small change

one dogged doggie

Normally I don’t take the dog for walks. Since I had no say in getting a dog, or even choosing this particular dog, I decided that the responsibility for her care goes to the people in this household who had brought her home. Those people would be the younger son and the spouse. But today is an exception, since the spouse had to leave town unexpectedly for a day, and the son is in school with other commitments also stacked pretty late into the afternoon. So there I was then, this morning, leash in hand, with the dog panting and ready to head out.

I had plans to take her down on a leisurely stroll on the bike path by the creek, where she would have had plenty of chances to socialize with her doggie friends, as well as sniff along the benches and bushes galore. But when I opened the car door, she balked. Nope, not her chosen route for the morning, she seemed to say. I’ve had more than my share of having to convince stubborn people, stuck on an idea, to change course, so I was fresh out of steam to go through the same process with dog, even if every dog handler in the Universe tells me that I should have stood my ground. Instead I just let the dog walk me up the hill. It didn’t take long to figure out why she chose to go this way. Sniffing may be the cat’s meow, but trying to spot squirrels in the oak grove along the ridge where the road took us the best treat for a terrier mutt bent on displaying her ferocious speed, even tethered on a leash. We must have passed the grove just as the squirrels themselves were busy with their morning constitutional, since there seemed to be quite a little crowd of them tempting Dixie with a well-aimed rustle now and then.

Some walk it was for both of us then. It’s afternoon now and we are both enjoying a well-deserved siesta.

 

And no, there is no picture of me from my siesta...

catching up

I don’t know where these days have gone, but it’s already Thursday and it’s suddenly July. Since I last posted about the scrumptious meal at the Can’t Fail Cafe, it’s been feast and famine on a lot of other fronts. On Sunday, we went to the Framers’ Market, where I bought a flat of strawberries, which I promptly dehydrated, hoping to capture the sweet essence of summer in the small bites.

I used all 9 trays of the dehydrator for this batch. I thought I would be set for months for nibbling on strawberries, but my younger son had other plans for these morsels, ones that involved eating huge handfuls of them at a time. I may well have to go to the market again and repeat this process with the strawberries all over again.

On Monday night, I started to feel ill, and by Tuesday I was hit hard with a wild case of food poisoning. All of which made it difficult to navigate (because it did feel like being lost on stormy seas) through my day. Posting was out of question in that state. Then, suddenly it was Wednesday, and what was there to post about? That I had been ill?

It’s quiet this morning, except for the odd chirp outburst of birds I can’t really identify, and dogs yelping and barking somewhere over the ridge. The trees around the house are stilled in sun. There is a sense of suspension, an in-betweenness that both opens and closes the spaces around me.

Then again, maybe I am still not recovered from whatever hit me on Monday night.

out to lunch

During the last few months most Saturday afternoons the spouse and I ended up in Oakland and Emeryville, over in the East Bay. A mere 25-minute drive form where we live, and yet, we might as well be in another country. That is exactly what I love about living in the San Francisco Bay Area. You drive a few dozen miles in any direction and you are truly somewhere else, not just in another town with a totally different character, but in a different climate, too, since temperatures can vary as much as 20 degrees from place to place, with skies turning from swealtering sunny to grim grey on account of fog that rolls randomly over the hills and through the Golden Gate.

During our outings in the East Bay, we passed Rudy’s Can’t Fail Cafe often, but today we stopped to have lunch there. This eatery is a stone’s throw  from Pixar Studios, which explains the odd combo of geeky-trendy and definitely well-tattooed regulars who hang out in the place. That and the fact that just about everybody in there had to be under 30. Now, I consider myself pretty geeky and, sometimes, trendy, too, even if I have no tattoos to show for either. The trouble is that I have been feeling like this, "with it," I suppose, pretty much for 30 years, so faced with the genuine article (an actual crowd of 30-year-olds), suddenly I felt very old.

Luckily, a few sips of the “Pressure Drop,” a tasty combo of Guinness with a shot of espresso, took care of both the pressure to be young and that dark drop in my mood. If I thought that people came to this cafe to bee seen or because it was the trendy thing to do, once I dove into my food I knew that the draw of the place had to be the hearty and very tasty fare. That the walls around the booths are lined with Barbie-like dolls in a band of blue light and all proclaim to be Rudy makes perfect sense, since good food like this can’t fail when it comes to appreciating the inner Rudy in us all!

The cafe’s website features a series of photos that illustrate the ambiance and the clientele pretty well, it seems to me.

parenting for the birds

Midday today I was having coffee and a scone outside of Peet’s at Bon Air Center when I noticed a gleaming little black starling eying me from a shady spot on the ground. Sucker that I am, I immediately broke off a few smallish chunks from my scone and threw them on the ground nearby my table. The little starling seemed to have hurled itself in an instant near the biggest chunk of scone on the ground, and within seconds, another bird, slightly larger and grayer than the first one appeared right behind it and struck up a chirp in an annoyingly insistent tone. The little black starling, hard at work at breaking up the chunks of scone into smaller pieces stopped in mid-peck and headed straight for the braying bird behind it, with its beak filled with morsels.

To my amazement, the black starling started to feed the bigger bird, and went on doing this for minutes, hardly stopping to feed itself between packing the bits of scone into the bratish bird’s beak. Which, by the way, in between being fed, also pecked at bits of food on the ground.

The whole scene was eerily evocative of parenting styles in Marin, and I suppose, most of the Western world these days. Overgrown offspring with beaks wide open and aimed at the vast skies and harried parents with heads to the ground scrounging for the next meal that will keep their offspring tethered and at the same time lost to the ways of the world.

the other shade of green in marin

I peruse craigslist for job postings every now and then, just to keep up to date on trends in job openings and pay scales. This morning, on the part-time list for the North Bay I came across a listing for a position that required fairly extensive programming skills in areas that cover Apache, Python, DB2  JavaScript, CSS, and so forth. It also called for "superior creative and innovative problem-solving skills."

And the pay for such a resourceful and broadly skilled programmer's services? $15-$20 per hour.And no benefits.

I know of cleaning people and gardeners (who wield leaf blowers for the better part of an hour) who make more per hour than this post is offering.

Then again, I also know that the people who offer this kind of pay for such work can outsource the work itself to India for a lot less than $15 per hour. 

Another posting from today is for an opening as an editorial assistant to the CEO offers $12 per hour and a 30-hour week, with no benefits, of course.

For some time now I had the feeling that wages offered for job openings in Marin are much lower than in the majority of the other counties in the San Francisco Bay Area. Marin is the home of some of the best-paid people, who work elsewhere, or live off their trust funds and investments. Of course, all this is just a hunch, and I would need to crunch some numbers and watch the trends more carefully if I were to make the case as fact, rather than just opinion.

Art by the Lagoon

Marin Arts Festival: the sky through a hoop
Originally uploaded by alembic

On Sunday, a balmy June day, if there ever was one, I told the spouse and younger son that we are going to the Marin Arts Festival. This outing was one way to avoid launching the dreaded decluttering process in the garage. Then again, I was also hoping, rather secretly, that this tour might inspire me to reuse the stuff I’ll have to sort through sooner, rather than later.

The festival is held on the lawn by the Lagoon in the Marin Civic Center. The building is one of my favorite landmarks. It was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who died before constructions was completed. Every time I drive by it, its golden structure topped with blue domes makes me think of California captured and contained in an idea made concrete. California as an abstraction, I suppose.

The festival was lively and varied. There was art of every sort, from the whimsical to the practical. With two stages located strategically, there was plenty of entertainment too, from belly dancing to blues. And there was food and wine, of course. And there was the crowd, too, some of whom carried on, dressed to the hilt, as if they were their own creation, a piece of living art.

 

If I came away from the festival with inspiration for the clutter, I did not do so knowingly. That’s because, after awhile the bounty of so much visual input shut my senses down in self defense.

At the edge of the festival, by the lagoon, I saw a number of big families enjoying picnics. I can’t even recall how many years it has been since I went to a picnic. So, if inspiration was to move me to do something, it’s to plan another diversion from tacking the clutter, this time with a picnic.

More pictures from the festival posted on my Flickr page.

my navigator

She never gets ruffled, exasperated, or furious. Always in a calm voice, my Android navigator, tells me when and where to turn. She was our companion in the rental car that ferried us across the more mysterious parts of Boston, neighborhoods we would have never seen, had our family vacation not turned into a family emergency of sorts. 

Yesterday afternoon, when there was another family emergency, the spouse’s car wouldn’t start in the garage of the Berkeley Bowl, I asked her to kindly navigate me there. She obliged, in that mechanically soothing voice of hers. She’s not supposed to have emotions, I suppose, but I did notice that she was so much more accurate with her distances here in California than she was back in Boston, where, if we had heeded her counsel about turning in a certain number of feet, we would have missed our route. Could it be that she’s as glad to be back in California as I am?

If only she could help me navigate my days now, as well as help me map how to construct a map of order from the cluttered terrain of this house. “In two hours go down to the garage, make a left turn and start chucking out the crap from the first shelf to your right.”

Yea, right. There is an idea to chuck.

homing in

We’ve been back home a week now. All the laundry from the weeks of travel has been done, folded, and put away. The fridge has been restocked with fresh food. The bags of accumulated mail has been sorted and filed. The house no longer thrills with the sudden weight of the deeply familiar. Once again, all I notice are the things that are wrong with it. Instead of a sigh of relief at being home, I am sighing over the slights that I believe keep the house from being home.

notes from midair

As we flew home from Boston to San Francisco, a few nights ago, I made some notes in flight. Since I wrote in a mostly darkened plane, my writing is almost illegible, but obviously, back there in midair, I thought I had a few important things to say. I even took a photo from the plane, just before we reached night’s domain, having chased the light for more time than a day’s allotment of it. Anyway, here are the notes:

Going west, the one direction that feels natural to me, back into the light that hangs on past the limits of the day set back east. The skies are halved and held by a sash of electric red that cinches the blank night of what’s below the plane to the hourless day above -- another night, its dome bolted by the random grid work of the stars.

I am watching Pretty Woman on the small screen of the seat in front of me.  A movie I didn’t like when I first saw it [back in 1990]. But right now, I really like it because it is taking me across time, the way this plane is taking me across space. A past with the allure of the future. A past in which grit is gold dust blown in from the future.

Like Julia Roberts in the movie, I am young again, my head filled with dreams, just as big as hers, though my legs are so much shorter, and my hair a third in volume of her mane. Back then, in that time little did I know how wide open the horizon was and how narrow was that sash of dreams that cinched my hopes and plans.

So here I am, dreaming again. This time, it’s the present, with the allure of the past with its gold dust, and the mysteries of the road not taken.

 

Update: Interesting notes on the pre-rpoduction of Pretty Woman at Wikipedia, listing all the actresses who turned down the role of Vivian because they considered the script and role sexist and degrading to women. also, the original idea for the film was a dark one, and not the fairytale that it became in the hands of studio execs.

home again

We’ve been home for days. For so many days now that it seems like we’ve never been away. Just this morning, I seem to have finally joined my almost-rested body in spirit too, not to mention the same time zone, finally.

Since we have arrived, the skies have been perfectly blue. While we were away, the hills have turned a pale yellow, but the trees and bushes are still deeply green from all the rain we have had this year.

The last couple of days, the fog has been rolling in, driving the cooling winds over the ridges, moving whatever stale air is left out of the valley. I am home, settled in the familiar summer breeze.