September 2006 Archives
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“…but you’ll still get the real benefit of knowing you’re giving a symbolic middle finger to that cheeseball next to you in a Ferrari who feels big in his car but small in his pants”
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mega-ultra-super cool-looking film; I have always loved this kind of conceptual art/architecture/design. Be sure to watch the trailer.
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“Americans of the future [will] know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.” A horribly sad day. Habeas corpus is dead.
Sunday morning we lingered in bed. I told you I had looked awfully good in my tight leather pants.
That afternoon we drove over to Alameda to the Forbidden Island Tiki Lounge, which was hosting a parking lot sale from 3 to 7 featuring vintage clothing, Hawaiiana, tiki statues, bamboo furniture, and other related art, crafts and cool stuff. I ended up getting three great Hawaiian shirts. After we’d made the rounds of the vendors, we went inside where we sat at the bar, ate happy hour half-price fish and chips and sweet potato fries, sampled the huge and exotic drinks (I went for the Macadamia Nut Chi Chi, while Jeff enjoyed a Neptune’s Garden), and generally took in the ambiance and the hip-ish crowd.
It was lots of fun; I just wish the bar were a little easier to get to from Daly City. And, given the complicated drink recipes, and how long it takes to make each one, I can’t imagine how it would be on a crowded weekend evening; Sunday afternoon it already nearly was at my limit of tolerance for crowdedness and wait time for ordering and receiving drinks and food. I did have a good time, though, and it was nice to get out of Daly City for the day: Jeff noted how it felt like we were on vacation, especially given the decor, music and relaxed atmosphere. One expected to walk out of the front door onto a boardwalk along the beach or onto a balcony above the surf, rather than onto a fairly nondescript suburban block.
And the weather’s been absolutely fantastic, even in Daly City. We’re experiencing Indian Summer now, which for San Francisco is more like “summer” than actual meteorological summer is. After three months of mostly fog and temperatures in the 50s and 60s, the past week has remained largely sunny and clear while temperatures even have climbed to the low to mid-70s. I wish it could be like this here all the time. I love this time of year.
Early Saturday afternoon we drove to Colma, the Necropolis of the Bay Area (established largely as cemetery space for San Francisco when that city first outlawed any new and later evicted all existing cemeteries within city limits), where Jeff’s father is interred at Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery (also the resting place of Joe DiMaggio, assassinated San Francisco mayor George Moscone, and all former San Francisco Catholic Archbishops).
The chapels at Holy Cross are contained in a small circular building that appears to date from the 1950s or 1960s, due to its Googie-style architecture. It looks as much a bowling alley as a church. Above, the front view from the cemetery entrance. Below, a side view from one of the crypts.
That evening I got all decked out in leather pants and vest (not part of my usual costume, these were gifts and I’ve worn them only a few times, specifically to square dance events), and headed over to the Leather and Lace square dance hosted by one of the SF gay square dance clubs. As I’ve noted before, I used to be really heavily into square dancing, from 1994 through 2001, dancing several nights a week, travelling around the country—and Canada—to club events and convention, and having reached the C2 level (modern western square dancing is divided into levels that get progressively more difficult; it starts with Basic/Mainstream, proceeds to Plus, then through two levels of Advanced, and finally to four levels of Challenge; C2 is the second Challenge level). But around the time I lost my dot-com job, and my dad got so sick, I dropped out of the activity and never got back into it. I had been a very strong (modesty aside) Advanced dancer and reasonably competent and confident at C1, but hadn’t spent nearly enough time dancing C2 to even begin to feel comfortable with it.
When we decided to move out to the Bay Area, I told Jeff I thought I’d start dancing again. I had made lots of terrific friends through the activity, and thought it would be a good way for me to quickly and easily establish my own social network, given that he already would have his family and high school and college friends out here.
Saturday night was my first foray back. Honestly, I’m not sure I’ll go again. On the positive side, it was great to see the three people I knew: Andy
So I left about only an hour and a half, having danced just two tips, and treated myself to a venti pumpkin spice frappucino on the way home. Whipped cream and caffeine made me feel much better.
In the meantime, Jeff had gone down the Peninsula to have dinner and spend the evening with Rajani, so Alex and I had the house quietly to ourselves until Jeff got home a little after midnight.
Last Thursday I wasn’t feeling all that well, which was unfortunate given 1) there were meetings scheduled from 11 to 12:30 and NERT training from 1:30 to 4:30, and 2) Jeff and I had agreed to go to karaoke at The Mint (warning: sound) with Julie
I made it through the day, though, and even to dinner (sushi) and karaoke. I didn’t sing, but I did have a really fun time (with the exception of discovering that my camera wasn’t working; it turns out that my 6Gb microdisk has failed), and both Julie and Michael were fantastic. I told Julie I’d sing something next time.
Friday morning arrived strange and unsettling. Around 6:30 the phone rang once, enough to wake us, but then fell silent. Only a few minutes later, the new smoke detector we’d just installed the previous weekend beeped three times and then stopped; the manual notes a number of scenarios in which it might beep once or multiple times, but nothing for a set of three beeps followed by silence. (I tested it afterwards, though, and once more since, and the alarm still works, so I’m hoping it’s okay. ) Then, when I left for work a little later, the backdoor into our garage was standing open. It looks like it just didn’t latch properly the previous night, and it only leads into the garage rather than directly into the house (there’s another locked door from the garage into the house), but still, unsettling.
And since there’s no such thing as too much mid-century modernism for one week, this evening we attended a presentation (and book-signing) at the Doelger Center here in Westlake, about builder Henry Doelger, Westlake, and the Little Boxes—Daly City mid-century modern houses “made of ticky-tacky” immortalized by Malvina Reynolds and Pete Seeger—that he built here. As I’ve noted previously, we’re now living in a Doelger, the same house that Jeff lived in from birth through third grade.
The book’s author, Rob Keil, gave a great slide presentation about Westlake history and architecture. Afterwards, we got to spend some time chatting with Rob and his partner, Esperanza. We also bought a copy of the gorgeous book (see some photos from the book), which will have to go on our coffee table—well, just as soon as we buy a coffee table.
It was a great evening, and it was nice to meet some cool Westlake folks like Rob and Espie; in the time we’ve been here, we’ve spent most of our time either working, settling in, or with Jeff’s mom, so we haven’t had a chance yet to meet other people here in Daly City, especially more-or-less of our generations; Jeff was by far the youngest person at the presentation at the Daly City/Colma History Guild meeting tonight, and even I was probably in the bottom quartile. Our next-door neighbors are a young couple with two young children, but just as we were finally starting to get to know them, they’ve put their house on the market and plan to move to the East Bay (no causality there, I hope).
This past Saturday we spent the day in San Rafael in Marin County for the Eye-on-Eichlers Home Tour to benefit the Hospice of Marin. Twenty Eichler homes were open to ticket-holders between 11am and 4pm; we got to about two-thirds of them. For those who aren’t familiar with Eichlers, they’re “architect-designed mid-century modern homes built by merchant builder Joe Eichler between 1949 and 1974”. There are about 11,000 Eichlers in California (with the exception of three in New York, all the homes built by Eichler’s company were in California); of these, about 10,000 are in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I’ve long been a fan of Eichler homes, and it was a real treat to get to tour so many of them on Saturday. Eichlers have a very distinctive style exemplary of the “California modern” aesthetic. They tend to be large single-level ranch homes with open floor plans, often with a central atrium or courtyard for indoor-outdoor living, radiant-heat flooring, and walls of glass and clerestory windows are common. The Eichlers in San Rafael also tend to have huge outdoor spaces, and many have pools. Eichler himself was also famed for his insistence on fair housing practices, at a time when other modern home builders practiced discrimination—one of the more famous of the altter was Henry Doelger, the merchant builder of the Westlake District of Daly City, in one of whose houses we now live. Doelger actually wrote covenants restricting non-whites from owning or even living in his houses unless they were live-in servants. From the Eichler Network site:
A strong proponent of fair housing and deeply opposed to racial discrimination, the liberal Eichler was the first large, tract builder to sell to minorities, and even built a home on his own lot for an NAACP leader. Joe resigned from the National Association of Home Builders in 1958 in protest of racial discrimination policies and, according to reports from long-time Eichler owners, offered to buy back homes from those who had trouble accepting their neighbors.
“If, as you claim, this will destroy property values,” Joe once told some disgruntled Eichler owners, “I could lose millions…You should be ashamed of yourselves for wasting your time and mine with such pettiness.”
I really want to own an Eichler some day, and I could definitely see us living in San Rafael; the commute wouldn’t even be much longer than my current drive to work, and the weather tends to be a little sunnier and warmer in the North Bay.
Photography generally wasn’t permitted on Saturday’s home tour, but I so loved some of the furnishings in one house that I asked the owner if he minded if I took some pictures, and he gave his permission; some of those photos are scattered throughout this entry.
Everyone’s first words to me: “Oh! you got your hair cut.”
Left, how it looked afterwards. Below (photo taken by Jeff, at the vista above Thornton Beach, near our house) is how shaggy it already was looking back on July 30! I’ve got lynx tufts to match Alex’s.
And below was the inspiration photo; I wanted to get something close to the guy’s hair in this photo I shot over Labor Day weekend. I have a wicked widow’s peak (my hair isn’t receding; I’ve had those high temples all my life), though, that makes his exact haircut a physical impossibility for me. I’m also not that handsome. Still, the stylist did a really fantastic job, I think, getting as close as possible.
I felt really sorry for my stylist. Not for any reason having to do with my hair, but she had quite a story. She’d moved down to the Bay Area from Humboldt County in January, and within the first two months her car insurance had been cancelled, her car then had been stolen, she broke up with her boyfriend, and she had to have surgery for a brown recluse spider bite on her face. She has to work two jobs (after her shift cutting hair she waits tables at the Denny’s across the street), lives in a tiny in-law apartment in San Bruno, and has to get up two hours before work in order to get the bus (since she no longer has a car) to the salon. Whew.
I gave her a really big tip.
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three new scents for men;The Dreamer sounds particularly intriguing: “It’s strangely mouthwatering, like a French pastry crossed with a Thai spice (caramel lemongrass?). Then there’s the hint of ice cream, gunpowder, hot cocoa…”
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“At age 100 or so, the old bag is increasingly being filled with fine whole leaf tea, the kind connoisseurs brew in their teapots, and the bag itself has been redesigned…”
I feel like a new father—exhausted and proud, and as though I had done the hard work of actually giving birth, when all I provided was a seed while someone else (in this case, several someones; the metaphor isn’t perfect) actually carried this baby to term.
It’s been a long but not too overwhelming labor. I did put in a long week of mostly eleven-hour days, with today running almost to twelve, and lunch this week has been mostly just five minutes of gulping a salad or falafel pita at the keyboard. My team’s been working just as hard if not harder.
After arriving here in June, I’d begun recommending some changes to our website, and over the course of the last couple of months we—me, my boss, the developers, the graphic designers, the writers and editors—had reached agreement on some initial steps. We’ve only had a final-ish design for a couple of weeks, and had given ourselves until next Wednesday the 20th, when there’s a new student fair on campus, to complete the organizational, navigational and design changes and go live. Then about a week ago something came up that required that we push up the schedule in order to have the site ready to launch by tomorrow, three working days and one weekend ahead of schedule.
And we made it, albeit pushing it out until close to 8:00 this evening. A bit premature, the kid’s a little underweight like any preemie, though only a couple of his new features are not yet fully coordinated, and he sometimes gets tangled up in his stylesheets. But he’s actually pretty healthy overall, and quite a good-looking tyke. And awfully smart, too.
I’m so, so proud of the work that the web team and the designers put in on this project. Yes, they were nervous, and maybe even a little skeptical at times, but I never heard a complaint, even when the delivery got bumped up so much from what already was a tight schedule; even through the late-stage complications no one cursed at me in the delivery room for what I’d put them through, but seemed as proud and as happily exhausted as me. Truly, I saw some amazing teamwork, especially today when we were down to the wire. None of us are paid nearly what we deserve for what we do for the University, which makes it even more amazing to see the level of effort and passion these folks bring to what they do.
The work’s not done; I’ve already got big plans for this baby’s future. And I know there will be growing pains and times I’ll regret having brought a new website into the world, but… I’m really through working that metaphor.
For now, I’m taking some time—yes, Monday it’s back to moving some of our other ‘zillion projects forward, but I’ve got this weekend, at least, to step back, reflect, and appreciate what we accomplished and how we accomplished it together. I think I’m truly in the right place right now, a wonderful if rare feeling.
But after looking at the first sign, I assumed I knew what the other was, and that’s how I ended up walking into the women’s restroom yesterday.
In most locations in our office, as in many buildings, restrooms are grouped together: there will be a women’s restroom to one side of a staircase of bank of elevators and a men’s restroom to the other. Yesterday I walked into an elevator lobby and saw a sign next to one door, marking it as a women’s restroom. I could see there was a restroom sign on the other side of the elevators too, so I walked over and walked right in.
Right away something felt wrong. There were no urinals that I could see. But on the far side from me, back toward the elevators, there was a space I couldn’t see, where the elevator shafts blocked my view. Maybe the urinals were over there.
As I started to walk that way, though, something else began to dawn on me… if I’m heading back toward the elevator shafts, and this bathroom is so wide, then wouldn’t that be…? Yes, sure enough, that space just contained another door back into the hallway, the same doorway with the female pictogram I’d passed by on my way to what I thought was the men’s room. This was still the women’s restroom, which turns out to have two doors opening into it from the same hallway. I quickly exited, and fortunately no one was inside or outside at the time to see.
So today I’ve looked very carefully at the little stick people on the walls, to be sure I’m going where I’m supposed to.
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Our home sweet suburb
Saturday we spent the day with Jeff’s mom and aunt in Pittsburg (California, near Concord, which makes me wonder why the settlers couldn’t come up with more original names) at that city’s annual Seafood Festival. The website, unfortunately, leaves a lot to be desired: there’s no map of the festival nor even directions on how to find it (beyond ” Park at Bart [sic] or Pittsburg Unified School District on Loveridge and ride the FREE Shuttle”; thank goodness for GPS navigation systems); three days after the event is over the site still says that entertainment for two stages has yet to be determined and the “LIST OF 2006 FOOD VENDORS IS COMING SOON!”; and the video commercial voiceover highlights the Zinfandel competition and dinner while showing people drinking white wine. Jeff was joking about offering the city some pro bono web design services before next year’s festival.
Website issues—and a lot of traffic and slowdowns on the way there, for no apparent reason—aside, I ended up having a really nice time. It was a gorgeous clear day, once we got there (I was a little worried, though, because it turned out to be 20 degrees warmer and significantly sunnier in Pittsburg than in Daly City, and I’d forgotten to put on sunscreen; fortunately, I didn’t end up burning), we saw a cool sand castle being built, we watched a little of the air show, and we ate some good food (tasty garlic fries, Cajun calamari, and Maryland crabcakes). One of Jeff’s celebrity-crushes—cutie Joey Altman, from local cooking show Bay Cafe—was on-hand to give a cooking presentation from 4-5. We were able to get a lot of photos (though the lighting was unfortunately quite bad under the tent, so they didn’t turn out as well as I’d have liked) as well as an opportunity to taste his grilled salmon and cole slaw sandwiches, and his shrimp and andouille corncakes with avocado corn salsa. Yum.
I’m not sure how I missed this back when it actually took place, and I was even still working at the State Department then (though it was during my last two weeks there, so I was somewhat distracted by the pending cross-country move). From an Essence Magazine interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, as transcribed on the State Department website, when asked if the decision to go to war in Iraq was the right thing to do:
Absolutely. Because it’s difficult, it doesn’t mean that, first of all, it won’t work out. I think it will. And secondly, that it wasn’t the right decision. Look at how many big historical changes that later on, it looked like it is inevitable, but they turned out right, were indeed very, very difficult in the process and looked like it was impossible. … I’m sure that there are people who thought that it was a mistake to fight the Civil War to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold. I’m sure that there were people who said, why don’t we — I know that there were people who said why don’t we get out of this now, take a peace with the South, but leave the South with slaves. You — just because things are difficult, it doesn’t mean that they’re wrong or that you turn back.
I really think that might be the most offensive thing I’ve heard all year from this administration, and that’s saying a lot. I am stunned and appalled that anyone, and particularly an African American, would think to compare the debacle in Iraq with the U.S. Civil War and the emancipation of slaves. If a white person had made that comparison, it would be roundly—and rightly—criticized; where was the hue and cry over Secretary’s Rice’s attempt to portray her boss’s ill-advised, poorly conceived and worse-run war in Iraq as comparable to the Civil War struggle over slavery? How dare she!
I had once written in this blog that in person Secretary Rice had come across “as genuinely pleasant and witty, [and] sincerely interested [in our work].” I regret now that I was so obviously bamboozled. The thoughts she expressed to Essence were anything but pleasant or witty, and demonstrate at best only self-interest.
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Populuxe videos from the Prelinger Collection
Ah, I just remembered something else I had meant to post about my experiences with license plate numbers. Writing the earlier post reminded me of the first time I took my Saab 9-3 convertible (the car I owned prior to the Prius) back to the dealer for service. I gave the keys to the mechanic and told him my car was the dark green 1999 9-3 convertible, with license plate ZCM576. He came back in a few minutes later and said that my keys didn’t work. I noted that if they didn’t work I wouldn’t have been able to drive the car there in the first place. So I went outside with him to see what was wrong. He walked right over to a dark green 1999 9-3 convertible with license place ZCM567. Another owner had brought his car in for service just a few minutes after me, and our license plates were partially dyslexic versions of one another.
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[via T.Kevin] Atheists “are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public,” according to a study by Penny Edgell, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota.
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[via hitormiss] smart, but approachable; informal and casual but not slovenly; simple color palette of cool blues and grays; minimal, with no visible logos or slogans
Today at work we had the first three-hour session of our 20-hour mandatory NERT training (yes, that’s a “T”). The AVC (associate vice chancellor) for our division has arranged for in-house training by the San Francisco Fire Department in what is, essentially, disaster preparedness. NERT stands for “Neighborhood Emergency Response Team” and aims at creating citizens who can be self-sufficient during a major disaster and potentially even to help as supporting members of emergency response teams; San Francisco doesn’t have the number of emergency professionals that would be needed in the event of a major disaster, so this effort counts on the ability of trained citizens to pitch in as possible and as appropriate.
Although the mandatory nature provided an immediate “groan” factor, and 20 hours does seem like a lot of time to be away from our desks over the next six weeks, and the first session was much too generic and focused on background information (pictures and descriptions of previous earthquakes, the history of NERT, etc.), I’m actually quite interested in the program. Even though intellectually I know the risk of experiencing a major earthquake here in my lifetime is almost a certainty, I’ve not done any real preparation since moving here in June. But there were moments today that were extremely sobering, and I’ve been practicing my “earthquake eyes” throughout the rest of the day—casing rooms I enter to see what would be the falling hazards, and what I’d use for shelter and protection—and am paying serious attention to the need to put together an emergency kit with sufficient water and food for us and Alex, and to develop a plan for where Jeff and I would meet, and how we’d try to keep in touch in case of an earthquake or other disaster during a work day, when I’m ten miles away from home.
I just hope that adorable Fireman Dan, our second facilitator, comes back week after week. T. Kevin: You’d have particularly loved him.
When we finish the training we get issued a yellow hardhat and orange mesh safety vest. Just imagine the roleplay possibilities.
The current California license plate standard is one number followed by three letters followed by three more numbers. So for each initial number-three letter combination there are 1,000 possible plates, from 000 to 999, for all of the millions of cars in the state. Granted, the plates aren’t distributed randomly across the state—when you register your car at the DMV, you get the plates right then, so they’re distributed in batches to the DMVs. This means that the other 999 cars with the plates in my particular set of 1,000—my last three digits are 893—probably registered their cars and got their plates at the same DMV office. Still, it amazes me that in the last two days I’ve been immediately behind two other cars with plates from that same set. On Tuesday I was behind a white car with the same first digit and three letters followed by 873 all the way from San Francisco up Skyline Drive and even on to Westmoor, though she continued down Eastmoor when I turned down our street. And on the way to work today, as I was driving through Golden Gate Park at 8:30—I still get a kick out of the fact that I actually drive through Golden Gate Park twice every day—I was behind a silver Saab 900SE that was number 935 from the same set.
Now I’ve become hyper-aware of other cars’ license plate numbers as I drive around, and I want to find more of the other 997 from my set.
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“Roughgarden’s cataloging of sexual diversity has challenged a fundamental biological theory.”
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the exotic ice creams are recommended by Xeni Jardin; the exotic candy bars sound amazing, too. I want to try the ginger/wasabi/black sesame seeds/dark chocolate bar, and the Red Fire bar with ancho and chipotles, cinnamon and dark chocolate. Truffles her
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feed icons in a variety of sizes and graphic formats
We had intended to see the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s new show, “Godfellas,” on Independence Day, but we ended up at the hospital with Jeff’s dad that day. Julie had been encouraging us to see it, and Peg and her family had really enjoyed it when she was visiting around that same time, but we hadn’t gotten our act in gear to go see it. This weekend was the troupe’s last performance in San Francisco (they’re still performing throughout Northern California this month, though, if you haven’t seen it), so we made plans to go today.
We took BART downtown from Daly City and stopped at Burger Joint (or, as the window proclaims, “bj”) for cheeseburgers and fries. Jeff had seen a segment on a local cooking show about the hamburgers there, and GQ had pegged their burgers as the 16th best in the country (and the best in San Francisco).
It was a good burger, to be sure, though I wouldn’t say it was the best I’ve had; it truly was nice, though, to be able to get a burger cooked a little on the rarer side, something not so easy to find these days. And the fries were fantastic (I think I care more about good fries than good burgers); I really love fresh, thick cut fries that still taste of the potato.
Afterwards, we walked the few remaining blocks to Mission Dolores Park, where we met Julie around 1:00—she had gotten there earlier in order to get a good place to put down her blanket—and we sat with her for the live music beforehand and the show itself. I’m so glad we went; it was a terrific piece of political satire (for those who aren’t familiar with them, the troupe’s name is something of a misnomer, as they’re not engaged in traditional mime; rather, they write and perform political satire musical theater).
The premise has Angela Franklin, an idealistic former social studies teacher—along with her smitten colleague, Todd, let go from his job as an art teacher in a Catholic school—lose the center she’s set up to give students exposure to subjects—art, civics—schools no longer are teaching, when a gospel preacher from New Orleans—the Rev. C.B. DeLove, the front man for a Catholic, Jewish and Evangelical “syndicate”—takes over the space as his San Francisco storefront for a campaign to get a “Mandatory National Day of Prayer” amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Ms. Franklin, a Thomas Paine afficionado, decides to take on the syndicate, to save the U.S. from a tyranny of religious leadership and the loss of the separation between church and, as the minister and his co-hort won’t say the word, “dat other ting.”
The satire is spot on, and the performances—a half-dozen actors create the illusion of a cast of two to three times that—first-class. I told Jeff and Julie that I left with a crush on both Angela and Todd. At one point in the show, the Thomases Paine and Jefferson show up and Jefferson also is quite smitten with the African-American Angela.
Making the day even better, the weather was glorious, at least in the Mission; when we crossed the San Francisco/San Mateo County border on the ride home, it was as though the fog had been stopped on the Daly City side, for lack of the proper papers, but had gathered reinforcements there in the meantime. It was still cold and gray at home, but at Mission Dolores Park it was beautifully sunny; our jackets went unneeded in our backpacks, and we soon were stripped down to our t-shirts. A few men took advantage of the nice weather to sunbathe shirtless; one particularly adorable guy who did so was sitting just to our right.
We hit Starbucks on the way home, where they’ve just replaced their summer banana/coconut line of coffee drinks with their fall-only pumpkin spice drinks, a particular favorite of Jeff’s. After they initially got both my name—apparently, I’m now “Ton,” pronounced “tahn” rather than the 2,000-pound weight—and my order wrong, we eventually left with the correct pumpkin spice frappucinos—and the pumpkin spice iced latte they had first made instead. Yum. There’s another reason autumn is my favorite season.
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the houses of the Westlake District of Daly City, where we live
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Foremost, I love the designs, but I also like that the examples use as many same-sex couple names as opposite-sex: Kyle and William, Tom and Rodger, Cathleen and Lorraine, Robert and Chris (ok, could go either way), Robert and John, Mathew and Timothy, Li
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“everything has a Pantone color… it’s just a matter of finding it
Back in my Virginia condo, food seemed to have a fairly long shelf-life. Here in Daly City, though, things seem to spoil rather quickly. Raw fruit, especially, seems to grow mold much sooner out here. Is this common for the Bay Area? Why might it be so much worse here? There are differences in climate, certainly: but while it’s damp and cool here, it was humid and hot back east, so the amount of moisture in the air doesn’t seem to be a major factor, and I’d have expected the higher temperatures of DC to be more of a breeding ground for molds than the more typical 50- to 70-degree temps here.
Is it some quality of the food itself? Is there some reason that fruit bought in California would be more prone to mold than fruit bought in Virginia? Fewer preservatives?
Or is it more likely that our 50-year-old house here in Daly City just has more mold spores than my 25-year-old condo in Arlington? One big difference in that regard could be the ubiquitous use of air conditioning in Arlington, such that almost all the air there was filtered. But we’re using the same kinds of air filters on our furnace here that I used on the heat pump there.
Do I need to worry that this is more than just a matter of having to buy less fruit at one time, in order to eat it before it goes bad? Are the spores that cause mold to grow on peaches, apples and grapes a particular health hazard to us? Respiratorily, we’ve both had a number of sore throats and rhinitis in the short time since moving here, but then I’ve always suffered from allergies so it doesn’t seem particularly worse here in that regard (in fact, my allergies seem perhaps marginally better here).
I’m more curious than seriously worried, and I haven’t seen any evidence of mold or mildew in the house more generally. But it is a little frustrating to have to throw out about half the fruit we buy.
