There are two things that North California Bay Area types are obnoxious about to the twelfth degree — fresh food and the weather.

Now the food thing is legitimate and all with farms and massive agribusiness a truck-ride away and wine country all cheek and jowl and all. But, every now and again the foodies act like they invented or discovered eating. I’m sure some cave barbecue back in the day with a Neanderthal chef and some barks and leaves tossed in the mix for flavor and aroma, because that’s essentially all that spices are, had our sense of freshness beat. And, by god, hunted meat beaten to the ground with a club sure as hell would beat “free range” for au naturel.

But, the weather, sometimes that is something on which fucking bragging rights are indisputable. Apart from walking around in t-shirt w/a jean jacket weather for the last week or so, admiring the flowering magnolia trees and cliched, Wadsworthian fields of daffodil, I realized the weather thang by calling Back East. (I so wish William Blake had written that poem, although he wouldn’t, because Blakean fields sounds way fucking hipper.)

When I was talking to a folk from home, the other end of the phone inquired about the weather. I said it was clearly become Spring time. They offered condolences about the cold and the rain and the mud and the wind and the misery. Of course, in Boston, in March, when there is still a chance for a late in the game dump of snow and the wind shifts from glorious kite-flying long days of sunshine to dismal bitter cold, and mud is the color of the ground, the consolation would be apropos.

Here, though, it is sunshine and flowers and seasonal allergies on full alert already. There is no muddy, cold shift of seasons. Nope. It’s fucking nice.

Weather like this makes me feel outdoorsy, even though my favorite outdoors have skyscrapers. I walked the neighborhood, running errands and imagined myself hiking in the wilderness, climbing boulders, surviving off the fat of the land. Free. Unencumbered. Walking into the woods in order to live deliberately, to suck life’s marrow and drive life into a corner. Like Thoreau, though, I would want to have the option of cutting over to Ralph Waldo’s house for a nice din-din of less Spartan proportions.

I’m kind of surprised that Thoreau never thought to mooch a ride off of someone like Mark Twain and go where the weather probably would have suited his simple living a bit more. And, I’m sure back in the 1800s, even with pirates and hookers and drunken Irish still having some good times in San Francisco, there would have been some snobbish epicurean folks to feed him a good supper.

In unrelated news, my sister is off to bike ride in South Africa. I’m not exactly sure who goes to Capetown for the bike tours. I’m even less sure who goes on such a trip via “Vermont Bike Tours.” ‘Cuz really what says biking and safari and Africa, like the land of cheddar and maple syrup.

Coincidentally, I got the paperwork to apply for my visa to Uganda on the same day she was off flying to Johannesburg by way of Washington, DC. I’m not making the arrangements, and I’m going with a group of a completely different sort than Vermont Bike Tours. They completed the reason for the trip on the forms, as “journalists for fact-finding.” How fucking cool and legit-sounding is that.

I’m going to be rubbing shoulders with editors from across the U.S. and rumor has it meeting Uganda’s president. What a path that led me here, but here I am.

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