Category Archives: fog

Look at this!

Posted on by under fog, storytelling

I’m not the person in our family who usually has insomnia – that’s my wife.  But for the past few weeks I’ve been awake in the wee hours of the morning.  I wake up with the task of my dream still at hand.

One early morning I was dreaming that I was trying to clean ants out of our house (those hardworking persistent non-native San Francisco ants that we haven’t had in our house in years, but I still fear their return) and I woke up and went to look for a sponge to use to wipe/clean them up.

This morning it was 4:10am when I woke up convinced that I was holding a mouse I had just found and I needed to find a box for it.  I could feel the tiny scared animal’s heart beating in my fingers and I could see the nest of paper bits it had made in a corner of the room. I put my glasses on and realized there was no mouse.  I’d seen a tiny mouse on our patio a few days ago.  Now it’s in my dream house.

Since it was just after 4am and we try to all get up around 7am on weekday mornings I decided to stay awake and get things done.  I started to make lunch for Lucy’s school lunchbox but I was pacing around and being too noisy.  I decided to sit. in. one. place. and look over our 2008 Christmas card address spreadsheet and make updates for 2009.  I was anticipating updating addresses of friends who have moved and adding addresses for some new friends.

Then I saw a line in the spreadsheet with my grandma’s name and address.  I was casually organizing the list and thought, “she’s not around anymore, so remove the row,” and then I just fell apart dripping big huge tears all over the cat and the laptop keyboard.

Since she died in March I have grieved her loss the most when I think of calling her or sending her a letter or visiting her or telling her about something.  When Lucy’s official Kindergarten portrait was delivered, I wanted to send one to my grandma because I knew she would love it.  When Lucy announced that she wants to be a “bug scientist” when she grows up, I wanted to tell my grandma because she loved to encourage women to be scientists.  When I have an interesting project at work I like to write to my grandma about it because I know she likes to hear about it.

She was my “look at this!” go-to person who would almost always respond with love and support and attention. I always wanted to show her things or share things with her and I always wanted to impress her.

I have a file drawer full of photos from her collection and I’ve been scanning them and hope to create and print a book of her photos for my siblings and parents. One of my favorites was probably taken while she was at Wesleyan in the late 1920′s or early 1930′s – such dashing women:

Harriet, Queenie, Evelyn, Margaret, Frances - early 1930's or late 1920's

Happiness

Posted on by under fog, happiness, san francisco, south park

On a night in October 1997 I went to a bar with a friend to meet up with some other friends who said they had invited their friend Moya.  Moya walked into the bar and announced to us that she had a cold and would be needing orange juice in vodka to cure her cold.  She read tarot from the contents of my wallet.  She was so dynamic and original and enigmatic and blatantly silly. I got such a crush.

A while later … On November 25, 1997, after dinner with friends, in the middle of an El Niño rainstorm, Moya and I went for a walk in the rain and ended up at a park near my house where there was fog rolling down the rock wall and a flood in the playground and we danced on soggy grass and kissed in the rain.  Thanksgiving was two days later.

My gadgets in 1997 were a cellphone, a 2way skytel pager, and a newton. I had a computer and dialup internet connection at my house.  Moya had a text pager for work and in her home there was a rotary dial phone and a cassette tape message machine and a turntable stereo and big windows.  It was the best studio apartment I ever knew.

We emailed stories to each other.  I paged text messages to her.  She paged text messages to me. It was IM/SMS for 1997. She picked me up at the office of my brand new company and took me out for dinner.  She told me stories about the moon and planets and galaxies. I asked her how far away Saturn is when she showed me her telescope. That wasn’t the point.

(with apologies to Billy Collin’s “Litany”) She is the tray and the letters, the balcony and the plants, the shot glass and the flask, the sleeping bag and the pillow.  She is not the minimalist bare wall or the question mark, she is the double dash.  She is of course the genius inventor and the naked romp in the Pacific Ocean.  She’s the native grass. I’m the palm tree. I am the seams in the sidewalk, full of grit.  She is the eye candy arm candy smoky scotch peat candy. She is a sheet of puffy clouds with a jet cutting through. She will always be the sleeping bag and the pillow, not to mention the shucker and the decanter.

I’m so thankful for the past decade+ of me and her. We are officially a tween!

The stairs of The Alexis (where Moya lived when we first met)

Lloyd Street

Happy! (not because of the parking ticket on Moya's car!)

Eye-Fi and Ocean Beach weather

Posted on by under fog

I found the Eye-Fi Wireless Camera SD Card when I was looking for reports of average October weather at Ocean Beach in San Francisco.  Moya and I take a lot of photos of our daughter using our Treo 700′s which translates into a fairly low-res photo history of her life.  We got a new camera (Nikon D40) and I used it to take pictures last weekend.  I forgot (doh!) that a regular camera can’t upload photos as soon as I take them, and, being the busy people that we are, it seems like too much effort to plug the cord into a computer or take out the card and import before uploading to the web.  The Eye-Fi (according to Photojojo) will do most of what I need.  Now if only it was an 8GB instead of 2GB card.

Fogstorm

Posted on by under fog, market, wind tunnel

Part of my usual weekday walk involves Market Street between Van Ness and 8th.  There’s a wind tunnel there that is particularly brisk and bright during a fogstorm.  This morning’s fogstorm inspired buttoning up my thin suit jacket, walking as briskly as I can, dodging tourists clumped outside the Ramada, skimming through people waiting for bus to take them to CalTrain, and stomping down 8th in a rush to get out of the wind. There’s almost always sunshine on Folsom with the people and waterhoses cleaning the sidewalk.