Here we are at the beach. M. is looking kind of Bay Watch, I’m not.

Meanwhile, the local constabulary was gearing up for the holiday. The neighbors say the chain-link fence is the annual tradition of a makeshift holding area for the drunks and ne’er-do-wells caught with illegal fireworks. I totally want a ride in the DUI commando vehicle (but not as a captured criminal).

Technorati Tags: Bay_Area, beach, California, fireworks, Joe_Wong

i don’t really know anyone who talks like this post’s title. Although, I do work with someone who has the cliche Valley Girl rhythm and intonation down so totally it makes me want to vomit with a spoon or jam a superheated metal rod in my ears when she speaks.

But, that’s not why I’m writing.

Last weekend, M. and I went to the county park that’s just up the street, and then we walked the very, very long, giant hill way home. Damn, have you ever seen scenery like these here pictures depict and could it be any where but here?

This weekend, though, was peak California. Sun. Convertible driving. Walks by the beach. The whole shooting match. And speaking of shooting match, it turns out our town is one of the only two in the county where you can legally buy your incendiary devices for the upcoming celebration of the U.S. of A. Better yet, it’s kind of a moral imperative to buy, since fireworks are a major fundraising tool for the locals. In the morning, we supported the local girls’ softball league (‘cuz maybe with such a league some little nerd girl like me won’t be pathetic 30 years later in city league play).

Here was our stockpile at the day’s start.

Later we passed some ridiculously clad folks jumping around the side of the scenic Cabrillo Highway with signs and gestures and arrows. Naturally, we had to head into the parking lot of the Moose Lodge and slap down some more money, this time to support the community theater in the incarnation of the Spindrift Players. And, thus, our arsenal is getting some place.

I is so going to blow some pyrotechnics up this Saturday. Fuck Guy Fawkes. This is America, and I’m going to get my libertarian California swerve on.

In the middle of buying gun powder and incendiary chemicals, I also swung by a local surf shop and got a wetsuit. The thought is that I may actually roll around in the famous surf of our surf town, if I slap on enough rubber to withstand the 50+ degrees of the water combined with 60s or 70s in the air. Next weekend we should be testing time. Ain’t nothing like rolls of black-clad flesh to make you feel like a bathing beauty.

Finally, to wrap up the all California all week and damn day long, there was the freeing of the bugs. Ladybugs.

My mint and sweet basil are sadly limp and ridden with holes. This morning, I pulled off a leaf and came up with aphids as a possible enemy. The enemy of my enemy is the ladybug. For $8 at the local Ace Hardware, I got to stroll home with a plastic container of the little buggers.

Toward nightfall, when they are rumored to be too lazy or something to fly, I let them go. Tomorrow, we’ll see if they like what my garden has to offer or take off to greener and more aphid- and mite-ridden pastures. For now, if ladybugs are lucky, we got a fuckload of luck in our backyard. I hope the sad, Sweet Basil catches some of the good vibrations.

Technorati Tags: Bay_Area, beach, California, fireworks, garden, gardening, ocean, Pacific_Ocean, Pacifica, suburbs

This week was a particularly arduous one for failing to meet the needs of a new generation of the “best” and the “brightest.”

I have in the past ranted about the youth I now hate as a stuffy, grouchy aging woman. It’s really the millenials with their T-ball trophy winning, helicopter parent indulging ways that cause me the only real pain as I strive to keep a paycheck coming.

Cursed as I am with a modicum of self-awareness, however, I have to think maybe I was an asshole once, too. After all, the family still remembers me for my pre-school “genius glasses,” as I insisted I was a genius and all geniuses must wear glasses. Now I realize not only that I’m an idiot, but I sit typing this post out with bifocals. Fucking bifocals. (OK, progressive lenses, because no one need know my eyes are indeed middle-aged and nerdy.)

It is my family that also reminds me of my compulsive need at the age of seven to announce to everyone who would listen (and many, many adults who were too busy to listen) in a sing-song voice, “I got a double promotion.”

Doubtless at my first job, I too, smarmily, smarty-pants-ian, proclaimed how all things good be done better if only my ideas were enacted. At least, I assume I acted like that, because I have the 20-somethings now telling me such things. Maybe it’s a universal?

If it is a universal, I am sorry. I am sorry if I ever said to any co-worker, “Oh, that’s just me, because I read books.” I understand now that telling people I read books, while implying I’m different from them, also implies that they don’t read and, by extension, are not as educated as me. To say you are used to talking with your friends and it’s a “rarefied” atmosphere is to suggest to the listener that their little, leaden world is earthbound and mundane. If I ever did that, I’m sorry.

If I ever suggested to someone 20 years my senior that our life experiences were on par and equal and really quite the same, please accept my apology. I minimized anything you may have done in that extra couple of decades by presuming my shorter existence included the same activities. I minimized your contribution by suggesting what I have learned from books is essential and identical to what you learned through living. I elevated myself and my meager contributions thus far to equal your demonstrable, documented successes, and I see now that I may have left some things out of my logic chain.

Further, I apologize for assuming that I was in a position to question how you live or offer advice on how you should change. For example, if I questioned the need for a man in your life to even need a suit, let alone two or a tailor-made one, because I had one suit since I graduated high school and found that it was enough, I’m sorry for my shortsightedness. Obviously, all sartorial choices should involve not just the age of the person, but the circumstances in which they live. I hadn’t thought of that when I told you your behavior was unnecessary, sorry.

If ever I cried, literally or figuratively, because I was so full of emotion, because no one was understanding my issues and my needs, please accept my sincere regrets for missing the larger picture. Older and wiser, I now can grok a universe in which everyone, literally everyone, has their own mountains to climb and shit-stream to swim. Crosses to bear abound. All people have emotional needs. I am not a special ray of sunshine who needs extra care and tending. And, if I am, frankly, I now realize it’s on my shoulders to get the care I need.

For unaware tears I shed, because I felt misunderstood, I apologize for ignoring your pain and misunderstanding your motives. More than that, I am sorry for the shallow tears, the tears of minor setbacks and small issues. In retrospect, death, tragedy, a broken heart, a troubled friend beyond hope or reach, paralysis, disease, illness, suffering, these are situations in which tears are earned and a needed balm. A hangnail or badly run meeting is not.

Today, sitting here and typing on a computer that wasn’t imagined in 1984, I have learned that often people’s actions are not intended as I think. Sometimes someone is brusk or unable to help solve my problems, because they need their brains and hearts to deal with their own junk. Or maybe beyond my vision, someone else’s need is greater than mine. Maybe there was a death in the family or a prolonged illness that has kept a co-worker from sharing completely my sense of urgency that my flight was delayed. For my inability to see your forest for my trees, please accept my humility and penance.

If ever I interrupted you or took more than my share unthinkingly, please know that I am sorry. In youthful exuberance, I no doubt shouted or spoke when it was not my turn. I probably conversed by over talking the other participants, because my ideas were bursting from me and so good and so well-formed. There was no reason to listen to other people speak, because what could they offer that I did not already know? More true if their voice was soft or they were too weak to be as assertive as me. If they mattered, they would speak up.

So, check. Rudeness, my bad. I’m sorry.

Most of all, I think my biggest crime might have been buzz kill. In my 20s, full of energy and life, full of opportunity, busting at the seams with determination and enthusiasm, I just assumed what you were doing was stupid. My choices in activities had depth and knowledge and were vetted by my superior mind, so clearly if you weren’t doing what I was doing, you were wasting your time. For eye rolls and sighs, let me bow my head, contemplative and contrite.

Now, today, in the here and now, I can see those kids over there enjoying a kickball game in the sun, or those adults high-fiving a solid base run in league softball, are just having fun. Yup, F U N.

My condescending attitude, my feigned, fake cheer, my “whatever” or “duh” isn’t fun. It’s not witty. It doesn’t further life’s dance, it slows it the fuck down. Who, I say looking back, who the fuck do I think I am or did I think I was?

If philately gets your pulse up, enjoy. If sports are your theater, play ball. If television, radio, video, YouTube, music, movies and mime all provide your window to the world, rave on. If sitting on a rock alone is your thing, let the world roll on by as you wish. Rock your Celine Dion, roll with your light contemporary jazz. May your boat float with whatever liquid keeps you aloft.

You don’t need my approval or my opinion or my permission. And, you certainly don’t need me bringing you down. For judgment, especially unsolicited, and for sucking the joy out of anyone else’s pleasure, for that and for my condescension, please accept my apologies.

Technorati Tags: age, youth, family, friends, life, work

THe thing about softball is it’s the ultimate regression. A can of beer on a picnic table is about every summer night (and every spring weekend) for so very many suburban kids all over the country. Now, I am a bit younger but closer to my mother’s age way back when.

The suburbs, to the best of my recollection, were about finding a place to go. At a certain age, your friends and you just wandered from empty park to parking lot to golf course to ball field. All you needed was a place to congregate and beer and weed were icing on the cake.

About a million three years ago, I bounced into homeroom come a Monday morning and the nerdish kids who were half of my school life confronted me. “I heard you got drunk and taken advantage of this weekend.”

What happened was roughly six kids and six bottles of Miller High Life and a town park. Some time during the evening, I allowed Dan to kiss me under the shadow of an old oak. I wore a sturdy cotton turtleneck and a merino wool “ski sweater” with the kind of stripes that said “racing” or “Brady Bunch” rerun. Somewhere in the kissing and the sipping beer, Dan may or may not have gotten his hand between the layers of cotton and wool. Buried below, protected by not just the fortress of turtleneck but appropriate undergarments, lay my breasts.

Those were the mysterious things that happened at parks.

Before that, though, there’s the game. I kind of wish I could have played Little League or some kind of non-school-related ball. Girls didn’t have that back in the dark ages, and gym class sucked. Not only do I get to occasionally throw and catch and swing and hit, but I get to yell things out like “the play’s at first.” Exciting stuff.

Tonight, the excitement mounted in two challenges. One, I left my bag with equipment, two balls, two gloves, two bats and a kickass whale hat I bought in Alaska, at the field. Very stupid. Stupider, there’s two pair of prescription sunglasses and a point and shoot camera at the bottom of the bag.

I realized my stupid forgetfulness while I was still in town, and I hadn’t yet headed on the wide open highway. Only problem was I remembered AFTER the local constable pulled me the fuck over. Apparently, not OK to go 43 in a 25-mile zone. Oops. Charming motherfucker that I am, I got a warning.

But, I wasn’t turning back on those same streets. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of Dodge and praise the gods that told me to hang back on drinking too many light beers in too few hours. Just like I earned so many, many years ago from Ms. Plotka, no shame in cradling a beer and sipping it slow over hours. Kind of like that half a Miller I drank thousands of centuries ago.

Technorati Tags: , beer, food, friends, suburbs, suburbs

I’m feeling not so much the day of the lord but a day of rest.

No whales to be seen today. I think they may have read the San Francisco Chronicle and realized floating shitheads abound. We did get to see a rather large pelican dive-bombing what I assume was a fish.

Sadly, I did see what I at first thought was a living seal bobbing close to shore. As it came closer and closer to the beach, it was clear that it was the corpse of young seal with a rather vicious chunk removed from its side.

I gotta say, I like the walking to the beach and doing nothing seaside, even if it meant seeing the down side of nature. The saddest part of the poor dead little guy was the cluster of girls that “discovered” it and then commenced with the throwing shit at it. Feebly, I walked by and told them to leave it alone. Why the fuck do little kids face death with stick and rock pelting?

Other than the wonders of nature, the weekend was all about rocking the wonders of technology. Clearly, Steve Jobs is working some serious voodoo. I purposefully ignored the new specs for Apple’s new line of MacBooks; No reason to consider when I was happily using last year’s model. In some kind of fucked up cosmic fate, on Friday, I closed my laptop lid as I groggily headed to bed only to wake up on Saturday to a shattered screen fanning out from what looked like a mini-bullet hole. Methinks I clammed onto some kind of boulder or something.

Worse yet, in the voodoo department, I already had an appointment set for a telephone call with Apple support and a visit to the local Genius bar. Mysteriously, the same fateful Friday my iPhone had stopped wanting to connect to 3G. As the Genius pulled open the box for a fresh phone to replace the ailing one, it was hard ignore the shiniest replacements for my cracked screen.

(As a side note, here’s the thing about Apple. Not only did the Genius replace my phone (in turn giving me another 90 days warranty even though the phone was due to end its year-long protection in three weeks), he gave me the business card for a third-party repair place down the street that beats Apple’s boutique pricing in case I wanted to fix the screen. I know folks bitch about the Cult of Mac, but that’s some pretty good customer service mojo offering up the lower priced advice.)

(Also, as another check on fandom for fandom’s sake, I have a long history of buying smart phones, especially if you at the old, olden days, when I had a Handspring Visor and modem module. I kept that next to my horseless carriage and victrola. In every phase of bleeding edge technology, I’ve had issues with hardware both of my own and the manufacturer’s making. Only with the iPhone have I gotten shiny new replacements when things went awry, although I remember Handspring as a relic of good hardware.)

Steve, and his Jedi mind tricks, wanted me to stay in the fold, so I obliged with a shinier, newer, faster MacBook with the sweet little SD card reader in the side that means I don’t have to find my cheap plastic card reader every time I take a photo.

The benefit of the cracked screen is M. is really all about the size of the display and prefers a desktop computer. In all the years I’ve ever seen him with a laptop, it’s been no where near a lap. A quick trip to Fry’s, some extra RAM and a 25-inch HD monitor later, and he has a sweet little system. You can’t see the crack if you don’t use the screen.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple_genuius, beach, iPhone, Pacifica, whales

Beyond kick-ass pictures of the real-live wilderness and a T-shirt with Tlingit-like art of stylized hummingbirds, I brought back a kick-ass rhinovirus. Jesus do I hate a cold.

Beyond the usual hatefulness of a stuffed head, aches and booger production, this episode includes a hacking cough, immune to rivers and vats of cough syrup and guaifenesin and dextromethorphan, time-release, immediate release, slugged and pounded in pill form. Sleeping is consequently a distant fantasy of something I once enjoyed uninterrupted. A couple more days of this bullshit and I might have to go beg some opiates off of a medical doctor with the special joy that is codeine.

Still and all, I managed to hunker back down at work and get caught up in post-vacation malaise. I also weeded my pathetic garden and trimmed hedges that had grown in some kind of suburban Murphy’s law of getting well beyond head high shrubbery, because we weren’t there to will it smaller.

Speaking of the pathetic garden. The chamomile thrives and the tomato plant has flowers, but all else is anemic. And, clearly some kind of something enjoys the basil such that I may never get more than a speck of a hole-riddled leaf myself. It lives, though, partially because we had the next-door 10-year-old boy keep an eye out an water in exchange for cash money. We actually only alluded to payment, as his mother volunteered that it would be no problem for him.

Note to other no-kids neighbors out there. If you’re a couple of folks who piss money away regularly (e.g. we bought an original artwork on a cruise ship), you’re apt to throw, say, $50 in a Chinese red money envelope. If you do so, it’s entirely possible mom might walk you up to the front steps to return most of it, or at least half as “too much.” Maybe I’m wrong, maybe he thought it, too, but either way it was a fun retro moment in modern suburbia.

My only real fear is our lack of fiscal restraint is misinterpreted as something nefarious. I figure your average pedophile probably is generous to a fault, you know, ‘cuz it helps in duping and encouraging young minds.

The thing that I’m not writing about, because the cough has zapped my strength, is teamwork, team playing and team sports. I’m having fun with the whole sadness that is my playing softball after work. Philosophically, I have all sorts of wasted bullshit to impart, kind of like wisdom, but it will have to wait for another day.

The pity is I seldom had fun playing organized ball in the traditional ball-playing years of youth.

In other news, we can see whales from shore at the beach near our house.

My joy was almost uncontainable on Friday evening. After a long, hard week of working for a living, I crested the hill and rolled down the highway toward the Pacific Coast Highway and our home. On Friday’s run I saw the lights of a Ferris Wheel rotating in the sky. A cheap, local carnival in the parking lot of the Sea Bowl, a local bowling area directly across the street from the next beach up to ours, the rock classically named Rockaway Beach. I didn’t hesitate to convince M. to change our plans for grilling up dinner to a walk over to the fair. Nothing I like better than a traveling carnival and losing money for low-quality plush toys.

Before the sunset, as we walked up the hill to the fair with a panoramic view of the ocean, we noticed the unmistakable spouts of water we had just paid out big money to witness in Juneau. By Saturday, I had a more powerful pair of binoculars and sat on the beach for hours watching the spots and dives of migrating gray whales head north for the summer.

Technorati Tags: Alaska, Bay_Area, beach, California, garden, gardening, Pacifica, whales

I should write long and in depth, but yet exhaustion trumps all other emotions. M. and I have arrived back from the honest to fucking god wilderness. We both have head colds, although mine, of course, may turn to something dramatic that will send me into a consumptive stupor.

But, evidence there is of where we have been.

Technorati Tags: Alaska, travel