Category Archives: Life as we know it

two months!

Holy maroly, it’s been almost two months since I posted here. Is anyone still checking on me here? If you have been, thank you. I’m going to try to briefly explain what has happened.

Sepi and I moved into our new home Sept 1. It was her home for many years but she has only lived in a small apartment in the house for around 9 years. The larger part of the house has been rented to a succession of tenants. Our first day was spent ripping out the old carpet and hauling new flooring up to the main living area. Two weeks later, I moved myself out of my apartment. The floor wasn’t done so everything was provisional.

I worked on the floor as I had time but I was quite busy with work so it went slowly. It wasn’t until the first weekend of October that we cracked Sepi’s stored furniture in the garage and brought it upstairs

(draft from November 2018. Now I can let two months go by without writing about it. I still feel bad, but I don’t write about it.)

gifts

We’ve gotten a lot of gifts for our wedding but today I want to talk about some gifts we gave to others. Specifically, a gift we gave to our officiant, Willie Brown.

Willie, of course, is the classic man who has everything. Sepi and I had coffee on Sunday with another politician who knows Willie. We asked what she thought. She was a stumped as we were. ‘A tie?’, was all she could come up with.

We went to Macys, then Nordstrom, looking for ties without success. Even the nicer ones were made in China and I wasn’t going to give Mayor Willie Brown a tie made overseas. Sepi texted back to her friend our dilemma and got back an address in the outer Sunset.

Well, it’s Sunday afternoon after 3 pm. Our meeting with Willie was the next day. We didn’t want to wait the gift until the day of the wedding; there would be too much else happening then. So, we headed out to the Sunset.

In the Sunset nowadays there are mini neighborhood centers all over. This was one of them. A block with a hip restaurant, a gift shop, a church, a yoga place, a surf shop . . . and another little shop with what appeared to be more gifts.

I still had ties on my mind so I was puzzled when I went in. I didn’t see any ties! Well, I was here, I might as well see what they had.

It wasn’t a gift shop, except in the very broad sense of the word. It was the shop of an artist couple: a painter and her print-maker husband. Their paintings and prints were all San Francisco themed. Sepi liked the one that was an image of a bear holding a map of California with the slogan ‘I Love California’.

(a draft from 4 days before the wedding. Amazing that I got even this much done. I was sure I had a photo of Willie and Sepi and the painting but I can’t find it.)

Christmas

I feel like I should recognize Christmas with a post. I don’t have much to say, though. I got out a couple of good posts last week about how I’ve been dealing with the season.

I did get it together to find gifts for

(a draft from December 2016. We’ll never know who the gifts were for! Could be a lesson there. BTW, this Permalink is titled ‘Christmas-2’ so there’s another post about Christmas somewhere.)

July 4th

I’m down at Mom & Dad’s on the evening of the 4th because I finally got fed up last year in Pacifica. Despite a ‘zero tolerance’ policy, Pacifica has more fireworks on July 4th than any place I’ve ever been to. Actually, last year was only the last straw. I had noticed from the first year I was in Pacifica for the 4th, that big bombs were common for days before the 4th. That’s in addition to the many ‘safe and sane’ fireworks everywhere.

This year it hadn’t been so bad but last night at around 11 pm a series of a dozen or so large explosions went off seemingly right outside my bedroom window. Thanks, assholes.

(a draft from July 2016)

Belief

I haven’t looked up the definition of belief. I wanted to try it myself. It’s hard to do without a circular reference. Here is what I’ve come up with:

’Belief is holding to be true something for which there is no objective truth.’

This definition is full of problems, I know, but I’m going to run with it. Belief is usually applied to religion, as in, ‘I believe in God’. I think most people would agree that it is impossible to find and objective truth about God, especially a Christian God (capital ‘G’).

But I don’t want to go down that particular rabbit hole today. Many people better than I have debated this issue without satisfactory resolution. I want to pivot to another kind of belief.

Typically, we say that something is true when we see it. Or when we can touch it. We have to be in the presence of our reality for it to be true. At the same time, we believe certain things to be true even when we can’t see them directly. I believe there is an airport on the other side of San Bruno Mountain because I have seen it many times and it is reasonable to expect that it exists when I can’t see it. Airplanes fly over my house all the time which tend to support the notion that an airport is nearby.

I woke up this morning with the knowledge that a belief that I had previously held was gone. I believed in the existence of democracy in America. I believed that at the root of our political system, the people had a voice and that our representatives in government were responsive to that voice.

Is there an objective truth to this notion? I used to think so but events of the past year have made me question that. I want to use the phrase ‘cognitive dissonance’ but that is hifalutin and I don’t think I can defend a definition of that.

When a large group of people act as if they are experiencing a different reality than me, I am at a loss to explain that. Anyway, I can only speak for myself. Today, in my reality, my belief is that we do not have a functioning democracy in America.

I’ve opened up this huge can of worms and now they have grown into snakes and crawling all over the living room. I think I’d better stop now. I’m not prepared to write a whole treatise on belief and perception of reality. I will continue to live what I hope is a righteous life. My seed is sown, for better or worse. I live to contribute my wisdom, if that’s what it is, can be transmitted to the following generations.

Wisdom or folly or silliness, I send myself into the future with these writings. I believe in the future.

Christmas

Christmas Day and I’m at home with Sepi. It’s going to be pretty much the same as the 200 or so days since the first ‘shelter in place’ in March. We’re not going anywhere. There will be a Zoom with the family this afternoon. There are always chores to do around the house but motivation is severely lacking. I’ll play the guitar a little. We may watch a movie later.

Everyone is hoping for a better 2021. I am too but I am tempering my expectations. Vaccine or no, masks and social distancing are going to be with us for a good long while. At the Symphony, we are among the few in the Local with a little work but it could vanish in an instant if the health authorities decide a full lockdown is necessary. Sadly, that is all too likely. Concerts with a live audience won’t happen until the fall at the earliest.

Merry Christmas!

just smoke

The day after my ‘heat and smoke’ post, the weather turned cooler but the smoke descended down to the ground and stayed there. Today is now the 5th day of AQIs in the high 100s.

I’ve become an expert in calling up the Bay Area Air Quality Management District website and checking the AQI map and data. Just now I see that we’re right around 200.

I went in to work on Friday but other than that, I’ve stayed in the house except for brief – really brief – forays outside to water the plants. I wear the N95 mask for that.

I’m beginning to feel like the inside of the house is starting to smell. Last night around dinner time, I noticed that the breeze was blowing for the first time in days. I thought that we’d have improvement by morning.

Nope.

Meanwhile, Ashley’s sister and her family have had to evacuate their home near Portland and are staying with Ashley in Washington. Their air is about the same AQI as ours but the forest around them isn’t on fire.

The TV weather people are making noises that there will be improvement by Wednesday but others are saying it will be weeks before it is better. When I go outside, the mask helps my nose and throat but it’s my eyes that are stinging when I come in.

Just like with the startup to the COVID-19 outbreak, I’m having to come to terms with the fact that I’m in a vulnerable group now.

heat and smoke

I think it was about three weeks ago when I was awake in the early hours and witnessed a lightning storm unlike anything I have ever seen outside of the Midwest. At the time, I thought it was really cool: huge forked lightning bolts I could see stretching from the clouds to the ground, bright flashes and huge booms of thunder. the only thing missing was the torrential rain.

There was rain, but only a little, and I should have known that the lightning would be a big problem for the forests in the state. Within a couple of days, news reports started coming in about fires around the Bay Area: one in Napa, one in Santa Cruz County and another in south Santa Clara Valley. They were all given names related to the lightning, and called ‘complexes’ because they were many smaller fires all started by the lightning.

Soon, it was 2018 all over again. San Francisco was covered in a thick cloud of smoke. Any outside projects that I had been considering went on the shelf. Going outside required an N95 mask and it still burned my eyes. I only went out briefly.

Last week it got a little better and I did some work trimming the tree in the front of the house. The summer pattern had resumed with cool ocean breezes and it wasn’t as smoky.

But over Labor Day weekend it got hot. Really hot. Saturday, Sunday and Monday we kept the shades and windows closed and wore as little clothing as we could. We couldn’t cool the house down at night so it stayed in the 80’s for three days. Outside . . .  take a look:

Besides being hot, the smoke had returned.

This is hard to see, but there is a gray cloud over downtown SF and Oakland. There was no wind.

Then later on Monday the sea breeze finally showed up. The smoke got pushed further into the East Bay and the temperatures fell by 20 degrees.

But something odd was happening. We awoke yesterday to what seemed to be a typical marine layer except the sun seen through the murk was red. As the day went on, the clouds never went away. In the afternoon I noticed that there was fog coming in over the Daly City hills but the sky above the fog was not gray so much as yellow. The temperatures were cool and the air did not smell smoky but something wasn’t right. It turns out that there is another fire started by lightning, in Mendocino, that is sending smoke to the Bay Area but the smoke is above the inversion layer.

Then, this morning, we are in some kind of science fiction movie.I took some pictures but they don’t convey how creepy it is. Everything outside is suffused in a dark red glow. Eating my breakfast at 8 o’clock, I had to turn the dining room lights on to see what I was doing.

I went outside briefly and rinsed the soot off of the cars. It’s on everything but for now I only did the cars. No outside projects today . . .

numbers

Just stuff in my head this morning:

66 years old.

94 days of shelter in place if I don’t count the one day I worked, now 17 days ago.

188 lbs.

Jane arranged a Zoom call for the family yesterday and put together a trivia game. My favorite was, how many descendants do Bernard and Nancy Wood have? 24!

20. Dollars I paid for an on-line guitar lesson. What do you call it when it’s not a one on one lesson but it’s not a class either? Kind of an automated class with videos. But I’m annoyed at some of the terminology so I haven’t finished it.

One. Banana with my one (so far) cup of tea this morning. It would be great if I could make this my breakfast, but I will almost certainly go up and have a bowl of cereal as soon as I’m done with this post. I’ve been trying to keep it smaller (the bowl of cereal not the post).

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