Watch this space ...

For photos.

My Canon 410 digital camera finally arrived (on the third time ordering) so I will be tweaking this, and my food blog, to be Photo Enhanced.

I might even fix the commenting feature Real Soon Now. It's been busy at work, and I have started cleaning again with a vengeance, so I have not been blogging much.

(Although if you really want to comment in the meantime, pop on over to my LJ.)

A sense of time passing

I'm constantly amazed at the changes south of Market in San Francisco. I attended a conference at Moscone Center today and was a bit taken aback to realize that the huge parking lot I listened to Jesse Jackson in during the 1984 Democratic convention (or, why I was one of the few Devoted Democrats who didn't hear Mario Cuomo's famous address to that body) was now the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Metreon (reminds me, I still want to see the movie "Saved!"), and a nice park with well-grown shrubs and trees. St. Patrick's church, which used to be out in the middle of nowhere, grimly holding its own in the downmarket slum that was South of the Slot, is now quite surrounded by the Jukebox Marriott, the Four Seasons, the YBCftA, and others (most of them quite posh - that part of SoMa has not suffered post-bust due to its proximity to Market and BART). Indeed, when I got to the doors itself, I realized that the conference was in Moscone North, UNDER the former empty lot (and the park).

"All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears" - Joan Didion

Oh, yes, as usual at tech conferences, I am amused that I can breeze into the Ladies and the fellows have to stand in line.

The kid is very observant

(this one is good enough for all the blogs)

My brother and his family recently moved into a nice brand-new house (they got to make the choices and everything). It was a long process looking for something they liked in an area they could afford, and lengthened by the construction process, but it's definitely worth the wait. I stayed with them when I was in the southland.

It has a nice open plan family room/eating area/kitchen in the back of the house. I was playing with my nephew and his Hot Wheels. He assigned me a car and it had been parked at my "house". Most of the other cars were parked at a restaurant at the "pier" (the cars are not allowed on the wood floor, so it's the ocean and the carpet is the land). Then he tells me it's seven AM and I have to get up and drive to the restaurant. "Why?" "You don't have a kitchen in your house." "No kitchen!?!" Without missing a beat, he says "It's a designer house."

After picking my jaw up from the floor, I said, "I guess you went to all those open houses with your mom and dad!". My sister-in-law, who was doing something in the kitchen and whose jaw also dropped, said, "Too many of them, it seems."

I'm baaaaack

And the camera is still not here. I don't feel so bad, although I wish that I had it with me and look forward to its arrival.

I'll be posting more around the blogs when I "catch up".

Non-Instant Gratification

One disadvantage of web shopping is that the price for the often better prices is that it takes a while to arrive. I got spoiled in my early days with Amazon where even the "Super Saver Shipping" would arrive in three or so days because Amazon has a warehouse outside Reno. I made two orders on the web the weekend before last and am still waiting for the items to arrive. I am hoping at least the digital camera gets here tonight, in time for my trip.

Of course stores aren't always the answer; I went to Lush's San Francisco store last night hoping to pick up some "Ickle Baby Baff" bombs for the mothers of small energetic boys I am visiting and they were out.