For the next few weeks, we’ll be observing an anniversary: 10 years since we left San Francisco and moved to Ann Arbor. I’ll repost articles Frank and I wrote at that time for our Ann Arbor blog, aSquared. Bittersweet, very definitely they will be, bittersweet.

‘[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

For the next few weeks, we’ll be observing an anniversary: 10 years since we left San Francisco and moved to Ann Arbor. I’ll repost articles Frank and I wrote at that time for our Ann Arbor blog, aSquared. Bittersweet, very definitely they will be, bittersweet.

‘[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’

For the next few weeks, we’ll be observing an anniversary: 10 years since we left San Francisco and moved to Ann Arbor. I’ll repost articles Frank and I wrote at that time for our Ann Arbor blog, aSquared. Bittersweet, very definitely they will be, bittersweet.

‘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]

For the next few weeks, I’ll be observing an anniversary: 10 years since we left San Francisco and moved to Ann Arbor. I’ll repost articles Frank and I wrote at that time for our Ann Arbor blog, aSquared. Bittersweet, very definitely they will be, bittersweet.

Laid Up

‘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, no longer available]. 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’’

Sorry about the confusing nature of this first one from ten years ago; it’s hard to quote quotes and make it coherent. Ongoing will be easier to understand. More retro posts to follow …

For the next few weeks, I’ll be observing an anniversary: 10 years since we left San Francisco and moved to Ann Arbor. I’ll repost articles Frank and I wrote at that time. Bittersweet, very definitely they will be.

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