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If Nixon could have an enemies list, why can’t I?

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I’ve written about it before, and if I weren’t too lazy, I could find it and link it. It is my mother’s knack for sorting the good eggs from the bad’ns.

This skill has been on my mind, because in today’s universe, or maybe it’s the California-tinged corner of the universe where I now reside, I’m not sure that’s considered a skill anymore. Somehow, it seems, it’s not politically correct or otherwise not cricket to call a person who whiles away their days behaving in a douchey manner a douchebag.

It used to be that if you called someone who stole your lunch money, called you names, pulled your hair or otherwise fucked you up in the schoolyard, a jerk and said you didn’t like him, you’d be an astute observer of human behavior. Now, there are bullying programs to try to reach the behavior and educate the assholes to stop being assholes.

The good guys, the victims, they are exhorted to not be judgmental, to examine their own behaviors, to show compassion and help teach the wayward fuckwads.

Yeah, here’s another idea, can’t I just tell you to fuck off and leave me alone?

Probably not hard to surmise that even as I approach half a century and think about how I want to live the waning minutes I have left, I still want to call a bully out for his horseshit. (By the way, my iPad just spellchecked that last word with an option of horses-hit. Trying using that in a sentence.)

Back to my mom, Pat. She was in many many many ways extraordinarily shy and/or reserved. She ate cold steak rather than “cause a scene” and send poorly prepared food back at a restaurant.

I witnessed her getting taken advantage of by the more sly and calculating and assertive in the world. For years at the school where she taught, a cadre of politically well-connected and outspoken teachers ruled the hallways. The rest of the teachers had extra bus and lunch room duty and no chance for any of the work that might garner extra pay. The power elite kept those gigs to themselves.

Over the years, she lost pooled sick time to slackers, while she herself literally never took a day of leave. OK, there was the one day, when my brother had appendicitis in Moscow, but that was only on account of the time difference for the frantic phone calls with our Russian-speaking family dentist to the embassy.

But, all at the same time, she was outspoken about injustice and bullshit when it was pervasive and hurt others. No underdog could have a stronger advocate in their corner to stare down anything from serious evil (like testifying in court for a student scheduling and physically abused) to petty misdemeanor.

In the latter category, I think she won this battle, but the memory is hazy.

For a school awards banquet one night, she was one of the teachers on the set up and decoration committee of parents and teachers. A couple of local moms, wanting to gussy up the auditorium had a brilliant idea — beautiful fresh flowers arranged in sprays and bouquets around the area. The source of the posies was none other than the neighboring cemetery. Their rationale, and by god it was the definition of rationalizing bad behavior, they wouldn’t be missed since the funeral was over and people had gone home.

Not being down with grave robbing and desecration and just general shittiness, I think old Pat succeeded in shaming them to put every stem back where it came from, in the dark.

Ironically, I wrote all of the above the day before M. was an invited speaker at a local high school tech club. In a swanky auditorium at the swanky community center in the swanky town, it appeared that the students had done everything themselves — from professional looking brochures, queuing up all A/V in advance and executing it behind the speakers and behind the scenes, and getting snacks catered by a local restaurant. At the end, they presented M. with a gift, a lovely orchid that was clearly alive, thriving and not stolen from a graveyard.

Anyway, I wish we could go back to the days of not pretending that we are all on the same page. Some people are not bothering to use facts when they argue factually. Some people like to blame and finger point. And some people are just fucking assholes, and we should be allowed, nay encouraged, to call them out.

Big asshole (Karl Rove) or small (line cutters and annoying colleagues), I know who you are and I’m not above calling a spade a spade.

I don’t know who you are, but I just might hate you

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I got called out for not writing anything political in politically charged year, a politically charged month. Fair enough, I am mad as hell, and I know full well that I live in a bubble that shelters me from morons.

The obvious target of my hatred right now are the so-called undecided voters. But, like some of what is implied here in this article from The Week, I’m not sure that they exist. All of the focus groups and idiots getting their 15 seconds of fame on the news channels are probably just happy to wave at the cameras. Maybe a chunk of them won’t even bother to get off their fat asses and get to a polling place on Election Day, when they aren’t guaranteed any camera time.

Nope, I think my anger is mostly at the real, live, breathing, pearl-clutching, hyperventilating ladies of the GOP. I say “ladies,” because I hate that word and everything my women’s studies reading ever taught me about the coded meaning of it. Sit like a lady, act like a lady, be quiet like a lady, allow yourself to get stomped on like a lady. For a few women, the language sadly still fits.

Here’s the thing, my sisters, you folks out there rocking a cootch not a dick between your legs, this shit is real and Romney and Ryan do NOT have your back.

Abortion is a loaded term with all sorts of shit laid on it that has nothing to do with what it is. Normal women get abortions. In every layer of society, every historic period (and most certainly in prehistory), always and forever in mankind, just like there has always been sex and hookups, there have been unwanted pregnancies. Here’s some factual information from actual research: http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/facts/women_who.html.

By all means, be against it in your own life. Help yourself, help your family, help your friends, help anyone you can work out what is best for them. Always remember, always, that the only way to really be able to do the right thing and make the right choices for yourself, for your family, for your friends, for whoever matters to you, is in a society where you are goddamned allowed to make a choice. And, in a society that recognizes your rights and supports your choices.

When weasels like Paul Ryan are about your business, when they want to put their noses in your uterus, and they really do want that, you have lost that choice. Keep weasels out of your vaginas, my sisters. It’s the right thing to do.

Oh, and while I’m ranting about weasels like Ryan, if you are a woman or a human being who doesn’t despise women (or children for that matter), you really should look up the bill he supported, the Sanctity of Human Life Act.

If life starts the moment of fertilization, that warm little instance when the sheets are still damp or the petri dish is still in the scientists hands, and we have laws weighing in on that instance, a lot of crazy shit happens in our modern world. Tagg Romney gets locked up for the criminal he is for participating in in vitro fertilization. Yup, we got contraband grandkids for Mitt and Ann.

And, any of us who have messed in the voodoo that is birth control pills, even if you did it to control migraines, acne, anemia or all sorts of hormonal things, you be committing a crime. A lot of pills work by giving the fertilized egg no place to call home and settle.

A real life thing that happened to me, which made me realize there are folks out there who truly don’t see eye-to-eye on this one. In my world of earning a living, I have to answer a phone from our company website. Where I work is involved in some huge human issues, and one of them involves women and health. That phone number on our webpage is a honeypot for attracting people with time to talk about the one issue that blows their skirts up; my job is pretty much only to answer the phone with respect.

So, an older, female, not unkind voice greets me on the line. Dare I say, a voice past the childbearing years. I am informed that the owner of the voice has read our website with great interest and in depth. It’s wonderful that we are doing good works around the world and helping poor people. I hear it in her voice, the wind up, the setting a snare, baiting the trap, she’s made calls before. She is kindly setting me up for what her real agenda is. Did I know that where I work is helping to kill babies?

The upshot was, as I good-naturedly took the hits knowing that there could be no victory in arguing against someone so strong in her convictions, she truly and absolutely believed distributing contraception is baby killing. She explained to me in detail how some contraception is a form of abortion, and it needs to be stopped.

At the end of the day this woman, who know doubt has a life and smiles gently and laughs with family and friends over sweetened iced tea and a good Sunday dinner, probably is not a monster. She wants to help babies and the world. I’m sure she wants to do right and good.

However, the rhetoric has gotten out of hand. The heat, the lies from cynical bastards who don’t really care about people, who themselves quell their best “Christian” impulses with back room deals guaranteeing good money for their investments, have taken hold.

They don’t want to protect Catholic women working at a Catholic university, as they claim because her religion is being attacked. They want to fight universal health care, because it cuts into the profit margin of pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

They don’t hate the birth control pill, because they so love the potential souls that never become babies. They hate it, because free women, able to make their own decisions on family planning, are an economic force with a voice, who will shake their status quo.

If they really cared about babies, if they really cared about women, if they really wanted equality, if they really wanted to help women in any way, they would support universal health care. Instead of vitriolic protests with photos of fetuses, hyped rhetoric and downright lies, they would support daycare centers, good, practical sexual education, preventive health care, women’s shelters, stronger laws and prosecution against human trafficking, domestic violence and child abuse.

If they supported women, the GOP would shut up their own kind, people like Rush Limbaugh. They would make sure their daughters grow up more like Libby Dole, giving them education, support and strength. They’d help get the word out that there are so many more choices beyond 16 and Pregnant, Teen Momor Honey-fucking-Boo Boo.

If you are a woman, vote. Vote for the people who have your back. Vote for the people who think you can make decisions for yourselves, and don’t try to construct a world where forced counseling and vaginal ultrasounds are for your own good.

Vote for the people who just might make a difference with equal pay. Or don’t need binders to know that there are qualified women.

Obama/Biden, ladies. Obama/Biden.

Clearing a blockage

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In the distant haze of a distant past, there is a very fuzzy memory. It is of a little girl named Tamara or Teresa or Tammy or Tatyana (well maybe not Tatyana, as I didn't grow up in Moscow). Let's call her Terry.

Terry somewhere in the years of elementary school and junior high branded herself a poet and marketed hard. In what could be my largely inaccurate memory, she read a poem at every assembly the schools ever had. Her crowning achievement was an award and inclusion in a scholastic something or other meant to reward young Byrons and Yeatses in utero.

What I also remember of Terry was that the poems were bad. Or given that my literary criticism skills at the age of 10 match my literary criticism skills today, that is, non-existent, maybe she was OK for a kid. However, seat upon auditorium seat of us children squirmed and groaned in unison. Even those friends of Terry's in the crowd found the poetry excruciating.

To this day, I fear being Terry.

When I perform stand up comedy, write, even ask a question at a meeting, my inner critic sweats giant pulsing rivers of flopsweat. Thankfully, it's invisible flop sweat of the mind, an internal anxiety, else I'd carry a towel and have to have suits fashioned of terry cloth.

I thought of Terry when talking to a professional person who is charged with helping to make me a better professional person. She checks in with me on my professional goals, and I try earnestly, vigorously to absorb and enact the rather practical, but perhaps a tad touchy feely, advice and actions she provides. Coach she is and kindly is paid to listen.

I told her about Terry. I also told her about an another voice I allowed into my writing head, who didn't belong there in the crowd of other voices. I may have made mention before of the dark noise I heard and credit for locking up my efforts to write for what's now years.

In a moment of a kind of intellectual enamor, I shared some writing with a member of the ivory-towered, ivy-covered halls. He, older, ostensibly wiser, definitely better educated had encouraged me, even as I was doing light editing, tech support and formatting for a tome he was writing on a Macintosh computer.

He kindly asked about my aspirations, somehow sensing my typing and word-processing skills maybe had other uses beyond office monkey. Naturally and happily, I shared what I had been up to creatively, eager to have someone ask. Nope, more than that, eager to have someone with a collegiate pedigree ask, like somehow, the words of the elites mean more or differently than the words of us plebeians.

In retrospect, where my brain should have gone was to the wise voices of my kind of people. Tony V., great Boston-based comedian, has (had?) a bit about Harvard. Not wrecking it too bad, the point of the bit is that they have the same books with the same words as everyone else, and everyone can access books; Harvard doesn't have a secret trove of information that is theirs alone.

In the end, the professor (actually he was a dean emeritus from a major powerhouse school) deemed my writing technically good and lively and funny. OK. On that we can possibly agree (on the days I'm not full of self-doubt and loathing).

However, he ultimately belittled me by asking the question possibly every person who ever feels like writing or creating or reaching beyond some kind of smaller purpose asks themselves – Why write? Why is it important? In his mind, and in the words that seeped from his mouth over Arnold Palmers at the Faculty Club for lunch, he decided I had enough working where I work, doing what I do to earn a paycheck, and shouldn't I think about that?

The question was posed as a value judgement on the status quo, which he deemed fine. Really, he held my gig as administrative support very high in both importance and my fortune in having it. In contrast, he asked me to consider the value of my writing and if it had any, and why I was not more satisfied with the status quo.

Sigh.

I thought about that conversation, as I had an entirely different sort of conversation about my writing with the woman who helps professionalize me. Again, I was asked what I wanted and why. This time, though, the point was to get me to chose and press for what I value. No judgment.

In the end, if I'm not Terry and just godawful, and if I just might have something to say that amuses another human, maybe that's enough.

;

When I’m 64 or more

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I help manage one of the worst company softball teams to ever don cleats (well that one guy) or drink a beer at a park after a game. Actually, right now we are in our winningest season, number 2 in the co-ed D League. I ought to thank Facebook, since one of our last wins were some sore losers associated with that bit of the interwebs, who showed up two women short of the required number and cried about their forfeit.

Still and all, we are not good in terms of softball. Some players are athletes, but not so much ever having played team sports. Runners and racquetball players, more like. Others aren't from one of your ball-playing countries, or more correctly the ball they know looks like this one:

The best thing about the team is the people, as the cliche would go. But, seriously, here it's not the awesomeness of people, it's the awesomeness of how surreal the collection is. Hands down, the most enthusiastic player is post-retirement age, like he's already essentially retired from two careers that by anyone's definition were top of the line, top of his field, moving and shaking all over the place. Although, he never will actually retire, I bet.
If I said what his past gigs were here, you could Google him the hell up and say to yourself, “What? He's your teammate?” You'd be like “Seriously, dee-rob, what the fucking fuckety fuck. Why is he hanging with riffraff like you?” You'd say that. I know it, even if you ain't never dropped no F-bomb or said riffraff in your life.
He's so enthusiastic that he regularly shames all us more regular, slacker company softball types into practice. The kind of practice that pisses off Allen Iverson, son.

We practiced. Yesterday, high noon, lunch time, middle of the day, straight up on the old sundial, the clear sky pounded 80-plus degree heat on our backs and faces.

The coach tossed a bag of balls at our waiting bats, and we all critiqued the swing and stance into the required poetry of solid contact. Then we switched up. I lobbed balls to the coach, and he simulated dingers and pop ups into the waiting hands of the fielders who mostly stopped the momentum of rolling balls by any means possible, trying to stave off an imaginary, error-caused triple and relay the ball into the infield.

“Mister, you have an water?” A woman passed with a ragged mop of a dog close behind. Despite the heat, we had none and admitted as much.

More of a pointer than a helper, I directed her to the nearby municipal park municipal bathroom. We got back down to the business of ball playing.

Minutes passed, and she came back into view from alongside the restroom facilities.

“Mister. Hey Mister, I think I need some help.”

A natural-born leader the coach trotted up to her, while I strolled with a little less purpose and the fielders mosied. “I think maybe I have sunstroke, or something,” the very pale and shaky-looking woman stammered, and just as I was walking up trusty cellphone at the ready, she was denying the need for 911.

She stallingly, unsure and worried not trusting her brain and recall, gave me the number of what she hoped was her husband's iPhone number, while explaining that he always had it with him and even stood in line for the latest one, no doubt in the first ever Apple store just up the street. I got his voicemail.

Right about then, I took a closer look. This woman wasn't young. She was well past getting an AARP card, definitely in the Medicare pool, and quite possibly had already eased into the “seniors ride for free zone.“

We sat her in the shade of a tree, the coach grabbed an empty plastic cup from his truck, a leftover from a recent post-game tailgate, filled it up with water, and she drank it down. The color started to return to her face, as we waited to hear back from her husband.

At that point, apparently deciding it wasn't life threatening, the coach and the enthusiast start smacking a few more balls out into the field. I hovered nervously, ready to dial 911, and hoping the woman's husband might actually call back.

At almost the top of the hour, we packed up our gear, and chivalrously the enthusiast who urged us onto the field that day, drove home the sun-addled woman and her hairball dog. The verdict by email a bit later, “she was OK, but she has a smelly dog.”

Many hours later her husband did call me back. Without thanks or worry to my message about his wife being sick, he had that puzzled greeting of the caller ID age “Um, ah, someone called me from this number and left a message.”

A brief explanation from me, and all I got was a “She must be fine, she's sleeping.”

I resisted the urge with every fiber and might to not reply, “Better check her pulse.”

 

Dawn of the kind of dead

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I have never been what you would call a morning person. In fact, I'm definitely more of a night crawler.

Most of the dawns I have seen in my life, I have seen on account of not making it to beddy by the night before. I've seen a few dawn's early light by virtue of not sleeping at all.

But, here I am today having snapped this photo after waking in the dark. Complacent, middle-aged me is trying a new thing. It's a new thing that circumstance has foisted on me, and goddamn it I am tired right now. I saw dawn by waking up and greeting it, not meeting it from the other side.

If things play out, I'll be experimenting with the old circadian rhythms. I'll be all up in the early to bed early to rise lifestyle. I'll undoubtedly fall asleep on the couch by 8 p.m., if not face down in my plate at the dinner table. Although, I've been known to fall asleep on the couch on a normal day.

If you see me writing more, it's because we are down to one car at the moment. Whilst saving the environment and carpooling, I am spending a bit of time thumb twiddling, as it were. M. has to get into work early. My place of employment is on his path south to that work. So, I get dropped off early and picked up late.

They say the elderly sometimes need less sleep. Maybe this month is the week I cross over and become one of the early rising elderly. Damn-it, I want my AARP card and movie discounts now.

More on money, but not mine

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After a 20+ “career,” or something like a career, I guess the kids call them “jobs,” working in non-profits and grant management, I ended up in a strange little niche. Instead of looking for money, I help give it away.

The environment is greater than first world conditions, it's privilege and quality of life and life-work balance.

Smack dab in the world of the richies, my poor self works.

Life is literally a buffet, at least on some days of the week. And, almost every damn day, having been trained as the accomplice to my mother's many capers, I have to squash deep down the desire to tuck a free bagel or yogurt or two, wrapped in a reused plastic bag, into my purse.

Allah will provide

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Growing up I had an a mythical or maybe horrific relationship with money and finances. It was a semi-idealistic view, but with an undercurrent of mixed messages and vague dread.

The basics were covered. Food, clothing, shelter, yup, we had them. So I didn't want. At least I didn't identify with the kids in the government-subsided apartments in town or the ones who carried their tattered meal cards that promised hot food every day. I had my ham and cheese sandwich on white bread and an apple, thank you very much, I was good.

Yet, I wanted. I knew my pants might get tighter and shorter for a few more months than the better dressed girls growing alongside me. Some of the same designer labels hugged my back and backside except in my case the labels were cut out or over-imprinted with another designer name — The House of Irregular.

I never noticed at home, but when I went out and ate at friends' houses, there was variety we didn't have. Or maybe freshness. Much of my gastronomical intake was from a chest freezer in the basement loaded down with day old bread and treats from the bakery outlet and meat bought in bulk and repackaged in plastic wrap in suitable meal chunks.

Ground beef was stretched across multiple days in various disguises. Burgers, chopped with onions and spices, mixed with mac and cheese, sloppy joes and fabulous taco fiestas, a new an exciting food idea in our white bread town.

It wasn't until adulthood that I understood the magnitude of my mother's feeding five kids, maintaining a household, paying for the house and all on a public school teacher's salary. I cannot type that we were poor, because that betrays what an incredible job Pat had done keeping us afloat. But, we weren't rich.

The climate on these issues was hot and cold. We didn't talk about money. Grown up stuff was solely my mother's domain, and she felt no compunction about keeping the details under her hat.

However, at a moment's notice, an unexpected squall would kick up and the lack of money would rush to the forefront of the drama. Want the coat with the little extra design and worst of all retail, first-run tag? Better run for cover before the barrage of “Who do you think I am?” “Who do you think you are?” “I work so hard, and you kids don't appreciate me.” “I work my fingers to the bone for you.” “You just take, take and think money grows on trees.”

Worst of all: “Fine. If that's what you want, you can decide. I'll just go without a coat this year, if it's that important to you.” Followed by silence. A thick, ominous silence.

Speaking of coats, Pat rocked a red dress coat with a real fur collar on special occasions, like holidays and church. On ordinary days, she'd wear the kind of ordinary, drab jackets and “car coats” that got folks through New England winters, and she wasn't opposed to wearing a hand-me-up from one of her own children. I have a dim recollection of Elmer's glue, the collar and tragedy that had my mother soaking and scrubbing fur for days. That dress coat had to survive another year, and by god she'd make it happen.

Good at math and figures and observant, I started to piece together the situation. But, money was an abstract concept for me about which I hadn't learned to manage. I only learned there wasn't enough.

The vague dread lingers in adulthood.

I seemed to have inherited Pat's knack for money management. In fact, I pretty much have made a living largely because of that knack, managing million-dollar budgets for other people.

I can make some calculations in my head. I know the logic of compounded interest. Putting together a contract or grant or spending plan is more muscle memory at this point in my career. I literally made four times what I put into my first condo when I sold it. Car dealers don't intimidate me, they are a game.

Still in all, I worry about money. Sometimes rationally. Sometimes not. I dream of having the kind of nest egg that negates any possibility of concern. Hedge fund billions.

I remain a thousandaire.

However, my mother's lessons end at one crucial point. My whole lifetime, or maybe not the first few years before my dad died, Pat scrimped and saved for survival. Only in her later years, with a paid off mortgage, a remodeled house thanks to a well-insured fire, five grown children with their own jobs and homes, a pension and a scattered but flush shoebox of investments, she still scrimped and saved as though it was for survival.

Her final years were Campbell soup, and they could have been caviar.

Worry as I might about cash, I don't live in privation.

I used Pat's money, my small inheritance, to buy a new car, finance a move cross-country, help create a settled household for my partner, who had less than me growing up. I shopped and paid off debt and created a new chapter in my life, but with a jumble of happiness, anger and bitterness.

If I had realized how much she would leave behind, I would have angrily tried to shake loose her self-induced deprivation. It's a remaining regret I have for not having done more before she died.

So, today, I worry, but I talk myself through it. I may not have a nest egg, or this week even much in my savings account. But, I have a comfortable life. My only debt I couldn't pay off in a minute is my car and our house. It's worked out in worst times than these, I remind myself.

Maybe the future will require cheese sandwiches and raman noodles again. Worry? Yes. But to live and live well and as best as I can, that is imperative. Otherwise, what's the fucking point?

A funny life

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Ain’t much to complain about so I’m keeping it light.

Good old M. has a halo of protection in this relationship. Mostly it’s protection from me.

An incredible blue-skied day yesterday–our town reputed for fog above all else delivers sun in October–found us walking along the beach. Apropos nothing I remember, I tapped him on the ass as we strolled along.

“Hey, that’s sexist. Whacking a man in the hiney like that. Your sexist.”

I heard it, but since the voice was behind us on the walkway, I assumed it was two people talking. Though, I was intrigued and slowed a bit. I had to see the voice’s face.

“You’re sexist. I saw that slapping a man like that.”

We caught each other’s eyes. I smiled in recognition. He meant me.

Once again, the cosmos and fellow humans had saved M. From me.

Over my shoulder, I replied, “it’s not the first time, and probably won’t be the last.”

In honor of Labor Day and not getting screwed by the man

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Lately, when I've had idle ranting thoughts, I've really wanted to post about “kids today,” and how they don't know nuthin'. Like I know people in the real world, not just the scary internets world, who shit on unions and the word feminist.

Here's what the whippersnappers don't know. Life is fucking hard and the people with the money and the power and the means to fuck you up can and will. Not only is there no free lunch, but keep an eye on the other hand if you see a hand out.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s. In my lifetime, a lot of women didn't own shit like cars and houses. My mom, educated, working, a widow with five kids, had stories about banks looking for co-signers on her mortgage and car payments, because the lady folk needed a hand and couldn't be expected to maintain good credit.

Just barely beyond the span of my life, in 1963 when Congress mandated equal pay for women, it was A-OK to pay a chick less, you know, just because. Up until the '80s, airlines fired female flight attendants who got married.

Civil rights happened, because for some reason African Americans thought they should be treated like all other Americans with jobs, decent pay, fair working conditions, voting without dogs growling at you, regular stuff. People died trying for a better deal.

We didn't eat grapes as a kid, and in our church we prayed for grape pickers not far from where I live now. Turns out it's better, but it isn't good. To this day, the fight goes on to regulate common sense and decency. Should farms really have to be told to provide adequate shade and water to workers in triple-digit heat?

So, I sit here in a house with my name on the paperwork. My crockpot dinner is largely from the local farmers' market. I sit in complacent comfort knowing I make a decent wage, my job treats me fair, my house is livable, I have health care and probably will have a couple of bucks in retirement. I get to use birth control. I'm educated.

When all of that comes together, here's what I know. Other people fought like hell for all of that to be possible for me today. None of that came together by the grace of those people born better off than me and mine. No one gave anyone their rights on a silver platter.

Someone fought for every right and privilege. Collectively, they fought more strongly. It's a continuum, and when we forget to stay organized, vote our own interests, speak out, fight, we'll have failed everything our predecessors sought to make better.

Down to the see in ship-like, high-tech vessels

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The America's Cup race isn't until 2013, but San Francisco is gearing up for the major event. This weekend's prelude was the World Series races.

Simulating the yachting lifestyle, M. and I hung out by the Bay. More photos here: https://dee-rob.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/08