Leanne Waldal » south park

Happiness

Leanne Waldal — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 07:01:01 +0000

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!)

Posted in fog, happiness, san francisco, south park Tagged: anniversary

Purging and moving

Leanne Waldal — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 21:39:52 +0000

My company spent 3 years (Dec 2005 – Dec 2008) on Folsom Street in San Francisco – a storefront on a noisy street said to have 80,000 cars pass by every day. When our lease was almost up, we found a new office – happy to leave behind an office where the windows were broken twice, a laptop was stolen, graffiti slashed into our windows, and regular leaks dampened our ceiling (amazing since we were on the ground floor in a 4-story building and the water would leak from the top floor all the way down to our space).

Moving is quite cleansing. There were things in the Folsom St office that had not been touched since we moved there. The new office doesn’t have a full kitchen and full bathroom. The Folsom St office had a fully stocked kitchen (baking! cooking! galore!) and a full bathroom stocked with plush towels. The towels were carted off to the SPCA for cats and dogs to snuggle in. The kitchen supplies went to my house or friends’ houses or Community Thrift. While purging the office and sorting through supplies, we (Thanks, Lori, for the help!) sorted through the earthquake/emergency boxes full of food and supplies and discovered one of the best earthquake/emergency supplies – Asyla Whisky! Only to be opened in case of emergency.

On December 23 the movers moved everything from Folsom St to my company’s new office on 2nd St. I moved Ganesha in my pocket that day on an underground MUNI train – I think he’s worth keeping around. I usually keep him perched on top of my computer monitor.

My new MUNI stop is Montgomery station (used to be Civic Center). My company is sharing space with a small very friendly architecture firm and I’m excited to be sharing space again. We shared some office space 4 years ago when we were in Hayes Valley. When I first started my company I shared office space in South Park (South Park, San Francisco not South Park, Comedy Central) and I enjoy the camaraderie of people working in the same space but not necessarily working together or on the same projects or in the same industry. I’ve noticed, in the few days I’ve been hanging out in my new space, that the architects seem to have very civilized consistent hours and they all leave for lunch in the middle of the day. I haven’t worked around people who take regular lunch in over a decade!

My conference room has a view of a new oyster bar and fish restaurant (Anchor & Hope).

And there are some windows that look out to this airshaft. I love airshafts — old space that got trapped in time.

Posted in folsom street, MUNI, san francisco, south park Tagged: asyla, cleansing, emergency supplies, ganesha, moving, office move, purging, whisky

Deliveries

Leanne Waldal — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 22:46:52 +0000

On my walks to/from home and work and my daughter’s school I often see people who deliver packages to my office. These are people I see almost every day but I don’t usually know their names. Sometimes they recognize me “outside” the office and sometimes they don’t.

Today, walking from home to work, I saw a UPS truck and I heard, “hey you!” delivered in my general direction. It’s “my” current UPS delivery guy. “What are you doing in this part of town?,” he asked. “Just walking to work,” I said. “You’ve got only one box waiting for you today,” he advised with a big grin.

I do a lot of online shopping for myself and for my business. I get a lot of deliveries every week — almost always to my office. (Note to self: should buy stock in delivery companies based on personal habits!)

Over the past 10 years my company’s office has been in South Park (SOMA), Hayes Valley, and, most recently, on Folsom near 8th in SOMA.

Most of the deliveries are via UPS or FedEx or USPS. Based on 10 years of almost daily deliveries, here are sweeping stereotypes I’ve noticed:

UPS and FedEx packages are much better (than USPS) at finding my company more than a year after a move.

The USPS delivery people are usually aloof, tuned into headphones, and not chatty. Our current USPS deliveryperson throws open our front door, tosses packages on the landing, yells, “PACKAGES,” and then heads down the street as the door closes behind her. The regular postal delivery guy just throws the mail on the couch.

The FedEx delivery people are more attractive and sometimes more chatty. One of our current FedEx delivery people has an obvious crush at my office. Almost everything is addressed to me, but delivery guy always delivers it to Nash, who sits about 5 feet away from me. When our office was in Hayes Valley our FedEx delivery person always delivered chatty chatty chatty leftist political opinions with packages and envelopes.

The UPS delivery people are the friendliest — though I’ve never met a chatty UPS delivery person — and it seems like change routes more often. We see a UPS delivery guy at our current address who used to deliver to our previous address.

I often see lefty opinionated FedEx guy when I’m walking between my daughter’s school and home — school is in Civic Center and he delivers around Civic Center and Hayes Valley where my office used to be. He still chats me up and advises me how to vote, who to call, and what political event or protest to attend. I think it’s charming and small-town-ish that he’s been seeing my daughter grow and that I run into him regularly and spontaneously while walking.