shannon_a

Berkeley may be the Karen capital of the west coast. When we were at Millennium on Wednesday night, a group of four raucous middle-aged women came in and sat at the table next to us. I couldn't help but constantly hear them because they were LOUD, and that included one of the Karen's drink order. She said, "I'd like an Emperor Cocktail on the rocks." And then after a pause of maybe a second, she continued, "That means with ice cubes."

Yikes.

(It was hard not to ignore the racial undertones, since they all seemed white and the waiter was black. But maybe she's that rude and condescending to everyone.)

Thursday was our last day in Berkeley. Kimberly and I had a leisurely morning at our Air B&B, then we headed into The City together, her going to the Asian Art Musuem to meet Katherine, me going to The Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) to meet no one.

CJM was on my maybe-see list last year. It moved up on my list this year because I'd read that the museum was closing down for at least a year. (Apparently the foot traffic in downtown SF has crashed since COVID, and CJM's attendance and also revenues is down 50% in that time. I have to imagine that the anti-semitism that's risen since October 7th last year has also contributed.) However, I was still uncertain about what I was going to do with my day in SF, because I was craving a visit to Golden Gate Park, but after Tuesday's hike I decided I'd had enough of the cold and honestly my legs were _still_ tired too. (They seem to have finally recovered this morning.)

CJM is a museum with no permanent collection, so everything at the museum is individual exhibitions. There were five of them at the museum for its last weeks.

A celebration of the building itself was perhaps unsurprisingly my favorite, because it was about history. The building was originally a power substation, one that survived the 1906 earthquake (though it had to be partially rebuilt with bricks from nearby, fallen buildings). But it had fallen into disuse in the modern day. The architect for CJM renovated and expanded it, in part by expanding the traditional silhouette of the building to suggest two Hebrew letters: chet (ח) and yud (י), which together spell chai (חי), or "life", as in L'Chaim. There was also a lot of other cool symbolism in the building, such as the 18 steps up the main staircase and the 36 windows in the Yud gallery, one of the huge rooms formed by one of those letter additions. (Chet and Yud together sum 18, and so multiples of 18 are considered lucky.)

The Yud gallery housed one of the other cool exhibitions, Leah Rosenberg's When One Sees a Rainbow. It covered the (36) diamond-shaped windows in the gallery with colored films and then matched that with colored chairs. Very modern art, but gorgeous.

Another exhibit called Looted was based on Polish artwork that had been stolen by Nazis in WW2. It was a film (and on a different screen a collage of films) that showed the stolen artwork being recreated by modern artists, then erased. It was moving.

Finally, the biggest exhibition in the museum was the California Jewish Open, which had been an open call to Jewish-identifying artists. They were organized into "connections", one room for the earth, one for other people, one for the divine, and one that I seem to have forgotten. I think the most beautiful thing I saw there was a set of "light sculptures", which were basically colored cellophane arranged in front of lights which doesn't sound like a lot, but it was stunning. I was also struck my a few different artists who had discovered they had Jewish ancestry through genetic tests and were now exploring that. Finally, there were seven missing pieces: they'd apparently been pro-Palestine/pro-Gaza but they'd required the museum meet a set of demands to be displayed, and the museum was unable to. (I don't know the exact circumstances, but this felt to me like more progressive purism in the Bay Area. These artists had an opportunity to contribute to the dialogue, and thus make a difference, but were unable to without this additional requirement.) The museum noted the issue and left a blank wall where the pieces might have been, to acknowledge the loss of that point of view.

Overall, I was quite happy to visit CJM while it was there. I hope they're able to recover and now that I've seen is history, I hope they don't have to sell the building, which is apparently on the table.

After CJM, I walked down to the water and looked over the Bay at the Bay Bridge and Yerba Buena Island.

Then I went back to Berkeley, hung out in the library (again! It had become a regular stop for us in downtown) and finally went over to MB's house for gaming. The whole old Thursday group got back together and we played _Havoc_ (a brilliant Poker-like game that is sadly out of print due to conflicts between the designers) and _Rise of Augustus_ (again, but EL loves being able to draw the tokens from the bag, and I enjoy it though I usually can't seem to win, so I wasn't going to complain). I think I came in second at both games, with MA winning _Havoc_ and CA winning _Rise of Augustus_, though the _Havoc_ loss was by a hair!

When I got home, we got things packed up, then early this morning it was off to the airport. We're boarding in about half an hour, and will be home by this afternoon.

A BETTER DAY FOR ELMER. My dad visited Elmer today, and he was still skittish but by the end of the visit he seemed to be hunting a lizard with his brother and had his tail in the air. Then our catsitter came over shortly afterward and she also reported Elmer hiding but in better spirits. So, hopefully our kiddo will be OK until we return home.

OUR REFRIGERATOR IS HAUNTED. Here in the suite. It frequently makes weird burbling and whining noises.

UP PANORAMIC HILL. This morning, the sky was overcast, but the rain held off, so I decided to take a walk up Panoramic Hill. This was one of my favorite little hikes when I lived in Berkeley. I could walk up from our house to the Clark Kerr campus, hike up into the fire trails, loop over to Panoramic Hill, and come back down. About 600 feet of ascent from our old house, some nice scenic views, and maybe an hour's time or so.

So today I did the reverse: up Panoramic Hill and then down above Clark Kerr before I headed over to Rockridge. And it was *HARD* work. Primarily the flights and flights and flights of steps up Panoramic Hill were hard work. I think that's partly that going up those steps is harder than the slopes (and steps) above Clark Kerr, but I've also definitely loss some of my climbing fitness from four years in Hawaii. Definitely time to get back into shape next year.

But it was a lovely hike today even if there were several rests along the way up.

OUT TO THE CITY. I walk through much of South Berkeley to get to Rockridge BART, and then took the train into and out of the city. Were things running on better schedule today? I dunno, because I never looked at a schedule. But I got a direct train into the city 4 minutes after my arrival at Rockridge and a direct train home from SF as soon as I stepped down onto the platform. So I was definitely luckier if nothing else.

ASIAN ART. My destination in the city was the Asian Art museum. I've never actually been there, though I'm sure I saw some of its exhibits when they were back in the de Young 20+ years ago.

The highlight of the trip was the Takashi Murakami special exhibit. A lot of his work is anime and kaiju influenced, and so it's a lot of fun. There was also some even _more_ pop art stuff, including happy flowers and even NFTs. But he also did some really thoughtful stuff, like producing two-D paintings of ceramics that REALLY looked like the ceramic.

The rest of the museum was terrific too. It was divided by culture, running from India through Malaysia into China, Korea, and Japan. So, so many buddhas (and really interesting didactics on the spread of Buddhism with trade in Asia, one of which said something like "and Buddhism was brought into this region as trade increased, and it was embraced by the population, we don't know why"). Also kukris and Samurai armor and swords and vases and jade carvings (jade can't really be carved by metal implements, it has to be abraded! I had no idea!).

I was bone tired by the time I'd been there a few hours, after 4+ miles of walking in Berkeley, 650 or so feet of ascent, and then circling and circling in the museum. There were a few smaller special exhibits I could have visited, but I couldn't figure out where they were, and I was tired, so I decided to call it a day.

A+++ MUSEUM. WOULD RETURN.

REST & DINNER. When I came home, Kimberly was chatting with K., who she'd spent some time with during the day. After K. left we both napped. (Tired!) Then we had dinner out with N., one of Kimberly's old co-workers, and someone we'd both taken a writing class with. Oh, she also married us. That is, she conducted the ceremony.

Good to see her, good dinner, and now it's another relaxing evening in the suite.

One day left. Gaming for me. Then we go home.

I said that Berkeley (and North Oakland) was much the same two pandemic years later, but there is one change I've noticed in wandering back and forth to our Air B&B. College Avenue is rolling up its streets at 7 or 8pm, except for a few of the pricier restaurants. Even the Wendy's up on Broadway had its lobby closed by 8pm.

Kimberly and I had no obligations this morning, so we went to Angeline's for lunch. It was very nice, having a lunch together, since we've done so much visiting with our individual friends, and Angeline's was tasty, as ever. We've been going there since it opened in 2006 or so (following a Katrina-related delay).

They checked Vaccine Cards to let you in to Angeline's! (Which is the rule in Berkeley; Oakland, ever late to the show, will be doing the same in February, which isn't criminally late or anything.) I felt empowered and safe! And newly annoyed at our shitty mayor Kawakami in Kauai who refused to follow Governor Ige's rule that restaurants be allowed to return to full capacity if they checked vaccine cards.

(And he wasn't whining about the full capacity; he was whining about the vaccine cards because he's spent two years trying to decide whether to overreact to the pandemic or ignore it.)

Had to yell at an idiot in Berkeley who kept getting in our face about collecting money or signatures or something for some charity or some cause. I don't know what because HE KEPT GETTING IN OUR FACE AND THERE'S A *#()@)#$ING PANDEMIC. After telling him to get the *)(#$ away from us the second time, I was about to move on to threats. But he moved on to accost someone else.

After our lunch, Kimberly was meeting some friends in the later afternoon, so I opted to go out to the SFMoma, to get a bit of San Francisco and a bit of culture into the trip.

No, stupid stupid BART lady, you don't take your mask off when you're about to sneeze. *)#@#*$.

(BART continues to be a cesspool, including an extra 15 minute late due to a missing train, a few more scofflaws, and a few more homeless, but still not as bad as that first trip.)

SFMoma was great. I'd never realized how few of their exhibitions are ongoing are how many are temporary. But that meant there was plenty new to see, even though the Moma was one of the last museums we went to before we moved.

Among the highlights:

(1) A new photography exhibit that included everything from historic shots of San Francisco and Oakland to people holding big circular mirrors in front of their heads (creating big light flashes) to a Native American posing with animal cutouts and blowups. Even the silly stuff was genuine innovation of form that I enjoyed. It was a bit crowded, the only place in the museum that was, but I was able to maintain my 6 feet by doing delicate dances across the galleries.

(2) Some dark and thoughtful paintings of Nazi buildings by a German.

(3) An LED message window displaying "truisms". Most were thoughtful things like "An elite is inevitable". One was "Always store food".

We're not going to get to see my sister M. on this trip. Their family has "coughs and runny noses", so it would be imprudent to get together with them.

That's been the main impact, thus far, of COVID on this trip. We've been avoiding sick people even more than we usually would, because if we get sick (a) we might be denied boarding on our plane; (b) we might be told to quarantine for 10 days in Kauai because we can't fulfill the Safe Travels requirements in the health form we need to fill out on the 30th.

More MOMA highlights:

(4) An architectural exhibit, much of which was drawings on the walls showing the full-color interiors of homes (real homes, but drawn) amidst black and white drawings of their exteriors. Very cool insights and commentaries on life.

(5) The Calder mobiles: always fun (and one of the few ongoing exhibits at the MOMA).

(6) An exhibit largely focused on letters and how far they can be varied from the norm while retaining their recognition.

One of the other big exhibits right now is on painter Joan Mitchell. Pretty much what I hate in modern art, as it was ugly slashes of paint across canvases. Which I suppose is better than colored blocks, but still.

She was apparently an important "abstract expressionist". I dutifully walked through her 8 or 9 rooms, but was unimpressed.

Because I was right there, I browsed through Yerba Buena Gardens after MOMA. I'm always moved by the MLK memorial and take the time to read all his quotes along the back wall, behind the waterfall.

Riding BART home was more crowded than I'd like, but that mainly meant that I had to stand from Montgomery to West Oakland, along with a couple of other people in my car, because one seat in each row was taken.

Dinner: Cactus taqueria and black cherry soda. Mm-mm.

Kimberly has been having dinner with friends, for her second get together of the day, which means I got a quiet evening at home.

Hospital Day 3. I have a leisurely morning and am able to bike out to Pill Hill just in advance of the rain. Well, it sprinkles here and there, but the further I get toward Oakland the more that lets up.

I visit with Kimberly around 11am.

It's weird seeing Kimberly in little snapshots like this. Last night she was bright and cheery and more vibrant and animated than anytime since the surgery. This morning she is groggy and keeps fading into almost sleep as I talk with her. The difference is in the oxycontin. In both cases, she's last had pain pills around 8.30am, but last night that was almost 12 hours previous and this time it's just a couple.

As she increasingly fades, I head out.

The great plan for the day was this: visit Kimberly; get in to San Francisco to renew/replace my San Francisco Library card; do some stairway walks; return to see Kimberly; and then head home a bit earlier than on the previous days.

The library card is something that I really wanted to do before leaving California, so it's good to find a time for it. he rest is just filling the day before I come back to see Kimberly, but sounds fun. I like exploring.

Let's see how that works out.

The stop at the library is easy. My old account has actually been deleted due to non-use, but *poof* I have a new one with a short form.

I wouldn't be able to do this in a month, when I have a new permanent residence, so it was now or never, and so I have California library privileges for four final years.

Muni now offers all-day passes over their Muni app for $5, so I've picked up one of those to make my day of exploring San Francisco easy, like I was in a European city that had reasonable public transit. (SF is actually pretty good, even if most of the transit is buses, and $5 for the day is relatively reasonable.)

From the Library, I take the 21 up to Divisadero. My goal there: Popeye's. Maybe I should have tried the chicken sandwich that people are murdering each other over, but instead I went for my old standby: popcorn shrimp.

We used to have a book of stairway walks in San Francisco, but it's either packed or given away. (Who knows which!? It'll be like Christmas when we're reopening all of our book boxes ... sometime in 2020.)

So instead I was Googling for stairway walks. And, I didn't really find any good walks online, but I did find a few lists of the best stairways in San Francisco, some of them linked to Google Maps for easy access.

And I decided for my first stop to go visit two newer stairways (or at least recently decorated stairways) that probably weren't in that book: The Hidden Garden Steps and The 16th Avenue Tiled Steps (aka "Mosaic Stairway"), both in the Inner Sunset, beneath Grandview Park.

All powerful with my all-day MUNI pass, I walked a few blocks over to the 6, and took it west.

At this point, one should perhaps address the rain. It's been raining most of December and after a bit of letup yesterday, the rain was predicted to come back today before noon.

It was sprinkling a bit when I was on Divisadero, then again when I hopped off the 6 below Grandview Park. But as I started to climb up the Hidden Garden Steps I was actually able to put my umbrella away, because the light rain was dissipating and/or being held back by trees.

Keep that in mind as I ascend.

The Hidden Garden Steps are the more recent steps, with the mosaic completed in 2013. And, they're utterly amazing. Mosaic tiles cover the risers of the 148 steps, creating a picture that can be seen as you scan the ascending steps. A moth, a snail, a dragonfly, and other garden critters can be seen, as well as a variety of plants, including a notably beautiful golden poppy.

The art is very representational and quite beautiful, and intertwined with it all are the names and memories of the community members who had these mosaics built.

And apparently this stairway remains pretty unknown, despite the fact that I actually think it's prettier than its earlier brethren.

Up at the top of the Hidden Garden Steps is a neighborhood with a little park rising up above it: Grandview Park. I can really hear the wind whipping up at the top of the park, under gray, gray skies. It's actually a bit intimidating because the wind sounds so fearsome. But there's just a bit of drizzle again, so what harm can a little wind cause?

This is the adventurous part of the trip that has been foreshadowed: I start climbing the (plain stone) steps to Grandview Park, and the rain suddenly starts coming down. I get up to the top of the stairs, and look up at the dirt path leading the rest of the way up, and I'm not sure what to do. Because the rain has become a torrent, and there's a river flowing down the dirt.

But I figure I'm here, right, and when am I ever going to be back?

And there's some other guy up there already, so it can't be that bad.

So I walk up into the torrent, and the wind is whipping my wimpy little umbrella around, and there's no cover. So I'm getting really wet.

Up at the top, I huddle as close as I can under a tree, which doesn't really stop more than 10% of the rain, but that's something. I enjoy seeing the gray clouds lying over the city, but I don't enjoy the whipping winds and rain that are just drenching me. So I don't stay for long. (Mysterious guy up atop the hill has already had the good sense to move on.)

There's a wood staircase going down the opposite side, again undecorated, and I actually wonder if I can make it down in the wind and rain. I do, though my umbrella whirls me around a few times in the wind, without really giving me much protection. And then I'm down on a street, still with no cover, and still with this really heavy rain coming down, now at an angle of about 45 degrees.

I decide to take cover under the eaves in front of someone's garage, and just stand there for 10 or 15 minutes, watching some of the heaviest rain that I've ever seen, thinking that I'm trapped out on a hill who knows how far from the closest bus, who knows how far from home.

Yeah, I could call an Uber or a Lyft, but surely I'm not really stranded out here, in what's starting to feel like a natural disaster. Am I?

Apparently not, because after 10 or 15 minutes the rain turns from torrent to storm, and I can actually walk around with an umbrella again without getting drenched. Well, actually, I'm already drenched, my pants and overshirt both pretty soaked. But not more drenched.

And I'm just a few hundred feet from the 16th Avenue Tile Steps, which I take back down.

Turns out that walking up them is the way to go, not down. But I stop at every landing and look at the tiles above me.

The 16th Avenue Tiled Steps are several years older than the Hidden Garden Steps, completed in 2005. They were the inspiration for the nearby Hidden Garden Steps and have become a bit of a tourist attraction, but not today. Oh, I meet a couple coming up who are enjoying the steps, and down at the bottom, where it's started raining somewhat heavily again, there's another couple who leap out of a car, take three pictures, then leap back in. But the rain is mostly keeping folks away, which I guess means it was a good day to visit.

In fact, I've seen pictures of the 16th Avenue Tile Steps before, because they generated quite a few local news articles for their innovation, and that's probably what's led to the tourism. But despite seeing pictures, it's still amazing to see these steps in person.

The 16th Avenue Tile Steps have an amazing overall vision: a river that goes all the way up to the top where there's a moon and a sun. And apparently some of the tiles are reflective and glow in the moonlight. So that overall vision is pretty awesome. But there's nothing as individually beautiful as some of the critters and plants at the other steps. So, yeah, keep the tourists over here.

I'd been planning more steps. And maybe visiting Union Square after dark to see the Christmas lights.

But the rain is still heavy, and I decide I want to head home, and get changed before heading back to Kimberly. And I definitely want to get out of this heavy rain.

Even moreso, as I walk across a number of streets that have pretty much become rivers. Because there's so much water coming down that the gutters and drains can't keep up.

At one point I do see a city worker desperately trying to get a drain clean. He must have had a cold and tiring day.

So I walk down to Judah, and I stand on the platform which like most of the N-Judah platforms has no cover. And there's a woman there too, and we both just stand there in the pouring rain. But thankfully the N-Judah comes pretty quickly.

(Because MUNI ain't AC Transit.)

There's one last surprise. The N-Judah stops short of Market, just before it enters the subway ... because the subway is flooded.

After a bit the driver tells us that trains are slowly entering the subway, so it'll be five minutes.

And then a few minutes later she tells us she has no idea how long it'll be.

I get out and start walking to Market, and see all the subway cars totally stopped just before the tunnel. A bit further on, the MUNI subway entrances are all closed.

Apparently that going-slowly-into-the-flood bit didn't work too well.

As I continue walking, heading toward BART, I see several Santas. I've been seeing Santas all day in huge numbers.

I later learn it's "SantaCon", when people dress up like Santa, and then go barhopping. It's apparently a big enough problem that some local eateries have banned Santas today, because of problems like "Santa vomiting on a five-year old child" and "Santa punching out a patron".

I don't even know what to say about that.

After an extended time in an N-Judah bus, then more time in a BART car, I'm feeling dry by the time I get to MacArthur BART.

That's really not the right word, but I'm not dripping wet any more, so I decide to hop off, and go visit Kimberly on the way home after all, as originally planned.

In fact, it's not even raining in Oaklnd. I get to bike back to Pill Hill, since I'd left my bike here, at MacArthur BART.

Kimberly's had a bad day. The understaffing problems at Summit are apparently particularly bad on weekends. And/or there were some type of party (a holiday party one suspects) and an emergency, which made things worse. So she's had problems getting help that she needs all day.

And her body is slowly waking up again, which is bringing its own share of problems.

So she's not the happiest camper when I arrive.

I convince her to order things she needs like blankets and pain pills, and fortunately the hospital seems to be running better post-party and post-emergency.

We visit for a while, then she kicks me out so that she can maybe get some rest because it's been a hard and tiring day.

I'm pretty tired too when I get home, but I have some dinner, and then a shower to get warmed back up, as I still have some clammy clothes.

And then I'm writing like I'm running out of time.

Pretty tired now.

My arms are particularly weak, which I've figured out is probably from fighting with an umbrella in really high winds. (I need to start using my arm weights, but not before we move, and in any case they're getting packed up in 9 days.)

Kimberly asked if I was going for a walk tomorrow, and I said maybe, because it's supposed to be drier.

But I think I just need to kick back tomorrow.

Other than visiting Kimberly. And starting on our disclosures form for the house. And answering some questions for Bitmark.

But some degree of resting, really.

The rains sounds like it started pouring down again just now as I finished drafting this.

For twenty years, people have been fighting to get bicycle and pedestrian access to the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. And, it should have been an easy sell, because there was one lane on each level of the bridge that wasn't been used (except for breakdowns). But, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission fought against it because they wanted to maintain the ability to jam more cars onto the Bridge, and Marin fought it because ... well, a vocal group in Marin is overentitled and overprivileged, and doesn't want to provide access to their community.

And, that access was needed. I mean, there's almost no way to get across the Bay using bike power. If you go North, you have to go past San Francisco Bay, past San Pablo Bay, out to the edge of the Carquinez Straits before you can cross on the Carquinez Bridge, and then once you get into the north Bay, biking access is terrible, so you have to go about 10 miles more north to get to bikable roads. In the south Bay, the southernmost Bridge, the Dumbarton Bridge, is bikable, but I've never done it because it's a low, ugly Bridge, and I remember commuting across it every day when I worked at Sun, and our trucks were constantly buffeted by the wind, to the point where I can barely imagine biking across it and living.

Maybe the Bay Bridge will someday have bike access across it, but that's at least a decade off, so the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge was people's great hope. And it opened to bicycles and pedestrians (but mostly bicycles) today.

The story of bicycle and pedestrian access to the bridge is entirely one of advocacy. It wouldn't have happened, no way no how, without Bike East Bay and others. Even so, they fought for six years after it looked like they had a foothold. And both Marin and the MTC are continuing to fight now. The MTC tried to turn it into a non-rush-hour-only bike path about halfway through the process, and the Marinites are still trying to get the four-year pilot program canceled.

I'm not convinced it's going to survive long-term, especially since it's never going to be a major bike commute. It's just too long. At 5.5 miles, it was the first or second longest bridge in the world (depending on how you count it) when it was built. And that's ignoring the fact that the east side is way out at Point Richmond and the west side is miles from downtown San Rafael. But for a pleasure ride, and for access to Marin for a weekend day. It's magnificent.

I purposefully went a little late, because I didn't want to hang around the ribbon-cutting ceremont at 10, nor did I want to have to fight with huge crowds on the bridge. So I meandered out, had lunch at my favorite Oscar's replacement in Point Richmond, then got to the Bridge around 1pm.

The whole time I was heading toward the Bridge from Point Richmond, I saw people coming back, many talking about how great the ride was. The numbers increased as I approached the Bridge, and though it was never crowded, I really felt a part of this community of bicyclists, and it was a great feeling. Pretty soon I had a broad smile on my face whenever anyone went by. I might admit to getting a little emotionally choked up too.

And they were right, the ride was great. It was really foggy as I approached the Bridge, but pretty soon I ascended above it. And since the bike trail is on the upper deck, I could really see everything. It was like I was out on the ocean, with a sea of clouds, and mountains rising all around me. It was like being on Avalon. And unlike the Dumbarton (and the Bay Bridge for that matter) it wasn't particularly windy. Instead, it was just a magnificent ride, up above the whole world, with the beauty of nature all around, and smiling people occasionally going by.

I was a bit worried about the difficulty of the ride because the roads up to the Bridge always looked long and steep to me. But the ride from Richmond proved to be quite doable, with the only gotcha being that the Bridge is made up of two cantilevered sections, with a big dip between them.

And, as it turns out, I can't speak about the approach from San Rafael. People certainly did look more winded coming from that direction, and the drop into San Rafael felt long and steep (but I couldn't even see what it looked like, because I descended into the fog, and pretty soon couldn't see much of anything).

So yay for a bike ride I thought I'd never take, because the March 2019 opening kept getting push back to back, to the point where we were only about 45 days from our planned departure on today, when it opened.

The downside of the Bridge is, of course, that it comes down in San Rafael. I'd say the ugly part of San Rafael, but I haven't actually seen the attractive part yet, if there is one. But you have a mess of highways and very busy roads, and San Quentin Prison, and a lot of unattractive industrial areas.

I meandered further into San Rafael, wanting to check out the bike paths along the new SMART train line, and found those pretty unattractive too, pretty much just a fenced path running alongside railway tracks. (It'll be nicer in 50 years when SMART fails, and it turns into a full greenway.) And then I ended up dumped from the path into a more commercial area, and there were huge masses of cars on big streets everywhere.

That's where a lady started screaming at me to get in a bike lane like everyone else. Obviously, she was at a pretty low level of moral development, since her basis for doing things was "what everyone else did". But what really confused me was that there was no bike lane. "What bike lane?" I said. "There's no bike lane." But she just kept screaming about how everyone else was using the bike lane that wasn't there, and I should too. I finally decided that she'd fulfilled her lifelong dream of moving to Marin County, but it turned out to be shitty San Rafael.

(Maybe the northern half of San Rafael is prettier. If so, this woman, who seemed very displeased with life, doesn't live there.)

I thought about continuing through that icky commercial area, because I saw more off-street bike lanes further north, and suspected they were more SMART-adjacent lines, but then I remembered a long-time dream I'd had: doing a mighty bike ride from RIchmond BART to San Francisco, across two Bridges — and truly showing the power of the new Richmond-San Rafael bike path, which opens up both peninsulas to bicyclists from the East Bay.

I looked it up on my trusty iPhone and was told I could make it in 2 hours and 1 minute, which would put me in the Tenderloin just as twilight descended. I decided to go for it. (It ended up taking me about an hour longer, getting into Civic Center BART around 6pm, so I actually got to see the Tenderloin in full dark: "Why did everything suddenly get so sketchy?" I would ask, as I biked along Polk, and then I realized where I was.)

I've done the north part of that ride before, through the super-cool CalPark Hill Tunnel, which gets you out of ugly San Rafael and into beautiful Larkspur. They were still building up the connectors south last time I was there (after taking the scant one bus out to San Rafael), but they're all done now, so you get to bike over to the attractive Corte Madira Creek and southward for quite a while before really having to worry about roads.

Though 101 is a constant presence as you head south, the bike paths are nice and the rest of the scenery is beautiful, with hills often surrounding you on two or three sides and waterways frequently snaking in from the Bay. I continued on into Corte Madira proper, then around a nice hillside road, and into Mill Valley. That's perhaps the most gorgeous area I biked through, with all the water and hills interfacing so nicely. And also it's where the start of the Mill Valley - Sausalito Bikeway is: another entirely off-road trail that took me a few miles further south.

I skirted Sausalito, and remembered fondly the Anniversary that Kimberly and I spent there some years ago, even stopping to take a picture at the building where we failed to have our Anniversary dinner (because the place we'd thought we'd made reservations at had gone out of business). And then exiting Sausalito I started to climb again, as I approached the Marin Headlands and the Golden Gate Bridge.

The closer I got to the Golden Gate, the more fog I saw, blocking out more of San Francisco and much of Bridge #2. And when I got onto the Golden Gate Bridge again it was even foggier than the first: this time I was right in the fog.

And that was another amazing experience. I often could see no more than 10 or 20 feet ahead, so it was like I was in my own little world. It was actually wet! When I took the sharp turn around the southern tower (slow! I did it slowly!), I almost wiped out because of the slick surface. But I could make out the towers as I approached them, and every once in a while bicyclists would materialize from the fog.

Eventually, I made it to San Francisco, tired not just from the ride, but also from the effort of watching so carefully in the fog.

The fog cleared as I descended down from the Bridge, and from there it was the same route I took during Fleet Week, with the exception of a stop at Ghirardelli Square for some chocolate (of course). Sadly, they no longer had Kimberly's favorite: malted milkballs.

And then it was a tiring ride up Polk, a quick turn through the Tenderloin, and perfect BART karma when I hit the platform.

Yes, we have problems at home. Yes, there is stress from the move, and yes Kimberly is getting (much) more than her fair share of stress from not just cancer, but also a doctor who hasn't gotten his pathology of the same out to anyone in a full week.

But that was a perfect ride that I've dreamed of for years, a great day of exercise, a great day of natural beauty, and a bit of destressing for myself before diving back into the scrum.

Kimberly has cancer.

I mean, Morgan, the NP, stepped back after talking about "invasive cancer" for a while, and said that they needed to see the pathology to confirm, but she didn't seem to have any doubt. It had infiltrated the walls of Kimberly's colon deep enough that they couldn't get it all, and also spread to the small intestine. That's cancer.

Honestly, this shouldn't have been a surprise. Kimberly's GI doctor seemed to think the odds were about 50/50 after seeing what the previous colonoscopy looked like. And then her surgeon started asking questions about whether members of her family might suffer from Lynch Syndrome, which is "hereditary non-polyposis colorectal cancer", and makes it more likely that you suffer masses in your colon earlier, and more likely that they develop more quickly into cancer. And it sounded like that answer was probably yes, that she likely has Lynch Syndrome in her genetics, which dropped the odds from 50/50.

So we were probably down to Trump-wins-the-2016-election for the odds that the mass wasn't cancerous. But we still hoped and believed in the best. I mean, Trump won, didn't he? (Though that certainly wasn't for the best.)

We knew the odds, intellectually, but we humans are really bad with odds, viscerally.

It's hard to know how to even react to news like this. I've been mostly numb since yesterday. Paging my way through books, mostly reading, but skimming more than I'd like. Sometimes just staring. Feeling empty, yet congested in my head. And overwhelmed, totally overwhelmed. Like I just can't conceive of getting everything done that needs doing. Kimberly has talked about anxiety leaving her paralyzed, and I can understand. And I also feel like I do when I haven't had enough sleep, and the least new input would just send me into tears.

And it's hard to even talk about how I'm feeling, because Kimberly's the one with the cancer. She's the one that needs support. Or the most support. My emotions or feelings are frankly secondary. But still there. And I'm certainly needing support too at this point.

So yesterday Jay drove us out to the CPMC campus in San Francisco. That's California Pacific Medical Center, and it was one of the nicest, friendliest, cleanest, and more comfortable hospitals that I've been to.

It's Sutter Health's flagship hospital, and though it's in the Tenderloin, which we saw while driving in, traveling from the hospital parking garage up to the Ambulatory Care Unit and back was all entirely nice.

We got there about 30 minutes early, and pretty promptly at Kimberly's appointment time a "candy striper" (a young volunteer, though he was male, unlike traditional stripers) came to get Kimberly. He also indicated that I should go with her, which surprised me. Kimberly often asks me to go with her into appointments, when she's feeling like she needs help, and the doctors are always entirely open about that, but I'd never had anyone proactively say I should come with. And I soon learned that I'd stay with Kimberly until they finished her prep, and I'd get to meet her doctors and nurses.

Which was such a world of difference from the competent but often impersonal and occasionally antagonistic hospitals here in the East Bay.

After the candy striper we met a couple of different nurses, who collected information from Kimberly, helped get her belongings together, and talked to us about the procedure and whether we'd be able to talk to doctors afterward.

Here was the bit of weirdness of the day (one which we knew about in advance): there was some type of conference going on, and so they were live-streaming some of these procedures over to the conference. Kimberly filled out forms giving them the OK; she was told twice that "her colon would be famous". (And we were told that this would make it harder to see the doctor, though an NP named "Morgan" would be doing her best to coordinate all of the information, so that she could talk to Kimberly about it.)

The reason for all this conferencing and such is the surgical procedure that Kimberly had is quite cutting edge. It allows for the resection of large masses in the colon through a colonoscope, without the need for more invasive surgery. So, as long as a tumor hasn't grown too far into the walls of the colon, it can be utterly removed as an out-patient procedure. Apparently, people come from all over the country from this procedure; we were obviously quite lucky that it was practically in our backyard (and that we were still in the Bay Area, not Hawaii).

So after many forms were filled out and many permissions given, Kimberly and I were left to our devices as we waited for the 2.45 surgery.

I read to her a bit from The Nonborn King, where we're still in the dull but useful summary of past books. We watched the time tick by. 2.45 slipped past. Kimberly, who'd gotten up around 4.30 from stress and/or distress over her prep, decided to sleep. I turned to one of my own books to read, then when I decided that Kimberly was mostly sleeping, I started in on some work I'd lain in for while I was at a hospital. A few paragraphs into that, and Kimberly woke and went to the bathroom. I then did the same. (Well, not the waking up.) By now it was 3.30 or so, and the entire corridor we were in was otherwise deserted, with the only sign of human life being a TV that had been left on, broadcasting the news to an empty room.

I messaged Jay, still out in the waiting area, just to let him know we were still waiting for the surgery to start.

I think we were a bit past an hour late when someone finally showed up, and suddenly we were on the move again. Off to a prep room. Nurses started to file in. Various people would stick their head in to see what was going on. One of the TVs in that room showed the current livestream, where a scope moving through a colon looked like the time tunnel from Tom Baker's early Doctor Who years. People were talking in the corridor. One nurse questioned whether another doctor was live, and finally decided that he wasn't, and that he could slip in to ask him a question.

A shaggy haired doctor finally showed up and introduced himself as the inventor of the procedure. He said that the doctor who was supposed to do Kimberly's procedure was still on another one, and that he'd do it instead. He was arrogant, saying how he was going to solve Kimberly's problem, no ifs, ands, or buts. And he was so proudly talking about his creative innovation. (I wonder if the change in surgeon meant that Kimberly's colon was not famous.)

But, I was thrilled to have him. I felt like we were at the place that was best able to take care of Kimberly's problem, via the least invasive means possible, and that we had the doctor who was most likely to be successful.

Though it didn't turn out that way, I feel like we absolutely did the best we could here, and that feels good, because it's a rare triumph in today's entirely fucked up healthcare world of forced compromises of all sorts.

Eventually, the nurse who had been avidly watching the time-tunnel livestream walked over to me and said that he could escort me out to the waiting room, as Kimberly was going to be brought into the procedure room.

And so I bid my wife goodbye, and exited, about three hours after I'd entered the bowels (the bowel bowels?) of the hospital.

Jay was outside, working on some electronic device. He said he'd managed to get some work done. He'd apparently visited the big board of patient info a few times while we were gone, and kept seeing that it said that Kimberly was still in pre-op, and had even begun to wonder if it just updated slowly. Nope, there was just lots going on back there.

I found some food downstairs, came back up and talked to Jay for a while. Two hours slipped by. I was feeling increasingly good about the possible results of the surgery, because two hours meant that they were actually removing the tumor — that they hadn't gotten in there and decided that they couldn't manage it. And I *thought* it meant that they hadn't gotten in there and found that it had infiltrated the wall of Kimberly's colon, because the previous surgeon had indicated that they wouldn't operate in that situation.

So, about two hours in, I pulled out my laptop, and figured I could get some more work in. Because that waiting room was super comfortable. There were very nice seats everywhere and even some desks for working.

But then Jay went up to the board one more time, came back, and said that Kimberly was in post-op.

And a nurse came out a few minutes later to get me.

And then we got the news.

They had pulled as much of the tumor out as they could. But it was deep in the colon's wall. And it was in the small intestine. And it all looked obviously abnormal.

So.

They're going to need to do surgery to take a big chunk of the colon out, and it's going to be a somewhat worse surgery than we expected, because they're going to have to take out where the large intestine and small intestine meet.

And it's cancer. They need the pathology, but no one seems to doubt, it's cancer.

Kimberly was feeling poorly after the surgery, and Morgan our NP was extremely concerned. She was very careful in what she said, but I've never seen a doctor with such a poor Poker face.

I thought for a bit that Kimberly was going to get admitted, because she was feeling so sick right after she woke up. I think Morgan did too.

But, the crisis passed. That particular crisis. And Morgan said that Kimberly could be released. And it all went off at 100x the speed of the Alta Bates ER that we have a mile from our house.

So ... onward.

Kimberly has to recover from this less-invasive surgery, and then she's got the big colectomy scheduled for the start of December.

And just like this one, we'll hope that is the end, but perhaps the odds will be more with us then ...

Since we got home last night, our DSL has been mostly out. It's actually been flaky for a few days, but they had some other local problems, so I assumed that was it. Nope, and it's been much worse today, so I called Sonic. They say it's good 'ole PacBell's problem, and they'll fix it on their own on Monday. We'll see.

But not being able to stream, and barely being able to access the net, and not even being able to HotSpot our phones because our reception is so bad in the house ... it just seems like insult added to injury.

Small problems in the scope of things. But they add up.

Every once in a while I post how many days we have remaining in the Bay Area over on Facebook. And, I wouldn't want to give anyone the wrong impression. I'm not counting down the days left until we get to go to Hawaii; I'm counting the days left that I get to enjoy California.

And that's the great thing about making this five-year plan to move. It's given me a lot of time to really appreciate what I have here in the Bay Area and make the most of it.

And it's given us plenty of time to prepare for our move as well.

Mind you, that preparation got more difficult this last week, when Kimberly got hammered with multiple health problems, one of which has resulted in emergency surgery for her on Tuesday. It's just one more thing that we really didn't need to deal with, but poor Kimberly has to, and it feels at times overwhelming when added on to all the work to prepare our house for sale and ourselves to move.

But, it is what it is, and we are persevering.

Anywho, I was talking about saying goodbye to the Bay Area.

In the last few weeks, pretty much as summer faded into fall, I've become increasingly aware of how little time we have left here.

So, I've been waking the fire trails up above Clark Kerr whenever I have a chance, and I got to see a few beautiful sunsets up there. A few weeks ago I took the bus up to Tilden, then walked up to Inspiration Point and down the fire trails to San Pablo Dam. Last weekend I had lunch at the Oscar's-replacement in Point Richmond, had a nice ride through Point Pinole (since you can now use it as a thoroughfare, with the two new entrances they've opened in recent years), and after a flat-tire adventure that led to a three-mile walk to the nearest bike shop, revisited Kennedy Grove. (I'd planned to go up a nice creek trail that I enjoy on the border between Pinole and Hercules, but ended up being in the wrong place and not have time after the puncture problem.)

These are all places that I know and am familiar with, and wanted to see again.

And Saturday I went out to The City, with the intention of visiting Golden Gate Park and The Golden Gate Bridge.

I love the fact that Golden Gate Park is huge and rambling (bigger than NY's Central Park!). I love that it has hidden nooks and crannies, some just off the beaten path, some mostly abandoned for decades.

Kimberly and I used to head out there every once in a blue moon, grab sandwiches from the nearby Andronico's (now a Safeway in all but name, with a commiserate drop in sandwich quality) and enjoy them in the Fern Grotto (or as I call it, "Fern Gully"), just above the National AIDS Memorial Grove. And, we haven't in years, since sometime before she broke her foot, and we probably won't again, sad as that is to say.

I decided to remember that on my own on Saturday. So I hauled my bike on BART, then Wiggle-d my way up to the Park.

I found a nearby sandwich place called "The Yellow Submarine", which I've seen before from the bus. When I got there I saw they advertised "Boston-style" sandwiches. Which turned out to be Philly cheesesteaks. Which amused me, because everyone else in the world calls them Philly cheesteaks, not Boston sandwiches, but maybe there's some Eastern rivalry thing going on there. Anywho, my chicken cheesesteak was stasty, and I enjoyed it in Fern Gully, and that was pretty much my visit to the Park.

(Other than some biking through it here, and there, which was nice, as always.)

From the Park, I biked straight up into the Presidio to get to the Bridge. There was one section which was straight up hill which took some effort. I immediately recognized it as a nemesis that I'd visited before, but I made it up the hill all on my bike, albeit with two rests along the way.

Biking through the Presidio was even more beautiful than biking through Golden Gate Park, because you get gorgeous coastal views along the way.

And then I was approaching the Bridge.

I had to swerve around a clump of meandering pedestrians as I ramped up onto the western side of the bridge, reserved for bicyclists. I kindly told the tourists that there were no pedestrians allowed on this side as I went, but they seemed pretty oblivious. So maybe they spent the next 30 minutes dodging bikes and wondering what was going on.

The ride across the Bridge was MAGICAL.

I mean, it's always a gorgeous ride, but as I'd hoped, the Blue Angels started flying over the Bay as I biked across, every once in a while making it over to the Bridge. I think it was mostly the warm-ups, as I only saw one at a time, at least then. But still it was just amazing seeing them up in the sky as I biked across. I pulled over ra few times to gawp.

(It was Fleet Week, if it's not obvious. I don't think I've ever been into the City for Fleet Week before, though I saw them circling up in the sky in a recent year when I was over at Point Richmond. But this time I knew it was Fleet Week and purposefully scheduled this trip to the City for that. As I hoped, it didn't make things too crowded, but was a wonderful spectacle for one of my last trips into the City.)

Once over the Bridge, I crossed over to the View Vista Point above Fort Baker, and from there was able to watch the Blue Angels for awhile from afar. There were more of them now, circling and looping and making amazing dives, mostly above the Embarcadero. On the bright side, no deeply rumbling afterburners right above, but they were pretty far away.

I wished I'd brought my binoculars, instead of just my better camera, but it was still pretty amazing.

My last activity for my day in San Francisco (and now Marin) was to hike up the SCA Trail above the North Tower Parking Lot.

And here, the trip became entirely magical again, because I'd hike a few hundred yards, and then I'd hear the jets, and they'd be close enough to see. A few times a set of four of them zoomed right over the headlands. One time, one went spinning over head. Sometimes I'd be on the same chunk of trail as other hikers, and we'd all stop and look up. It was amazing! Though the mile hike up the SCA trail took quite a long time as a result!

I eventually got to where the SCA Trail meets the Coastal Trail, and it was getting late, and Kimberly had had a seizure episode back at a friend's house, and so I wanted to get back. So I looked at those other beautiful trails headed into the distance, imagined walking them, and turned around.

I'd never realized quite how many trails there are in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and from there into Muir and beyond. It's an amazing area that I'd love to hike more, but pretty far from our house by BART and bike. And there are only 80 days left. And the weather is quickly turning cold and gray.

I had to thread through crowds as I biked through Crissy Field and around Fort Mason on the way back, but eventually I found Polk Street, which took me back to Civic Center BART.

Along the way, I powered up a hill (one of a few on the route), and passed two people on the electric Ford bikes, and thought, "They're doing something wrong".

And within a few hours of leaving the Marin Headlands, I was home in Berkeley.

The Bay Area is an amazing place full of natural beauty. I'm glad I've been able to really mindfully enjoy it these last few years. And I'm sorry Kimberly hasn't been able to join me for much of it due to health reasons. Having a car in Kauai will probably be a big, helpful change in that regard.

I must admit that I entered this week with a bad attitude related to our handyman ("Tim"). He cranked up the price of our door twice last week, and also had really underbid on materials costs. Meanwhile, the joyful fact that he wanted to show up at 11am often turned into noon or 1pm, and then he wanted to stay until 6 or 6.30. Then on Tuesday, his first day back this week, he was scheduled to show up at 1pm and ended up here at 3pm.

Fortunately, things went smoother from there. He constructed the hatches for our crawl space under the house, and they looked quite good, minus the fact the he reused the frames from old, past hatches that were missing when we moved in. But we're hoping the house painters can clean that up. Then he did a good job of getting three of our ill-fitting doors upstairs opening, closing, and latching better (but still asked for the median of the variable price he'd quoted for four doors). Then he actually found a cartridge for the lock in our sunroom door and got it all installed and working beautifully. Those are all things that will definitely add to the value of the house.

I do feel like we got taken for at least $1000-1500 in the process, in that the bid which I originally thought was high got increased, with the materials also being underbid. But I'm doing relatively good at not caring. We'd been having troubles finding handymen, and at this point we really needed one for a variety of work going back years and years.

Did I say house painters? Yeah, getting that going was our big July initiative. I definitely wanted them to fix up and paint the wood on the outside of our house, but was willing to also look at a quote for the entire exterior. They *only* gave us a quote for the whole exterior, and it's expensive, but it was just over my number where I thought we should flat out take it. So, we've got them starting on Wednesday.

I'm not thrilled to have them so close after the handyman work, as it was exhausting managing Tim for four days while I kept the cats locked in my office (though part of the exhaustion was two days of simultaneously filing and shredding Skotos material). But Kimberly has thus far been our main contact on the painters. When they get here, they'll be more self-sufficient, and hopefully Kimberly and I can share the responsibility more when they need to talk.

My share thus far has been talking to neighbors. We have a teeny, teeny lot, just a bit bigger than the footprint of our house. So the painters identified two areas (the kitchen and bathroom walls on the east and the bathroom and back hallway walls on the south) where they'd need to get into neighbors' yards to safely put up their ladders. I thought the condos on the east would be more problematic, because their side walkway is locked and the painters wanted to put up some plastic to protect our closest neighbors and we needed to talk to at least two different households. But, I was able to get ahold of six different people (our two closest neighbors, then the owner and three tenants for another apartment accessible by that walkway) within 24 hours and everyone was totally cool. I thought the house to our south would be non-problematic, because we've worked together before (on killing Acacias) and the work is quite far from their residence, but I haven't heard back from them at all yet. (They could well be out of town, their comings and goings and usage of the house have always been mysterious.)

Oh, and I moved lots of boxes. You see, the work is going to start with power washing the exterior, and the painters' contract notes that this can cause leakage, particularly on older windows. We *have* redone about 50% of the windows in the house while living here, but almost all of the windows that I'd piled up boxes under ... happened to be old windows. So they all had to be moved interior. (I've got one line of boxes under the newer windows in my office, and hopefully they'll be fine, but maybe I'll pushing them back a foot or so after I finish up work on Tuesday, and can have my office more clogged up.)

A few more bits of house work and we're done: interior painting; fixing collapsed drywall and a closet and fixing some ripples in plaster (also to be done by interior painters); putting up a new exterior light and taking out an unused light switch (to be done by an electrician on Tuesday).

Weekends continue to be one of my prime restorative times, especially if it's a Saturday when I can hike or bike. So this weekend I decided to head out to the largest park in San Francisco that I'd never been to, which is John McLaren, number 3 in the city (at 312 acres) after The Presidio (1480 acres) and Golden Gate Park (1017 acres). Big jump there, and of course none of these reach the size of the parks I regularly hike in like Tilden, WIldcat Canyon, and Redwood Regional Park (which are all around 2000 acres) — but still pretty big for an urban park.

So, I BARTed out to Balboa Park, which I found is a world of difference from the affluent Glen Park area, just one stop up. It's a bit more of a run-down urban area. Not bad, but occasionally sketchy and the bike routes were much rarer, despite the streets being pretty busy. I stopped and had lunch at a Popeye's that was amazingly busy.

The actual park (John McLaren, not Balboa!) is one of those urban parks that gets lots of practical usage. So, the ugly southside of it is all kinds of sports parks while the northeast side has a lake and playgrounds. But there's lots of attractive, quiet park in between. The very middle was the only bit that felt like wilderness. I did a hike on the "Philosopher's Way", which is a loop with some side paths here and there that runs from the middle of the park up around the north and back. It was some pretty neat hillside walking toward the middle, and then some quieter forested areas around the north. There was really an amazing amount of diverse terrain in a relatively small area. And oh, there were beautiful views of the city and bay whenever I was walking on one of the edges.

One of the neat things about the Philosopher's Way was that it had these big granite trail markers which just featured understated arrows. They were really easy to make out, and kept you going the right way among the park's many paths.

Interestingly, the Philosopher's Way avoided all the more trafficked parts of the park. So I had to go out of my way to see the teeny little manmade lake to the northeast and to cross over some of the "Hidden Bridges" (which were very nice, long bridges among relatively forested areas, crossing over streams and ravines). Also, to go the Upper Reservoir, the park's sort of other lake — and also the only place I saw a homeless person all day, in an experience totally unlike modern-day Berkeley. Just past the "No Swimming or Wading" signs, he was bathing in the Reservoir. I also investigated the "Philosopher's Labyrinth", another one of those little stone mazeways or spirals that seem popular in San Francisco. And then it was back to my bike and down the hill to Glen Park Station this time (because I didn't want to mess with the streets and neighborhoods around Balboa Park Station again).

Overall, it was nice to see a new neighborhood of San Francisco, and nice to see a new, interesting park.

I have no idea what San Francisco's fourth or fifth largest parks might be, but I've been to many of the largest green areas in the city at this point.

I don't think I've been out to San Francisco recreationally all year. That's in large part because BART does most of its track maintenance on the weekends, and this year this were maintaining track around West Oakland. That means that about every other weekend all summer they were doing bus bridges into the city. Spoiler: you never want to bus bridge on public transit if you can avoid it, and you especially don't want to while hauling a bike. So the couple of times that I thought about heading into SF for a Saturday, because it was warm and there wasn't a big event going on out there, I couldn't because of the bus bridge.

But, it's autumn so the construction is down, and it was unseasonably warm this first Saturday in November, and I decided to get out to SF while I still could, with my main goal being to bike up to Golden Gate Park and around it.

Standing on the BART platform, I was pleased to see one of the new BART trains arriving. There are just a few of them on the tracks, so this was a special treat. By some definitions.

Clean: CHECK. Ugly as sin with day-glo colors: CHECK. Lots of space due to lack of seats: CHECK.

I was most surprised by the lack of bike space, because bike space is one of those things that BART has been highlighting on these new trains. The old cars have two spaces for bikes, one by each set of doors. You can easily place one bike against the wall, and you can more delicately lean one or two additional bikes against that first one. Easy bike space: 2. Total bike space: 6. The new BART cars cut that in half, and though they now have racks, that doesn't make up for the lost space. You can in fact only fit two bikes easily in the three rack spaces because the third has to be squished in the middle, backward. Easy bike space: 2. Total bike space: 3. In other words, there are going to be a lot more people forced to hold their bikes on the busier routes. Thanks BART for thinking of the future.

(I took two non-new trains over the course of the day, and each time someone laid their bike against mine; if the same went on at the other half of the car, that's more bikes than the crappy new cars could support.)

The Park was great. I love Golden Gate Park because it's so big and lusciously green and has so much different stuff in it. I biked all the way through the park out to Ocean Beach, enjoyed the beach for a little bit because it was shockingly warm and not windy, and then biked back up to Spreckels lake (where I wrote for a while) and then biked up to Stow Lake so that I could hike up Strawberry Hill (where I read for a while).

It turns out that Strawberry Hill to home (via walking, biking, and BARTing) takes about the same amount of time as the top of Tilden Park to home (via walking and bussing).

In other news ...

We're now 14 months from our planned move to Hawaii, and that means I've started to see some lasts.

When I got my glasses from optometrist last Thursday, I told him I probably wouldn't be back. My next glasses would usually come no earlier than October 2020, which should be after we're well settled into our island home, and enjoying the fact that winter isn't coming.

When we started the always-hated daylight-standard time on Sunday, I realized that this would be the last time I had to face its full wrath. This year we get four horrific months of it getting dark while I work, but next year it should only be two, before we move to the land without clock resetting.

And as of today, I think I've voted for the last time in California, which may mean that was also my last experience of going down to my polling place and filling in a ballot, because Hawaii is testing out all-mail voting in Kauai, starting in 2020.

In yet other news, the work on the house next door that started while I was in Toronto (at the end of September) continues. They actually disappeared for two full weeks at the end of October, and we sat watching to see if their unprotected wood-framed back area was going to get rained on, but they got lucky, and the one storm that was supposed to come in during that time disappeared. Now they're back waking me up every morning, but gone by 3pm or 4pm. Weird.

Today, K. and I went out to the Legion of Honor.

This is always a bit of an undertaking, since it's out in the back corner of San Francisco and San Francisco's streets are slow moving and a pain to get through. But it was more of an undertaking than usual because of K.'s broken foot.

Fortunately, she has access to Paratransit, which got the two of us to and from the Legion of Honor, door-to-door, for just $19 each way. That's a bit more costly than public transit out there, but half the price of Lyft, and, y'know, possible for someone with a broken foot (and no car).

The Paratransit experience was ... not something I would usually subject myself to. They give you a 30-minute window for pickup and you have to schedule your time coming and going.

And the vans, oh, they're awful. Like no shocks and the seats were less comfortable than I'd like.

And both the drivers we had really, really, really wanted to talk.

But, like I said, transit for someone with a broken foot (and no car) gets a definite thumbs up.

And I actually did a lot of writing in the vans, even if it was a little uncomfortable.

We had tasty sandwiches for lunch, which I picked up at Whole Foods on my way home last night. Then it was off to the museum. We immediately walked back through the wing of post-Renaissance artwork, which is our favored side, to the Impressionism and post-Impressionism room at the very end.

That's about the time when I realized that this might be the last time we got out to the Legion of Honor.

I mean, we have almost two years left in the Bay Area. But our membership to the Legion of Honor and DeYoung ends right after our birthdays and so that'll decrease our chances of going out there from something-that-is-sort-of-interesting to if-there's-an-amazing-exhibit that we want to see. And it'd be easy to not have anything in that category for the next 23 months. I know there isn't between now and the end of summer.

So we took special care in the Impressionist room and really looked at all our favorites, and I took several pictures.

We'll be saying good by to a lot of things in the next two years.

The exhibit we saw was "Rodin & Klimt". Which was basically a Klimt exhibit that was for some reason smashed into their normal Rodin galleries, with a bit of extra Rodin sketches and stuff thrown in.

Gustav Klimt is awesome. Kimberly got me a print of one of his works some years ago, and I really like the style. Realistic faces, weird patterning, and art nouveau influences.

They didn't have a lot of Klimt, but they had quite a few pieces and quite a few of them were quite nice. The most surprising was one of his earliest works, which was almost photorealistic. Not necessarily my favorite, because it didn't have the other neat influences, but surprising and pretty.

I was also quite interested in the histories, which talked about his work in the Vienesse Secession. It was a radical departure from classic art, like Impressionism, but in Austria instead of France.

A nice exhibit.

Two catastrophes on the way home.

K. crashed a bit on our way out and hurt her knee and bad foot. Hopefully they'll be better in a day or two.

Then coming up Ashby from the freeway, we saw a dog hit by a car almost in front of us. The dog's owner came streaking out a second later and when she carried the dog off it was wagging its tail. So, surely there were things broken, but hopefully the dog is OK.

And hopefully that won't cast too long a shadow on an otherwise great day.

San Francisco, Saturday: Right-wing neo-nazi enabler with permit for nazi-enabling rally decides at last minute to move his rally to some place he doesn't have a permit for. Unshockingly, city, which had prepared for right-wing violence at old location, doesn't allow last-minute move to new, unpermitted and unprotected location. Was there magic thinking that neo-nazis could find new rally location and counter-protesters couldn't? Do neo-nazis perhaps have rally telepathy? Or had neo-nazi enabling leader just realized they had almost no turn-out and wanted to be able to blame their failure on mean, mean city? Possibly, neo-nazis just couldn't find parking in city, especially not after last-minute move. Neo-nazi enabling leader then goes on run for day, ending up in Pacifica before finally returning to city for rally he called. There, he finds 20-25 depressed racists (or racist enablers) in Chrissy Fields. Meanwhile, thousands of counter protesters march the streets.

UC Berkeley, Saturday. UC Berkeley Police decide they might like to control crowds this time, rather than allow free reign to arsonists and anarchists, so they block off western crescent where Sunday's anti-hate rally is to be held. And then they go so far overboard that they literally become the fascists that the protesters are protesting against. They ban numerous extremely dangerous objects from the western crescent, like water bottles, backpacks, and liquids that aren't factory sealed. Because free speech can only be truly free when its practitioners are naked and thirsty. Berkeley residents initially respond using their favorite method: they write aggrieved letters to the editor from their home offices, looking out over their multi-million-dollar views. Not that they were going to the protest any way. Because it's not like a Safeway is being rebuilt or anything.

Berkeley Civic Center Park, Sunday. Today's bigotry-support rally is inexplicably labeled "Against Marxism", as if that's some sort of political force in the US. They might as well be protesting against Sufragettes. Maybe they're just trying to cosplay alongside the counter protesters, whose anti-Nazi protesting could be straight out of the 1940s.

Berkeley Skies, Sunday. The helicopters are buzzing the city by 10am. I imagine "reporters" perched in their vulture-mobiles salivating, hoping for the ratings-inducing violence they were denied in San Francisco yesterday. When asked, Berkeley rarely fails to produce a spectacle on command, full of drama and violence, signifying nothing. And the news vultures know it.

On the Ground in Berkeley, Sunday. I regret the fact that Kimberly, a week and a half into a sickness, isn't well enough to escape into San Francisco with me, as we'd planned, but I'll find somewhere else to go after lunch, lest the constant buzz of the vultures for 8 or so hours raise my stress to a breaking point.

Hills above Strawberry Canyon, Sunday. I bake my stress out in the blazing kiln of the East Bay Hills. As I hike higher and higher the antagonist thwip-thwipping of the helicopters soon becomes a dull roar, occasionally drowned out by the susurruss of Highway 24. I stop to write. I hike more. I ascend ever higher and as I drop behind a stutter ridge, the helicopter pollution fades away. The heat blazes to 90. The tension sweats down my back. I eventually decide to loop up to the Tilden Steam Trains and back, mainly because I can refill my water bottle there. I really need a second water bottle for some of these hikes.

UC Berkeley, Sunday. So how do real people react to the UC Berkeley police's extreme fascism? They just refuse to enater the barricaded western crescent. Duh. Absolutely no one could have predicted that having such huge restrictions that a normal persona couldn't enter the "free speech zone" would result in people not doing so. Congrats UC Police, you have 3,000 people roaming the streets, totally uncontrolled and uncontained. Thankfully, these are the anti-hate folks, who responsibly protest according to the SPLC guidelines: away from the racists (and their racist enablers). So the UCPD's incompetency won't cause problems.

Hills above Strawberry Canyon, Sunday. I descend down some of the trails burned by last month's fire. The hillsides are dusted with white, and the path is covered with rocks. It feels like a metaphor for Donald Trump. The fire promised change, but all it did was burn away necessary vegetation, causing rocks to tumble down, creating a rubble-strewn commons. But that's not it at all, because Trump lied about everything he was promising before the election and afterward. A better analogy would be if the fire claimed there was no greenery above Strawberry Canyon, and then burned it all down, and you realized that the best you could hope for is that the greenery would eventually grow back to be what it was before Trump sullied the White House.

Civic Center Park, Sunday. The bad protesters are out at the Civic Center Park . And, I don't mean the racists (and racist enablers) because only about twenty of them show up. I mean the so-called antifa, who are our black bloc anarchists under a more publicly acceptable name. The fact that they come masked and armed to demonstrations really says it all. Predictably, they break into the park, assault people, and generally seem to create a riot all on their own. Bad news organizations call them far-left because the so-called reporters are far too stupid to understand that political beliefs do not run along a single line. It's these anarchists who have been the criminal drag on all of our Bay Area protests for the last decade. And they turn out to be the only actual problems in Berkeley today too. And beating up the racists, perhaps even the maybe-racists, that's a bad look. It lets them act like martyrs as they post their tear-filled screeds from their mother's basement. It maybe even targets people guilty of nothing more than stupidity or enabling of racists, neither of which deserves physical assault. Fortunately, the anarchists are outnumbered by a factor of ten or more, so pretty soon everyone goes to Ohlone Park to hear a sermon, and the whole day anticlimaxes just like Saturday in San Francisco.

In My Head, Sunday. My first reaction to these two days of failed alt-reich demonstrations is that white nationalists are really awful organizers, and that explains a lot about the White House this year. But a more optimistic side of me hopes that we've hit an inflection point. That the neo-nazis were morons to out themselves so publicly in Charlottesville with their zieg heils and their swatstikas. A year too late, so my theory goes, the more righteous right-wingers have realized that they're aiding and abetting awful human beings, and have decided to stop. So every right-wing demonstration since Charlottesville has been attended by just tens of people. Some have decided to demonstrate online instead, as pathetic as that sounds. Is it true? Time will tell.

South Berkeley, Sunday. I descend from the hills. The helicopters are gone.

A Night at the Movies (Friday: 23). Kimberly and I rarely go the movies, but Christmas is our definitive goto movie day, because that's what we did on several Christmas days in the '00s when we were keeping to ourselves. So we went a bit early this year, and saw Rogue One right after I knocked off work on Friday. Great Star Wars movie; one of the best. Great characters, great development. Yes, its tone is different, but it had a tone of sacrifice and danger that I think is missing from many of the core films.

The Journey Home (Saturday: 24). We got up bright and early on Saturday to go down to San Marteen for the holiday. That's been our pattern the last few years and it's been quite nice staying over and having Christmas with the folks. But it's quite long to BART down to Fremont, then drive to San Marteen: over an hour and a half. I keep praying for the southern BART stations to open, but Warm Springs BART is entering its third year behind schedule. It's apparently been built, but they're losing trains between Fremont and Warm Springs. Theoretically, Berryessa is going to also open in 2017, which is the exciting one because it's right next to many folks I know, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Tichu! (Saturday+: 24+). We often play games while down in San Marteen, and this time around I brought Tichu because the Wiedlins are big card-playing folks. Rob, my Mom, Bob, and I played a couple of games on Saturday, and it went over great. (Then Jason and Kimberly joined us for a game on Sunday.) Well, Bob had some rather humorous problems distinguishing the phoenix and the dragon; I'm not convinced he realized they were separate cards at first and he never quite figured out their scoring and use. But even with that, everyone enjoyed the game, and I believe multiple folks wanted to get their own copies. (In fact, my siblings later made up their own deck for New Years!) It's definitely going into my bag regularly for future South Bay trips (except that I need to get a fresh copy soon, as mine is pretty worn from ~20 games).

I Am the Ping Pong King! Ko-ko-kachu. (Saturday+: 24+). There is always ping pong at the Wiedlin household, and I managed to remain undefeated against Bob, Rob, and Jason. (Well, undefeated in two-out-of-three sets; two of them came down to the rubber match.) I'll also admit that two of my opponents were somewhat intoxicated due to the beer & pizza from just beforehand. Probably primarily from the beer.

It's Starting to Feel a Lot Like Christmas (Sunday: 25). Christmas morning at the Wiedlin house is fun and chaotic. Stockings for us kids and lots of presents that everyone is crazily opening their prezzies simultaneously. There was much loot, including a nice windbreaker, a nice jacket, some hiking shoes (all successfully tried out!), and a few games. Thanks parents and siblings!

Farm, Farm on the Range (Sunday+: 25+). One of the presents I got from Rob was Stardew Valley, a computer game that I'd mentioned, that he then ran out and gifted to me on Steam. I'd heard good things about this roleplaying farm-sim, and occasionally I play extensively through a game over my holiday break. This seemed like a good time to return to that old habit. Steam says I played it for over 20 hours, so it's definitely a success (and speaks well to my relaxing over the holiday!).

It's Starting to Feel a Lot Like Christmas II (Sunday: 25). At home, late on Sunday night, Kimberly and I had our own Christmas. There were more stockings (prepared by her this year, with just a little help from me because she was feeling time-crunched) and more prezzies. Nice Hawaiian shirts, a TARDIS mug, and more wonderful Kimberly-created bookmarks. Yay.

Hike Any Mountain (Monday: 26). On my Monday back from San Marteen I needed some restful, relaxation time, so I did my most common medium-length hike up in the hills behind us. I walk up to the rear of Strawberry Canyon and then loop back over the top of Panoramic Hill. It's about two hours, has a nice ascent, and great views. I also wanted to try out my new hiking shoes, and they worked great. No slipping, nor sliding, not even after I hiked down some places that usually give me problems.

A Night at the Movies II (Monday: 26). I got Kimberly a few DVDs for Christmas, and we watched one of them Monday night: JasonBourne. She was a big fan of the first three, and I'm happy to say we were both quite pleased with the fifth-ish one. It was nice to see Bourne's super competence expressed in a new way, through more thoughtful and tactical work. We had some problems with the pile of coincidences implicit in the main antagonist, but other than that, this was a fine movie. I have no idea why Rotten Tomatoes rates it exactly the same as The Bourne Legacy (the pseudo fourth movie), because that was a big "Who Cares?" while this was entirely enjoyable and provided some nice closure.

The MOMA Has No Clothes (Tuesday: 27). Imagine a room filled with black sand. On the opposite wall is a shattered mirror. Off to another side is a picture of a hand holding a bean, way up on the wall where it's hard to see. A voice intones deeply accented gibberish. Wait, there's no need to imagine, because this crap is actually an installation at the MOMA in San Francisco. AKA, the sort of crap that gives modern art a bad name. Also there, giving modern art a bad name: a pile of red, white and blue bicycles, a triptych of entirely white canvases, an entirely black canvas, and an entirely blue canvas. MOMA should be ashamed of displaying that sort of thing. But we also saw great mobiles by Alex Calder, interesting cityscapes made up of individual photos, some other nice collages, and a beautiful set of dodecahedrons made with string and some sort of metal. It was an enjoyable four(!) hours at the MOMA, but probably our last visit while we live in California.

It's Starting to Feel a Lot Like Christmas III (Wednesday: 28). Melody and Jared visited us on Wednesday to complete our trilogy of Christmases. We talked, we ate at Chevy's, and we exchanged gifts for gift cards.

Game On! (Wednesday: 28). This year I've mostly been coming home from EndGaming pretty early, because Kimberly has been going to bed early, but on Wednesday I splurged and told Kimberly I'd be home after she was asleep. As a result I got to play two long games: Orleans: Invasion and Key Harvest. Yay! It was a lot of fun!

Park Place (Thursday: 29). Kimberly and I like occasionally going out to Golden Gate Park, getting Andronico's sandwiches, eating them, and wandering around. So we did that on Thursday. I have a new appreciation for the park since I've been to New York, as it's so different from Central Park. It protects you from the city, whereas Central Park feels like a big bowl with city all around. Anywho, we walked around, and I kept getting turned around. It was fun. On our way out I climbed Strawberry Hill, and was impressed by the views.

On the Seventh Day He Rested (Friday: 30). After six days of running about, I mostly relaxed at home on Friday. Though I must admit I did a short climb above Clark Kerr (my 60-minute or so super-short walk up in the hills). And we ate dinner out. And we got groceries.

These Shoes Were Made For Walking (Saturday: 31). I had a casual morning on Saturday, but after lunch I decided to head out to Briones Reservoir, an EBMUD area that I've been wanting to explore for a while. Google tricked me into thinking Bear Creek Trail went right out to Bear Creak Road, but all that was there was an inaccessible fire trail. So instead it was another .6 miles up the road and 300 feet of ascent, which tired me out before the walk. The actual Reservoir is gorgeous with great hillside trails looping around it. And it was entirely empty due to EBMUD's policy of making it as hard as possible for people to use their trails. And best of all, there were benches every mile or so. I only walked about a mile and half out (then the same back), but I now really want to figure out how to walk the whole reservoir. It's 12.5 miles, or 14.5 if I don't bike up that steep hill, so it'll take some stamina and a full day. Maybe in Spring.

A Final Gift from 2016 (Saturday: 31). While I was out hiking, Kimberly was sickening with the flu. Thanks 2016, you rock.

Writing Like He's Running Out of Time (Saturday+: 24+). And finally, writing. In recent years, I've used my last week of the year to write really extensively, but this year (shocker) I decided to mostly relax instead. Oh, I did write whenever I was on a BART train, and there were quite a few. So I got a few histories done going to Fremont and back and bits and pieces on my other trips. But I'm probably a bit behind going into the new year. But, this post is done. My 2016 index for Mechanics & Meeples is done. My 2016 RPG year in review needs a double-check for important stuff and an edit and it's done. And then I need to see if it's possible to get a week ahead on my histories like I'd hope.

But carefully. I wouldn't want to lose my week of R&R.

Kimberly says that Labor Day is her least favorite day of the year. It's because of the block party, a loud, raucous affair with blasting music that takes over the next block around lunch time and continues through the day. I've long thought that the people putting it on are horribly abusing whatever permit they get from the city, because it's decidedly not a block party, it's a party to which they invite all their friends from the entire East Bay.

But there are some fights to be fought, and some not.

So today I suggested to K. that we should go out to Glen Park, and we did. We were out of the house before 10 and walking up into the park by 11 or so. We had a nice lunch from the overpriced but tasty Canyon Market that we ate in the park and then hiked along the canyon walls, a trek that was supported (literally) by the new walking poles that K. got recently.

We really had no desire to come home afterward, so after the hike, we hung out at a park/playground for a few hours, me writing and K. working on her iPad, then walked back the long way to 24th & Mission BART.

Ironically, the first time we went up to Glen Park was Labor Day, 2013. I didn't write about why we went that day, but obviously we were avoiding the obnoxious block party then too. Afterward, we did the same walk down through Diamond Heights to 24th and Mission, and I remember being really tired out by it. Not at all today — not by the climb up the canyon and not by the walk down to the Mission. So yay for improved physical fitness (particularly walking) over the last three years.

And by the time we got home the party had only an hour or so left to go.

The rest of the weekend I've been out and about too. On Saturday I walked from our house up to Lake Anza in Tilden via the fire trails above Clark Kerr and Strawberry Canyon. I used to think that Tilden was far away, so it's pretty great to to hike up there and to think nothing of it.

On Sunday, I mostly lazed around, but after dinner I did a quick (well, 100 minute or so) 5-mile hike from the south side of Clark Kerr to the UC Botanical Gardens and back.

It's really cool to have all those trails to accessible, so close, and offering so many different possibilities.

I've been doing plenty of writing, of course, working on three really tough histories this week for DMSGuild (and ultimately for my sequel to Designers & Dragons). I can't quite say they're about three major products for D&D, but they are about two major products, and one other that was deserving of a major history. They'll be up on DMSGuild over the next two weeks and total about 6,500 words between the three of them.

And I'm getting ready for a semi-surprise trip to British Columbia. Oh, and I'd known it was a possibility since late July, I think. C. idly mentioned it and I realized I needed to get out of the house the next day to get my passport renewed, since that was just 7 weeks out at the time.

Surprisingly, my passport arrived just two weeks after I requested it. That helped make things stress free, especially since I was a bit worried about my name change, which had never been reflected on a passport. But no problem. (Apparently.)

Then last Monday, C. confirmed to me that I was being invited on the British Columbia trip, if I thought I could deal with all the people for a full week.

The reason is a company retreat for the blockchain company that C. is now working at, and that I've been doing tech writing and editing for. I really have little idea what to expect, but I've liked working with them, and I'd liked to be included going forward, so it seemed like a good thing to do.

The venue looks beautiful, but as I told C., I hope I actually get to see some of it, and not just be stuck in a hotel the whole time. (He says there are breaks in the schedule, but we'll see how it all works out.)

Anywho, I've been trying to get books read and histories and reviews and APs written before I leave; starting tomorrow I also need to get more serious about getting a few Skotos things out of my hair.

And then it'll be off into the blue for a week away from home. Busiest year in maybe forever, since they'll be my third major trip, after Hawaii and New York.

Lucky we aren't ending up in Hawaii for Christmas too, like we'd originally considered.

I have been mostly burned out since returning from New York late Tuesday. I've been successfully catching up on my Skotos work and even doing a few larger tasks, but my evenings, when I usually work on my own projects, have been mostly lazy times.

Oh, I've been reading. And watching some TV. (And getting groceries and eating out with the wife.) But I typically spend a few hours or more writing and/or editing my own stuff in the evenings, and I just haven't had the stick-to-it to do it.

Apparently spending six days working hard from morning to night take their toll.

My work days in Manhattan looked like this: wake up at 7am; out of the house by 7.30; work until 5 or 6pm; walk home, explore, and get home by 8pm; Skype with the wife; talk with Chris; write a journal entry; get into the shower by 11pm; read a chapter or two afterward to despaz the mind and try to get into bed by midnight.

So, no wonder it tired me out.

Today K. and I were free from work and other obligations, and so we decided to picnic out at Glen Canyon Park. It's one of our favorite semi-distant destinations because it's very near a BART station, but it's nonetheless a large, beautiful park that feels like it's out in the middle of nowhere. (That's doubtless helped by the fact that it's indeed in a canyon.)

We picked up our picnic (sandwiches & chips & desserts) at the Canyon Market, per usual, hiked out to where we know there are picnic tables, lunched, then hiked on.

The hike through the canyon itself is always beautiful. K. describes it as jungley, while it reminds me of Ed Levin Park above Milpitas, where I sometimes went to a day camp when I was growing up. The foliage often completely enshrouds the path, but at the same time it's very well-maintained.

(In fact, in our occasional trips to Glen Canyon, over the years, we've enjoyed seeing it improving. It's not just that they're building new facilities [which I could care less about, though it'd be nice if they had some actual bathrooms]. It's also that they're improving the trails, especially the hillside ones.)

K's ongoing knee problems kept us from climbing up the hillsides, but we did drift up a bit on our way back, allowing us to see down into the jungley canyon.

Overall, it was a fine Memorial Day, though our trip back was a little annoying. As usual lately, BART had some of their lines down for the holiday weekend (because what better time is there to screw up the BART lines then on holidays?), but they were starting them back up for the Warriors game. So we hit the transfer point at 19th Street in Oakland to find one train entirely missing, presumably because they'd just turned the Fremont line back on. So we waited for 21 minutes for what should have been a timed transfer (or close to it).

But we had our current read-aloud book with us, The Aeronaut's Windlass. We ended up reading a total of 3 chapters over the course of the day.

Overall a nice day, and a nice weekend (between a totally lazy Sunday and some fun Castle Ravenloft Board Game playing on Saturday).

Hopefully I'll be a bit recovered coming into the new week.

Kimberly and I both had a busy rest-of-Thanksgiving.

On Friday, we did our own things. Unsurprisingly for me, that meant a bike ride. I opted to bike the Lafayette-Moraga trail, which I haven't in some time. It's a beautiful trail that runs south of Lafayette and starts ascending into the hills as it approaches Moraga. There are some really nice vistas (and a nice waterfall, though I haven't seen water falling in some years). There also seem to be more autumnal trees on the trails east of the hills, which was another reason I was eager to see it.

Any who, it was a nice ride. I took Moraga Way back, which landed me in Orinda. I was surprised how short the whole trip was. 16 miles or something. That used to be a major ride, but no longer. I was also surprised how much ascent there is. I'm not quite sure the altitude of Lafayette, but I hit a height of 777 feet on Moraga Way, just above Orinda. That would be much of the way up to the ridge line if I were riding the hills on this side.

When I got back to Berkeley, I picked up K. from the movies, then we had dinner at Cancún, then we had groceries at Safeway.

Fun times.

On Saturday, Kimberly and I each found ourselves without our regular Saturday gettogether, so we opted to go out to Golden Gate Park together. We took BART to the N-Judah to an Andronico's south of the Park, where we picked up sandwiches, soda, and chips. Then we hiked in to the Park, to Fern Grotto, where we planned to eat our lunch.

Unfortunately, Fern Grotto was criss-crossed with cautionary tape and warnings about construction. I looked in, and the Fern Grotto itself looked fine. So we ducked under the tape, wandered into the Grotto, and ate on one of the pleasant benches. Squirrels looked over us the whole time, sometimes jumping toward us through the trees in little military formations before ducking back. But, we were unmolested as we ate (and later did some writing).

The construction seemed to actually be going on at the AIDS Memorial Grove, down at the end of the Fern Grotto, so sadly we weren't able to visit there.

We wandered the east part of the Park for a while, and finally decided to pay the admission to the Conservatory of Flowers — a little five-room hothouse erected in the 1870s. It was pleasant as always (and the warmest I'd been in weeks). I love the central room, with its high ceilings and stained glass. I love the water flowers room with its big pool. This time around the special exhibit was about the Pan-Pacific Exposition of 1915, and there were lots of models of it all. Such a pity that none of the Pan-Pacific buildings survived other than the Palace of Fine Arts (but it was all built poorly with temporary materials, so no surprise). Any who, neat little exhibit.

We exited the Park, then walked along the Panhandle, then decided to walk back to BART. That means we walked the Wiggle to Market. By the end of the day I was pretty tired! (Just over 10 miles or 23,000 steps according to my Fibit.)

Today was more restful. Well, other than a walk out to Holy Hill in the afternoon, then a walk to Ici for ice cream (and/or sorbet) in the evening.

But definitely less hustling around than the other days of the holiday.

So that was the holiday.

There was lots of eating out. There was lots of walking. There was lots of time spent with Kimberly. And there was a little bit of writing done.

Today I attended the first day of #RebootingWebOfTrust and I'm exhausted. This is Christopher Allen's design shop to kickstart the next generation of decentralized trust technologies.

Here's what I learned.

BART Sucks. It's been a long time since I took BART during rush hour, and I'm pretty shocked by how jaw-droppingly horrible it's become. The train was almost 20 minutes late in the morning due to "a police matter at the Plaza", and that was unshocking. It seems like about 1 in 3 times I ride BART nowadays, there's a notable delay.

However, the absolutely jammed trains were surprising. Very tight standing room only all the way from Berkeley to Embarcadero. Coming back was even worse, though I got a seat that time, because I was bright enough to walk up to the Civic Center before boarding. (Boy does Market Street go to Hell between Powell and Civic Center.) By the time we got to Embarcadero they needed those Japanese workers who cram people onto trains. (The driver eventually had to tell people to get back and wait for the next train.)

BART literally should be running twice as many trains during rush hour as they are, from what I saw.

Decentralized Trust People Rock. The workshop was a collection of people who were not just smart, but nice, and able to work in groups. I was astounded by how low the ego was for these top-class security and privacy folks. They were happy to listen to peoples' ideas and really think about them before producing a collaborative work that everyone contributed to. Co-operative work is often hard, because people take over groups, and though there were certainly leaders, they weren't controllers to the same extent.

San Francisco is a Nice Place to Visit … The conference room for the workshop was up on the 23rd floor of Three Embarcadero Center in the Financial District, and it's got an absolute stunning panoramic view. You could see the whole Bay, from the Golden Gate Bridge in the north to the Bay Bridge in the south, and even the Richmond Bridge off in the distance. The Marin Headlands, Angel Island, Alcatraz, Treasure Island, every bit of it was visible … and very clear thanks to the rain we had yesterday.

But on the way back to BART I was reminded of why I'm happy I don't live in San Francisco. Because the streets were just jam-packed from Embarcadero to Powell or so, reminding me that SF (unlike Berkeley) is a real city. Then you start hitting the edges of the Tenderloin, and the crowds clear out, but what's left isn't that pleasant.

So, beautiful city, ugly city.

Security & Privacy Are Fun. There are a lot of fun topics under discussion. Stuff related to reputation and trust, PKIs and decentralization. Though I find this sort of all-day-around-people sort of thing very exhausting in and of itself, the topics were something that kept me interested. I'm looking forward to seeing the papers that come out of this.

One more day in San Francisco tomorrow.

Met up with the Appels yesterday: my dad, Mary, Melody, Jarod, and new member, pup Koloa. (Kimberly was unfortunately unable to join us due to current struggles with meds.)

They picked me up at about 9.45. The plan was for 9.30, but they'd typed the wrong address into the Waze app and so Stephen Colbert (the current voice of Waze) correctly directed them to an incorrect address 12 blocks away, and then they had to drive across Berkeley, fighting with busy streets, to get back. I mention this mainly because overreliance on modern mapping apps was a theme for the day.

(That's foreshadowing.)

Our first stop was Land's End. That's the northwest corner of San Francisco. Kimberly and I have hiked there before, though that's five years gone I suspect. It's a great trail, very well-defined and pretty heavily used, but with beautiful views of the Golden Gate.

Unfortunately, it took us almost two hours to get from our house to Land's End. The Bay Bridge was awful (though my dad got to ride on the new bridge for the first time), and then the drive across San Francisco involved buses constantly pulling out at us and vehicles constantly illegally double-parked and causing us grief. We only got to Land's End around 11.30 or so, and even then there was a delay while my dad and I got some quick-energy from cookies and Mary had a whole salad for lunch (because she'd eaten breakfast at 6am).

The trail was nice, as ever. My dad was less-than-thrilled with the 10 or so flights of stairs, right in the middle, when you rise and then descend before heading on to Eagle's Point. But, there was nice scenery, nice company, and a dog having fun. It was great. There were also pictures taken along the way here and there.

At Eagle's Point we turned around and came back, with one change on the way back. When we got the Labyrinth, Mary, Melody, and I hiked down to see it (while Jared and my dad and the dog rested at the top). The Labyrinth is just a little spiral of stones that sits out on one of the promontories along the trail. It was recently destroyed by )*(#@_(#$ vandals, but we were happy to see it built up again. Melody and I each walked the Labyrinth and added a stone to it. Then it was back up to the main trail, which is a bajillion stairs (about 20 flights all told going to the Labyrinth and back). When I walked up those steps some years ago when Kimberly and I walked it, I was exhausted, but this time, I felt great. So, I'm clearly in better shape than I was several years ago. Yay, biking and Fitbit. (I turned out to have sore legs today though, presumably from the ~50 flights of stairs that I walked all together while out on the hike.)

And that was pretty much Land's End, the hiking and active part of our day.

Melody found us a nearby deli to have lunch at (a successful use of mapping technology). There was a bit of a wrangle about finding somewhere with outside seating so that Koloa could join us (another continuing theme for the day), but I came up with a solution to that: we got our sandwiches, and then drove a couple of blocks over to Golden Gate Park. After driving a few blocks through the Park, we found a picnic table, with parking nearby-ish. Voila!

(My dad was impressed with how well I knew the area, and I told him that though I don't get to SF much, when I do I'm walking or biking, and so I get to know the territory much better.)

The sandwiches were good. Three of us had Dutch Crunch, and it was good. There were chips too.

I was tempted to title this entry, "If you value your life, travel not to Point Reyes." Because that was our next destination. My dad had wanted to see it because he never had, in his decades in the Bay Area, and Jared and I had both glanced at Google Maps and seen that it was just an hour from Land's End.

So it seemed reasonable.

What we hadn't really realized is that Point Reyes is vast and empty. Though part of it is just an hour from San Francisco, you can keep driving and driving and driving and find nothing but roads for hours.

Our road to Point Reyes started when highway 1 diverges from 101. I saw a really cool bike trail there that seemed to be running on a wooden pier through a marsh or something. Looking at the maps now, I think it might have been a trail around Coyote Creek near Sausalito, but I'm not sure. 1 runs to the coast, and then up the coast. Unfortunately, early on it's way up in the hills, so you don't get great views until you drop down to Bolinas Lagoon (but that was beautiful). And it's full of twists and turns. Fortunately, there's was Bonine all around at lunch, thanks to my dad's supply and the supply I pilfered from Kimberly before I left.

Eventually we diverged from 1 and started heading deeper into Point Reyes, toward the Point. We were past an hour into the trip by this point, as we were well into the Park, and also often going slower than the speed limit on windy roads. (Stephen Colbert kept telling us there were traffic jams ahead, and as best I can figure, it's just because many cars in that area go below the speed limit, because they don't want to die.)

Coming up on two hours, we were deep into the Park and getting close the point, and zeroing in on some signs that promised beaches and a lighthouse. We finally chose Drake's Beach mainly because it promised bathrooms. On the way, the Waze app largely failed, telling us that we were driving through fields well before we got to the Beach.

Drake's Beach was cold and gray and very windy. The visitor's center there was closed, even though it should have been either open or just closing (because it was drawing up on 5pm). The bathrooms were open, though, and huge. There was a changing area that you could have fit a couple of king-sized beds in. Given the conditions of the beach, it was presumably for changing into parkas.

A lady walking her service dog on the beach told Jared and Melody not to walk their non-service-dog, lest they get ticketed. She suggested South Beach instead, which I picked out on a nice map on one of the walls of the area.

On the way away from Drake's Beach we saw the bizarrest thing: a huge elk head poking up over a hillside. There was presumably an elk attached. It had antlers from here to eternity. It seemed so over-the-top and larger-than-life that I figured it must be a statue or something, but Melody says it moved. (Perhaps it was just being blown by the gail-force winds.)

It was another mile to South Beach, where we find another wind-swept, frozen, post-apocalyptic wasteland. This was a pets-allowed beach, so Koloa frolicked around after her 5 or 6 hours in the car to that point. Fun was had by all. Except Mary, who hid in the car to avoid the gail.

We probably spent a total of 15-20 minutes on those two beaches. Tops. Then it was back in the car to escape from Point Reyes.

There were map-nav problems on the way home too, because we'd lost cell signals about 5 miles before we got to the Beaches. We hoped we could get signals back before we had to make the decisions about which way we were going as we got back toward civilization. Fortunately, my AT&T eventually picked up (and so we used Google Maps instead of Waze for the navigation on the way home).

We were fortunately able to take a different route home, which cut straight across the peninsula before dropping us back on 101. It was much less winding, and I found it much prettier. That's because the landscape was much more what I think of as typical California. Lots of hills, mixed green and brown.

Strangely: there were big rocks deposited here and there. Some were man-sized, some much larger. I don't tend to see rocks like that dotting the landscape in our local parks, so I was curious what was up with that.

And then we hit the Richmond bridge, and there was more horrible traffic. Because, apparently, bridges suck when you're not biking them (but they also suck when you can't bike them, which is currently the case for two of the three Bridges we rode over on Friday).

By now we were trying to figure out the meal-with-a-dog question again. Someone suggested we could maybe take something home, and I called Kimberly to get her OK on that. An hour and thirty minutes or so after we left South Beach, we thus pulled up into Oscar's, where we bought burgers, chicken sandwiches, and fries to take home.

Kimberly had the cats locked up by the time we got home, so Koloa was allowed in the house.

After the meal, though, I let Callisto out, and she was pretty OK with the dog. She kept sniffing him and laying down to watch him (safely out of reach!). She never seemed particularly concerned or worried about him, even though he's 4x her size. Well, except when she got stepped on by a backing-up Koloa, and then she went and hid out in the Dining Room for a bit, to clean herself.

So that was the big day with the Appels. The company was great and Land's End was great, but there was way too much driving afterward. My dad was pretty apologetic about picking Point Reyes, but none of us were too upset about it. Jared and I had both looked it up and raised no concerns, and as I said, it wasn't some place I would have ever biked too.

We all can say we saw Point Reyes now, and probably won't again.

I was dead exhausted by the time the family left around 9pm or so. Too tired to do anything but read, and much to Kimberly's surprise, I then went to bed early (something I pretty much never do, because I can't fall asleep).

I'm still worn out today. I had to have a fruit soda to get my energy up enough to role-play, but then managed to stay alert and awake for the afternoon. (Hopefully that tiredness is from the day full of driving and socializing, but Kimberly appears to have come down with a cold, so I may now be fighting that off too.)

Yesterday the weather report said that the East Bay would be in the high 80s. That's very hot for us East-Bayers, so I decided to do my Saturday biking adventures in San Francisco. It's, I think, just the 4th day I've spent biking over in the City, and just the first time I've really dived into the heart of the City, rather than just riding the Bay.

I started out on Market Street, which the City Council has been working to quiet for years. The most recent change was just a few days ago when they outlawed turning onto Market Street from 3rd through 8th. The result is indeed a much quieter Market, with most of the traffic being buses, taxis, and bikes. Apparently Uber and Lyft were becoming a big problem on the street, especially for bicyclists (because they were regularly sitting in bike lanes) and they're pretty much gone now. Lower Market is still challenging because you have to dodge buses, but it wasn't the horrifically busy street that I remember (just bus-sy).

Further up Market Street, past 101, you duck behind a Safeway and then you're on the Wiggle, a bike route that even has its own PSA and theme song. It's pretty much the route between Market and the Panhandle. Nice, quiet streets with very clear markings that eventually bring you onto a protected bikeway that leads into the Panhandle, and beyond that Golden Gate Park. It's all very well constructed, and exactly the type of safe bikeway you can have on city streets with careful thought. (It was also the source of Civil Obedience from bicyclists in the last week; a local precinct started aggressively ticketing bicyclists on the Wiggle, so bicyclists started showing them what happened to traffic if they put their foot down at every stop on the Wiggle as the cops were requiring. Traffic snarled to a halt. Two full-stop demonstrations, and the clueless cops went back to what they're supposed to be doing, which is ticketing Vision Zero violations that actually cause traffic fatalities ... like cars not stopping.)

The Panhandle is AOK. I don't think I've ever gone its full length before, but the best part of the trip came when I got to Golden Gate Park. I don't like how many cars fill Golden Gate Park. I've never liked that. But a mile or so into the Park, the streets were blocked off for automobiles, and then it got pleasant. It got even nicer a bit further when my path diverged from the main road. Though the parts of GG Park right next to the roads are very crowded, you get just a quarter-mile from parking, and the Park becomes much quieter, because the people who use GG Park largely don't like to actually walk. And, I love the quieter, darker parts of the Park, which is just so full of nooks and crannies. My favorite stop for the day was the Polo Fields, which have a track around them that bicyclists train on. I decided to do a lap, and it was beautiful, fast surface. Even weirder was the Angling & Casting Club, which really looked like it should be a Roman Bath or or something. While in the Park, I actually got lost twice, once because of construction and once because I just got confused and took the wrong turn (ending up back at the Polo Fields instead of the Windmills). I love that the Park is big enough to allow that sort of thing. By the time I got to the Park's western extent, the temperature had dropped enough that the rest of the day was totally pleasant.

I had never realized that there's a long strip of public land on the west side of San Francisco that runs from Golden Gate Park to the SF Zoo. That's what I rode as I headed south. It's unbroken, with sand all around. Lots of people are crossing from the beaches back to their cars or houses. Often the dunes are too high to see the beach, but occasionally I got to see long vistas of the waves crashing into the sand. Ahhhh. The Bay is just nothing like the real ocean.

At the Zoo, I took a left and went here and there and ended up at Lake Merced. This is a big public land in the southwest corner of San Francisco, which had always caught my eyes on the maps. But it turns out to be pretty disappointing. Much of the green area there is actually surrounding golf courses. Then, the actual park just isn't that well constructed. There's a big lake, but it's far enough down from the park that you often can't see it. There isn't even a path around the lake at lake level! And there's too little seating and way too little shade. (Hello? Trees!?) I did find one of the scant trees and sat against it, overlooking the lake, writing for a while.

Afterward I went to Fort Funston, mainly because it was right next door. This used to be military defense, but it's now a beach and dog park. I locked my bike against a street sign (no bike parking at one of the entrances, darn it!) There were some nice trails here and there, and some interesting remnants of the base. Unfortunately, some of the park's main paths were ripped up for reconstruction, and apparently have been for some time. So, those was much walking in sand, and I was wearing the worst shoes for doing so. (Never, never, never will I ever again buy shoes with mesh across the top to create airflow; I got rain in my shoes last winter, sand in my shoes in Hawaii, and sand and dirt in my shoes yesterday.) Nonetheless, I enjoyed walking along the cliffs, then there was a viewing platform that I stood entranced on for a while, watching the beach and the views.

And that was pretty much it for the day.

I came back through Daly City, which was the only place that I had a jerk honking at me to get off the road. I find that ignorant asses like that are more common when you get outside the SF-Oakland-Berkeley area, so I wasn't surprised that I met one yesterday in Daly City. From there I looped back up into San Francisco, finally hopping back on BART at Glen Park. (And 'lo and behold, bike lanes reappeared as I moved from Daly City back into SF.)

The whole route was slightly under 25 miles in a big circle from Embarcadero, out to Golden Gate Park, down to the Zoo and then around to Fort Funston, over to Daly City, and then back in to SF. There were no hills of much note in that route. I did drop down as low as 50 feet or so and got as high as 400 (though I might have exceeded that on foot when I hiked around Fort Funston). The weird thing is that I circled all the big hills in San Francisco: Mount Davidson, the Twin Peaks, and Mount Sutro. I just stayed clear of them the whole way.

It was a nice ride with GG Park being the highlight, but I enjoyed seeing the more farflung places. And it was definitely cooler than the East Bay, especially when I was up against the Pacific, as I was most of the afternoon.

Suddenly it's Birthday. / The longest holiday. / When they say 'Season's Greetings' / They mean just what they say. / It's a season, it's a marathon / Mature eternity / And it's not over til it's over / And you end the yearly spree. [Apologies to Loudon Wainwright III]

I sit amidst the debris of birthdays past. Bags and tissue paper sit about the room, while birthday cards look on for the mantle. The week of birthdays is finally over for Kimberly and me.

It was a week of food. Top Dog on campus for me, a pleasant evening of reading aloud in the growing shadows beneath Stephens Hall. For some reason K. laughed every time she talked about how I'd decided on Top Dog for my Birthday dinner. But a Chicken Apple Dog with Chili sounded like what I wanted most in the world that evening.

Then tonight there was an early dinner with the Wiedlins at Chevy's, which everyone seemed very happy with. Well, everyone except Jason and Lisa who sadly did not attend, due to illness.

But, the alternative would have been worse: "Guess what we got you for your birthdays? VIRUSES!!! Happy Birthday!"

And yesterday was the pièce de résistance. K. and I spent the day in San Francisco as a birthday celebration with much eating.

We got fancy-dancy sandwiches from the Canyon Market to eat at Glen Canyon Park. We've enjoyed the park a few times, set down in a ravine which makes the rest of the City invisible, and this time we were pleased to see many of its renovations complete. There's now actually an entrance to the park and even better there are now nice new stairways climbing out of the park up its steep sides if you exit further down the Canyon.

(And, we did, climbing the entire canyon wall to get up to Diamond Heights. It was better than scrambling up scree. After that, we hiked several blocks to get to a bus line which took us to a bus line which took us to ....)

Ghirardelli Square is often the highlight of a day in San Francisco. What can I say? Chocolate fans! We also enjoyed sitting out at Aquatic Park, enjoying the view and the Bay and the breeze (and reading aloud). As I told K., the stone bleachers looking down on the park remind me of the public works of '30s and '40s and a sense of civic community from that time that's now gone. I can imagine neighbors coming together and sitting together on a balmy night in 1949 and feeling like they were part of something greater.

As for us, we had seagulls that I encouraged K. to feed with the other half of a fancy-dancy sandwich that otherwise would have gone to waste (Spoiler: They loved it!) and some rotten kids smoking pot and blowing it up toward us. (Smoke your pot? Cool. Give me a headache with your smoke? Not cool.) They were other folks too, but each group an island unto themselves.

A clear spring day / In a bright and balmy March-time; / We are alone, / Gazing from our stone bench to the cove below / On a salty silent shroud of calm blue water. / I am a rock, / You are an island. [With apologies to Simon & Garfunkel]

Fun Flash Fact: It looks like Aquatic Park was indeed a WPA project in 1936-1939. Thanks, Mr. Roosevelt!

Our Saturday in SF ended with a dinner at a hole-in-the-wall fish and chips place called The Codmother. Very good. Too much food. We gave those leftovers to homeless folks at the end of Market, rather than to seagulls.

Of course our birthday week also included one-quarter of a crappy play on Wednesday, and then a visit with the Wiedlins today which was somewhat more extensive than just eating. There was also talking and presents and cards.

I actually have multiple gift monies that I need to spend. I'd already decided to order some nice collections of comics with money from my dad and Mary (some "Morning Glories" deluxe hardcovers, and something else), so perhaps I'll look at books with money from my mom and Bob.

I rather spontaneously took my bike out to San Francisco yesterday and had a beautiful day out there and in Marin. It's really a gorgeous city and it was a bright and beautiful day.

The Green Paths. I started out at Embarcadero and biked around from there to Crissy Field. I was quite struck by how much effort SF has put into its bike paths since last time I biked through North Beach. There are now consistent bike lanes from the Ferry Building to somewhere around Pier 39, all painted bright green. It gets dicier from there, as you can ride up on the Bayside paths if you want, but those are clogged with tourists, or else you can ride the angry streets. (I did the latter.) Still, the trip out there was very nice, with my only problem being get stuck behind slow moving tourist bikes or bike rickshaws when the adjacent street was so bumper-to-bumper that there was no way to get around. I actually hopped off my bike at one light and walked my bike along the Bayside path to get ahead of slow bikers.

The Presidio. After most of Crissy Fields I turned my bike up into the rest of the Presidio. My goal was the Presidio Officers Club which has recently been reopened with a museum and an archaeological lab there. It was actually somewhat disappointing. There was a nice timeline of the Presidio with some artifacts and beyond that it was fun wandering around the building, which is almost all open to the public. But a lot of it is set aside as an event venue now, with ballrooms and such, and those were just big open spaces in the middle of the day on a Saturday.

The rest of the Presidio was very nice though. I have barely been there since it was turned over to the National Park System in 1994, so it was really nice to see what a great urban park it's becoming. I rode the Presidio Promenade back and forth and would love to explore some of the other trails, particularly the ones going through the "historic woods".

Golden Gate. One of my goals was to ride out to the Golden Gate Bridge, and I did! I'd actually tried to make the ascent to the bridge several years ago, on the day of Jason's bachelor party, and totally failed. Today it was no problem: I just rode the Presidio Promenade the opposite direction of the Officers Club, and I was there. Granted, it was an easier ascent than the one I tried a few years ago (straight up from Fort Point), but it was also zero problem.

The ride across the Bridge was totally beautiful. I think I walked the Bridge many years ago, but I've definitely never ridden it. The northern path is solely designated for bicyclists so you get to bike out with open ocean and the actual Golden Gate to your left. Very nice. I was a bit amused how the trail got all clogged and chaotic at each of the towers — not just because you have to make sharp turns to go around them, but also because all of the tourists stop their bikes there to take pictures.

Marin. In Marin I went down a steep path which takes you to Fort Baker, below the Golden Gate. It's a former army base right on the Bay that's been nicely refurbished. Much of it is now a "luxury resort", with the old army buildings turned into luxurious places to rent. I'm of mixed emotions over that — now just the commercialization, but the upper-class commercialization. It somehow seem wrong to turn a working man's, blue collar army base into a resort for the one percent. On the other hand, it's probably better than them being totally abandoned like the eerie, empty barracks on Alameda or just south of Golden Gate Fields. There's also a kid's discovery museum back there and a teeny little beach. I sat at the beach for about an hour, doing some writing and watching dogs chase toys into the Bay.

I would have loved to travel on to Sausalito from Fort Baker, as it was just two miles on, but I'd had a late start to the day, and decided I didn't want too much of a good thing.

The Journey Home. I was a bit worried about getting back up to the Bridge from Fort Baker, as the road was pretty much straight up — something like 200 feet of ascent in a pretty short distance. However I managed it riding, then it was back across the Bridge. I was amused as I dropped down into the Presidio, seeing all the tourists who looked like they were dying, trying to get their bikes up to the Bridge. (I'd passed many of them on the way up originally, but now I could see their contorted faces.) Then it was along the Bay. I eventually turned south at Polk Street, riding back to BART through Russian Hill, Nob Hill, and (unfortunately) the Tenderloin. I was happy to see more bright green bike lanes around the Civic Center and also on Market.

Surprisingly when I got off BART in Berkeley, I found K. and her friend L., who'd had lunch in the City, wandered it widely, and had come back on the same train as me. So K. and I ended up walking home together.

Sore. Today I've discovered that my legs are shockingly sore. That used to happen sometimes when I rode, but it's been a while. I guess all the climbing did it — up to the Presidio, up to the Bridge twice, then through Russian Hill and Nob Hill. Apparently if I lived in the City, I'd get much better as hill biking!

Profile

shannon_a

Erzo: Home Page

April 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Lettuce for Crossroads by branchandroot
Resources: P r o l o g u e

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jun. 6th, 2025 04:35 am

Entries tagged with san francisco

Last Dance in Berkeley

Berkeley: Day Three

A Free Day in the Bay

In Which I Get Wet, Walk Stairs, and (of course) Visit Kimberly

In Which I Bike from Richmond to San Francisco

In Which .... SHIT

In Which I Bike the Bridge One More Time, as Days Count Down

In Which I Say Good to Tim (the Toolman) & Hello to John (McLaren Park)

In Which I Visit SF and Begin Finalizing

In Which We Visit the Legion of Honor, Perhaps for the Last Time

In Which Neo-Nazis Fail to Find the Bay Area for Two Days Running

What I Did on My Christmas Vacation, by Shannon A., Age Forty-Something

Laboring Weekend

Lazy Daze

More Thanks Giving (Or: Into the Forbidden Grotto)

The Web of Trust, Day One

A Day in the West

San Francisco Adventures

The Birthday Week

San Franciscan Dreaming