19 February 2002

Lord, Lord.

Any of you out there who write high fantasy novels? You are hereby banned from watching ice dancing. Just don't do it. Why, oh, why, did all of their costumes look like bad fantasy covers? Why?

Any of you who do cover art, you're doubly banned. I mean it. Those things were just abominations all around.

Okay. So. Off we went to my godfather's to pick up Grandma, Grandpa, and a bruised but undaunted Onie. (She fell just outside my godfather's house and blacked her eye, cut her nose, and jarred her elbow. Oy.) Joe put Aunt Dor, Uncle Rudy, and Uncle Dud in his car, and we headed into the City. Drove them past Pac Bell Park and down the Embarcadero to Ghirardelli Square, where we had lunch.

Here's Uncle Dud having a taste of traditional San Francisco sourdough.

We drove down Lombard St. and around to the Palace of Fine Arts.

And here is said Palace, looking vaguely ominous to me. (Do things ever look concretely ominous? I mean, isn't ominous a sort of vague thing in itself?)

Our next stop was at the Golden Gate Bridge area. Here's Mark with Grandma, Grandpa, and Onie.

And here's the whole crew (minus Grandma, who was taking the picture).

Mark with a sample cable of the type they used on the bridge.

Me in the garden.

Grandma and Uncle Dud and I went out on the bridge (nobody else wanted to). Here's me and Uncle Dud.

And here's Grandma with her baby brother (still Uncle Dud), with the city of San Francisco behind them.

Grandpa and Onie ponder the distances.

This is really where I live now. The city that has this in it. Every once in awhile I'll look up and see one of the big bridges ahead of me, or I'll look north on a clear day and see the San Francisco skyline, and it just hits me, yeah, I live here.

It's not something that you'd think I'd be able to forget easily. But the photogenic CALIFORNIA! stuff isn't the landscape of my everyday life. It's easy to remember that I live here, with rain on birch trees and one of Mark's laptops perpetually parked by the couch. It's just hard to remember that I live here, with the big red bridge and the ocean and the redwoods. The Bay is now a rather tame body of water for me. It's something to take for granted, like the highway and the grocery store, except when the sun comes out and hits it just right or the algae in the salt-harvesting pools are particularly colorful. But the ocean is something different entirely.