Everything is free now

I've been to two new places since we last spoke.

Yesterday, I discovered an amazing place full of free books, CDs, DVDs, magazines, and even sheet music! And you can take it all home! Yes, the public library is no longer just a place to sleep off your crack high and urinate on yourself, it is also a place to rent books on gardening, which is what I did. I also got Eric a book on how to win at Blackjack, per his request.

Then this morning at 8am I went to another place that is no longer just for homeless drug addicts: the local free health clinic*. There is a program here called Healthy San Francisco that provices free or extremely discounted health services to people living at 300% or less of the federal poverty line who have been uninsured for more than 90 days**. The trick is that you have to be enrolled in the program and have a card***, and it is only valid within San Francisco. The non-bonus of living a block from "crack alley" (~6th & Mission) is that you get to go to the same free clinic as the guy screaming at his beer and telling it "you're fired". I am now officially enrolled and officially terrified of ever going back to the clinic.



*Upon closer inspection, it actually still is pretty much exclusively for homeless drug addicts.
**That's me!
***This isn't a health insurance program, so does that make it an uninsurance card?

Scooby snacks

Eating your Scooby-Doo Fruit Snacks before 11am is either a sign that you're having a really bad day or totally awesome.

I would say the biggest downside is that you might happen to start humming that song from the late 90s by the Fun Loving Criminals ("...running around robbin banks all whacked out on scooby snacks...") which is really what could make your day take a turn for the worse.

And thus, let me add to the list of things I can't control: myself, in the presence of food containing sugar and in the shape of the Mystery Machine.

Playing house

This past Sunday we moved into our new place! And by moved, I mean we took one-and-a-half carloads of our clothes, shoes and toiletries, a toaster oven and a coffee maker to our new place.

My furniture and other miscellaneous belongings won't arrive from DC until late September so we'll be doing some version of urban camping until then. Until we finally borrowed an air mattress we were sleeping on our therma-rests on the floor. I've seen homeless people with more home furnishings than we have right now.

But we are resourceful! Courtesy of the craigslist "Free" section, which usually only offers things like a complete set of Playgirl magazines or free dirt (if you come pick it up) I was able to billy-goat us a folding table, rug, recliner from the early 70s and rickety wooden chairs from long before that. This was real progress.

I think it is probably still a bit premature to be planning a housewarming party but for now I am very happy with our camp site, I mean living room.

The chef recommends

For a lot of reasons (none of them interesting), we seem to have gotten behind in our grocery* shopping lately. This has led to some extremely, um, entrepreneurial meals that I might someday fashion into a cautionary tale to frighten small children. For now, I give you this:

Selections from The Billy Goat Recommends, A Cookbook

Reduced-fat wheat thins with low-fat cottage cheese and Pace triple pepper salsa

Popcorn with a bowl of warm pasta sauce

Fuji apple slices with cream cheese and raw walnuts

One small container of hummus eaten with a fork

Fancy blue cheese from the farmers market spread on dried pear slices that technically belong to the guy you are sub-letting from but he probably won't notice, right?

Whipped cream stirred into coffee in place of milk

And on your last day in the office of your now-former employer, I suggest eating nothing but handful after handful of peanut M&Ms all day.


*Pronounced "gro-shree"

Yay baseball!

We're taking advantage of living a block from the baseball stadium by going to games on evenings when you don't need arctic gear to survive more than a few innings. Last night was a perfect night for baseball so about 45 min into the game we wandered out our front door, scalped some $40 tickets for $10 each and headed into the land of $12 plastic bottles of Miller lite.

The game was fun but it quickly became clear that I wasn't going to leave happy without having gotten a foul ball, so I asked the universe to send one our way. I asked kinda quietly at first, but Eric said he didn't think the universe heard me - I had to shout it. So I did. (I guarantee you it was no more obnoxious or disruptive to the people around us than the women who were shouting an inane conversation behind us. "I was at this yoga class in Santa Monica and the guy from Six Feet Under walked in and I thought oh my god I can't believe this...")

So then I decided to take a picture:



As Eric was posing, we heard the crack of bat on ball and a guy behind us say "That's us!" And sure enough everyone around us was tracking the foul coming right at us, trying to position themselves to get it. Eric, typically quite agile, was unfortunately still posing for the photo and so did not dive for the ball with 8 other dudes, and as such did not get entangled in the ball of arms, legs and maybe even a few tails that grunted and bumped its way down the aisle until the guy with the sharpest teeth emerged victorious.

Thanks anyway universe!

Eat me when I'm fatter

While I was in Canada, Eric fed himself by doing what we call "billy-goating" out of the fridge. This leads to classic meals like "cream cheese spread on flour tortillas and rolled up" or "cottage cheese mixed with salsa and scooped up with wheat thins." Suffice it to say one is not likely to find billy-goated meal menus on epicurious.com.

With billy goats on the brain this morning, I looked up the tale of the Three Billy Goats Gruff and learned that it is an "eat-me-when-I'm-fatter" tale. As the story goes, the billy goats have run out of food and gotten thin, and to get to the lush fields to get fat again they need to cross a troll-guarded bridge by outwitting the troll.

This raises the obvious question: could fridge trolls be the breakthrough we've been looking for to turn the tide on the childhood obesity epidemic in the US?

And I'd bet that with the educational system being what it is, the ability of American children to outwit trolls is probably pretty low.

Just saying.