We’ve taken it pretty easy this vacation, opting not for the “Oh, my god, we’re never coming back here, so we must see everything!!!” mania that drives us to every park, museum, shop, cemetery, library, pedestrian street, festival, and parade in whatever place we’re visiting. I exaggerate, and I have deeply enjoyed prior vacations, but I think we needed a more low-key, recharging type vacation this time. California in general and San Francisco in particular seems like somewhere where we very well may return in the future, so we haven’t been packing it in too hard.

(You know, maybe we should; I guess it’s not impossible that a bald madman will purchase a lot of real estate along the San Andreas fault and then send some nukes into the fault so that all of the current coastaline will drop off into the ocean, which, as a child, is what I assumed would happen someday, after watching the original Superman. The plan seemed so obvious to me then that I figured it was only a matter of time before someone just carried it out.)

Anyway, we have done a fair bit of seeing of sights and acquiring of things on our trip. Here are some things I’m very happy with.

• A $0.50 paper accordion in Chinatown that actually plays two notes (but unfortunately can’t be controlled really)
• Several interesting zines and indie publications, most notably, Ker-Bloom, which I found on the indie shelves at City Lights, and whose author, I coincidentally noticed had done them at the SFCB where we saw the steamroller prints being made the other day.
• A corduroy jacket at Jetrag vintage clothes in LA.
• A book of some crazy Sun Ra pamphlets, also from City Lights.
• The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas by Davy Rothbart, from Skylight Books where we went with Patricia in LA.
• Various items from various spots in SF, which we were directed to by Matt Shaw in the excellent recommendation list he made us.

If not, now’s the time. I love Cat and Girl.

Like, not having hot water in our cute inexpensive motel for the second day running.

Like, falling down like a dope after tripping over a curb, breaking the lens on your camera, the second camera to bite the dust in the last 12 months.

Like, running out of clean socks.

That said, life’s still pretty good.

There so much good stuff to write about, I don’t even know where to begin.

Let’s start with the obvious. First, I get to be married to the most wonderful person in the world, and have been so for five years yesterday. Happy Anniversary, to her turniptude, the dubstress, T-Dubarino, Teresita!

Second, happy first birthday to Hope, one of the two best nieces a guy could have.

And then the assorted great stuff we’ve done today. We rode the bus to Flax in the morning. After lunch, we went to a really nifty street fair at the San Francisco Center for the Book. In addition to seeing a lot of book artists and letterpress printers selling really cool work, there were a bunch of people making these huge prints by inking linoleum cuts and running them over with a steamroller. I will almost certainly write more about this on the Rainy Planet Press Blog soon. After that, we walked to the Mission district and nearly drown in the hipsterdom of it all.  I enjoy stopping in at 826 Valencia and some of crafty shops. A lot of the shops on Valencia Street felt a lot like Magpie, but amped up and stretched across a bunch of shops stretching for five or six blocks. Just to keep it real and remind you that the Mission isn’t completely totally gentrified yet, we saw a (possibly homeless) guy unconscious on the street, two police officers bringing a guy in handcuffs back to the scene, with some witnesses saying “yeah, that’s him; he kept kicking him in the stomach”.

And then we had another fabulous dinner at an Italian place not so far from our cute motel.
And yet, despite it all, travel fatigue has officially set in. I’m getting to the point where I am really missing the cats, and just feel like sitting at home all day.

Greetings from the west coast. I have a large backlog of posts that will have to wait until tomorrow, but I thought I’d revel in the free ubiquitous San Francisco wi-fi by saying ‘hello’.

It was harder to find in LA, to be sure, but also, to be fair, we didn’t really try that hard. Nice to be offline once in a while. The B&B we stayed at in Cambria, CA last night didn’t even have cell phone coverage, which was actually awesome.

Have some photos to tide yerselves over.

This Wired News story is definitely true for me & Terri. We started our first official blog the week after.

While September 17, 2001 was probably the safest possible time to fly out of Logan, and while the following 10 days were probably the best possible time in the last 5 years to be an American visiting Europe (you know, “nous tous sommes des Américains” and all that), naturally, lots of family and friends were on edge about us going through with our honeymoon as planned. Calling everyone every day was infeasible, so we got a free Blogger account, and promised to update as often as we could get our heinies to an internet cafe.

And so we did.

I had a dream that Terri and I walked into a music shop. In the corner was this dusty accordion case. I opened it up, and it was hard to see (a cloth was over it), but I tried to move away the cloth, and when I did, I could sort of tell that it was this magnificent black electronic accordion with all kinds of switches and dials and buttons along the left side. It was a definite upgrade from my current one, the electric accordion my cousin Christian found a couple of years ago and gave to me, which I suddenly realized I had been wearing on my back the whole time. I put the new one on, and tested it out, and it sounded amazing, even though I didn’t really know what I was doing.