Year: 2004

[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’...

[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...

[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...

[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 Obviously out-of-date yet somehow appropriate.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...

[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:...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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’...

[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...

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...

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,...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

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.)...

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...

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...

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...

[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...

[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:...

[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....

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...

[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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

[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:...

[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...

[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...

[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...

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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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!)...

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...

[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...

Saw the surgeon today: Verdict was basically the beginnings of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Ergo, I won’t be using the computer much for the next six weeks and so won’t be posting here much. I’m to remain splint-ed up for the whole period and he injected my wrists/hands with cortisone and an anesthetic which made things...

John Kerry’s speech had its eye-rolling moments, but it also had it’s total kick-ass ones too. He’ll have to keep hammering these points home if he expects to decisively send the Boy Emperor packing in November, but it’s a good start. Excerpts: ‘We can do better and we will. We’re the optimists. For us, this...

Warning to the untutored: Do not try to tie a firecracker to a bunny rabbit, fail in your attempt to explode said rodent, and then post the photographs of the spectacle to the World Wide Web, as some teenage lifeguard apparently did recently in Castro Valley, CA (and knowing that he was from Castro Valley...

Yesterday I saw a campus tour guide leading a large group through the Diag, attempting to make her comments about the Physics Building heard over the monologue of a preaching regular who was standing on one of the short stone walls surrounding the Diag and delivering a sermon to thin air about how you can...

I don’t know why, but in addition to the lazier-than-usual vibe around town, these all feel like signs that summer is starting to enter its waning stage (even though the season’s only been here five weeks, it’s been here much longer in terms of the academic calendar): Lots of students gradually making their way back...