this is a dummy entry, delete it

So many comic book milestones for us! This weekend we completed our transfer of our subscription from Lee's to our new (closer to our) neighborhood comics shop - Isotope. James is a nut, but he's a lot of fun. His store is cozy, he throws a great party, and as an added bonus he runs his store on Macintoshes - allowing me to feel warm & fuzzy about exchanging support of one-another's livelihoods! We took Courtney with us; she stated emphatically that there weren't any hip & cool comic book stores like that in Las Vegas - we had to explain that there weren't really any other stores like Isotope here - it's unique. (To be fair, Courtney quite likes her comic book purveyor; but it's apparently no Isotope!)

In other news, on Saturday we also took Courtney on her inaugural visit to the Exploratorium. Fantastic. Don't miss the exhibit on seeing & sight - make sure you try the game where you have to count the bounces of the basketballs. Oh, how i love the Exploratorium....

How very, very cool. I was gleefully verifying that gastronome had popped to the top of MT's recently updated list, and started poking about some of the other sites in the current list. I found one word - a site that gives you 60 seconds to write about a word - freeform, stream of consciousness, whatever comes out of your fingers. Neat!

I have the words "It's beginning to look a lot like GM" incessantly swimming through my head to the tune of "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas". I guess it's just one of the occupational hazards of working at Apple, with MacWorld SF just around the corner from New Years. Over the last week or so, i've had an unusually large number of early morning (9am, 8am) meetings to attend - which means that at this time of year, i leave the house before dawn, and watch the sunrise as i drive down 280. The light has been fantastic - i've seen three very different sunrises, which cast such differing light on the gorgeous trees and hills and landscape alone the highway. It's always lovely to be shocked back into appreciating the astounding beauty that becomes part of your regular everyday background. I have the feeling that now is a good time for me to approach many other things in my life in the same way - remember just how many wonderful things i am surrounded by, every day.

And maybe that will be easier when this next version of our software is live. ;)

Y'all need to get out there and vote today if you haven't already.

The San Francisco ballot is HUGE this year. 20 local propositions and 7 state, plus the usual slew of elected offices up to State Governor, yielding a total of four big ol' ballot cards. Some fairly major issues are on the ballot: $13 billion bond issue for improving school facilities statewide, $1.6 billion to repair and quake-proof the water supply infrastructure for the Bay Area, and the like. There are also some pretty trivial issues in question, like "do we change the way the city decides which newspapers it publishes official notices in?"

I don't really know how it works in other places, but here in SF we have a Board of Supervisors, one each elected from 11 districts of the city, who share power with the Mayor. It's all pretty leftish here in the city, and you have to start thinking in the finer grain of "liberal" versus "progressive" versus "radical", but the Mayor is perceived as being owned by special interests, while most of the supervisors tend to populist representation of their neighborhoods. We live right on the edge of the largely-Hispanic Mission district, and up until this year were represented by district 9's Tom Ammiano, the gay stand-up comedian who had a pretty good run against Willie Brown in the last Mayoral race. However, the district boundaries were just revised, and a section of the border between districts 8 and 9 moved over a block. We're on that section of the border. We're on that block. So we're suddenly part of the Castro-Noe Valley neighborhood, upper-middle-class yuppies and guppies. Since the odd and even numbered districts elect their supervisors in alternate elections, we wind up voting for our Supervisor in two successive elections due to the redistricting, which feels kind of like we're getting away with something.

The redistricting itself is kind of amusing. According to the "Task Force on Redistricting" web site, the factors taken into account in setting the borders include:

• US Constitution & SF Charter rule requiring districts equal in population,
• Federal Voting Rights Act rule against diluting the voting power of minorities,
• Consititutional rule prohibiting use of race as the principal factor in redistricting,
• SF Charter Requirement to keep "communities of interest" in the same districts and use adjusted census data where available, and,
• 2002 Election Task Force goals of considering "propensity to vote" and maintaining neighborhood boundaries, commercial districts and grouping related institutions.

The second and third items are my favorites. You can't split an ethnic neighborhood and dilute the voting power of minorities, but you can't split the city up on racial lines either. The solution is to tack a more or less complete ethnic neighborhood (like the Mission) onto a more or less complete white neighborhood (Bernal Heights) and call that a district (District 9 in this case). Seems to work OK, but what do I know? You can see the changes made here — see that little sliver between 8 and 9? We live right in the middle of it.

Wow.

What a fantastic celebration this year. In addition to our personal altar, we participated in our neighborhood festivities.

We had a few friends over for dinner, joined in the processional (next year, better costumes! Large paper maiche skulls, please!), admired the community altars and lit some candles to add to them, ran into friends, viewed the altars and art exhibits at the Mission Cultural center, and then repaired to 16 Hill to relight our candles and share some hot chocolate.

Things i really liked:
The personal-percussion. The laughter. The families. The children painted with skull face-paint. The community. My neighborhood. The gorgeous altars. Remembering my dead, with joy. Looking at death, and letting go of the fear. Hot chocolate and good food and conversations with friends. Walking in the streets; watching dancers in the 24th & Mission intersection. The joy, full of knowledge.

I think you're likely to get a lot of short entries while i'm here. 8)

Last night we actually had dinner in the hotel - Hideyuki picked, and it was a fantastic chinese restaurant. Course after course of deliciousness. I went out for a quick walk (10 minutes, maybe) afterwards, but then i succumbed to bed - it being fiveAM body time finally caught up with me. (I went to bed around 10pm local time.)

I woke up at 5am local time here. It was clear i was going to sleep no more - i could have gotten up to go to the fish market, but given the day i have ahead, i'm glad i knew i could sleep as long as i wanted. So i got up, put on the house yukata, and brewed a cup of tea. When i'm done writing, i will shower and head out for a walk before meeting Tim and Frank for breakfast at 8am local time. I really want to eat some noodles, one way or another, today.

My reading page's makeover is complete. And even more-or-less up-to-date... though if i remember more of what i read over the last four months as i clean up the house, i'll definitely add them in. For bonus points, i set up the movie review page the same way for Russell - now he just has to get back to writing, and import his old entries!

That, a sucessfull book shopping trip down Valencia, and a lovely late lunch at Ti Couz with friends made for a lovely day. Now i just have to hang on to that feeling until Wednesday night....

So, to follow up on this entry about seeing three representations of the number 23 on Mission sidewalks at 23rd, I discovered that on the opposite corner of that intersection are two more mosaics: one reading |||| |||| |||| |||| |||, and one with three staggered rows of 8, 7, and 8 dots. Two on one corner, three on the opposite corner. No significance, I'm sure.

While i was there for all the wrong reasons, watching fireworks from the roof of my building at work was pretty cool. We were able to see about 8 different shows (the De Anza show being the closest and thus the largest), of varying intensity and size. I think we saw the Great America show, the downtown San Jose show, the Shoreline show, and we think one of the others might be the Santa Clara show. Most of them kindly held their finales during different minutes, so we were able to watch several end-game blowouts.

I've seen lots of fireworks in my time, but never just stood and slowly rotated, watching so many at once. Pretty neat.

On the way back from getting burritos at El Farolito (among the best burritos in the neighborhood, in a hole in the wall at 24th and Mission), I noticed some mosaics in the sidewalk on Mission at 23rd. I don't know how long they've been there. I'm not very observant most of the time.

They're each about 4 feet by 12 feet. The first one reads: "10111". The second one reads "XXIII". The third reads "=+(symbol which looks like an equals sign with a third, slightly longer, stroke between and parallel to the other two)".

I'm sure there's no signficance to this.

This camera is so tiny, Russell is afraid he's going to swallow it. It's *perfect*.
(For the record, the Amazon camera had an attempted delivery on Wednesday, and it was deposited into our hot little hands Thursday morning. The Dell camera has not yet arrived.)

A picture of my coffee cup this morning.
Goblin is sultry.

Later: Recommended recipes for a Singapore Sling.

My good deed for the day:

Russell, my father and i were walking home from a tasty dinner at Ti Couz this evening around 11. On Valencia, the block before our turn onto Hill street, we noticed a cat running around on the sidewalk, chatting with us.

We were in front of the used hardware/appliance store, and the cat was one of three who lives there. The resident cats sit in the window (often on disconnected hot plates!), and we greet them daily. The middle-sized one of the three, who wears the red harness, chatted us up and said hello. She's quite friendly.

We know the cats are let out sometimes in the morning, with their owner around - but they're definitely indoor cats. We were a little worried about her, and she didn't mind cuddling up a bit - so after knocking fruitlessly, i noticed the phone number on the sign above our head.

I called the number with my celll; we heard the phone ring maybe 5 feet in front of the window. In hope, i left a message. In the middle of speaking("Hi, my name's meriko, i live around the corner and we were walking by, and one of your cats is out here, it's about 11 o'clock at night...) a woman picked up, saying that they'd be right down, that her husband was very worried about the cat. We heard them coming down the stairs, and released the cat back to her people, who were very happy to see her.

I love our neighborhood. I'm glad the kitty is safe in her home tonight.

So. While i've clearly been a laggart with my writing, everything else seems like a whirlwind these days. Things should return to normal with the close of WWDC at the end of next week, and i'll be sure to start reporting regularly again - if nothing else than for my sanity. In the meantiime, things have happened:

• We had a lovely dinner party with our friends Nicia, George, and Forrest. Food was great, conversation better, and zombie games the best.
  
• Russell's contract was cancelled. Want to hire him?
  
• My friend MikeM has had a Kubrick quote in his sig for a long time: "If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed." Russell and i went on a Kubrick-fest these last few weeks - Barry Lyndon, Eyes Wide Shut, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining. Jeepers, that man had range.
  
• My boss resigned, making some of my professional problems more tractable, if more work. Oh, and i'm not technical enough to be an engineering manager. Or something. (Granted, he wasn't technical enough to tell me HOW i wasn't technical....) Point. Moot. But amusing.
  
• Speaking of work, our project took a hairpin 180 in focus, so i've been spending a lot of weekend hours down in C'tino.
  
• We had our carpets cleaned. Hooo-boy, does it improve the room score. Frequent visitors might not recognize the living room carpet. We definitely need to hit it and the stairs more regularly.
  
• We're working our way through the new 'hood restauarants at Guerrero and 22nd - Luisa's, an italian joint (good food, inexpensive, nice folks - same chef as the now-gone Pastaio on 16th), Tao Cafe (Vietnamese with French influences, inexpensive, fantastic food - highly recommended. Good veggie/vegan options too. Still have to try the pho.), and La Focaccia (Pizza, need to get there soon). I'll properly review them when i've been a second time.
  
• WWDC is this week. I'm on the run all week, and we'll miss our symphony this Friday. Anyone want our tickets? We're NOT missing the Josh Redman trio on Saturday, though.
  

My 'main billboard' (the one you see at the first stoplight you encounter, exiting 280N onto San Jose Avenue) is usually something tedious and boring - O'Douls new bottle colour, vote for me, and other sundry things i really don't care about. A few weeks ago, the billboard was taken over by an ad i think is just brilliant - especially for San Francisco. The billboard is black, with big white sans-serif letters, and a solitary yellow box of a border. It says: "The SUV backlash officially starts now. miniusa.com" It makes me grin every damned time i pass by it.

i'm not sure i would have understood - except Andy has been obsessed with the new minis. He's not the car guy in his relationship - it's David who gets Car and Driver, and goes to the car shows to ogle the new models. But Andy loves the new mini, so i'd heard about them. They're terribly cute - and optimal for San Francisco. Somehow, though, they push the same button that the new bugs do - a tiny economy car has been revamped and remodeled, and suddenly costs what my Acura did? Seems a little odd. Then again, if it makes you happy, what's the problem? And all that said? I still can't wait to see them cruising the city.

I've been spending a lot of time on 580 this week. (See caregiver & vigil, below.) I've been noticing this very strange set of billboards - in SF and in Oakland - not all the way out towards Livermore. I've seen three of them. I visited the site they quote, and it's a very stock, normal site - no reference to the billboards at all.

And the billboards just seem so ... sarcastic? sardonic? Something like that. The three i've seen:

Billboard #1 - in SF, just before boarding the bay bridge.
Head South.
Hit LA.
Get a fun augmentation.

Billboard #2 - just after you get onto 580E from the bay bridge
Head South.
Hit the theme parks.
Get a little loopy.

Billboard #3 - on 580W, mid-Oakland
Head South.
Get to San Diego.
Rediscover your wild side.

So odd. The site? www.visitcalifornia.com. I wonder what the SoCal billboards say...

Still trying to get into the working at home groove. I don't feel like I'm accomplishing enough yet. It's not like I don't distract myself with researching not-really-on-topic things when working in an office setting, though. The guilt-pressure hasn't yet built up enough to really drive me yet. Maybe using the laptop makes me think I'm on leisure time and I need to sit in front of a desktop machine to feel productive.

And then there's the cat. Goblin was incredibly fussy this morning. I fed her and threw her a couple of Pounce treats and cleaned her litterbox and explained to her repeatedly that, no, I wasn't going to leave the house and abandon her all day. She's finally apparently tired of crying at me and is now being lazy.

But I made some inari today, and since I completely miscalculated the amount of rice to make, I had to use it up rolling some random sushi. So not only did I make twice as much inari as I could eat, I now have approximately a kajillion cucumber rolls -- getting stale in the fridge. In meriko's words, "that sounds... appetizing."

We finished watching the first season of Buffy last night, and followed it up with the La Femme Nikita DVD. The subtitling on the DVD doesn't match the subtitling of the VHS version that I'm familiar with. It also has some weird translation choices that made me unhappy -- apparently-arbitrary changes of number, and idiomatic insertions/deletions that I thought unnecessary or just plain bad, even with my knowledge of French, which requires metric prefixes like "micro" and "nano" to quantify.

And there's the goddamned CD player, which used to whine and wail all the time, and which I've been threatening to take to the shop for years. I finally took it to the shop, and $140 later, it still whines and wails. Damn it. Damn it. Do I take it back to the shop and try to reproduce the problem for them, and try and argue that they should re-fix it for free?

Anyway.