doubting thom

On September 20, as previously reported, Jeff and I went to a presentation in conjuction with the release of a book about Westlake, and were invited to a party at the author’s house on Saturday the 30th.

A bit trepidatiously (Jeff and I both can be a bit shy in large groups of strangers), we arrived at the party to be heartily greeted at the door by Rob, who remembered our names and immediately took us in hand to meet a few of their friends, introducing us to them as “our new friends.”

We had a wonderful time, and met some really fantastic people, many of them fellow Westlake denizens. We met Michael Nava, lawyer and author of the wonderful Henry Rios mysteries from the 80s and 90s, and his partner, George. And George introduced us to a neighbor of theirs, saying “I think the two of you even work for the same company.” Seeing the puzzled look on my face–I don’t tend to think of the university as a “company”–he followed up, “UCSF, right?” I nodded, “yes,” and he noted that the neighbor works at UCSF too.

I asked Richard–the fellow UCSF employee–which campus he works at (we have more than a half-dozen locations around the city, as well as a program in Fresno). It turns out that he not only works for the same university (and as my co-workers today reminded me, that’s not all that unusual given that UCSF has 19,000 employees and is the second largest employer in San Francisco), but at the same location, in the same building, in the suite across the hall from my own! We’ve already made plans to have lunch together on Friday.

He also gave me some advice about commuting, which I tried out this morning, and it’s a wonderful change. It doesn’t shave a whole lot of time off of the commute–maybe reducing it from 30 minutes to 25, perhaps a little less once I become more familiar with it–but even if it were exactly the same amount of time it would still be preferable, because it involves driving down Skyline Drive and then up the Great Highway, paralleling the Pacific Ocean only a couple dozen meters away, for about half of my ten-mile one-way commute; and another portion of the remaining five miles is along Golden Gate Park. There’s something about starting one’s day driving along the ocean and through the trees that’s good for the psyche, and the trip home today was just incredible, with the sun just setting over the ocean, bathing everything in a rosy gold aura. Surfers in their wet suits were climbing into their jeeps, men in shorts were jogging along the boardwalk, couples were walking hand in hand on the sand. It was a really nice way to ground myself again after a long crazy-busy day at work.

We ended up staying very late at the party, not leaving until around 2 am; we started to leave several times before that, probably beginning as early as 11 pm, but we kept getting brought back into conversation with Rob. I really like both him and Espie, and all their friends we met, and I feel like we’ve made some great new connections here in Westlake.

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, who did a fantastic job calling the dance, and whose calling I’ve particularly missed, Greg and Rich (apparently Geo and Patrick showed up after I’d already left, dammit). I had hoped I’d know more of the crowd, or that dancers I knew would attend, but neither turned out to be the case. And for whatever reason, I just wasn’t able to connect with the largely unfamiliar-to-me crowd. Only one person I didn’t know spoke to me at all–to be fair, he was a really sweet man, and I had a nice time chatting and dancing with him. And perhaps it was something I brought to the evening that was offputting; I know that not having danced in over five years I was feeling very self-conscious and not very confident about my ability to remember the calls, even at Mainstream and Plus, and that could have contributed to my wallflowerness. Or maybe I was just way too sizzling hot in my tight leather pants, and everyone was afraid to talk to me <grin />. I absolutely don’t want to presume any unfriendly intent, because I honestly don’t think that’s the case, but the outcome was the same; I just didn’t feel welcome, nor was I having much fun sitting by myself.

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 and Michael from work. I felt really distracted throughout the day, and had to get up and walk out of the NERT training at one point when I started to feel especially light-headed.

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).

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.

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.

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.