Tiring and Retiring: In which I remove myself from the workaday world

It’s time. I’ve saved for years. I bought five extra years’ service with the state, bolstering my pension. I don’t have to work in the court system any more. The judicial process is painstaking, and as a citizen I appreciate the serious efforts of the courts to apply the law, to resolve conflicts, to get things right — at the same time, I don’t have to take those pains myself any more.

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The New Bay Bridge

Twenty-four years after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, we finally got a new bridge to replace the damaged eastern span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. It’s pretty, despite SF Chronicle architecture critic John King’s dismissal.

Here’s the new span next to the old span.

 

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Gardening, two

We’re enjoying spending time in the garden lately, and it’s so pleasant to see young plants taking root and growing. This rosebush has dozens of buds that are reaching up above the fenceline.

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Gardening 2013

A friend is suffering through the cold in the upper midwest, wanted to see some greenery, then sent a reminder this week that it would be nice to see the garden. so I took the camera out into the backyard yesterday and this morning, and spent some time cropping the picures so they don’t suck up too much space.

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God’s Own Gadfly

 On my walk in to work in the mornings, I sometimes pass a Goodyear tire store at Turk and Larkin streets, Kahn & Keville, which maintains a large signboard out front, often with amusing or thought-provoking messages.  Up through the election it had something from Voltaire, on how uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd one.

Before that, it had a note on the passing of Gore Vidal which I found poignant.

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Ecliptical Shadows

 

I’m not really much for eclipses. I get the whole astronomical fascination with the topic. But the aspect of eclipses that interests me most is how predicting them was used to mollify or terrorize other cultures — pretty devious.

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Return of the marching bands

Every May our street is closed off for a marching band competition. A minor nuisance, as we all have to move our cars elsewhere in the neighborhood, but mostly it’s great fun to see the kids come down the street playing their hearts out (sometimes well, sometimes not so) as they pass the reviewing stand, which is located just up the block from our house.

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Little Miss Brown Eyes

When we’ve taken pictures of our Edie girl in the past, it’s been hard to catch the color of her eyes, as they get lost against her black lab coat.  For instance, here’s a picture my brewing friend Dave took one afternoon a few years back (whilst cooking up an ale) of our duo up on the back deck:

 

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Dawn View of the City

Every so often I catch the light just right. Just before the sun comes up, it hits the windows of the highrises in San Francisco, and they glow as if molten.

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Doggie DNA Redux

Okay, so we had so much fun finding out about Ernie’s ancestry, we got a DNA testing kit to do the same for Edie, too.

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