[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

One of my favorite spots in the southwest … our next destination, post-grad school?

Flagstaff, AZ

Population 52,894 (2000 census). Seat of Coconino County. Elevation about 7000 feet. Home to Lowell Observatory and Northern Arizona University. Incorporated as a town in June 1894.

The first permanent white settlement in the area (apart from an expedition of Mormons and a group of Bostonians) was by Tennessean sheep rancher Thomas McMillan in July 1876. The Atlantic and Pacific Railroad came in 1881 and Flagstaff became a major railway stop.

The beauty of the Coconino National Forest and the San Francisco Mountains and the ponderosas, not to mention the low-key charm of the town of Flagstaff itself, was nothing short of spectacular. We arrived late yesterday evening on the tail end of a rowdy thunderstorm, and it took almost a half-hour to find our Best Western, which was located across the street from the main railroad running through the center of town. The hotel itself was quiet, though, and the occasional train noises were not that much of an impediment to sleep.

We didn’t stick around long enough to see a heck of a lot of the town—by the time we got ready for the next leg of our journey today, it was too late to do much of anything but get breakfast and do a little driving around the center of town. But what I saw, I liked a lot. I can imagine living here.

The stretch of country between Boulder City and Flagstaff is some of the most splendorous scenery I have ever seen. We had hoped to go out to a restaurant the night we got in, but because of the beagle’s presence and because it got too late by the time we finally got around to making a decision about where we wanted to go, we eventually ordered catered hotel take-out.

This morning we had breakfast at the Galaxy Diner on West Route 66. It was a fifties diner that looked like it had actually been around in the fifties—not one of those faux-fifties diners. The waitress seemed a little standoffish at first, but she gradually came around and was actually chatty by the end of the meal. She reminded me of a younger version of Polly Holliday’s Flo on the seventies sitcom “Alice.” The meal itself was fantastic—I had eggs and toast and potatoes with onions. I don’t remember what Steve had, but he was happy that this was the first place that we’d stopped where hot sauce was waiting on the table.

The town was pretty quiet when we were there. The main thing we noticed was how prominently NAU figured in the local newscasts. I also noticed that the Weather Channel frequently plays a snippet from Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” during its “Local on the 8s” breaks, which I thought was somewhat spacey, and thus somewhat appropriate, but also somewhat jarring mixed in with the Windham Hill and other MUZAK that usually gets played. One great part about being in Flagstaff was actually landing and walking around in a town that my Arizonan father had mentioned many times by name.

Mesa, my dad’s hometown, is 165 miles south of Flagstaff, in a completely different meterological and cultural zone of the state, but it still felt good to set foot on ground which it wasn’t that hard to imagine that he may have stepped on or ridden over at one time or another in the thirties or forties.

—Posted by Frank at 13:09:24 | 15-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Day Two of our trip, as I remember it, was really pretty nice, with the possible exception of traffic and crowds in Las Vegas. The weather was beautiful and rainstorms swept across the Mother Road after we joined it at Kingman. It was glorious scenery and weather and is why the desert southwest is still my spiritual home …

Day Two

Day Two — Tonopah, NV, to Flagstaff, AZ

Today’s statistics:

We travelled 478.3 miles from Tonopah, NV, to Flagstaff, AZ. Spent $58.00 on gas, $45.49 on food, and $84.24 on a hotel, the Best Western King’s House Inn on Historic Route 66 near Beautiful Downtown Flagstaff.

Here’s the boring, exhausting details, almost as they happened:

—US 95, between Goldfield and Scotty’s Junction, NV, 11:35 PDT | 15-Aug-04

Our day began with a blaring alarm clock at 8:30 a.m. I slept like a log, but a certain beagle who shall remain nameless kept kicking Frank awake all night. I still think he managed to get some sleep. He’s taking the first half of today’s journey; the 208 miles from Tonopah to Las Vegas. I’ll take over there, we’ll do a brief run down the Strip so he can see the … interesting place that Las Vegas is, then it’s over Hoover Dam and 250 miles to Flagstaff. No, we will not be stopping at the Liberace Museum or Wayne Newton house or well, anything else. One stop for gas. That’s all we can stand.

The beagle is starting to get in the routine of sleeping some while we’re going. He didn’t sleep at all yesterday on all the twisty, turny, curvy, up and down roads of the Sierra. But today’s route is on roads with barely any curves and he’s lying down and snoozing now. He’s a very, very tired beagle.

It’s hot out here in the desert; not unbearable, but probably in the low 90’s. It’s not great weather for dogs, especially pampered, fat beagles who are used to sea breezes and fogs cooling them while they lie in comfort on their couches. Speaking of couches, I hope the beagle’s couch is now on its way to Ann Arbor. After Yellow Truck took so long to deliver and then pick up the trailer, I’m wondering if it will actually be there by Friday the 22nd. We shall see. ValueMoves already took the payment, so fingers are crossed.

In the meantime, while it’s quite barren, Nevada is still, I think, quite beautiful, with the exception of the places where human habitation has been dumped on it. Not to mention all those nukes. We’re approaching Nellis Air Force Base and the Nevada Test Site and the Yucca Mountain site, which the Bush Cabal wishes to turn into a toxic waste trash heap over the objections of … well, pretty much everyone except for his corporate cronies.

Also, there’s a site on the map near Las Vegas which is simply marked, ‘Danger Area.’ No explanation or anything, just bordered in red on the map and ‘Danger Area.’ And in Nevada, that could mean just about anything.

A few miles back, we passed the Cottontail Ranch. No, they don’t raise bunnies. They provide a service which is [ahem] only legal in the state of Nevada. We’re counting the bunny ranches … that was number two.

No sign of any aliens …

—US 95, Bailey’s Hot Springs, NV, 12:10 PDT

The beagle owns a hot springs RV park in central Nevada!

Oh, and we just passed the third brothel, just north of Beatty; this one is named ‘Angels Ladies.’ Hmmmm.

—US 95, Beatty, NV, 12:16 PDT

Saw our first wreck of the trip, here in Beatty. A Jeep Cherokee broadsided and lying on its side in the street. A Jeep tipover is not exactly what I wanted to see on this trip. Well, that’s ugly …

—US 95, Amargosa Valley, NV, 12:43 PDT

Just passed big huge signs for Area 51 and the Yucca Mountain Visitor’s Center … Hmmmm. I don’t see no aliens … or black helicopters.

—US 95, Indian Springs, NV, 13:16 PDT

Indian Springs Air Force Base—sign that says ‘Military Exercise in Progress.’ On the side of the highway, an unattended ambulance with its lights going, no one around. Hmmmm. On the base is a military barracks-looking structure that says ‘IS Hilton.’ Some soldiers or airmen standing around in cammies with very large guns. IS doesn’t look like a fun place to be at the moment.

—US 95, Just North of Las Vegas, NV, 13:25 PDT

Getting rained on as we pass a ‘correctional facility.’ And we just saw our first double-trailer Wal-Mart truck. Unlike the brothels in Nevada, Wal-Mart trucks between here and Ann Arbor will be far to numerous to count.

Well, my computer battery is running dead, I’ve been doing lots of work with it. So that’ll be the end of the periodic updates for today. Need to find an adapter to fit this thing. More later …

—Best Western King’s House Inn, room 111, Flagstaff, AZ, 23:00 MST

478 miles today and I’m pretty pooped. I’m finishing up a veggie lasagna meal from a delivery service; it’s been pouring in Flagstaff and we elected to stay in and let someone else make the effort to feed us.

I took over driving from Frank in front of some casino in downtown Las Vegas, then promptly made two wrong turns, almost got us broadsided by a very large van, and made another wrong turn. Finally, we hit the Strip in front of the Stratosphere and were promptly overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of Las Vegas, which always brings up the phrase, ‘Wretched Excess’ in my head whenever I hear that name.

While downtown is awash in a huge amount of money, there were some not-so-nice sights in other parts of town. On the side of a boarded-up Payless Cashways big box store in North Las Vegas, someone had spray painted graffiti which read, ‘Broke.’ A few old studio-type apartments stood seedy, neglected and leaning drunkenly just three blocks from the massive Stratosphere, where tourists were paying big bucks to ride to the top in order to pay more big bucks to ride a rollercoaster and a thrill ride which bounces you up and down a very tall spire on top of the Stratosphere itself. On the Strip, illegal immigrants stood on street corners making what is probably a pittance to hand out flyers to tourists advertising strip clubs and $1.99 prime rib dinners. If there is any spot in America where wretched excess co-exists side-by-side with extreme poverty and desperation, it is Las Vegas Boulevard.

After driving down the Strip and taking some pics, cashing a check at Wells Fargo and sitting through 1.5-million of what are surely the longest red traffic lights in the entire world, we made our way to Boulder City, where we gassed up and then stopped at a Jack-in-the-Box. While Frank went inside to eat, I watered and fed the beagle, who enjoyed stretching his legs. We walked out in the desert, then returned to a grassy strip in front of the Jeep. He laid in the grass and panted and drank some water. After I got some food, we headed out and drove through downtown Boulder City, which is surprisingly nice. Cresting a hill, we spied Lake Mead spread out in the valley below.

A few miles later, we hit the security checkpoint for Hoover Dam. Anyone with an RV or rental moving truck was being searched. We wondered if we would be, what with the Jeep being so packed full, but we were just waved through. Crossing the dam is … an exercise in dodging tourists and drivers who are driving without realizing that they are driving and aren’t paying attention to the driving. But the dam and the area around it are truly spectacular. Today’s photo gallery has some very nice pics of it all.

South of the dam, US 93 follows some curvy hills, then straightens out and heads towards towards Kingman. The wind that Frank had fought all morning in Nevada now whipped up good, and I had to fight it myself. A fully loaded Jeep isn’t exactly streamlined, and we did some wandering over the road. But it was a good trip and we reached Kingman in no time, finally joining the Mother Road.

As we approached Kingman, we could see in the east a solid wall of dark blue cloud. Thunderstorms were causing flash floods all over northern Arizona. I’ll be the Grand Canyon was spectacular. As it was, I-40’s route was a grand spectacle of dark cloud, green sagebrush and trees, and brown, rocky mountains, hills and mesas. The weather was perfect for me; thunderboomers (a word Frank had never heard) and wild western scenery. Lightning struck all around us and the booms were occasionally so loud that they could be heard over the wind and engine noise in the Jeep.

Bayley slept through all of this; a straight road is good for beagles to have a nap on. No tossing side to side.

The 150 miles to Flagstaff seemed to go by rather quickly; there were bursts of heavy rain, followed by completely dry zones and for awhile there, it just rained steadily. We hit one construction zone that slowed things down, but it was only three miles and not too bad.

We hit Flagstaff at 19:49 and I promptly made yet another wrong turn, driving a few miles east on Route 66 instead of just half-a-block west. Okay, in my defense, it was dark, raining and I was tired. Sue me.

But we did safely arrive and the hotel was ready for us, the card already charged, the room waiting. Bayley cost me an extra $11.01. We ordered in and now we’re decompressing and I’m catching up on two days of lost internet access. I had 168 spam e-mails waiting and uploading my photo galleries is taking forever.

It was raining hard the last time I was in Flagstaff, 16-Sep-96. I seem to have come full circle. It’s a beautiful night, there are wailing Santa Fe trains outside, and we’re snug in a little room on Route 66. All is well. And the best thing of all: I go home tomorrow, my home state beckons and La Villa Real de Santa Fe de San Francisco de Assis—The Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi—is our very next destination, where we’ll spend two nights, is a mere 385 miles away. Can’t wait!! My heart is already vibrating with the anticipation and excitement of the reunion with my spiritual home.

Today’s trip stats:

• 11:00 — Left Tonopah, NV — 0 miles | 0415 total

• 11:20 — Goldfield — 27 | 0442

• 11:48 — Scotty’s Junction — 61 | 0476

• 12:16 — Beatty — 95 | 0510

• 12:43 — Amargosa Valley — 125 | 0540

• 13:14 — Cactus Springs — 166 | 0581

• 13:16 — Indian Springs — 169 | 0584

• 13:51 — Las Vegas — 211 | 0626

• 15:37 — Boulder City — 244 | 0659

• 16:32 — Hoover Dam/Arizona State Line — 252 | 0667

• 17:43 — Kingman, AZ — 325 | 0740

• 18:38 — Seligman — 397 | 0812

• 18:56 — Ash Fork — 421 | 0836

• 19:11 — Williams — 439 | 0854

• 19:49 — Flagstaff — 478 | 0893

Good night from Flagstaff, AZ, y’all!

—Posted by Steve at 23:55 | 15-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

This is where you need XM satellite radio …

Soundtrack, Day Two

Lots of jazz and fading-in-and-out talk radio on poor-reception stations. Popped in John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. Somewhere along the line I also popped in Elvis 56.

—Posted by Frank at 23:43:09 | 15-Aug-03

And here’s the photo gallery for Day Two:

« Our Move to Michigan – Day Two »

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

I still haven’t quite figured out how to pronounce ‘Tonopah’ … is it ‘TOEnuh-pah’? or ‘tuh-NO-puh’? or ‘toe-noePAH’? Whatever it is, I’m sure it means ‘Middle of Bum-F—- Egypt’ … And thus begins our cross-country trip. A note on these entries: the times may get all weird; we wrote some of these entries while on the road and posted them later. I remember the Yosemite portion of this trip, crossing the Nevada border and arriving in Tonopah, but the rest tends to be a blur. I remember that the beagle was very worn out that first night.

Day One

A Note: Sorry folks, I had no dial-up number for internet access last night in Tonopah, NV, which is, after all, WAY out in the desert. One of the next nearest towns is Coaldale Junction (which is really no more than a gas station and an FAA VOR navigational aid, used by commercial airliners on their way to San Francisco). There’s another nearby town we passed through which featured a sign declaring the population was ‘13 and a half.’ We didn’t slow down long enough to find out what the half-a-person was. Nonetheless, tonight we’re in Flagstaff, AZ, back in civilization with real dialup numbers. Lordy, I miss that DSL and cable modem broadband! Anyway, here’s the first post, which was supposed to be online last night. Apologies for the delay.

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—Best Western Hi-Desert Inn, room 124, Tonopah, NV, 23:00 PDT | 15-Aug-03

Day one of the road trip is finally over. On two-and-a-half hours of sleep, we travelled 415.4 miles from San Francisco to Tonopah, NV. Spent $82.51 on gas, $29.20 on food, a $20 entrance fee to Yosemite and $75.21 on a hotel .. .the fabulous Best Western Hi-Desert Inn in Beautiful Downtown Tonopah, NV. Total Day One expenses: $206.92.

The day began with a wake-up call at 6:30 a.m. I was barely able to rise after yesterday’s big moving day and because I was sleeping in my sleeping bag on the floor. I went to bed very late because I had to do laundry (you really don’t want to ride 3,000 miles with a smelly dog bed) and pack for the trip. I probably couldn’t have slept much anyway.

After a soak in the tub and loading the car, Bayley and I said our goodbyes to David and then left the apartment for the last time. Yes, I’m a big wussy; I pretty much bawled all the way over the Bay Bridge. After Yellow Truck finally picked up our trailer (a day late), we said more goodbyes to Kit and Gracie and Rudy and Suki cat. These were very hard like all the rest, but they were the last ones. Gracie whined and pawed and moaned and groaned. It was very, very sad to be leaving behind so many wonderful people and puppy dogs. But Gracie and Rudy will be heading south themselves in a couple of months, so they get to share the grand moving adventure too.

We stopped off at a drug store in Livermore so that I could get a prescription filled, then headed for Yosemite, which, while hot and touristy and dusty and dry, still manages to be beautiful and serene in spite of man’s best attempts to despoil it. Still haven’t figured out what those large brush piles by the side of the road every few feet for miles were for; each pile had a layer of cardboard in the middle. Very strange looking. Some tree groves are dead and you can see the ravages of past fires. Bridal Veil Fall and Yosemite Falls were both down to mere trickles … it is August, after all. The first time I saw them was in late March of ‘97, and they were roaring and simply the most beautiful things on the planet. Half Dome and El Capitan remain reassuring in their forever-feel and the Tioga Pass road, which I had never driven, was magnificent as well. Still, if you wish to see Yosemite in all her glory, be sure and do a mid-Spring visit … less tourists and crowds, more freedom to move about, and the falls and newly greened trees, as well as the remaining snowpack, are truly breathtaking.

I’m writing this as we finish up the last 40 miles of the trip; it’s 19:11 and we’re exhausted and should be in our hotel and getting dinner in about an hour or so, thank goodness. We’re just east of Coaldale, NV, on US6/95. The countryside is typical Nevada; harsh and mountainous, yet still beautiful. It’s been a grand trip so far; no problems, we’ve made good time, etc. The beagle has been a bit uncomfortable perched on his bed through the very twisty roads and traffic jams in the Bay Area, but now that we’re on a more straight, even road here in the Nevada desert, he’s able to finally lie down and get some sleep.

He was a very tired and hot beagle after his little visit to Bridal Veil Fall, where he attracted the attention of everyone on the trail. One little girl asked to pet him; we demurred, because his typical reaction to a stranger is to howl loudly in their face (just like with Kit this morning) and scare them half to death. But the walk down the trail was good for him, since we’ve already started burning off calories and fat in preparation for a more adventurous life in Ann Arbor. Our goal is to get his weight down by the winter so that he can play in the snow without having a heart attack. He turns nine years old on Aug. 20, which means we’ll probably be touring Memphis and driving to Nashville. I guess I can start calling him Grandpa now that he’ll be 63 in human years. But considering how beagles very much demand a routine and don’t like things upset, he’s handled this pretty well so far, much like he did moving from Dallas to San Francisco, San Francisco to Denver and Denver back to San Francisco in 1996 and 1998, respectively. He’ll be fine, and he’ll love his new home.

The setting sun is turning Boundary Peak (at 13,140 feet, the highest point in Nevada) and Emigrant Peak (6,790 feet) truly gorgeous shades of orange and yellow, with wedges of purple and dark blue in the shadows behind outcroppings. There is some cloud cover and the sagebrush adds some vibrant green, It’s a very pleasant evening, the loading-of-the-truck and Day One of the trip are over, and we’re well-launched on the brand-new life. The pain of goodbyes is over, although much sadness lingers. Parting is not sweet sorrow; it’s not sweet anything. I hate it. But what’s happening is best for everyone; life is all about change, after all. You don’t change, you’re dead.

And now I can’t wait to get to Santa Fe. We can have a day of complete rest and see what is surely one of my favorite cities in my home state, my spiritual home. But first comes a 200-mile journey to Las Vegas, with a little side trip down the Strip for some ogling, followed by a trip over Hoover Dam and 250 miles to Flagstaff, AZ.

Today’s trip stats:

• 08:51 — Left the apartment — 0 miles

• 08:58 — Gassed up at Twin Peaks Auto — 0004

• 09:20 — Bay Bridge — ?

• 10:17 — Leave Kit & Erin’s in Oakland — 0031

• 10:45 — Livermore, Long’s Drugs — ?

• 11:52 — Manteca — 0094

• 14:00 — Gassed up at Crane Flats, Yosemite National Park — 0191

• 14:47 — Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite Valley — 0215

• 17:47 — US 385/CA-120 Junction (Frank starts driving) — 0292

• 19:45 — Tonopah, NV — 0415

Good night from Tonopah, NV, y’all!

—Posted by Steve at 22:32 | 15-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

I know that that’s one big-ass dam, lemme tell ya!

Hoover Dam National Historic Landmark (NV/AZ)

Built at a total cost of $165 million between 1931 and 1936, the Hoover Dam is 726 feet high. Lake Mead, the reservoir created by the dam, covers 247 square miles and holds 46 trillion cubic yards of water.

The dam, at its inception the largest public works project in US history, was the brainchild of many: Major John Wesley Powell, a one-armed Civil War veteran and geologist who undertook a huge project to topographically map the Grand Canyon and Colorado River region in 1869-1871; his nephew, Arthur Powell Davis, who spent over twenty years exploring the Colorado River and authored the main engineering report on the dam project, only to be forced to resign his Bureau of Reclamation post and go to Turkestan for work; Harry Morrison, Charlie Shea, Harry Kaiser, and Warren Bechtel, who organized the various financing and bids on the proposed project; Frank Crowe, who supervised the building of the dam in the face of punishing heat and harsh conditions and broke a workers’ strike in August 1931; Walker “Brig” Young, who surveyed Boulder Canyon in 1921 to find the best spot for the dam; and Gordon Kaufma , who planned the imposing Art Deco architecture of the dam.

The project was first named the Boulder Dam, but in September 1930, Secretary of the Interior Ray Wilbur a ounced that the dam would henceforth be named the Hoover Dam, an apparent attempt to gather much-needed credit to the administration for drumming up jobs in what was an otherwise dismal record. When Franklin Roosevelt took over in 1932, his Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes, changed the name back to Boulder. In April 1947, Harry Truman signed a Congressional resolution restoring the name Hoover to the dam.

The dam, which we had to pass on our way between the states of Nevada and Arizona, was an incredible thing. All you had to do was stop at one of the vista points, get out of the car, and take a look at the sweep of the dam to get a sense of its grandeur, a perception of the sweat and pain and money and time that went into the construction of this behemoth of human engineering. “Standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam,/I’m on the centerline between two states of mind,” go the lyrics to the Sugar song.

Now I know how true that expression is: the dam doesn’t just hold back water, it is a border between the Left Coast (if you include Clark County in that definition) and the rest of the country. The guards stationed at the checkpoint along the highway leading up to the dam are not just guarding the dam; they’re guarding a state of mind, a marvel of machinery, a massive expression of human labor that defies you not to bow before it and feel humbled.

—Posted by Frank at 16:30:00 | 15-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Wild, woolly Las Vegas. Whatta complete hoot. So very unreal and otherworldly …

Las Vegas, NV

Population 478,868 (2000 census). Seat of Clark County.

The first settlement at what is now Las Vegas was, ironically, a Mormon outpost, founded in 1855 and abandoned two years later after repeated raids by the Paiutes. Las Vegas itself was incorporated in 1905. In 1931, gambling and quickie divorces were legalized in Nevada, and construction was started on the Hoover Dam. The rest is history.

The first casino on what the world knows today as The Strip, the Hotel El Rancho Vegas, was opened in April 1941 by Tom Hull (no, not Bugsy Siegel) across the street from what is now the Sahara. The event that prompted Hull to open the Rancho was, the tale goes (is this a recurring theme or what?), a flat tire. He had a flat on Highway 91, his traveling companion hitched back into town to get help, and Hull stood on the shoulder, started counting cars, and became convinced that this was a great spot to start a place for exhausted motorists to rest along the highway to his properties in Los Angeles. (He had already started other Ranchos in Sacramento and Fresno and owned the Mayfair in Los Angeles and the Roosevelt in Hollywood.) The El Rancho burned down in a fire in July 1960.

Coming into Vegas was a breeze until about 5 miles from town. It’s somewhat amusing that the stretch of Highway 95 just north of Vegas is occupied by a bunch of upstanding little towns like Indian Springs with sturdy churches and signs warning darkly of the consequences of sin, as though they were the last bulwark against the inevitable descent into hell. Where do I suspect that the folks stationed at Nellis Air Force Base spend their free time? Indian Springs? Yeah, that’s it.

The traffic coming into town was not unmanageable, but it was rough for a non-local to negotiate the zooming cars and trucks and the exits and byways (not to mention the tangled Spaghetti Bowl), so I got out off an exit near the Convention Center and let Steve take the wheel while I snapped shots and gawked at the overstimulating panorama of the Strip. The Sahara, Circus Circus, the Stardust, the Frontier, the Venetian, Treasure Island, Harrah’s, Caesar’s Palace, the Mirage, Paris, Bellagio, MGM Grand, New York New York, the Tropicana, Luxor, Mandalay Bay—all you can do is gawk, gawk, and gawk some more, or close your eyes once you get a headache from all the neon and flashing and excess. Driving in a car along the Strip for half an hour obviously doesn’t do it justice. If I had wanted to do Vegas justice, we would have stayed for a night or two and wandered the Strip and gone in and out of all the big casinos.

But even as a passenger in a car down Las Vegas Boulevard, you get a quick sense of the city, its rhythm, its flavor, its style. The Strip itself is ostentation at its most marvelous and unabashed. I noticed a huge billboard advertising Gladys Knight at the Flamingo and marveled at the fact that a once semi-gritty Atlanta/Motown soul singer like Gladys was now a glitzy headliner at a Vegas casino. Then again, ZZ Top is at Mandalay Bay, so ….. Once you get off the Strip you see the real Vegas, if such a thing exists, because what is Vegas without the Strip?

Along and around Charleston Boulevard, you see boarded-up storefronts, gritty boulevards, hot, angry-looking drivers, car salesmen in too-tight shirts and strangling ties, homeless men pushing shopping carts full of their belongings down the street, lots of other evidence that the city’s commitment to its infrastructure outside of the Strip is inattentive at best.

We stopped at a bank branch off Sunset Road, not far from McCarran Airport, a part of town which was somewhat more business-park-like, and a group of homeless men were taking a breather on the bank lawn near the sidewalk. A pissed-off-looking man hopped into his white Porsche and gunned it for all it was worth to make it to the stop sign at the other end of the adjoining mall parking lot, as though the Prince of Darkness himself were riding his bumper.

Vegas is an amazing place, but I don’t know that I’d want to live in the shadow of the Strip on a permanent basis.

—Posted by Frank at 14:00:00 | 15-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Hitting the road with some tunes and enjoying the countryside. I love it …

Soundtrack, Day One

John Cougar Mellencamp’s Scarecrow. Obviously out-of-date yet somehow appropriate. Then a Columbia compilation called The Golden Age Voume 1, with old-time forties music by likes of Gene Autry, Bob Willis, The Chuck Wagon Gang, and Patsy Montana, which was a lot of fun. Followed by an album of Ella Fitzgerald sides with the Chick Webb Orchestra. And on the way down Highway 6 into Nevada, Neko Case’s Black Listed, a pretty damn good CD by a great alt-country songwriter from Vancouver by way of Alexandria, VA.

—Posted by Frank at 23:59:01 | 14-Aug-03

Also, here is the photo gallery of Day One of the trip:

« Our Move to Michigan – Day One »

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Yosemite is grand, but go when the crowds aren’t there: fall and spring. Spring is best, because the waterfalls are full and gorgeous …

Yosemite National Park, CA

Population: a bunch of park rangers and a variable transient population of tourists. Area: 1200 square miles in Mariposa and Tuolumne Counties.

California Senator John Conness introduced a bill, which Abraham Lincoln signed into law in June 1864, setting aside Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias for the State of California as an inalienable public trust, although logging, mining, and grazing continued in the Valley until John Muir stepped into the picture. (Conness later died in an insane asylum, but that’s another story.) Here is what Muir, whose name adorns the high school I attended in Pasadena, had to say about Yosemite in 1911:

“Apart from the human interest of my visit to-day, I greatly enjoyed Yosemite, which I had visited only once before, having spent eight days last spring in rambling amid its rocks and waters. Wherever we go in the mountains, or indeed in any of God’s wild fields, we find more than we seek. Descending four thousand feet in a few hours, we enter a new world; climate, plants, sounds, inhabitants, and scenery all new or changed.”

The place is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful places on God’s increasingly greenless earth, and I should have my California citizenship revoked for not having visited before now. But I hazard a guess that Muir would rip his heart out and wear sackcloth and ash if he were able to see what Yosemite has become: a Back to Nature theme park, a marketer’s gimmick, a mockery of God, a naturalist’s nightmare.

You pay $20 at a checkpoint and get handed a ticket and a map by a nice ranger. You drive down narrow, groaning, car-filled roads to get your look at the Valley’s main attractions: Yosemite Falls, Half Dome, Bridalveil Meadow. You get out of your car and walk with lines of tourists up paved trails to designated areas where you can pose for photos against backdrops and pretend that a thousand other people aren’t doing exactly the same thing. You can ignore, or get prissy and stop to pick up and get the back pocket of your jeans gummed up with the contents of, a littering Jolly Rancher wrapper some jerk has dropped along the path. You hear parents tell their kids things like: “We drove four hours to see this, so shut up!”

Yosemite is glorious and a testament to the universe’s abundance in spite of the desecrations wrought upon it by humankind (and maybe I should just shut up and let the photographs speak for themselves, and maybe I should just stop being critical every moment and enjoy the scenery). But it is also a perfect diorama of George W. Bush’s America: a Grizzly Adams version of the Great America Mall, complete with its own official concessioner website. It makes you wonder what the valley must have looked like in 1911, through the eyes of John Muir and his traveling party.

—Posted by Frank at 16:00:00 | 14-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Tonopah (I still don’t how to pronounce it properly) is the very definition of ‘Middle of Nowhere’ …

Tonopah, NV

Population 2627 (2000 census). Seat of Nye County, the third-largest county in area in the United States.

Founded in 1900 by Jim Butler (whom one Nevada historical site describes as the “laziest mining tycoon of all time”). Folklore has it that Butler, while prospecting, lost his burro in a windstorm. The burro cowered beneath a rock outcropping. When Butler found the cowering beast, he noticed something unusual about the rock, chipped at it, struck paydirt, and started the last silver rush in Nevada.

Tonopah grew within two years from a rock outcropping to a bustling mining town of 3000. Wyatt Earp ran a saloon here from 1902 to 1905. The big news in town the day before we arrived (according to the Pahrump Valley Times) was that a defendant company planned to appeal after a jury had awarded $136 million, the largest judgment in Nye County history, to Equatorial Tonopah Inc., a US subsidiary of the Sydney, Australia-based Equatorial Mining Ltd, in a judgment against Kvaerner Inc., a US subsidiary of a Lysaker, Norway-based engineering construction firm. Equatorial Tonopah’s lawsuit alleged that Kvaerner had made faulty projections on the feasibility of a copper mine 17 miles north of Tonopah that Equatorial Tonopah had bought for $15 million plus $32 million in equity from Cyprus Amax Metals in 1997 (and, after the yield proved far less than what Kvaerner had projected, closed in July 2001).

I drove us into town around 8.00. As we came in off Highway 95, from twenty and ten miles off the town looked like something out of a mirage, there one minute and not quite there the next. The town and its surroundings were undoubtedly awe-inspiring physically. The San Antonio Mountains, which turn pink and amethyst in the sunset, are stark, lonely, and majestic. The town itself is like something out of a John Ford Western. The Mizpah Hotel, the town’s main landmark, founded in 1907, sits in the middle of Main Street with a huge ghost-town sign announcing its presence.

Among the people illegitimately claimed to have connections with the Mizpah: Jack Dempsey, who allegedly worked as a bouncer there (although, according to the Nevada State Library and Archives, he “only” fought a match against Johnny Sudenberg in Tonopah in June 1915 and didn’t actually work at the Mizpah in any capacity), and Howard Hughes, who allegedly married Jean Peters there (although, according to the same source, Hughes actually married Peters in January 1957 in his apartment at the L&L Motel, not at the Mizpah).

As we came to our hotel, the Best Western Hi-Desert Inn, we were greeted by ominous glares from a bench full of well-wishers on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. The sound of yowling children sailed in the window when I rolled it down to get a breath of fresh air. The bellboy cart we dragged out to the Jeep to load our overpacked possessions nearly collapsed under their admittedly copious weight. A bunch of kids who apparently lived in the neighborhood behind the hotel favored using the parking lot as a skate park.

After we settled in, we decided to go try to find something for dinner. No restaurants looked open, so we stopped at Scolari’s, a supermarket at the south edge of town (which, essentially, was about a quarter mile down Main Street from the hotel). The supermarket had a big parking lot, but like the lot, the market was almost deserted, except for a few shoppers and the handful of employees staffing the place. It was 9.00 on a Thursday night but it felt like Sunday around 11.00. We grabbed a few frozen comestibles and went to the checkout counters, where a strapping brunet clerk asked Steve whether he was “ailing” because he grabbed at his belly while trying not to drop the pizza package in his hand. The clerk was almost painfully polite, in a sickly kind of way that would have seemed sarcastic if it had not been so seemingly ingenuous (and if it had not been almost anywhere but California).

At the other end of the spectrum, the main drag seemed to be a public meeting space for the area’s bored teenagers, who screeched up and down it in their souped-up cars and noisily marked their territory with testosterone-laden skid marks. The absinthe-green Silver Queen Hotel sign and the lit-up neon cross from a generic Protestant chapel behind it added a final bizarre touch to the evening.

I was content to spend the rest of the night in the hotel room watching the Weather Channel. I guess it was the xenophobic and suspicious California Blanche DuBois in me realizing that I was 355 miles from Oakland and that Tonopah marked the point at which there really was, barring some unforeseen emergency the nature of which it would be impossible to conceive, no turning back.

Tonopah reminded me of nothing more clearly than the eerie, vaguely hostile tiny towns along the highway that Inger Stevens encountered in the 1960 “Twilight Zone” episode in which she is traveling cross-country, has a blown tire outside Pittsburgh, and begins getting tailed by a silent porkpie-hat-wearing hitchhiker wherever she goes, eventually realizing somewhere in Arizona that she actually died in the blowout and that the hitchhiker is the Grim Reaper.

—Posted by Frank at 23:59:00 | 14-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

I remember very little about even going through this town …

Oakdale, CA

Population 15,503 (2000 census); founded 1871 by the Stockton & Visalia Railroad Company; main attractions Hershey Foods Corporation and Oakdale Cowboy Museum.

We came in along Highway 120 and passed through town in less than five minutes—it’s a small town. But this Stanislaus County town 90 miles from Yosemite was the first place I knew that I was out of the Bay Area for good. There were American flags everywhere, big and small. (In the Bay Area, American flags made a surge right after 9/11/01 and disappeared just as quickly two or three months later.) There was a huge “SUPPORT OUR TROOPS” sign painted on the door of a hardware store. There was an abundance of hand-lettered signs. People on the street stared at the Jeep. I felt like a fish out of the liberal pond. I was a fish out of the liberal pond.

Keep in mind, those of you who don’t know me, that I am a Californian through and through—not in the stereotypical “hey dude, whassup” sense, which you can already ascertain because of my tortured, vaguely pre-Raphaelite writing style, but in the sense that other than a period of nine months in which I lived in Great Britain during my junior year, and other than a few trips in recent years with Steve to Colorado and Michigan and Oregon, and a few odd forays during my highly random childhood to places like Mexicali and Yuma, AZ, I have never been outside the borders of the Golden State.

Everything you read henceforth in my hand bears the imprint of that condition. That means good and bad. If I stereotype a place, if I make an unwarranted assumption, if I fall flat on my face in characterizing a region or a state of mind or a point of history, I will beg your forgiveness and your forbearance, because this Californian, you must realize, hasn’t gotten around a hell of a lot.

—Posted by Frank at 12:00:00 | 14-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Frank’s last day in California/first day on the road …

Dottie’s True Blue Cafe

My morning began at 7.45. I took care of whatever last minute things I could think of. This included imposing on the patience of Kit to dispose of some things I just hadn’t gotten my act together to pack, including some rolls of wrapping paper that had been sitting around my room for months if not years. How do you pack wrapping paper? You don’t. I should’ve gotten rid of it weeks ago. That and all the other crap I left behind for my poor housemates to dispose of. My apologies, Erin and Kit.

I sat and watched a little morning TV while waiting for Steve to arrive from the other side of the Bay. It was an act of anxiety—I was tired of pacing around. The house seemed so weird. The energy was horrible. The sun was out, it was a beautiful Bay Area morning, yet the place felt like a mortuary. The downstairs echoed and rattled with the emptiness of my cleaned-out room. Even the kitchen felt hollowed out. Kit was upstairs in bed with the dogs. They all seemed bummed out and stuck to themselves while I paced and fretted and sweated.

I watched KTVU. The show had this bouncy featurey piece about undiscovered great SF restaurants. The restaurant on tap was Dottie’s, a diner in the Geary/Jones area that I had not heard of (let alone patronized). The reporter was a perky brassy blonde who wandered around asking obnoxious questions of the clientele (and the harried owner/chef, whom she’d obviously interrupted in the middle of the morning rush) and taking showy on-camera bites of their omelets and pancakes to demonstrate how awesome the joint was. The camera panned around to the door once or twice to catch shots of the bleary-eyed yet lively line of waiting customers at the doorway. There were the usual SF assortment of bike messenger types, suit-wearing government employees, platinum blonde lesbians with piercings, queer fashion plates, you name it.

That short three minutes of bubbly morning TV seemed to sum up everything I love (and hate) about SF in one swoop: the parochial banality disguised as urbane sophistication, the relentless and almost heedless California optimism blended with the yawning pretend-New York City display of “we’ve all seen and done this before” (I say this because, for example, when Candace Bushnell is interviewed by a New York newspaper it’s a “whatever” event, but when she’s interviewed by the Chronicle it’s not only a front-page arts section spread, it’s a bizarre display of “Look at our coup! Only in San Francisco would Candace Bushnell agreed to have been interviewed by a newspaper!”), the public (and public-relations) show of inclusiveness not ever quite obliterated by the reality of SF’s unending history of exclusionary attitudes and politics, the strange and unshakable sense you get that SF really truly and honestly believes that it’s the one place that’s at the cutting edge of everything in American culture, politics, and zeitgeist.

—Posted by Frank at 09:00:00 | 14-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

I still haven’t quite figured out how to pronounce ‘Tonopah’ … is it ‘TOEnuh-pah’? or ‘tuh-NO-puh’? or ‘toe-noePAH’? Whatever it is, I’m sure it means ‘Middle of Bum-F*** Egypt’ …

Happy Trails ‘Til We Meet Again

San Francisco:

The Beagle has left the building.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

See ya tonight in Tonopah! (How DOES one pronounce that?)

—Posted by Steve at 06:43 | 14-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Moving Day. Yegods. Whatta day that was. Exhausting. Near tears. Panic attacks. Loading that big truck. My last night in San Francisco. Facing the wrenching goodbye where Bayley and I had to say goodbye to David after nine years of him putting up with us. Makes me all tired just remembering it. This entry is surprisingly upbeat for me. I hid all the anxiety and exhaustion and frustration pretty well …

Moving Day

Moving day came and went … at the time, it seemed as if it would never end. But, all in all, it was a pretty good day.

The 15-foot Budget rental truck was ready as promised. After we came back home, a couple of workers from the Two Irish Guys moving firm showed up five minutes early to load the truck. They were smooth, professional and pleasant and it was a very trouble-free experience. They didn’t even complain when they had to move the couch down five flights of stairs because it wouldn’t fit in the elevator. I tipped them nicely and so, if anyone is looking for someone to load/move things for you, I highly recommend them You can usually find a listing for them on Craig’s List.

After the truck was loaded, we hit the road, David driving the Jeep behind me. Two unnerving incidents when two people cut in front of me, leaving slamming on the brakes and hoping the thing would stop in time. But fortunately, nothing happened … I haven’t had a wreck in 22 years and I’m certainly not about to notch one up now, especially not on my final full day in San Francisco.

Once in Oakland, Frank called me to say that the rental trailer for the cross-country phase had been delivered. Promised between 9 a.m. and noon, it actually arrived around 1:30. But ValueMoves handled things well and have been a pleasure to do business with … so far. We’ll see what happens when we unload it in Ann Arbor.

Then the fun began. I feel as if I’ve climbed, oh, what’s the third-highest mountain in the world? And now I’m on the summit … the trailer, from Yellow Lines, is loaded successfully. Now comes the second-highest summit (isn’t that K-2?), which is the road trip, although that will be easier and much more fun. The highest is unloading our stuff in Ann Arbor and distributing it among three floors of townhouse. Ouch.

Yet, from the summit of having all of my things loaded for the move, things feel pretty good. I’m very tired, very achy, very exhausted and … not quite as emotional as I usually am. Which is a bit strange. Towards the end of the seemingly endless loading-of-the-trailer, I did have a panic/anxiety attack. Primarily, this was due to a couple of contradictory factors: Seeing the end in sight for having things loaded, yet seeing more stuff that still needed to be loaded. Strange, I know.

I inherited, somewhat, the packing gene from my father, who was always a whiz at it. I managed to get all of our stuff into a space 8X9X9. Unfortunately, it was supposed to be 8X9X6, so we’re going to encounter some additional charges. This was not good and an additional source of anxiety.

Between us, Frank and I have over 100 boxes of … stuff. Books. CDs. DVDs. Glassware. More books. Stereo and home theatre equipment, including a 46-inch TV. Couch. Dining room table. Four chairs. Another TV. And so on. While regretting that I had to go over the space limit, I am sorta proud of the packing job. But we’ll revisit that issue the morning of Aug. 23rd, and see how I did.

The loading took from 2 p.m. until just after 8. Long, grinding hours, punctuated by playing pookie and ball with Rudy Doogle and Gracie Punkin. We’ll miss them terribly.

We then went to dinner at Crogan’s in Montclair one last time (best onion rings, ever) and I said final goodbyes to George and Deb, who were gracious enough to come over to the restaurant to give goodbye hugs.

After we dropped the Budget truck off, David left me in the Castro to get some prescription refills made. I forgot to bring my script for Xanax, so I’ll have to get it filled later. The Castro, on my final visit, was a bit different. I almost never go there at night, and things were kinda hopping. Gone was its daytime persona of tourista/errands/medical doctors/pharmacy/bookstores and greeting and dining with friends. In its place is the night life, which is decidedly … different. Different crowd, more intense, very interesting.

Joel and Scott were then gracious enough to pick me up and drive me home (I sent David on ahead to check in on the beagle, who had been alone for about 10 hours, and in the dark, at this point). And we had a nice final chat and goodbye hugs.

Followed by laundry and final packing for the road warrior part and here we are, approaching 4 a.m. and I’ll have about three hours sleep. So it’s off to bed I go, in my sleeping bag on the floor. My last sleep in San Francisco.

It’s been a wild, strange seven years, it certainly has.

Tomorrow night, we’ll be coming to you from good ol’ Tonopah, NV, which I still haven’t figured out how to pronounce yet. I’ll ask the good people at the Hi Desert Inn to set me straight. But we’re very excited to visit Yosemite on the way. YNP is grand, glorious and wonderful. I love the Sierra.

In the meantime, everyone take care. I’m getting some shuteye; I have another mountain (or two or 30) to climb tomorrow.

Good night, y’all.

—Posted by Steve at 03:51 | 14-Aug-03

We left the Bay Area a year ago today. Just loaded ourselves and the beagle into the Jeep, drove, and by the end of the afternoon, we were over the Nevada border.

Hard to believe it’s been that long. I still miss aspects of SF and the Bay Area, but it’s all essentially memory and history to me now, which is something, to be honest, I never thought I’d say. I lived there off an on for almost 20 years, and it all gets wiped away in less than a year of living somewhere else. Such is life.

It speaks well of Ann Arbor as well, despite all of the various complaints I make about it to fill blog space. I can’t imagine myself having had a smooth time of letting go (and doing all of the other mental tricks you do more or less automatically when you adjust to a new phase of your life) if Ann Arbor hadn’t been a good place to do it in.

Ann Arbor is home to us now. I don’t know how long that will last; I graduate (with luck) in April, and Steve may resume his own program in June, which would keep us here at least another year. I won’t be unhappy if that is the case. There are some annoying and irritating aspects to living here, but they are nothing (so far) that rises above the level of inconvenience.

I consider myself and Steve to be very lucky to have that kind of life here. It could be so much more unpleasant in so many other ways. I am reserved in my sentiments only because I don’t think anyplace else will ever feel like California to me, which is not to say California is perfect, but only to say it’s where I spent most of my life up till a year ago.

I gave up my last vestige of California-ness this week: I broke down and overcame whatever denial I was living in for the past year and finally got a Michigan driver’s license. (I have had a valid California license this entire year, so don’t assume that I was driving illegally or anything like that. Anyway, the number of times in the past year that I’ve actually been behind the wheel have been so numerically insignificant that it’s almost an insult to the Motor State for me to gain admission to the driver’s license club here.)

I wouldn’t consider the wait at the Secretary of State’s office on Maple a pleasant experience, but then again, it was way closer to pleasant than any wait I had at any of the California DMV offices I sat in over the years. The woman who took my number was very friendly, asking me what I was here in Michigan for when the weather was so much nicer in California. She then told me that she was worried about her 16-year-old son getting his first license because a friend of his had already been in three accidents. Yet another reason that my newly minted driver’s license isn’t likely to get much more than cursory or emergency use in this state.

Anyway, when they finish with you at the Secretary of State, they punch a hole in your out-of-state license and hand it back to you, which is an oddly deflating event. It’s confirmation that your identity as a person from that Other State is no longer valid or relevant.

I guess I already knew that, and it’s not as if I’ve been trumpeting my California identity while I’ve been here, but it’s still a strangely symbolic ritual.

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

No comment here. We DO miss them all …

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Adieu!

‘Don’t say goodbye, say see ya soon!’ Goodbyes are hard … Kit, Erin, Me and Frank and the girls, Rudy Doogle on the left and Gracie Punkin on the right; George and I say farewell at Union Square; Frank and I bid the city adieu. [sniff]

—Posted by Steve at 03:00 | 13-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Well, I do miss BART when I have to deal with the drivers around here … but I don’t miss its expense, dirt, filth and crazy, weird people. And there are better pizza joints around here than Milano’s (lord knows Bayley isn’t discriminating when it comes to leftover pizza crust treats), so I guess that’s a wash too … I don’t have a pic of it, but I do occasionally miss the Raintree Cafe at Eighth and Irving, where we used to go quite a bit.

Last Calls

Some scenes from the final moments in San Francisco: The last BART train I’ll ride gets ready to leave 12th Street/Oakland City Center; the same train leaves me behind at Glen Park station in San Francisco. And the last one, well, that’s the beagle getting his final pizza crust treat from Milano’s Pizzeria at Ninth and Irving, our favorite neighborhood pizza place.

—Posted by Steve at 02:56 | 13-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Ah! The anxieties of the final hours before a major move! God! I’m glad we’re not going through this right now!!!

30 Hours and Counting

This is just going to be short update tonight. So much going on.

Today was full of final packing, praying that my dishes will make it unscathed, much uncertainty about the big loading the truck thing tomorrow, giving the beagle his bath so he’ll smell halfway decent in the confines of the car, ironing out final wrinkles and nailing down final details.

Between my last post and this one, there has been a lot of heavy lifting and running around, burned fingers, scraped knuckles and punctured thumbs, some angst and anxiety and realization that we’re not going to be able to do everything we wanted to before departure (i.e., touristy things around San Francisco-although we did do quite a bit of them). There’s been beagle angst (a very uncharacteristic and unnerving potty incident in the living room floor); I witnessed a woman run a red light and plow into two cars at one of the city’s notorious intersections that has always scared the heck out of me for four-and-a-half years; a final trip to Andronico’s to get a box of Krispy Kremes; last beagle walks in Golden Gate Park; final dinners with friends; and not a whole lot of sleep.

The farewell with friends have tended to be more ‘see ya laters!’ than tearful goodbyes, which is a good thing. Friends are, of course, the number one thing we’ll miss, with the fog/climate a close second. The weather has been beautiful the last two days and the fog is just beginning to make an appearance. I’m hoping it’s there to say goodbye to me as I leave Thursday morning.

The itinerary is set, the hotel reservations are made, the utilities in Ann Arbor are reserved, the check is ready to give to the landlord, affairs are wrapped up here and tomorrow (or rather today as I write this) begins the final big physical push of bringing my stuff down from the fifth floor to the rental truck on the street, followed by a trip to Oakland, where we will load all of our stuff on the cross-country trailer.

A sense of relief will come when the trailer is loaded and the rental truck is returned at 17:00 PST. Then I can relax and load the Jeep and be outta here bright and early at 6 a.m. Thursday.

I entered San Francisco for the first time at 2 a.m. one fine morning in late April of 1994, having just driven 30 hours non-stop from Dallas with David. My what the last nine-and-a-half years, seven of them here in the Bay Area, have brought many wild changes. I’ll be reflecting on them over the next nine days right here.

Meanwhile, I drew up a budget; it calls for the move to cost $3,112, which includes transporting goods and food, hotels, gas, etc., for the trip. There is an additional $2,561.44 for move-in expenses for the townhouse, meaning the whole grand cross-country adventure comes with about a $5,700 price tag. We’ll follow along with expenses in this ‘blog as we come to them each day.

But for now, no new pics (althought I have tons to post), it’s off to bed for a few hours. Awake time is 07:30 PST, so I better get to snoozing; that’s only 5 hours from now, yikes.

More later …

—Posted by Steve at 02:23 | 13-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Tunes on the road …

Soundtrack, Departure

Heard Art Pepper’s “Summertime,” one of the sublimest West Coast tunes you could ever listen to, on a jazz station when Steve was driving me home tonight [12-Aug-03] after a goodbye dinner with George at the Cheesecake Factory in Union Square and I was seeing the Bay Bridge and the downtown area for the last time. I haven’t lost it this whole time, but this was one moment I came close.

—Posted by Frank at 00:59:02 | 13-Aug-03

We have a new photo gallery:

« How to Make PeaMutt Butter Dog Treats »

August 12 and it’s 59 degrees outside. Astounding.

I was walking to the bus tonight, with my usual combination of focus on the path in front of me and absorption in my own thoughts, when to my right I suddenly heard a woman raising her voice and asking, “Do you speak English?” (It was more of an exclamation than it was a question.)

It turned out to be a well-meaning if politically incorrect matron from out of town, maybe from an Oakland County suburb like West Bloomfield or Farmington Hills, wanting to know if I had change for a dollar to feed one of the greedy State Street parking meters. She’d obviously been rebuffed in her pleas by other passersby. I dug into my backpack and gave her some quarters.

She was at least amiable, which was far more than I could say for the surly undergrad at Shapiro ten minutes earlier who’d not even looked away from his computer screen when I’d approached to check out a book. This always puzzles me. You’re a student, you’re employed at a desk to check out books and probably also to fulfill a work-study requirement, yet you ignore approaching foot traffic unless it’s (presumably) of the opposite sex, roughly your age, and physically appealing.

Yeah, I was an undergrad once too, back in the Pleistocene Era, so I know the mindset (and had the mindset, too). But that doesn’t make it right.

According to the National Weather Service, July 27 was a record low maximum temperature for this region:

The high temperature reached just 64 degrees…falling well below the record low maximum for the date of 70…set way back on July 27th 1874. Adding insult to injury…the high of 64 degrees occurred just after midnight! Temperatures hovered in the mid 50s to around 60 during the afternoon hours of the 27th as a steady rain fell. It was also the coolest July 27th on record since 1870… overall…with an average temperature for the day of 61 degrees. While no official records can be quoted…it is pretty safe to say that it is unusual in July to have cooler afternoon temperatures than at midnight.

Like I said: My kind of summer.

The weather this month has been amazingly, well, temperate. There was a bit of mugginess in the air this afternoon, but nothing that was even remotely oppressive. It was actually cooler outside this afternoon than it was indoors. And the cloud cover rolled in later in the day, with the nightfall taking on a signs-of-a-thunderstorm cast. There is something very pleasant about an August night when the fireflies are thick and the dusk is rising and the possibility of a summer storm lurks. It’s my kind of summer.

I haven’t made much comment about the marriage thing lately because, frankly, it’s too exhausting to keep up, and it’s dispiriting to see what lengths the right wing will go to in order to cloak their efforts to destroy gay peoples’ lives in the rhetoric of “preserving the family” (when the measures they are pushing do no such thing, but only destroy already-existing families).

Missouri recently approved a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and I don’t know enough about the amendment and its history to be sure, but the Missouri amendment (at least on the surface) seems actually less restrictive (in the sense that it doesn’t seem to contain Trojan horse language effectively banning civil unions and domestic partnership privileges) than the amendment that will probably be up for a vote here in Michigan in November.

Anyway, what prompted me to shoot off this post was the following wire story about a biology professor who’s moving out of the Commonwealth of Virginia, which in June enacted the most draconian anti-gay law in the country. The professor makes it clear that she’s moving because of the law:

In a letter to Virginia Tech President Charles Steger, Lynn Adler says she will leave Tech to take a position with the University of Massachusetts in Amherst this fall.

She says she is “sad and sorry” to be leaving Tech, but felt it was necessary because the laws of Virginia make it difficult for her to have a long-term future in the state.

Her partner does not have health insurance working part-time at Tech, and she says the state will not recognize them both as parents if they decide to have children.

She says the last straw was a law passed earlier this year that prohibits contracts between same-sex couples that purport to bestow the obligations of marriage.

The law is considered to be the harshest anti-gay measure in the country.

What’s interesting about this beyond the surface is that Charlottesville, VA ranks #25 on a list of software workers as total number of workers employed. No other locality in Virginia (other than the suburbs of DC) makes the list. Areas of the country that have strong concentrations of people employed in software-related activities also tend to have habitats that, as Richard Florida and his colleagues at the Software Industry Center at Carnegie Mellon have pointed out in empirical research, “attract creative and diverse people of all sorts,” tending thus to “do well in attracting [further] software activities and jobs.”

It may not be in Virginia’s interest to attract those types of jobs, but then again, it might not be in Virginia’s interest to join the 21st century, either. Only the legislators who thought this law was a fantastic idea can explain that. Here’s the kicker of the Lynn Adler story:

Adler says she was instrumental in bringing over a $500,000 in federal grants to Virginia Tech from the National Science Foundation.

Bye bye talent, bye bye capital, bye bye economic growth.

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

A year later, these seem pretty inconsequential things to be missing … I had mostly forgotten all about them.

San Francisco Scenes I Will Miss

Things I will miss about living in this San Francisco neighborhood: The patch where they start growing pumpkins every July to sell in the pumpkin patch a block from my apartment; the view north up Funston as you drive to Andronico’s; and getting Krispy Kremes at Andronico’s (this is a picture of my last box from there, by the way [sigh]).

—Posted by Steve at 00:42 | 09-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

A year later, I STILL definitely do not miss these things …

San Francisco Scenes I Won’t Miss

Things I won’t miss about living in this San Francisco neighborhood: The higgledy-piggledy and dangerous intersection of Seventh Avenue and Lawton; the 36 Teresita Muni bus which I used to catch every morning at 6:20 a.m. at that spot; and the old, creaky, breaks-down-often, nasty elevator in my apartment building.

—Posted by Steve at 00:34 | 09-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

If I remember right, the beagle was very upset that we moved down the hall to my roommate David’s new apartment for the week before we departed for Michigan. He sulked under my bed when we got there and subsequently got himself stuck and had to be extricated …

Pouting

‘Mad beagle. Stuck under bed.

—Posted by Steve at 00:24 | 09-Aug-03

I’ve been so laid up with carpal tunnel (and thank you Hillary, Michael and Dorothea for your wonderful advice and care, I do appreciate it) that I really dropped the ball on an important milestone for aSquared AirBeagle: Happy Birthday to Us! We’re a year old!

Because all of those entries are from my trashed Movable Type installation, I don’t have an archive of them any longer on the server. So I thought I’d do a little retrospective of our cross-country adventures while moving to Ann Arbor. Since I’m now an old fart of 40, I’ve already forgotten the particulars of last August’s continental brouhaha.

It appears that I had the first idea to do aSquared around 23-Jul-03:

Beginning of the End

‘Sorry for the few-and-far-between updates, folks, but things are a might busy around Le Maison du Beagle. See, we’re moving from San Francisco to Ann Arbor, MI, in just a very few weeks (in just a mere 23 days, in fact), so I’ve been a bit frenzied, flying to Detroit, looking for a new place (we scored a fairly spiffy new townhouse with plenty of outdoors for beagle to roam around in and not far from campus and Michigan Stadium) and packing up the books and DVDs, figuring out all the nagging logistics of a 2,800-mile, cross-country move and wrapping things up here.

‘It’s turning out to be possibly a month-long orgy of goodbyes … visiting favorite spots in San Francisco, taking final pictures, saying goodbyes to friends and the doctor and his staff and so on and on, so the ‘blogging is lagging. But I’m going to try to keep up. In fact, in a few days, I’m going to start a side journal, a little log of the beagle’s cross-country adventures, along with some pictures. So stay tuned.’

—Posted by Steve at 23:33 | 23-Jul-03

Oh, those heady days of preparing to push off into the unknown! What a fast year, in some respects, it’s been. Wow.

I suppose that aSquared’s official birthday was 1-Aug-03, when I posted the following:

Answering the Siren Call

‘Welcome to the first post in the ‘airbeagle moves to michigan’ ‘blog, your best way to track us as we move across country in the Jeep, from San Francisco to Ann Arbor. Or bust.

Here’s the way things work around here. « The graphic at top provides a visual way to track us as we move across the country » [Ed. Note: The very first aSquared graphic]. The first photo is, obviously, of the Golden Gate Bridge, which will we miss, here in San Francisco, which we won’t. Well, maybe just a tiny little bit. More on that later. The last photo on the right is of the Michigan Union on the campus of the University of Michigan, ground zero in Ann Arbor, where we will toil through two years, two Michigan winters, four semesters of grad school for Frank and lord knows what for me. The photos in the center will be replaced as we’re on the road with photos of spots we pass by on the way.

You can read each day’s journal posting, obviously, in this left-hand column and see what day and time it was posted and by whom. In the right column, you can see where we are, how far we’ve driven and an estimate of how far we have to go, plus ways to view previous entries and links to other sites, both internal to airbeagle.com and newspapers in the places we’ll pass through.

As the trip itself progresses, I’ll post photos of what we’ve seen that day. Fair warning: most of them will feature Bayley Murphy Beagle in some form or fashion. Just so you know.

Sound ambitious? Well, it is. But we’re lookin’ at 3,053 miles of America, folks. It’s a fascinating land and we want to document what we see of it. First, to see if we can document it or if we get bored or tired of it and blow it off towards the end. Second, to keep a record of what will be a strange and wonderful trip.

The route itself is pretty much planned thusly (although not set in stone):

• Day 1: San Francisco to Yosemite to Bishop, CA—because we want to avoid I-5, Bakersfield, Barstow and Needles at all costs. Been there, done that, didn’t enjoy it.

• Day 2: Bishop to Las Vegas—not because we want to gamble or anything, but because there are lots of cheap hotel rooms and everyone should see the epitome of wretched American excess at least once before they die. It’s kinda like Frenchmen in the sixteenth century making the journey to Versailles, then dying happy.

• Day 3: Las Vegas to Gallup, NM—yes, you heard me, Gallup, NM, because there might be a pow-wow going on and Gallup is probably as far as we’ll want to go that day.

• Day 4: Gallup to Santa Fe—because I can’t pass through my native state, my spiritual homeland without stopping off and showing off the nation’s oldest and highest state capital to Frank. If you just stay on I-40 through New Mexico, well, you’re just sad, that’s all.

• Day 5: Santa Fe to Oklahoma City—because it’s 527 miles of absolutely nothingness and we wish to spend as little time as possible in the Texas panhandle. Like Barstow, been there many times, bought many t-shirts, felt as spiritually flattened as the landscape, no thanks.

• Day 6: Oklahoma City to Memphis, TN—because Graceland is in Memphis and, as with Vegas, how can you call yourself an American if you haven’t paid homage to the King?

• Day 7: Memphis to Nashville—because scoring tickets to something bluegrass-y at the Ryman would be extremely cool.

• Day 8: Nashville to Lexington, KY—because bluegrass country is even prettier than bluegrass music.

• Day 9: Lexington to Ann Arbor, via Cincinnati and Dayton, OH—because an airplane nut like me can’t be that close to Orville and Wilbur and the Air Force Museum without taking a quick gander.

Yes, I know, we could go down here a couple of miles from the apartment and get on I-80 and go all the way to Chicago, then join I-94 on up to AA. It’s shorter, faster … and as boring as Lynne Cheney giving a patriotism lecture to a college professor. Plus you gotta go through Salt Lake City. And, just as with Barstow and the Texas panhandle, well, you get the idea.

So there’s the route. One can see a fair piece of road going that way, and a fair piece of America and Americans. El Capitan and Yosemite Falls. Siegfried and Roy. Hoover Dam. Palace of the Governors. The Sangre de Cristos. A giant stainless steel cross and Cadillacs stuck in the earth west of Amarillo. The Oklahoma City National Memorial. The under-construction library of our last democratically elected president. Lisa Marie, Elvis’ DC-8. Georgetown, KY. And at the end of the road, a new life. New adventures. New friends (and a couple of old ones thrown in for good measure).

More, ever so much more, later. The packing has just begun and I’m just plumb wore out with it all. Y’all stay tuned. The Mother Road beckons and gets more insistent every day. We’ll heed her siren call.

But first, I’ve got to disentangle the beagle from the bubble wrap …’

And so it began, a year ago last Sunday.

Like I said, from now until 23-Aug, I believe I’ll read last year’s posts into the record, since they don’t exist in the archives, and I’ll start with these other posts from 1-Aug-03:

‘Just to get things kicked off, here’s a pic of the packing frenzy beginning, followed by four pics of how worn out it made the beagle.

There’s nothing more pathetic than a beagle whose couch/throne has been displaced from its regular position. So, he elected to sleep through much of the brouhaha.

I just know that’s gonna be one mad beagle when he hops in the Jeep on 14-Aug … and hops out on 22-Aug in a whole new state.

Shhhh. Let’s not tell him.

—Posted by Steve at 00:02 | 01-Aug-03

More retro posts to follow …

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Many mega-dittoes from me on this one …

Things I’ll miss (not)

Within the space of fifteen minutes just after 7:30 on Monday morning, within a block of the center of the Financial District, I passed by an older bearded man in rags pulling down his trousers and shouting at bystanders for refusing to look at him; another somewhat younger man standing on the corner hawking Street Sheets and imploring people to give rather than receive; and a squalid lump of human stench squatting on one of the Market Street sitting blocks (I don’t know what else to call them; they aren’t benches, they aren’t planters) a block away from that, his belongings in a discolored heap inside, on top of, and overflowing a stolen shopping cart next to him.

I don’t know what the solutions to homelessness are. I don’t know that anybody does, especially not the politicians. I don’t think the homeless should be shipped out of town like many San Franciscans do. I also don’t think they are served by wandering the streets. All I do know is that I won’t miss the spectacle in my face every single day, and that there but for the grace of the universe go I.

—Posted by Frank at 14:33:27 | 8-Aug-03

We went to see “A Home at the End of the World“ last night at the Michigan. The screening was introduced by Tom Hulce, best known for his performance 20 years ago in Milos Forman’s “Amadeus.” The movie wasn’t all that great; it was brief, the ending was very abrupt, and probably the only really two fantastic things about the movie were its soundtrack and the brief clip from “All about Eve” that flashed on the screen. What was interesting, though, was Hulce’s introduction before the flick started.

He rambled a bit, and seemed oddly at a loss for words at one point, but he clearly perceived the movie as a vision of what it was like to live in the Midwest during the 1960s and 1970s (and that first third of the film was actually pretty good), and he launched into a bunch of fond reminiscences about strolling down State and Liberty and across the Diag with friends as an undergraduate at UM in the summer of 1969. What made the evident warmth of Hulce’s memory all the more intriguing was that the summer of 1969 was not exactly the most peaceful time in Ann Arbor, with South University being taken over for three days that June by student protesters and rioters and other pitched battles going on all summer long between various protesters and the University administration.

A lot of the audience (it was sparse; it could not even be described as a crowd), composed mostly of folks our age or older, loved Hulce doing this—a lot of them appeared to relate intensely to what he was talking about, to the memory of Ann Arbor as something other than what it apparently is now. That fascinated me. All places change, of course, and change is only accelerated as we move deeper into a time where nothing is stable anymore. But I’m always engrossed with the specifics: why is Ann Arbor so different now from what it was, say, 20 or 30 years ago? I can take stabs at guessing the reasons, one of them being, I suppose, that there seems to be very little (in terms of establishments or cultural landmarks) in town left that was around 10 years ago, let alone 20 or 30. The nostalgia and reverie of Hulce and the audience was way more complicated than the usual “Those were good times” scenario.

I could be totally off base on that perception, but it seems to me that history gets erased here much more assiduously than it does in other cities in the Midwest. (Unless it’s the history of UM, which gets guarded and preserved fairly zealously.) Why that is, I couldn’t hazard a guess. I don’t think it’s just a function of the generic “college town” explanation.

I can’t believe how great it is that the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority has finally gotten with the program and is starting to allow people with University of Michigan IDs to ride the bus without paying. (There were one or two free routes before this, but citywide is a godsend.) I’m saving easily $8-10 a week.

I’m no paragon of the spoken word, as anyone who knows me can verify, but it always amuses me when I hear students — not just undergrads, grads and everyone in between — using filler words in their speech.

“Like” I can understand; it’s an unconscious filler word, like “um,” “uh,” and all the rest. But today I listened to a couple of poli sci grad students chattering away over coffee about lesson plans, peppering their conversation with words like “ordinal” and “constituencies,” and one of them kept very studiously and carefully interweaving into the dialogue California beach bum expressions like “SWEET!” and “Okay, so … that’s cool.”

There was also the woman from Toronto I overheard larding her conversation with liberal doses of “Fer shure!” (Moon Unit Zappa, you’re wanted on the white courtesy phone.)

I blame California for all of the above.

This afternoon while I was waiting for the bus, I saw a couple of undergrad-looking guys, one toting what looked like a box containing a router and the other some other kind of electronic doohickey in a Toshiba box, and knew beyond a doubt that the influx has officially gotten into high gear. The students have been traipsing around campus all week, actually. There are more every day. No longer does the campus even have the pretense of feeling deserted, dead, or de-populated; it actually never felt that way all “summer,” regardless of the urban myths I’d heard about such a utopian state. I guess it’s almost time for the insanity to resume, alas.

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Well, it looks like this one saw me full of anxieties about leaving San Francisco for Ann Arbor:

Overwhelmed

Scenes from a farewell dinner for Frank with his colleagues:

A lovely scene tonight as Frank’s co-workers treated him to a delicious pizza dinner and cake to say farewell. They’re a wonderful set of people, gracious and unpretentious and the evening was quite enjoyable. I was a bit too tired to fully enjoy it, I’m embarassed to admit, but it was both touching and bittersweet and yet another goodbye-to-San-Francisco moment. Many thanks to Mabel for hosting the event and doing such a fabulous job with preparing delicious food for us.

And then I came home. And here we have it … that overwhelmed feeling that hits every move. Overwhelmed by the sheer physical task ahead of me … moving all I own down to a truck to be driven across the bay and loaded onto a trailer for cross-country transport. Then unloading everything into the new home.

I’m not really that great with adaptation. Never has been my strong suit. As a matter of fact, it’s my old nemesis. And this is the beginning of that bugaboo.

And as my old nemesis, it’s a very familiar feeling. One which I know I will have and one which I know what it will feel like and one which I know how to fight and one which, thank goodness, I know will not last long.

I guess tonight’s problem is simply fatigue. I’ve been packing an entire two-bedroom apartment, throwing things away, scrounging boxes, running all the myriad errands all over town, handling all the logistics of finding an apartment, closing out the old one, switching off utilities here and turning them on there, another ‘plane trip to Detroit, job interviews, handling the last-minute and therefore urgent needs of my three clients, comforting the dog, packing up my fleet of airliner models, arranging moving trucks and trailers, saying goodbyes, traipsing around all over the bay area for final look-sees, last visits to the doctor (good news there … my health is excellent), mourning the imminent absence of the great and wonderful San Francisco fog from my life, finding another auto insurance carrier after GEICO wanted to increase my six-month premium from $638 to $2,594 (!), putting a new spare tire on the Jeep, inspecting it, changing its oil, washing it and lubing it and cleaning it out, reassuring friends and relatives and explaining why-oh-why, spackling nail holes in the walls, cleaning the grill and scrubbing the balcony, cleaning, arranging, numbering boxes, painting the rust spots in my medicine chest, final vet visits for a very discombobulated beagle, who knows exactly what’s going on (he’s done this 14 times before in a mere nine years of his life), and comforting said beagle by giving lots of snuggle hugs and assuring him that his own private patch of ivy awaits him out his back door, that there will be plenty of snow to romp about on in just about 3.5 short months and that yes, indeedy, he’s going to just love Michigan.

Which is pretty much where I am. I’m looking forward to the trip. I’m looking forward to the beginning of a new life in a new city with Frank. The townhouse we’ve rented is fabulous … in other words, it’s all good. I’m particularly excited to take in Yosemite again, and the new (to me) country up and over to Lee Vining, down to Bishop and Vegas and joining the Mother Road at Kingman.

I can’t wait to see my native state again. From border to border, New Mexico makes my soul and spirit resonate … it vibrates in me with a hum and excitement … it revives a connection that has been there since birth. I can honestly say that, as far around the world as I’ve travelled, few (if any) places on the plant make me as truly happy as the Land of Enchantment makes me.

I’ll also enjoy showing Frank, I-40 virgin, what America is really like … that it’s not George W. Bush’s Amurrica, that it is, in fact, a vast and exciting and varied and colorful and wonderful place … peopled with the occasional fascist nut, but , hey, no place is perfect, right? Keep the radio off the AM dial and stop and take plenty of pics and … enjoy … the experience. A New Mexico sunset. The cool piney altitude of Flagstaff. The folks of Oklahoma. The Lisa Marie, Elvis’ DC-8, sitting in a park at Graceland. The Ryman Auditorium. And so on. The trip will be simply fabulous, as will the commencement of our new lives in a new city, state, time zone and mentality. It’s all good.

It’s just that here at 11:45 p.m. on the last night before the deluge, I have to rearrange all the boxes and furniture, load up the kitchen stuff, pack the fragile pics and posters, disconnect a huge home theater system and 46-inch TV … and make changes to a project for a client and start another one for her, pick up moving equipment at U-Haul, wait on a glass company to fix a chip on the windshield of the Jeep, meet with a client and then start hauling everything down the hall to our one-week temporary apartment.

It’s a long, exhausting, sometimes nightmarish thing, is moving. I have to say that this one, other than the physical demands on me, is turning out to be less problematic than the other 15 I’ve done myself since April 1994.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed. Until I’m standing underneath a waterfall in Yosemite and then crossing the Nevada border a few hours later, it will be hard to believe it’s going to happen.

And yet, two weeks from right now, we should be sleeping in … Oklahoma City, OK. Whaddya know?

Good night, ya’ll.

—Posted by Steve at 03:12 | 05-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

I have to admit to being a snob here; I always preferred SF to Oakland, which never really grew on me, its storied past notwithstanding …

A note about Oakland

It may seem that I’m dissing Oakland by writing about things I’ll miss about the Bay Area (and concentrating most of them on San Francisco). I’m not dissing Oakland, but I’m not fully embracing it, either.

I live in Oakland much of the week, and there are things I love about it—its sprawling hugeness, its rolling hills, its vast parks, its hidden neighborhoods, its insistent heterogeneity, its stubborn retention of a certain working-class scarppiness in spite of all of Jerry Brown and Jacques Barzaghi’s efforts to domesticate it. (There are also things I don’t like so much about Oakland, but this post isn’t about dissing Oakland.)

But I don’t have a car (right now), and to properly love Oakland you have to have one, without a doubt. To properly love San Francisco all you need are a MUNI pass and two feet.

—Posted by Frank at 08:50:09 | 4-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Fog. Oh, the fog. Yes, indeedy, god knows I do miss that …

Things I’ll miss, #8

The fog. It doesn’t come in on “little cat feet,” as in the Carl Sandburg poem. It comes in like a crushing Genghis Khan army.

Friday night as I was on my way to Base Airbeagle, I walked along Kirkham and up the hill on Locksley—and the fog was so thick, it was exhilarating. You could see maybe ten yards in any direction, tops. The fog rolled over the neighborhood like a massive gray carpet being shaken by a giant pair of hands. The mist crashed against your face, driven by the wind. This wasn’t Cornwall or the Cotswolds, it was the Inner Sunset.

When I first looked for apartments in San Francisco, it was in the Inner and Outer Sunset that I looked, and I hesitated because I found the fog irritating, depressing, and forbidding. Now, I can’t think of any feature of San Francisco that I’ll miss more—and that I have already missed more living most of my week in Oakland.

—Posted by Frank at 08:40:29 | 4-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

I do miss the ease of BART … no cars, no traffic, you can sleep or read the paper or cruise hot guys, er, I mean, relax on the way to Oakland …

Things I’ll miss, #7

BART. It’s frequently overcrowded, more than often delayed by mechanical problems, it’s somewhat scary late at night, and it’s damn expensive. But if you’re trying to get around the Bay Area (or many parts of it) without a car, it’s indispensable.

And on a day like today, when it’s not too packed, when you don’t have to be any particular place at any particular time, and you’re not short on change, it’s a fun ride. You can fall asleep. You can peoplewatch. You can get reading done. And if you’re in a contemplative mood, there’s nothing more conducive to brainstorming or daydreaming than staring out the big windows as the train hurtles along the track and you watch the warehouses and the clotheslines and the churches and (in the distance) the hills glide past.

—Posted by Frank at 21:54:01 | 3-Aug-03

I was walking along William today and a man sitting on his porch was blasting what sounded an awful lot like Billie Holiday out one of the front windows of his house.

Ah, summer.

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

The stairway walks are fabulous, but they totally kick your ass …

Things I’ll miss, #6

Stairway walks. San Francisco has more than 350 stairways, some of them obvious landmarks like the Lyon Steps, some of them completely hidden discoveries, like the series of stairs that winds through the neighborhoods above Castro and 17th Street, or the amazing convoluted stairway walk through the parkland at the edge of Glen Canyon Park that starts at Portola Drive and ends by dropping you out into Glen Park. You feel like you’re in an entirely separate landscape, bucolic and almost completely divorced from the general tumult of the urban cage that San Francisco can be.

I discovered these walks through my friend Steve C., who had a well-worn copy of Adah Bakalinsky’s Stairway Walks in San Francisco when he lived here. We both took the walks, individually and separately, and for me, the walks were a great form of exercise, a great way to do some weekend socializing, a kind of permissible semi-voyeurism (some of the stairs wend through some semi-private nooks of the city that most people wouldn’t bother searching out), and, of course, a great way to see the City.

One big regret I have is that I never took the long city-wide walk that Bakalinsky outlined. Another is that I didn’t do all of the walks.

—Posted by Frank at 21:37:09 | 2-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Mitchell’s is pretty fabulous and we haven’t really found anything to equal it around AA, as of yet. Anyone have suggestions?

Things I’ll miss, #5

Mitchell’s Ice Cream. I had tasted Mitchell’s but today was the first time I’d actually been to the store, a cramped hole in the wall on a non-descript block on the edge of Noe Valley and Bernal Heights. Waiting in line was not my favorite thing: it had been a hot August day, and people were crowding around the door impatiently waiting to get their ice cream fix (and boy, do people get persnickety and weird about ice cream). Fortunately, the place has a strictly enforced take-a-number system that makes the line less of a nightmare; all you do is pick your number and wait (and wait, and wait). And the help behind the counter are polite, patient, and speedy, not surly and nasty like a lot of San Francisco service workers. And of course, there’s the payoff: possibly the best ice cream you’ll ever eat.

—Posted by Frank at 21:19:15 | 2-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Oh yeah, I remember views. Unlike here in pancake country …

Things I’ll miss, #4

The views. There are spectacular views in San Francisco that you won’t see anywhere else in the world. This is true of many places, of course; but those places aren’t San Francisco, with its unique combination of maze-like neighborhoods, its myriad (actually, 42, if you’re counting) hills, and its unparalleled landmarks.

—Posted by Frank at 21:07:33 | 02-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

I have to say that there are fabulous book stores around Ann Arbor, so I don’t miss these probably as much as Frank …

Things I’ll miss, #3

Green Apple Books. Haven’t ventured out there lately (it’s in the Richmond, and I now live in Oakland) but, for its selection, its sprawling looseness, and its rickety hardwood floors, it’s my favorite Bay Area bookstore.

Runners-up: 2. Stacey’s.

3. Moe’s Books in Berkeley.

4. Cody’s, also Berkeley.

5. Booksmith.

6. Aardvark (for the imperious tabby cat alone).

7. Kepler’s, in Menlo Park, although its atmosphere and clientele were often a little too snooty for my liking.

8. City Lights, a San Francisco institution, and one that was inexplicably attacked as a leftist hive (you would’ve thought it was an al-Qaida meeting hall) and a symbol of everything that’s wrong with America in several out-of-control letters to the editor in the Chronicle during its fiftieth a iversary earlier this year.

9. The defunct (the space is now a yoga facility) Ninth Avenue Books.

10. Alexander Book Co.

11. Modern Times.

12. Bound Together, for shock value alone (not anymore, but when I first moved here, the concept of an anarchist bookstore was pretty amazing). The staff was surly at best, but as someone commented somewhere else on the Internet, “If you were a left-wing anarchist, would you be in a good mood?”

13. European Book Company. All kinds of Europe stuff, including supercilious French staff, supercilious being a particularly amusing quality to sport at the intersection of Larkin and Geary. Years ago, I found a fat English-Dutch dictionary here and just about died.

14. A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, which is last because it has a great deal of sumptuous and intriguing stock to distract you, but seemingly never has exactly what you’re looking for.

A Different Light should be on this list—when I first settled down in San Francisco ten years ago, I had some of my most exciting times as a newbie to the City participating in a rambunctious writing workshop there—but I’m not that fond of the place anymore; it’s become too generic, too much like all of the other touristy boutiques and chain stores in the Castro. As you can tell, I spend way too much of my spare time in bookstores.

—Posted by Frank at 11:55:10 | 02-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

I have to agree with Frank on this one … I miss it still!

Things I’ll miss, #2

The Bay Bridge. The Golden Gate Bridge is the celebrity. But the Bay Bridge has so much more majesty, solidity, and grandeur. It is my favorite bridge in the world.

—Posted by Frank at 11:52:19 | 1-Aug-03

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

In his first postings to aSquared, Frank talked about aspects of San Francisco he would and would not miss:

Things I’ll miss, #1

Claes von Oldenburg (another friggin’ SWEDE!) and Coosje van Bruggen’s “Cupid’s Span” at Rincon Park. You either love it or you hate it. I happen to love it.

I glanced at it a lot on my way in to work over the Bay Bridge. It added a lot of (well-needed) whimsy to the Embarcadero.

Von Oldenburg is now apparently adding a sculpture of a gigantic banana to the sterile Cantor Arts Center on the Stanford campus (van Bruggen riffs: “The banana is a fruit with many interpretations; it’s a flower, it’s a phallus . . . the banana is kind of a wit”), which, in my opinion, is an absolutely transcendent touch.

—Posted by Frank at 11:45:21 | 1-Aug-03

Here’s another retro/anniversary post … skip it you’re not into my sentimentality. I apparently made a laundry list of things I would and would not miss about San Francisco. A year later, well, my list is holding up pretty well. I still agree with most every item on the list.

I’m Taking My Heart With Me

Frank makes note in his ‘blog of a woman asking him for directions to Lombard Street today … quite possibly the last time he’ll have to give a tourist directions to the ‘Crookedest Street in the World.’

It reminds me of one afternoon after work while waiting for the cable car down to the Embarcadero at Grant and California, the heart of Chinatown, across from St. Mary’s Cathedral, etc., etc. Two tourists, obviously lost and confused, asked me how to ride the cable car. Turns out they were from Jonesboro, AR. They seemed to be enjoying themselves in Baghdad-by-the-Bay. It was just your average day in a tourist mecca, something that I’ve been rather blasé about; on the one hand, the geography, weather, history and … fabulousness … of this place is wonderful, but on the other, sometimes it can be a royal pain-in-the-tuckus.

Now, the encounter with the Jonesboro couple was pleasant, as was a 7 a.m. cable car ride up the hill to work one spring morning when I found myself riding with the members of a Swiss national folk singing choir, who sang a beautiful melody as we ‘climbed halfway to the stars.’ But other encounters weren’t as pleasant. During the summers, height of tourist season, it was often really annoying, and sometimes downright scary, to wade through the throngs in order to get to work at 700 California. Annoying because apparently people leave their brains at home when they go on vacation and tend to congregate in clumps on the sidewalk, impeding all progress by anyone else. Downright scary because I can’t count the times I’ve seen a tourist do something truly stupid in the street, either getting on/off the cable cars on California, or thinking that Grant is an open-air shopping mall, not a busy one-way street open to cars.

All-in-all, I kind of enjoyed the cachet of living in a cool place. I do grudgingly admit it. In certain ways, SF is very hip and very cool and I think the bottom line is that I’m pleased and proud to have been a resident of it once in my lifetime.

But no place is perfect; even Eden had its snakes. San Francisco can be dirty, filthy, incredibly physically stressful, amazingly packed with people in a small area (or at least so it seems to this New Mexico/Okiehoma boy); it can be ridiculously provincial while being ridiculously pretentious, all at the same time. It’s a fabulous, glorious, stinky, seething … PLACE of a city. As much as I moan and groan about it sometimes, there are things I will dearly miss. The fog has been particularly thick and pervasive for the last few weeks and as I write this, I can barely see the buildings across the street. That won’t be easy to say goodbye to.

So I’m starting a little list: Things I’ll Miss About San Francisco and Things I Won’t Miss About San Francisco. Let’s take the negatives first so we can end on a positive note, shall we?

Things I Won’t Miss About San Francisco:

• The smell of urine-soaked doorways

• The possibility that my home might fall down in an earthquake

• The approaches to the Bay Bridge

• The bad attitude that the place seems to engender in its citizen

• That ‘Excuse me’ means, when it comes from a San Franciscan, ‘Get the f*** outta the way!’ and is said in a tone to match

• Feeling like a rabbit in a particularly crowded hutch

• The stench of my neighbor’s daily 4:30 p.m. fishhead soup binge

• San Franciscans attitude towards allowing dogs to run around without being leashed

• Muni (although that one might change after I’ve ridden Ann Arbor’s public transit a few times)

• Living in a tourist mecca

• The memory that is triggered whenever I pass the corner of Sansome and Market where the bike messenger was smacked in the back of the head by the Muni bus mirror. Trust me, it was very not pretty

• Hawai’i. So close, yet so far

• Living within range of Kim Jong-il’s nuclear missiles

• The fact that the San Andreas is within spittin’ distance

• Certain nameless local television ‘news’ personalities … particularly that weatherlady who thinks that cable-knit sweaters with tight leather miniskirts or a kicky little denim tuxedo jacket over a spaghetti-strap top is … acceptable fashion for the rest of us to have to see

Not being able to get out and just … drive without having 45,000 other people sharing the experience with you

• The incredible physical toll the place takes on you when you’re commuting to work or just buying groceries. It’s all drama. All of it

• Did I mention the urine-soaked doorways?

Things I’ll Miss About San Francisco:

• #1: The fog

• The climate

• The hills and mountains

• The Pacific Ocean

• The Golden Gate

• The eucalyptus trees outside my windows

• The cliffs overlooking the GGB and Baker Beach

• The Presidio

• Swiss choirs singing on the cable cars

• The labyrinths at Grace Cathedral

• The view from Twin Peaks

• San Francisco International

• The Castro Theater

• Standing at Fort Point underneath the GGB at the spot where Jimmy Stewart jumped into the bay to save Kim Novak

• Driving in the rain in the winter through wine country

• La Cantina Mexican restaurant in Santa Rosa

• Virgin Megastore

• Milano’s Pizzeria

• Cheap Pete’s Frames on Geary

• Mt. Sutro rearing up behind my apartment

• Sassy raccoons going through the garbage bins at 3 a.m.

• The possibility that an big ol’ earthquake might add some drama to your life at any moment

• The beagle’s favorite trail to see the feral kitties behind the greenhouse in Golden Gate Park

• The National AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park

• UCSF hospital

• The daily parades in Chinatown during the entire month of February to celebrate Chinese New Year

• Attempting to order breakfast at McDonald’s at Grant and California in Mandarin Chinese

• Being able to get on a 777 and be in Paris 12 hours later

• NorthPoint

• Ghirardelli’s ice cream shop

• Monterey Bay and Carmel

• Sausalito and the ferry ride to and from it

• Giovanni’s Pizza on Bridgeway in Sausalito

• The fact that I can pretty much be who I want to be and not be hassled by the Fascists for it (mostly)

• That fact that Republicans can’t hurt you here

• And, of course, the friends I leave behind …

Hmmm. Well, THAT was an interesting exercise …

—Posted by Steve at 00:02 | 01-Aug-03

Wonder what I’ll write about Ann Arbor when/if we leave here? [grin]

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

This was Frank’s first post to aSquared:

The last time I’ll give directions in San Francisco?

“Is Lombard down that way or up the other way?”

A short hip-looking woman with black hair was asking me directions.

I pointed up Van Ness and told her it was twenty blocks or so north (actually, it’s more like 28 from Market, a good 45-minute hike with all the red lights along Van Ness) and that she’d probably want to catch a bus.

Weird feeling, to realize that that may be the last time I ever get asked for directions here.

—Posted by Frank at 20:00:31 | 31-Jul-03