Off-off-piste

In June 2008 I started this blog, which I called Off-Piste as a nod to taking a different road, or rather, paving an totally unknown road, into the next chapter of my life. I ended my very first blog post with:

So there I was: jobless, newly certified as an Ashtanga yoga teacher, shacking up with a guy I've been dating for about 5 minutes in a sublet we can't afford next to AT&T Park in San Francisco, and I've just decided to move from Washington DC where I've lived for three years to see what sort of life I can make for myself in San Francisco....

What happened next has been well chronicled in the posts that followed: we found a place to live in which we urban camped for a while, I started a company with a guy in DC, which failed shortly thereafter, leaving me unemployed again. In spite of being unemployed, Eric and I lived a full and celebratory life: we took a number of wonderful trips including Joshua Tree National Park and a week in Maui, we went skiing in Tahoe several times, we climbed Mt Shasta, and we explored the city and surrounding areas by bicycle, on foot, in kayaks and even on a motorcycle. We spent more than our fair share of time in wine country. I did eventually get a job, my 'dream job' in fact, and I rejoined the working world this past March, which has brought adventures of its own.

One evening in July, as Eric and I were enjoying "retirement" (we try to take at least a few minutes of our retirement every day just in case we don't get to retire later in life for any number of reasons), I commented to Eric that life at that moment in time was as easy as it will ever get. It was so simple! So blissful, so peaceful, so easy.

God or some other deity or universal life force with a mischievous sense of humor must have overheard me because the very next day I found out I was pregnant.

It was without a doubt the most exciting and wonderful news I have ever received and it was also perhaps the biggest single shock of my life.

Apparently, this is what living Off-Piste is all about: we're doing this a little differently. And the remarkable thing is that, while this wasn't "the plan" (possibly because there was no "plan") it is actually probably the best way to start the next chapter of our lives together that we could have come up with.

Telling friends and family has been a lot of fun, and many have been as caught off guard by this news as we were. When Eric told friend Anne from grad school that he's going to be a Papa her response was:
"You're getting a dog?!"

When I shared the news at work, it disqualified me for a long-term project they had been moments away from staffing me on. The colleague who would have managed me on that project told me:
"I have had a lot of people do a lot of things to avoid working with me but you are the first one who has gotten pregnant to stay off my team."*

And so, we continue Off-Piste. If I were starting this blog today, it might read something like this:

So there I was, not much more than six months into my dream job and already nearly four months pregnant, two weeks away from getting married in a hot air balloon, and seriously questioning the wisdom of becoming parents in our teeny fourth floor walk-up apartment in a neighborhood where the sidewalks often feature human poo, among other things...

This is going to be interesting!


*My response: "If having unprotected sex is what I need to do to stay away from you, I'm willing to do it." I think this made him uncomfortable.

Weasels playing yahtzee is also a favorite

I'm in Stinson Beach for a work offsite Wednesday through Friday of this week. We are staying in beach houses that all have their own flavor. I was pleased to discover not only glass dolphin figurines in the bathroom but this, the little know Japanese version of Dogs Playing Poker.

List of things I should know but don't

Having biked around San Francisco for a total of over four years now, I tend to think of myself as someone who knows the flattest routes for getting around the city, avoiding the worst of the hills.

I was recently proven dramatically wrong when a friend of ours, having heard about the route we took to bike from SOMA to Golden Gate Park on Sunday, said, incredulously:

"You don't know about The Wiggle?"

No, we don't.

But now we do. The Wiggle is the flattest path through the city, in particular going from SOMA to Golden Gate Park. This discovery is akin to finding out, after a year and a half of walking up and down four flights of stairs every day, that our apartment building has an elevator*.

Eric said it best in his response to the friend's follow up email with additional info about The Wiggle:

"I can't believe we've been getting all that unnecessary exercise! I'm definitely going to wiggle from now on."


*I remain reasonably sure that it does not.

Still doesn't make it OK to list a one bedroom with a "nook" as a two bedroom

We are looking for a new place to live and I checked out a place on Saturday that was listed on craigslist through a local broker named Gavin Coombs. His listings are all over craigslist and though I have never met him in person, I have heard he is quite the local character. Apparently he is particularly well known for his prominent chin.

In confirming the appointment to view the place (one of his helpers would open the door for us but would not know anything more than the apartment number), his email included the following third person reference which I felt was worth sharing.

"Circle back with broker G if you have any follow-up questions or if you'd like to rent after viewing."

I'm almost tempted to start referring to myself as Consultant E but it doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Yogi E?
Not quite.

Blogger E?
Hmmm.

Hardly strictly the best-kept secret in SF

You may remember Hardly Strictly Bluegrass from last year when Eric and I had to hang our bikes from a tree to lock them up because it was so crowded and there were so few places to put bikes.

To give you a sense of how much more crowded it was this year, we got there relatively early and we had to lock our bikes hanging up in trees three blocks away because the trees, benches, signs, everything was so covered in bikes. It resembled a pestilence of some sort, actually. An example:

The festival lineup gets more and more impressive every year and this year was no exception. We saw Gillian Welch, Earl Scruggs, The Del McCoury Band, Aimee Mann, Doc Watson, and others and the artists love to bring each other up on stage, so we also saw cameo appearances by Emmy Lou Harris and the Old Crow Medicine Show. (There is an even longer and even more impressive list of people we didn't see.)

One thing that felt different this year from last was the crowd. San Francisco crowds are always completely weird (par for the course: we saw two people, not together, wearing red clown noses) but there was something a little off about the crowd gathered this weekend. A little crazier, a little edgier; more than a few of them really seemed like they could be running meth labs somewhere in the outskirts of the city. For example, the people we sat next to today included a guy they all called Roach who was twitchy and kept trying to sell us cans of Budweiser for $2, a skinny bald guy in cutoff shorts and a hoodie who brought not one but two plastic bottles of Dawn to fulfill some ill-conceived bubble-blowing vision, and a woman in her early twenties with pretty blond hair and too few teeth for someone of her age.

They got to be tiresome neighbors after a while, and we were in the shade which was easily 15 degrees cooler than in the sun, so we left those creepy tweakers behind and moved to a sunnier spot, ate some pizza, and enjoyed the show (both of humanity and of music).

Memo To Everyone Who Is Trying to Kill Me

Attention all operators of motor vehicles in the city of San Francisco:

I kindly request that you please signal when you are going to make a right turn so that bikers like me can go around you on the left side. If flicking the little lever to use your signal is too much effort, perhaps just a brief flick of the eyes to the rearview mirror so that you don't turn right into me? Is that too much to ask to avoid senselessly murdering someone?

Further, I would ask you to please refrain from double parking in the bike lane on busy streets. I can understand how convenient that must be for you but it is a real hazard to bikers.

Also, would you be so kind as to look for approaching bicyclists before suddenly pulling out of a parking spot with no signal or any indication of imminent movement? I would be so grateful, really.

And finally, please, please, look for bicyclists in the bike lane before suddenly swerving over into it and almost hitting me. (Taxis, this applies double to you.) Do you have any idea how scary that is when you do that? If you did, you would understand why I have to yell at you and maybe give you the finger. And why I have to swear extra when I can see that you are inevitably talking on your cell phone. (You know that's illegal, right?)

Though you act as though I were, I am not in fact invisible when I put on my helmet, roll up my right pant leg and hop on my bike to ride to and from work.

I beg you to spend the infinitesimally small amount of extra energy and attention required to be more biker aware as you drive around your thousands of pounds of motor vehicle.

7:15pm, Thursday evening

[Eric and I, sitting on the couch. Windows are open. There's a ruckus from the street. Eric stands up and peers out the window.]

"It's those Mexicans again, riding little bicycles, drinking beer and singing," Eric reports.

"Which ones?"

"The guy who wears the Steelers jersey, and the older guy who called you 'churro.' "

"Oh yeah, those guys."