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Seattle to SF

 

This was going to be a long, long day. Due to our extra day in Seattle, we were pondering the idea of driving all the way home without an overnight stop. 820 miles of freeways, mountains, Portland, Redding, and more.

 

Back through Washington and back through Oregon (where I finally managed to photograph the Failing Pedestrian Bridge) and back into Eugene (which may be the single whitest place on earth). When we passed from Oregon into California, Oregon thanked us once again. I love a polite state.

 

Long drives home after long trips are always a little depressing. You have all the work of driving with none of the fun to look forward to. Hate ’em. But I love that Mark apparently has a masochistic streak which kept me from having to do any of the actual driving. I netertained him as best I could.

 

By the time we hit Buz’ Crab in Redding, we were pretty much worn out. And we still had a good 3 1/2 hours left to go. But lots of fried fish offered that extra bit of strength necessary to complete the trip.

 

We made it home. Alive and somewhat worse for the wear. We slept. There may have been dreams of Portland and Seattle, but we were probably too tired to notice…

Home

Home safe and sound. Lots of pictures and trivia to follow. But that will come later…

Love ya, baby. Did you ever consider becoming a long distance truck driver?

Post-trip

Four months into the year and I’m finally no longer catching myself typing “2001” every few days or so. I think this is a very good thing…

  • Many things on my mind tonight, some of them weighty and some of them less so. I’m a little worn out after yesterday’s 820-mile drive (even though I wasn’t driving) so I’m not going to try to dive into them. But I’ll offer some highlights for later inclusion. Maybe…
  • After this trip, I’m convinced that Seattle is not only a more liveable city than San Francisco, but also a more attractive one. It looks better from a distance, and now I also realize that it looks better close up.
  • Portland is no slouch either.
  • I really desperately need not to live in San Francisco anymore. And soon. I know I’ve been singing this song for a couple of years, but the music’s getting much louder lately.
  • I was a little apprehensive about traveling with a companion. I needn’t have been. It rather makes me question that vow of solitude I took many years ago.
  • This semi-annual migration to and from Daylight Savings Time is just plain stupid. Arizona and Indiana have the right idea; they never bought into it.
  • I’m rather excited about this.

Enough. Gonna go read one of my new books for a while. Trip pictures and stories may start tomorrow if I don’t have to write any rants about how things went to hell at work while I was gone…

Back to Work

Why yes, now that you mention it, things DID go to hell at work while I was gone. But not quite as badly as I expected. One of my co-workers at least has the exact same allergy-generated laryngitis and phlegmy throat thing I developed mid-trip. And here I thought I was special for having gone to Seattle and picked up some special malady uniquely related to the vegetation of the Pacific Northwest…

Speaking of which, Seattle seems to have its own Embarcadero Freeway to deal with…

And thanks to all of you who are allowing my vacation to last just a little bit longer. Only one piece of legitimate email so far today, and even it didn’t require a response. Wow…

Phallic Gourd

I was reminded again tonight that — assuming you’re not using a vegetable brush –there’s almost no way to clean squash without looking vaguely obscene in the process…

Mmmm. Books.

After an annoying day at work following a somewhat sleepless night, it was great to see that the Book Fairy had dropped by my house while I was on vacation, showering me with Herb, Zippy, and Hitchcock…

Thanks Adric. You are my hero today…

These spammers, on the other hand, are not. So much for that fantasy that all Candaians are polite and nice and literate. What’s so difficult about understanding the statement “if you use this contact form to send ads, form letters, or threatening material, you WILL come to regret it”?

Garden variety spammers are bad enough, but the ones who come into my site, look for the contact form, presumably read the page which leads to it, and STILL paste their bullshit into the form and hit “submit” really annoy me. They get special treatment for being both idiots AND assholes…

Insomnia and Soccer

Two insomniac nights in a row. Maybe it’s because, after 37 years, I somehow finally got used to sleeping curled up next to someone after doing so all last week. Anyway, tonight I stop working by 8:00, plop down on the couch, watch Tippi Hedren bat away at those birds for a couple of hours, and go to bed shortly afterward…

Working on a new site. The great thing about freelance web design is that you get to learn a little bit about a lot of widely diverging topics, from the Gilmore Girls to Brazilian soccer to pan-channel wall signage…

Malls

Seems another city is engaging in a discussion about removing its ill-advised downtown pedestrian mall from the 1960s. They’re dropping like flies all over the country, from Winston-Salem to Chicago, as municipalities realize this well-intentioned attempt to compete with the suburbs actually did little more than make Main Street more desolate than it already was. And Fresno’s is even among the liveliest of the survivors…

But San Francisco drags out the notion of closing Market Street once a year or so. Since we’re so “different” and “special” here, it’s naturally assumed that any idea which has failed miserably everywhere else in the country will magically and mystically succeed here if it costs a lot of money and inconveniences a lot of people. And especially if it involves making the city look just a little bit more like Disneyland…

Yes, I know I’ve written about this before, but I never cease to be amazed by this san Francisco smugness which says that we can never learn from the mistakes of other cities. We’re only allowed to MAKE the mistakes so other cities can learn from US. Some would call this visionary. Some would just call it wasteful arrogance…

Interesting time-waster for today. Cool photos. Many of which are disintegrating…

Productive

Productive day. I got a lot done on the new client site which is this week’s project, and a lot of updating done for another client. And I now have my video masters back, so you will see pictures of Seattle, Portland, and points in between soon. But probably not until after the weekend, because I’m off to Fresno in the morning…

One sentence fragment. Two sentences starting with conjunctions. Bad first paragraph. Bad second one too…

On a semi-unrelated note, I’ve decided that I photograph (perhaps “videograph” would be a better word) really badly in anything other than incandescent light…

The Weekend

Highlights from the weekend just past:

  • An actual barbecue in an actual yard with an actual kiddie pool.
  • Sitting in the living room with Mark naked, eating ice cream, and listening to Laurie Anderson.
  • Other things it wouldn’t be gentlemanly to talk about.

    Jarring experience of the weekend just past:

    • Getting in the car in at 4:00 in Fresno, with a temperature of 90F and getting out of the car three hours later in SF to a temperature of 50F with severe winds. While wearing shorts…