairly new windows in the house, which look almost exactly like the new windows we've had installed in at home, are either super tight or else incorrectly counterweighted, so they're hard to open. However, the place the house tried to kill me this morning was in the shower. It has a handheld shower unit and the builders put it at exactly the level where if you bend over to adjust the water temperature BAM you smack yourself right in the eye. Which I did. Hard. Hoping I didn't bruise my face before the wedding.

Anywho, that's the killer house we're living in.

It's a pity, because the house has nice bones and is on some nice land. I suspect the people renting it thought they were going to make more money than they actually did, and have gone cheap as a result, which is unfortunately common in rental situations.

(And it was very nice of my dad and Mary to rent this space, and it's 100% better than staying in a hotel.)

Last night we had the pre-wedding dinner with family. We had 15 people, which also included Jared's mom, dad, sister, brother-in-law, and my dad's siblings. It was the first time I'd seen the more far-flung Appels in about a decade, and it was nice to see them. Kimberly and I sat between Uncle Don and Aunt Judy at the dinner. I had good talks with Uncle Don, and Kimberly enjoyed talking with Aunt Judy, so it was all good, and the dinner was quite good too.

The wedding is this afternoon. For the moment we're just casually sitting around our house. It's actually kind of cool, as it's the only time the six of us have ever shared a house.

Oh, and I neglected to talk about how Placerville is trying to kill us: there's a huge fire burning in the hills above us: the King Fire. It's maybe 15 or 20 miles from where we're staying, but it was only 5 or 10 miles from where we had the pre-wedding dinner last night. As we stepped out of the cars at that restaurant, we immediately noticed a helicopter bobbing up and down not far away, presumably loading water from a nearby lake. Then we discovered that our table had bits of ash on everything. We had the staff move it under covering and clean it up a bit.

Today the (outside) wedding is around the same place. It was apparently very smoky in the morning yesterday, but less so in the afternoon. Based on the wind patterns that Wunderground reports, we'll probably see the same today. Since the wedding is at 4.30, all should be well.

Just saw a baby deer bound through the back yard. Beautiful!