Category: local color

  • Summer

    I walked along the ridge between Tennessee Valley and Mount Tamalpais last Saturday, after a barbecue in Mill Valley. I was in a short-sleeve shirt and was completely chilled afterwards. The wind from the coast- damp fog speeding along, comes over that ridge and sweeps down into the Bay. I’ve been on a boat right…

  • tagclouds

    Ah, very cool. Created from here: Get your NSID from Flickr (view source on a photo page, search for “nsid”) Paste it into here, It will generate all of your tags, then it submits it to another site that generates the tagCloud. Neat!

  • Gazpacho

    Inspired by Top Chef I’ve changed some of the ways I cook. Like, I stop reheating things from Trader Joe’s. I made this dish that had my book club drop-jawed that I had made it, and hadn’t… brought something from Trader Joe’s. We have a rule that you can only bring food mentioned in the…

  • Green Parrots

    The reality of living in North Beach: noisy parrots. They swoop by the place where I work, sitting next to my balcony, and make a horrendous clatter. They’re really noisy. I mean, really noisy. But when you’re hiking up a long winding staircase to the top of Russian HIll, you’ll turn and suddenly confront a…

  • Old School

    I felt like writing an old-fashioned blog post. The photo above is another one from the Cooper-Molera adobe in Monterey. It’s architecturally a blend of Mexican/Californian and New England. Like Cape Cod meets Baja. I’m doing a million things, and doing nothing. Moving in molasses. I have an article due for MarketingProfs, and two big…

  • Social Lives (or the lack of)

    Sitting at Grand Cafe on Thursday night with a visitor in town, we were in the corner booth, and she asked me what kind of social lives were in the City. Her English is usually quite good but she just got off of a long flight and was wiped on the 26th awake hour of…

  • Taking Time

    Someone I don’t know that well, but moved to North Beach right around when I did, Jackson West, has been blogging about North Beach on Curbed SF. He says, On a bad day, it’s like living in an off-brand corner of Disneyland. On a good day, reading Frank Norris in a claw-foot tub older than…

  • Movies

    I added 3 iMovies to this site- all local color kind of SF, documentary-style things. Check them out. The 1-minute ones are more “moving pictures” as in studies in neat stills, and sounds. The cab ride is a kind of snapshot of going through town, to music. More movies are at video page on this…

  • gridswap & mornings

    I’ve been working for a long time on: gridswap. I took this script: drag & drop from the god of all things DHTML and UI: Walter Zorn! My goal was to get people to be able to pick up and drop books from month to month in a yearly calendar. The complexity is that the…

  • Everything’s Backwards

    The drivers here go up Jackson, then let the break go and do a nifty backwards careen at an angle into the garage. The brakeman here is telling me, “Everything seems backwards, doesn’t it.” Because I was walking backwards – giving the legs a break- and their car was going backwards. I’m almost ready to…