Science has measured and discussed the positive and negative effects of ions for years. I’ve heard that the ocean shore carries a different ionic charge, which can be energizing for many critters, and as proof  I give you our Edie girl:

On the morning of our third day at Tomales Bay, we headed out to exercise the dogs. It was still a little cool as we drove out to one of Point Reyes’  beaches. When we got there, we had the beach to ourselves; I’m always impressed with how high the waves are. It seems to me as if the water is higher out where the waves form than it is along the waterline itself.

Edie was just nuts from the get-go. There’s something about the beach that fires that little girl up beyond belief.

She ran loop-de-loops, tongue lolling out, and took off for the hinterlands then came charging back

Ernie tried to give chase upon occasion, but since his injuries when Edie rolled him a few years ago, he’s no longer a sprinter.

Boy chases girl — sounds familiar, huh?

If girl escaped boy this often, we wouldn’t have a population crisis.

We ran and chased her some, but the difference was Edie had channeled the Energizer bunny. She just kept going and going.

When she ran down into the water, Mrs. O said, “she’s not getting back into the truck.” 

And she was quite a (happy) mess.

At times she outran the camera lens.

And still she kept going.

I took 35 pictures down on that beach, and this is just a sample of them. I’ve put them in chronological order, except that the first Berserker image up there was actually one of the very last I shot; here’s the larger image of Edie girl toward the end of our walk (and her run).

As we left, we put her in the back of the truck, to keep the wet sand out of the backseat. Softie that I am, however, I opened the back window so she could see us. Oops! She shouldered the window open and tried to squeeze into the cab, bringing a lot of wet sand with her.  I forced her back into the bed of the truck, half-closed the window, and on our ride back I think she came to like being back there, as she got better sniffs.

As far as the ionic effect, the web sites say positive ions cause the ill winds, scirrocos, mistrals, the Santa Anas and bitter winds. But down at the beach it’s negative ions that have such a positive effect. After seeing how happy our Edie is when she hits the beach, you don’t have to convince me.

 I seem to have developed a thing for trying to save scrawny trees. When I had such a notion last spring, near where I work at SF’s Civic Center, it met an ignoble end. 

 Sometime earlier this summer there was a fire in the old campground out on the former naval air station, where I walk the pups. The kids sometimes party out there at night, and occasionally the homeless spend a night there; it isn’t hard to guess how it started. Most of the burn evidence is gone and green was sprouting again by autumn, but you can still see some evidence of the fire.

While some underbrush and a tree were burned out, I noticed that  one tree (with supporting poles), while scorched, seemed to have survived.

While Alameda is nothing like SF for homeless encampments, there’s still evidence people bunk down for the night out here, such as this windbreak devised in the old campground:

 The police presence is thin late at night. Last New Years, a few of us dog walkers noticed someone had rammed the campground’s fence. The new gap in the fence lines up with a straightaway approach from the main gate (you can just make out the approach under the branches below)—it’s not hard to imagine some revelers gunning it down the straightaway and, for whatever reason, not turning away at the last minute. On New Years Day the evidence included parts of the undercarriage strewn among the smashed branches, twigs, and leaves of the bush they took out—ten months later most of the debris is gone but the gap remains. (The deep ruts made clear they couldn’t extract their car–in desperation they must have gotten a friend to come and tow the car out.)

Btw, the skinny tower just beyond the car’s windshield (and behind the left edge of the tree) is a practice fire tower; those four T-shaped odd towers to the left were used by the Navy to test jet engines. One of the dog walkers who grew up here says they roared pretty loud when they fired those babies up. 

But at the burn site, a forlorn little tree had survived. Last July, August and September I brought buckets of water out about once a month and poured it into the ground around this little guy (hoping it didn’t need drought and dormancy in summer, and I was doing more good than harm).

 It did have green branches coming up from its base (the Mrs. calls them “suckers”) and I took them as a good sign—until I came back and someone had cut them all away. (Huh?) It may have been someone from the east bay park service for all I know, but still, wouldn’t a little tree like this need all the functioning greenery it can get? Look close and you can see the raw spots, below.

 Well, we’ve made it through the dry season, now comes our Mediterranean climate’s wet season. The tree looks to be the same species as one of its neighbors; hopefully they’ll both thrive this winter and have lots of new growth next spring.

I like the campground. It’s a pretty netherworld. It’s not hard to imagine what it once was, when the gates were manned by armed guards, and retired veterans came in their campers and used the hookups here to spend the night.  

It’s a huge political football here in Alameda, how the vast old naval air station will be reused. I’m sure much good will be done–if they also figure out a way to get all the extra people on and off the island. But for now, the old and abandoned remains beautiful to me, just as it is.

*       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Our Edie Girl – Mighty Squirrel Hunter

 Our dear Edie girl lives a good life—plenty of walks, lots of tummy rubs and affection, a couple days a week with her pals at doggie day care. Sure, she’d rather have more people food in her diet than doggie kibble, but until she starts bringing home a paycheck, chicken and lamb kibble is what she gets. Still, that’s not the biggest frustration for our girl. That would be the tantalizing closeness of jackrabbits springing from cover, the taunts of squirrels just out of reach. (And they do taunt her, pausing on lower branches to chatter insults, stopping on the fence, squirrel aroma perfuming the air, with teasing tail twitches as they jabber at her.)

 Edie will spend the day on our back deck, watching them down in the yard until the torment gets the best of her and sprints down to chase them up trees. She will lay down by the pear tree, hoping they will forget her until she makes her charge, missing again.

 Until last weekend. We were in our small front yard, Mrs. O tending her garden and me digging a hole for her to transplant a bush, with the dogs hanging out close by. I monitor them more closely in front, obviously, with traffic out on the street and passersby who might fear dogs. And they do push the envelope, moseying out to the sidewalk, but obey when I scold them. Out of the corner of my eye I was suddenly aware of an unusual commotion; the dogs rounded the fence into our neighbors’ yard. Preoccupied, I glanced around to see a squirrel tossed in the air. Those squeamish about such matters should skip the next paragraph.

 It startled me; then I told my wife that Edie had finally gotten a squirrel. Ernie knew it first, and his hunting instincts had kicked in, too, as he was close on Edie’s tail. I’m not sure what had gone on in that squirrel noggin—maybe it had wanted to cross the street and thought it could get past her. Anyway, what I saw was her tossing it in the air to break its spine. When I approached she backed off, deferring to the alpha, and I shooed the dogs back into our yard. The poor little rodent was trying to drag itself under a car. It’s not easy for me to feel sorry for any of them—given how they chew up our deck and the wiring for our deck lights, how they dig our yard into a checkerboard, how they uproot our planters, but you hate to see anything in pain. I took the shovel I had been using and gave it a quick jab at the curb to end its suffering.

 We threw it away in the trashbin in our sideyard, and Edie went to hang out there, near her inexplicably discarded trophy. It must have seemed so unfair. Finally she had gotten one, and rather than winning praise and adoration, we’d tossed it in that smelly old bin. Another example of the perplexing behavior of humans.

Mrs. Ombud and I were watching a movie (Little Fish, I think) when the phone rang. We don’t always pick up during a movie, figuring they’ll leave a message if it’s important, but when I heard my next door neighbor’s voice I hit pause and got the phone. He was talking about some large branch that fell in our yard, across the fence into his.

We talked for a bit, and then Mrs. O and I went out into the yard. This was after quite the big wind storm we had here, with gusty bursts of rain, on Tuesday October 13.  It was still very dark and wet out in the yard, so it was hard to see the damage. But the next morning the view from our back deck looked like this:

The limbs fell from the back of the yard toward our homes, straddling the fence line and falling on his sheds (notice dent). Our neighbor has a chainsaw, so we made plans to get out there the next day and chop up the branches. I clambered up into the old kid’s house a prior owner built in the back corner of our lot, and took a picture from our yard into our neighbor’s.

I also stood up by our house and took a picture of the tree. The point where the larger branch snapped off is obscured, but on its way down it took out another limb, and that’s what you can see here:

As you can see, it’s quite a way up there.

So my neighbor and I got together and cranked up the chainsaw, heaving branches away from the fence into the middle of our yard, until we had quite a pile, and I stacked all of the logs he sectioned off, wondering in the back of my head, who do we know who needs firewood?

Poplar probably isn’t the best, as it’s so light it’ll burn quickly. We’ll find out; I stacked it under the kid’s tree house. My wife’s cousin has a house up in Inverness with a fireplace,  a cozy retreat, so we’ll toss the wood into the back of our truck and drive it up to Inverness some weekend in the near future.

Another view from the kid’s house, sjhowing how much foliage came down. (Every week now, we fill the green waste bin–and I mean fill it. I’ve been trimming branches and packing it down to give the city as much compostable leafy matter each week as we possibly can.

Finally, the pears. The blessed pears I’ve been waiting to ripen since, oh, July. we’ve been harvesting like crazy here. most of them stay pretty green, but they do ripen sort of. And I have a coworker who likes some hard, unripened fruit (pears among them). He has a whole bin in our downstairs fridge now, full or pears. (“Put them in the fridge!” he tells me. “Don’t let them ripen any further!”)

We’ve had a very nice pear cobbler, and a pear pie, and we gave a lot of the pears to our neighbor with the chainsaw. A day or so after the big blow, when I took these pictures, I was trying to show the fallen trunk through the leaves, and you can’t see much, but you can see that in mid-October we still have fruit onthe tree.

And on this note, I’m going back upstairs to see if I can take a nap before getting up and going to work.

Despite the fact that  I’ve worked for a computer book publisher and a technical media organization (jobs I approached as editor and journalist, respectively), I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t always grok the bells and whistles.

But I thought I had a pretty firm handle on email, and how it works, and a general sense of wordpress. Actually, it’s wordpress that seems to leave me in its dust all too often.

In the past, when I wanted to email a fellow blogger privately, without online publication, it was easy enough to simply respond to the email notification I got in my inbox. Hit reply, type away, and hit send. I did that on Sunday, logged off, and went about the rest of my day, involving cleaning up the equipment and putting it away after bottling 10 gallons of imperial stout Saturday, yardwork, televised sports, and making a dang good batch of Feijoada Incompleta (a Brazilian black bean soup I’ve modified) if I say so myself.

I logged on today to finally crop and post some pictures of the storm damage we sustained a couple weeks ago, and got quite the rude shock. The email I’d thought I’d sent personally to another blogger had been posted in the comments section of my last post. WTF?!?!

It was germane only to a recent post on that person’s blog, so it was a total non sequitur here–but it sure threw me for a loop. It’s 5 am here (insomnia, again) so I was already “feeling kind of ethereal” (Thank you, Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders) and I couldn’t figure out how it happened. How on earth did my email end up in my blog? I couldn’t possibly have been so far out of it that I wrote a private note in the comments section while on the web, could I? Maybe it’s time to call the funny farm …

But now I realize that wordpress has set it up so that, when a comment arrives in your inbox, if you hit reply (which used to send a message to your correspondent, I swear it) it now gets posted in the same blog post. Sheesh. Okay, it looks different in the inbox now, but still. The same Pretenders’ song, Precious, also references Howard the Duck (“Now howard the duck and mr stress both stayed“) and if you remember Howard, you know that his tagline was “trapped in a world that he never made.”

I can relate.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *

This is probably as good a place as any to show what happened to the wayward sailboat I posted on earlier this month, which became a floating home to the homeless guy and his dog. I tried to post these photos in my comment, after our big storm October 13, but don’t see a way to post photos in comments. (I’m not going to claim there isn’t a way to do it.)

Anyway, later that week, after the storm, on a very foggy, still morning, I went out with my camera and found the boat looking like this:

His bicycle is gone, so I know he wasn’t on board during the storm. And it was really rocking on the bay, so I can’t imagine he tried to ride the storm out–obviously, the waves swamped the boat. And now it’s the city’s problem …

I did the casual carpool this morning. For those outside the SF Bay Area, the casual carpool is a way to reduce congestion during rush hour. I think it’s primarily in the East Bay (across San Francisco Bay from the City), rather than down the peninsula or in Marin county, but they may have it elsewhere, too.

 At certain randomly designated (even spontaneously discovered) corners, often near a bus stop, commuters or cars can wait for each other to share the ride across the Bay Bridge, taking advantage of carpool lanes so that they don’t have to queue and pay the toll. You pass the long queues in the toll lanes and zip right on through to the bridge.

 This means that perfect strangers can walk up to a waiting car, nod hello and get in, then the passengers read or listen to their own music, while the driver (hopefully) minds the road. Oftentimes no one says another word until we arrive at Fremont and Howard streets (a hodge podge of vehicles disgorging riders) and say our thanks and good byes.

 Other times are not so quiet. 

This morning two women sat in front, while a quiet fellow and I got in the back. The women worked together and were laughing and telling stories the whole way in, and some of it was fairly amusing. They were completely dishing their coworkers, including who should be fired and who is clueless and how to handle various people, even sharing technology solutions they had discovered for recurring problems. It sounded like a madhouse, including people throwing things and pushing each other, particularly a guy who had been there for over 20 years, whom numerous people had tried to get fired for his inability to get anything done. At one point the passenger exclaimed, through her laughter, “Everyone in our group should go to anger management!”

 “Yes,” the driver replied, “only not together.”

 And then they were really laughing. “Everyone has to go separately!”

 They also talked about their car accidents (this concerned me somewhat, and I began paying some attention to the traffic) and how much more dangerous it is in the Bay Area, compared to Los Angeles, where the driver grew up. The passenger (a younger woman) said she had begun casually surveying all of her women friends, asking who had taught them to drive. “It’s bad to say I know, but I think women don’t really learn how to drive unless they are taught by a man. I hate to be sexist, but the women I know who are good drivers were taught by men, and the women I know who aren’t were taught by women.” And they laughed some more, perhaps at the scandalousness of this.

 As we got to the City and dropped off the other guy, I spoke up and mentioned where I work—occasionally it happens the driver is going the same way, and that happened this morning, so I continued riding with them. “Just don’t ask who we work for!” they exclaimed.

 The driver said she had never been in an accident while growing up and driving in LA, and the first day she drove in the Bay Area she was in an accident, and ever since every car she had owned had been in at least a fender-bender. Explaining the first few, she complained in mildly outraged amusement about the Bay Area drivers who had caused them, but admitted the last one was her own fault. “And you know what I hit?” she asked me, chuckling. “A parked car. It was at the casual carpool pickup spot!  The car in front of me was full and I thought it was going to pull out, as I got my passengers, and I tried to pull into traffic and I hit its bumper!”

 “You see!?” The other one admonished. “The first thing my Dad would have asked is, ‘do you know the width of your own car?’”

 She felt that male teachers reinforce constant vigilance and awareness of the surroundings, knowing the dimensions of the car and what it could handle.  Personally, I’m certain women can be perfectly good driving instructors.  But I am curious about generalized distinctions, while realizing each individual brings unique talents to bear.

 Perhaps the passenger’s point was that the lesson can become focused on operating the vehicle rather than emphasizing the calculus of one’s own size and velocity in relation to the flying metal all around you. But the passenger, through her laughter, felt women get distracted by conversation, and connecting.

 Relevant to the driver’s story of being in an accident her first day of work in the Bay Area, I mentioned once moving to a new neighborhood, and the first time I got on the trolley car there the driver proceeded to drive the trolley car right out from under its trolley lines. (It never happened again, over eight years.) Instead of turning she went straight, and the trolley car was totally stranded–that really cracked them up.

“We both work for [a transit agency]!” they exclaimed.

 “We weren’t going to tell!” They were both laughing and hollering.

 “But we won’t ride it!” 

 As I got out I laughed, too, saying, “I had no idea how much I was taking my life in your own hands, here.”

After all that, the office seemed very tame.

 We’re getting ready to leave town, which means my life is once again a half-baked scramble to do a to-do list before it to-does to me.

Some of the list pertains to preparing for a plane flight, a chunk of the rest is loose notions for posts. Aside:  I write most easily when I’m out walking the dogs or walking up Market street in to work. For some reason, that’s when the ideas pop up. If I were a cartoon, my blog posts could be thought bubbles trailing along behind me.

*    *    *    *    *

 So I went in last Monday for the medical procedure to correct the esophageal constriction I have, called Schatzki ring, again. The nurse plugged in an IV to the back of my hand and electrodes on my chest and, after they put me on the table, an airhose in my nostrils. The rest of the cast called her Shane, and I saw the name “Shangrila” on her medical dog tags. I asked her about it, and she said her parents named her after seeing the movie Lost Horizon.

 They sprayed the back of my throat with an anesthetic to prepare for the tube, and another nurse joked about the things I’d said under sedation the last time, then talked about how they were going to give me “the good drugs.” The IV was already sending me to a calmer place than this frenetic world. But soon the good drugs were coming, ha ha ha. I could opine about their notion of what constitutes a good drug—but never mind.

 I closed my eyes for a moment and when I woke up, groggy, they were done. The endoscopic tube had gone down my esophagus and into my stomach; they verified the ring had re-formed and fixed it again –hopefully this time the fix will last longer than three years. And I can say I’ve been to see Shangrila and the experience knocked me out. Unfortunately, I can’t remember much beyond that …

 *    *    *    *    *

 Before that procedure, the handyman came over that Monday morning. I don’t do ladders too well any more, so I had four little tasks to handle, touching up the gold paint on the sunburst under the peak of our roof, fixing a screen and the rain gutter that fills with incense cedar leaves, plus screening over the openings in our addition where sparrows build their nests (I’ve no idea what our contractor was thinking putting in those circular holes; they’re perfect for nests). But I’d been putting all that off for a year or more—what drove us to call him now was our dishwasher breaking.

 As I mentioned last Monday, it turns on okay. The electrical display comes on, and when “finished” it’s hot inside, yet the dishes are still dirty—only now baked on hot and dirty, because our unwelcome guest had chewed through the wires signalling the water to turn on.

I smeared hot sauce all over the wiring back there, and only wish the little pest would take a lick or two before sniffing–so long as it doesn’t like hot chili sauce. (Because it would be so depressing if it did.) These damn vermin are getting expensive—although I was grateful the fix this time was as cheap as re-connecting the two wires it had chewed apart.

 *    *    *    *    *

 Speaking of fixes—I have another shot or two of Molly, our new cat and purported “mouser.” (She lived most of her life in an antique store until the owner died.) I spoke to my folks this morning and told them how amazingly docile she is, so of course she chose today to become adventurous, come up the stairs from the basement on her own for the first time, and face down the dogs.

I’ll try to post more on that later. Really. I’ll bump it up the to-do list, right behind packing and before … laundry?

 *    *    *    *    *

 Finally, the pears. For some reason our pear tree has gone nuts this year. Okay, not literally nuts, just prolifically. As fast as the squirrels gnaw off the green fruit (what is with the rodents around here?), take a few bites then discard it, littering the lawn with enough spoiled fruit to fill a 5-gallon bucket a third of the way, the fruit just keeps on coming. Here’s the tree three weeks ago:

Notice how green the fruit is. Now here’s another shot from this weekend, three weeks later:

C’mon, I’m ready for pear juice, down here.

And now, duty once again beckons. Off to dog-walk, work-prepare, and commute-go.

They’re an odd trio now, clumped out on the curb, reminders of other times and incarnations, ready to be hauled off somewhere.

Each one of them came to us in a different way. I didn’t think we needed the dumpster, dropped off last week by our trash and recycling agency, as our goal was getting rid of the couch and the fridge, but Mrs. Ombud was right—we soon filled it with junk:  rotten redwood timbers from the back of the yard, leftover wood scraps, parts of an unwanted crib, a rusted dartboard left on the wall of our back deck by the prior owner.

The prior owner had left the refrigerator, too. We already had a fridge we preferred, but we moved this one down to the garage, where it came in handy as extra freezer space and a place to store bottles of homebrew. For years we’ve been talking about getting rid of it—the light no longer works, and a thaw made a mess of the freezer. Our handyman would unplug it, needing an extra outlet for his power tools, then forget to plug it back in. We’d gone over to the coast to pick blackberries once, stored the surplus in our freezer, and the bags of berries had melted and run, leaving a purple stain on our new cement garage floor.

Each spring we would decide to limp it through one more summer, then get rid of it, and for seven years now it’s sat down there, motor occasionally whirring away, its doors often going weeks without being opened. For some bizarre reason ants had recently taken a liking to the damn thing, and there were little clumps of their papery exoskeletons inside. (And it’s not like anything sweet was spilled–it had beerbottles, fer chrissake). Then came the coup de grace, a rat had taken up residence last winter underneath, by the motor. It must have been nice, warm, and dry. The little bastard left plenty of calling cards, and that was it—this spring we paid an exterminator to attempt to rid us of the rats (they seem to multiply faster than the few we’ve caught), and we decided to replace the fridge. We found a used side-by-side on Craigslist, and last week drove out to Martinez to pick up the new one. It’s nice to have working lights when you open the door to the sparkling clean white interior.

*     *     *     *     *     *

But the couch—the couch and I go way back. In 1985 I took a summer off from my job and traveled to Europe at the same time my friend J went. J thought he had a job lined up in Florence, where he flew first to find a place to live (although many told him it would be impossible) then went to see his sister in England.

He bought a car in England and drove to Paris where he had a car accident (“the traffic light was obscured by branches!”), then made it to Barcelona, where the car conked out. He waited for a few days, but every day the mechanic would say to him, “manyana, manyana.” He finally took a train to the south of Spain for that leg of his trip, before heading back toward me in Geneva.

I’d had a flirtation with B, a saucey Swiss I’d met here in San Francisco through S. S had liked me, and I liked her, but not in that way, if you know what I mean, and I’ll bet you do. B went home to Geneva and we had a pleasant teasing correspondence for a while, with her inviting me to come visit if I ever finally went to Europe.

So I flew into Frankfurt and drank delicious beer and went to Heidelburg and saw the Schloss and other sights and got on a train to Geneva where I met B and she told me she had a French boyfriend now. Which made staying together in her efficiency very interesting.

I never met the French boyfriend, and now suspect S had gotten upset about our rendezvous and complained to B, who, not wanting to lose a dear friend, had invented him. But we had fun and I met another in that circle of friends (it was amazing how much these 4-5 women traveled and visited each other), a Dutch woman, who insisted I should meet P, a Spanish nurse living in Lugano, which was on the way, sort of, to Florence.

Meanwhile, J, back in Spain, was still getting “manyana, manyana” from the Barcelona mechanic. So he took a train to meet me in Geneva.

I was very much looking forward to seeing J, a good friend I’d known first in Minneapolis then San Francisco.  I looked down from the tiny balcony and saw the cab drop him off. I went to the door and was trying to think of something cute to say, perhaps riffing off Stanely’s “Dr. Livingston, I presume?” but J brushed right on past me, hauling his luggage in, exclaiming, “where’s the bathroom?! I need a shower right now.” Well, that’s J, ever hurried and prepossessed.

After he got cleaned up we agreed to take the train to Lugano, but stop in Zermatt, first. In a paradoxical twist, while J had been assured there was a job waiting for him at Harry’s Bar in Florence, lots of people told him it would be damn near impossible to find a place to live there, yet he had.

It was an amazing old flat, too, shared with a young American woman nicknamed Coo. It was in a centuries old stone building, had hand-painted cherubs on the walls, and felt like a living museum. When I visited, hot and dusty upon arrival, I bent to untie my shoes, and found precise little swastikas in the tile floor. That startled me. They pre-dated Nazism, of course, by decades if not centuries.

Anyway, the Italian parliament had passed a law saying no one, absolutely no one could hire foreigners (upon threat of jail), even experienced waiters such as J, so he no longer had a job waiting for him in Florence. He was unsure what to do, as he’d planned on staying in Europe for a year. We stopped in Zermatt, Switzerland, met some locals including a well-connected Englishwoman who knew someone who needed a waiter, so he stayed behind to apply on Monday while I went ahead to meet P, the Spanish nurse, in Lugano.

P and I hit it off quickly. We had a wonderful long weekend together, taking the funicular up and down the mountain and driving to Lake Como in Italy and eating in wonderful little cafes until I finally said why don’t you come live with me in San Francisco? She looked at me as if I had suggested she apply to be Minnie Mouse in Disneyland.

“La la la la!” she sang out loudly, “I cannot hear you saying this!” It was preposterous to her, outrageous, to simply give up her job in Switzerland and go to San Francisco, a city she loved—so we decided to do it. After I had finished my three month trip around Europe, of course.

Meanwhile, J was delayed in Zermatt, where he’d had good luck finding work. I was still quite happy with P in Lugano, living the good life and sending merry postcards home to the US explaining to our mutual friends that J had a flat in Florence, a job in Switzerland, and his car, of course, was in Spain.

They all understood immediately, and if you knew J you would, too. He always had dozens of schemes and dreams going on. In SF I’d had a 35-gallon aquarium for several years and good luck with neon and cardinal tetras. A friend of ours once looked at the fluorescent blue and red of the tetra school, flashing in the light and he said, “it’s kind of like the inside of J’s brain, isn’t it? With all the tetras as separate dreams of his, darting together in different directions.”

I left P in Lugano and continued on my trip, going down to Florence and meeting Coo, whom J had said he would call and inform I was coming (he hadn’t, which steamed me, but she was very understanding). So I went to the Uffizi, and also saw all 3 Davids in a day, then met J and we moved him out. Everything in luggage and shopping bags, all higgeldy piggeldy. There was a train strike, too, which was real madness, but we got him to Lugano, left his stuff with P, and he and I traveled on to Zurich and Munich and Hamburg and Copenhagen together.

At Copenhagen we parted; he turned southwest, visiting Amsterdam before going on to his job in Zermatt, and I went up to Scandinavia and met long-lost relatives for three weeks.

I had a great time, including buying a Nordtourist pass and taking trains around Scandinavia–over to Finland, then up above the Arctic Circle in Norway, and I met some interesting women, too, eventually visiting one in Brussels in August, but I’ll skip all that, because I’ll bet you’re wondering about the couch.

What would you rather read about, all the great places I visited, sights I saw, people I met, or have me tie this back in to the couch? I mean, it might be fun if I mentioned the best museums and you could comment on your favorites, too, no?

Okay, I will say that I felt I should remain faithful to P, whom I  met in Paris for five memorable and mostly happy days, before I returned to London (two weeks total there, and a great time, including teaching a party of people how to mix margaritas) then flew home to San Francisco.

 Anyway, P and I did not work out. All I’ll say is that when she got to California, she was a changed woman. (S was not very happy with us, either–which is why I’ve often wondered about what really happened with B.) I wrote about seeing P again years later, fictionalizing the characters, here.

J also met someone. He worked at a hotel in Zermatt for a year, and on a day off he met W. When W came to live with J in San Francisco she told me how they first met. 

They were both in a cafe one Sunday morning, and she knew he was American and wanted to talk to him, but he was pre-occupied with his newspaper. She managed to get enough out of him to find out he had lived in Minneapolis—surprise, surprise, as she had grown up in Minnesota. They hit it off, skiing and drinking wine and having a great time in Switzerland, and she agreed to go with him to SF, where they set up housekeeping in an apartment at Pine and Larkin, not far from where I now work.

They bought a nice old cream hide-a-bed for their living room, as they furnished the place. But thy didn’t work out. She was still young and adventurous, and he was becoming a homebody, still wanting to read his newspapers, so they split up and neither had room for the couch.

I had just moved into a wonderful 10-room flat with a two car garage, where I lived from 1988 until 1996, and had plenty of room for the hide-a-bed. J & W’s cat, Bella, had done a number on one of the arms, but I fixed that up (sort of) and that couch has been with me for 20 years now, following me from SF to Alameda, with any number of friends coming through town and crashing on it, and getting chewed on by Ernie when he was still an anxious pup. That got patched, too. Some of my friends complained about the crossbar under the thin mattress, but the few times I slept on it, I found I could lie across the bar and it worked just fine, for me.

It’s final resting place had been down in a backroom off our garage, where I could recline and watch the TV in my office, at an angle, until the rats found it last winter, as I mentioned here. Now it’s out on the street, with the old fridge (taped up so kids can’t get in), and the dumpster.

I’ve kept in touch with P, on and off. The last I heard S had gone off to Australia to be a chef. B met some guy and went to South America. J is still a good friend, living in Phoenix now, and he once ran into Coo here in SF. She just happened to be passing through, and they saw each other on the street! W eventually married a vintner and now lives somewhere up in Napa.

You know, of course, of how objects can hold memories. Down through the years I’ve looked at that couch and thought about those friends, and how the series of events that brought it to me began almost a quarter century ago in Zermatt, Switzerland. It’s a winding sequence of memories, perhaps. But whose life works in a straight line?

And would you want yours to?

I was bottling some India pale ale on our back deck this weekend, busy filling the bottles before I cap them, when I found out that my adrenal gland still works.

I prefer to bottle with someone else—it’s pretty much a two-person job. The beer is in a bucket with a spigot, I attach a hose to that with a nozzle so that, when you press the nozzle into the bottom of an empty bottle, the beer flows, filling the bottle. One person fills bottles, the other uses the bottle-capper contraption to stamp the soft metal caps on and seal the bottles.

It’s a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon, with a little music or a ballgame on in the background, and maybe some fully conditioned and chilled beer handy in a glass, too.

It had been a sunny morning so, as I cleaned, sterilized and rinsed bottles, I had our large deck umbrella open. It’s about seven feet tall and opens wide, so it casts a decent shadow, which is helpful as beer and sunshine do not mix. After rinsing the bottles I set them on an old white plastic deck table we have, pretty rickety, but fine for outdoor furniture, and good for letting the bottles dry, except that it’s pretty unstable.

In the afternoon the wind picked up a bit—it often does in the Bay Area. Cool air and fog are sucked through the Golden Gate by the heat of the Central Valley, so the valleys and canyons of the east bay hills get a lot of wind, and it can get pretty breezy along the bay, too.

I was maybe half way through when a solid gust hit, and I looked up to see that the wind had tilted the deck umbrella off balance. Right toward the rickety white table. Loaded with empty bottles. In a split second I realized what would happen once that umbrella toppled completely over, hitting the table, and sending all those sterile bottles flying like bowling pins all over and off the deck, crashing to the grass and the cement patio below. Mayhem, I tell you, mayhem would happen, and not only that—all my work in cleaning those bottles, would be gone, too.

I suppose the insides of the bottles that didn’t break would still be sterile. But I didn’t really have time to think it through that far. In the second or so I had for the dawning realization of how very bad it would be for that umbrella to continue toppling over onto that table full of squeaky clean bottles the only real thought I remember is I think I can get there in time.

Two steps, and a dive. I caught the pole in my left hand and pushed up, to get fully underneath it – the wind didn’t help, but I got it centered again and set it straight down. I moved a heavy pot full of dirt over onto the end of it, to keep it planted, so to speak.

In an instant it occurred to me how much extra work I had just been saved. Do you ever have moments like that, where you’re just plugging along, getting the stuff on your to-do list to-done, and disaster is averted to make you very grateful for the status quo you were taking for granted a few seconds earlier?

I was thankful in that moment, and thankful, too, that my adrenal gland still seems to be in good working order. To all of our glands, in good working order, hear, hear!

I paused to toast, then got busy bottling and capping my IPA again.

 I spoke to Ms. Norberg, of StubHub.It took a while; the past couple weeks have been a bit of a blur. There was a bit of damage control going on at work – nothing out of the ordinary, and in fact, in some ways it was a good thing. I work in a bureaucracy that, decades ago, used to get somewhat backed up. It may even have fed into stereotypical notions about bureaucracy; I don’t know, I worked in the private sector back then, publishing companies, CNet, a law firm, etc.

 Perhaps as a result, the group I’m with now prides itself on processing its work quickly. Projects don’t tarry long, even though there are complex situations that can take a while for resolution. Plus, as we are resolving issues members of the public have a keen interest in, some have to be fast tracked, such as those involving children.

 Anyway, as we’re all still human, something slipped and I pitched in to help a coworker. We got things back on track but it meant I didn’t call Ms. Norberg of StubHub as quickly as I might, and then we played phone tag for a bit.

 I’m finding out that people rely on the digital display on their phones to record numbers for them. Even though I carefully enunciated my direct line at work to Ms. Norberg’s voicemail, she somehow dialed the number captured by her phone system, which is my office’s main phone number. (What displays on people’s screens is not my direct line—I have to tell people on cell phones not to call the number displayed on their gadget.)

 So she sent me an email saying she couldn’t reach me, and I called her again, but it all took about two weeks.

 After initial pleasantries, she began again to tell me that StubHub does not print tickets, and cannot guarantee, yadda yadda. It was starting to annoy me; it was enough to live through it all once, I didn’t want to listen to their CYA again.

 But then she changed tack. She reiterated that they want to make it up to me. And she told me that StubHub does have a partnership with major league baseball. As I mentioned earlier, it would have been nice if someone at StubHub had run interference for me and contacted the Pirates, so that the team in Bradenton had known a guy had had his ticket stolen and been ready for me when I arrived.

 She said they had identified the customer service reps at StubHub who had given me halfway assistance, and they were being re-trained so that, in the future, they’d go to the MLB teams and be of more help. That impressed me.

 And she said they wanted to make it up to me. I had gotten an email back in March offering me a voucher (for $20, I think) which was nice but it had slipped from the forelobes the way so many things do. My out-of-pocket, for the ticket, shipping and the StubHub fee had been $42.75, and Ms Norberg sent me an email with a gift code I can apply to future purchases as a discount.

 Which is decent of them. I’ll use it for Mrs. Ombud; getting reimbursed for the ticket doesn’t mean that much to me. I got into the game, albeit not in the seat I’d bought behind the Twins’ dugout. But it really was quite a hassle for us, for my wife in particular, and in some way it makes up for all the stress we went through.

 If she has something she wants to see, that’s fine, otherwise, maybe I’ll use it to go see a Twins game when they visit Oakland.

The upshot is that it pays to blog about experiences like this. I think Jellyjules’ approach is good, too (she commented in my last post that she writes letters the old-fashioned way to the presidents of companies) in that she gets a response. An what worked for me was to simply blog about it. Back in January I put Comcast’s name in the subject line, and now StubHub — both times, the companies have contacted me wanting to rectofy the situaiton. chalk one up for the blogosphere.

So, I’m sitting at a new desk at work. I don’t know how long I’ll be there, although the powers that be have moved my computer down to the new office, which is on the opposite corner of our block from where I used to work. It might be a matter of weeks, or months or even years. I might find out sometime before I retire.

Or I might not. Some things, in my mandarin work world, are determined not even in San Francisco, but in Sacramento. Let’s just say that there is a prominent politician who has appeared in Hollywood action movies who has a say in it, and leave it there.

In the meantime, I can show you a bit of my new view. I used to work in a new building on this block, but now I work in a much older building; neoclassical, I think. So my new office is actually an old office. If I lean over to one side of my desk and look out the window I can see SF’s City Hall.

But generally, the view from my desk looks more like this.

Still, it has a window I can actually open, and how rare is that in the modern steel and glass Bauhaus office world, any more?

There’s a lot of construction going on around here, so even with the window closed I hear the staccato of jackhammers and the frequent thumping, crashing, and pounding of construction equipment.

But it’s okay. I’m happy with the new work, and the new locale; and if the bureaucrats in Sacramento could resolve some issues, a lot of us will be given a new start.