Weekends
Being a “live-in-SF” bay area person, you meet certain… challenges… in planning your weekend. This is how mine evolved:
— conversation with Mom about going to her house, and parents coming to mine, in a kind of cheap vacation swap. They have a nice pad in Monterey, so we would have both gotten the benefit of having a vacation without spending any money! Problem: Dad wanted to do his retirement job. They are celebrating 46th wedding anniversary: amazing! She’s going to postpone it for the Oscars! Sad.
— conversation with abother townie about golfing. Weather prohibited it, and then we hung out for like 12 continuous hours on Friday.
— convesation with a neighbor, consisting of about six phone calls, about either
1) seeing a movie (I had to beg off as I got behind on work) and
2) seeing the Oscars.
a) problem with her TV: she can’t really host a TV night since her sister is living in her living room
b) I don’t get any reception, and my TV is about 12 years old with ridiculously high contrast. We thought of the other person on the email who has a nice TV-living room setup, and interesting commetnary on the movie people, but she hasn’t responded.
c) discussed going to a bar to watch. bad points: extra calories, good points: more social than living room.
d) decided I’m not that interested in watching the Oscars after all.
— can’t bike to the Mission to test new bikes, as it’s raining :(
— Continuing this weekend is the: White Elephant Sale benefitting Oakland Museum. Must go next year. Oakland museum is one of the best museums in the Bay Area, besides being very tied to the community, it’s got a really good California art collection. The permanent collection has the miner, ona horse, with six-fingers. For some reason I adore this painting, will try to find a link to it. Friend bought a Disco book at the Sale and is now selling it for more than 300$. Yes, there are some good finds there, and it benefits a great cause.
— conversation with another friend about upcoming theater events, next week: 4 Adverbs by Daniel Handler (and we know various email addresess for him – showing the 6 degrees of separation rule, or something.)
Ended up: scrapbooking, doing paid-work, work on the reading I have coming up, and playing video games. Yee-ha!
Sometimes being in the hub of so many events, you get a kind of overwhelmed feeling and you need to cocoon.
Cover Bands
I saw an amazing cover band at Slim’s Friday- cover of U2. I think that’s the most cover-able band in the world. Simple setup, good guitar, hot lead man, I mean, what can go wrong? The belly dancing on stage was odd, and great.
Pakwan was TEEMING with people Friday night. Mostly all of which were East Asian, and some were honkie like me. I did the dumb thing of calling on the bridge to order pickup, then realizing I didn’t have my wallet all day (I get really forgetful when I’m stressed). Drove home, and realized stress and hunger was making me a BAD DRIVER so I caught a cab back to Pakwan and just sat there and ate. Cars are dumb to have on weekends, in downtown SF. Restaurant nearby that has the best name ever: Kebabistan. As yet, it’s not on SF’s citysearch. I think it’s on Jones, half a block up from O’Farrel.
Scoring Free Newspapers
I don’t want to write about it because I don’t want everyone to do it, but I know there’s only about 11 people who read this, so whatever. You can read any newspaper, for free, at the Ferry Building public area near Peet’s. I’m addicted to going here after the gym and getting either a bento box from delica-rf, or a Peets au lait. Yummmm. Also, the Asian Weekly at Pakwan is a damned good read, and had an interesting take on Bush’s visit to India from the Muslim perspective. There seems to be a very Pakistani bias to the Asian Weekly, but this is a recent insight.