City Bound:The Ferry Building (Part 3)

Pedaling up and around the Embarcadero took me to the Ferry Building. You can have your Coit Tower or Fisherman’s Wharf, this place represents San Francisco for me. There was a wooden Ferry House here since 1875. This building dates from 1898. It’s where people who worked in the city crossed on ferries from Oakland and Marin, to get to work each day. It’s also the place where anyone traveling across the country by train ended up. A few people still commute in by boat these days, but most drive.

When I stopped and locked up my bike here, I could hear some of the ferry goers from another era scrambling up from their benches and rushing through the doors to crossover the Embarcadero, out onto Market Street to work. A group of women walk past me, laughing and talking. The dark-haired one, Emily, is a telegrapher. Later on this morning, she’ll be in touch with her fellow op’ in Chicago, my Great Aunt Mabel. Once they finish their business with the transfers, they’ll chat on the wire about Mabel’s handsome new male-friend. Then Emily will instruct her chum to make the next move in that ongoing chess game they’ve been playing for a few weeks.

If ever there was a natural Time Portal, it’s this building.

Please click on the picture above to enjoy the beautiful details

To Be Continued

(Final Episode is Angels and Crocodiles)

City Bound:Biking the Embarcadero (part 2)

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It's got a reputation for hills, but San Francisco still has a good stretch of flat, bike'able streets. I swung out of the train station at 4'th and Townsend and headed out around behind the baseball stadium. From there I merged onto the Embarcadero. The old piers are on the water side, many of them have been gussied up as businesses and shops. Across from the water is the intensely downtown business district.

This guy thinks he’s working hard on his cell phone, but I see what I see.* This place has always reminded me of Toon Town.

Go ahead and click on the picture to take in a few more details. See what you think.

To Be Continued

* What's that you say? You suspect Photoshop CS4 had a hand in his headgear? Bite your tongue!

City Bound: Car Free to San Francisco (part 1)

Go ahead and click on the photo to fully enjoy the details of the rails. The bike car's the first car on the train and commands the best view looking north to the city.

I took Thursday off and biked over to the local train station to catch the 10:14. Like most romantics, my heart doesn't yearn for city sights. And at the same time, there's something awfully intriguing about the pace of totally urban life, for which I get a tremendous craving every once in a while.

I don't enjoy city driving. And there's no point in it when I've got a lovely wide tired, three-speed bike to companion me, and a train station that's a five minute ride from my house -ten if I stop and talk to a few neighbors along the way. Which I usually do.

Peggy had a bag of lemons out, so of course I stopped at her house too. One of those will come in handy when I make my London Loaf this week.

I made the San Francisco train with the necessary extra five minutes to convince the ticket machine it should accept my debit card, popped my pink cruiser bike on board, and settled into the bike car to listen to the clackety-clack back beat of the train starting up.

to be continued

Do Bee Do Bee Do: The Anti Quiltin’ Bee

Please click on the picture above

to enjoy the beautiful fantasy quilt detail.

“I love these digital quilts I’ve been making, “ I told my friend Marilyn. “No scraps, no batting and a whole lot less time.”

“Yea, but what about all the fun they used to have at quilting bees?”

She got me wondering if quilting bees were as charming and folksy as they look in the movies. Were they real pals’y kind of places, or was everybody looking to see if your stitches were small enough? Did people feel obliged to go even if they didn't want to, like Tupperware Parties, or were they heaps of fun? I 'spose it depended on where you were and who you hung with.

Trying to imagine what a fantasy quilting bee scene would be like, I wrote a little Objective-C code to enable me to travel way WAY back to the time of home made lye soap (have a good time washing that out of your eyes), barn raisings, and quilting bees.

Loading program into debugger…

Program loaded.

run

[Switching to process 14843]

Running…

Welcome aboard PORTAL PILOTS , serving the needs of the time travel community for over three centuries.

Customer LRS531957 PLANNING A TRIP FROM THE YEAR 2010 TO 1893

SO SORRY We are experiencing a slight disruption in service. You will be dropped off at the nearest portal.

PORTAL PILOTS apologizes for any inconvenience to your schedule.

While you're waiting for the next Time Portal to open up in the year ... 1977..., feel free to complete our customer satisfaction survey, and be entered to win a coupon worth five percent off, on your next PORTAL PILOTS trip!

Debugger stopped.

Program exited with status value:0.

My ipod battery is dead and I forgot my charger. (I can’t even remember if we had three pronged outlets back then anyway). What am I going to do here for a few hours?

Hey, the summer of 1977! I remember this! I had just finished up my junior year at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and was living and working with my sister in Yuma Arizona. She had gotten me a junior programmer gig for the summer.

Trisha had gotten roped into going to a Tupperware Party. Her best friend, with whom she volunteered at the “League of Women Voters”, was putting it on, so of course she was stuck with going. I was stuck too but, coming from one of the more alternative U.C.’s in California, I saw it more as a cultural experience.

The nice-lady who ran it showed us a fine new product. A hot-dog bun keeper for the freezer.

The two of us stared at each other in amazement.

“Because, girls, you know the problem you have keeping hot dog buns in the freezer. You KNOW how those darn buns stick together!”

Trisha and I were both thinking the same thing. Don't they have a big knife to whack them apart with?

We drank our carcinogenic diet sodas and after 30 minutes, figured we could slip on out while the others were playing some kind of game with clothespins and a laundry bag that we never did understand.

The nice-lady’s skinny backside was firmly anchored against the door.

“Girls! (toothy grin). Where are your order slips?”

We managed to mumble that we were not buying anything.

She gave us a look of amazement, tinged with horror. “But what about the hot-dog-bun keeper?” (I'm not making that product up.)

The nice-lady swiveled her head slowly back towards the rest of the group, who were now frantically scribbling on their forms amidst a welter of clothespins.

Trisha swung one foot around the screen door. I slithered through, and we lit out like two banditas into the badlands.

Signs of Fall:Pixel Paintin' Pumpkins

I spent much of my day working on creating and debugging self-review exercises in my quest to learn Objective-C. I really like writing and debugging code, but it's hard teaching yourself a new programming language. Over the last few weeks, I've figured out a way to make my self-imposed homework fun, by linking them to my art-journal. I've shared my experiences in this online piece, Reviewing Concepts: Time Travel for the Masses, a piece I wrote at my self-education blog.

I also took a little time to create another fantasy quilt and stencil an imaginary pumpkin just like Martha Stewart, or one of her hard-working staff, would. My pumpkin, however, is one I plucked off one of my old photos with the help of Photoshop. And of course every pumpkin needs a quilt of it's own.

As always, if you click on the picture above, you'll see a lot more beautiful detail.

First Signs of Fall:Quilts, Squirrels, Fighting the Good Fight at the Polls

Please click on this quilt picture for more beautiful details.

I wish I had this fall beauty to toss on the bed. It's a lot quicker stitching up a new quilt in Photoshop than on my machine. When I did make quilts, I loved appliqueing designs on top of other patterns.

It really is getting cool enough here in the San Francisco Bay Area for an extra light quilt. As romantic as chilly fall weather sounds in books, I don't actually miss it. Or the snow that can go with it. Our summer crops are all harvested - all three apples worth. My neighbors little boy ate the other five while they were still somewhat green. And he was quite welcome to them. He clearly found the idea that edible food was just hanging there within reach of his fingers fascinating, and it was a pleasure to see him munching them. According to his mother, they never made him sick.

The squirrels weren't too happy when those few apples disappeared. They had to content themselves with harvesting our cherry tree during the summer. We've never yet managed to beat the squirrels to the cherries, but we have options they don't have. We're fighting higher density building in our area. Where are the birds and squirrels going to forage then? I guess that's what happens when you don't get to vote. I'm going to reread those city council platforms really carefully before I go to the polls.

Pause for a SLO Sip: Drink your Milk (Vintage Style)

This picture, advertising a brand of milk I'd love to see in reality, is all my own work, except for the wonderful anonymous black and white cow. I wrote about how I found this great SLO moo drawing in a previous entry *. I'd still love to meet the person who drew this.

Please click on the picture to take in all the beautiful details.

(What I wrote when I designed the SLO SIP bottlecap)

* My daughter goes to school at Cal Poly Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo, California. She's a student in the Agricultural College. A polytechnic is run a little different than a run-of-the-mill university. Lots of animal husbandry classes and close work with bees and buds. The university store sells a selection of university farm product, but I'm pretty sure they don't have their own milk. However, I think this bottle cap would be just great for a big glass of SLO SIP.

The beautiful SLO cow picture I used to create this cap was drawn by an unknown Cal Poly student. One of my daughter's housemates found it in their rental house, and I rescued it from the recyling bin. I'd love to know whose work this nice SLO MOO is!