9 posts tagged “pictures of things”
I had a lovely vacation. I met lots of nice relatives that I never knew I had, and saw several that I knew about already (like my parents and sister and aunt), I saw Alcatraz and Coit Tower (below) for the first time, I went on a botanical rampage with my dad, I hung out in a beautiful house overlooking an estuary in Bodega Bay (left), I went kayaking with my sister (and my cell phone took a little dip in the Bay...), and we all drove around the Russian River Valley in search of wine tastings at ten thirty in the morning. The food was delicious, the weather was freakishly good, and everyone in our party walked around looking windswept, tanned, and beautiful. Trust me.
(there is plastic covering the windows at the top of the
tower, but industrious people have managed to slip coins through the
edges and onto the windowsill. That's what you see in the foreground,
because I was being fancy.) (You can also see a reflection in the plastic, because I don't really know how to use a camera.)
Alas, it is impossible to gently ease yourself back into the real world after that kind of vacation. I'm already back at work, and seem to be acquiring an alarming number of extra shifts, such that I may end up tethered to the front desk for the whole of July. I have scads of e-mails to delete-- I mean... read-- errands to run (including a trip to the phone store), and, yes, a whole new semester of circus school starting up in a few short days. I'm continuing my lessons with Daniela and going on to the next level of static trapeze, which I am approaching with some slight trepidation.
I'm also approaching it with several minor, kayak-related injuries. Yeah, kayak. The little plastic boat. Turns out that, in spite of a) not having a motor or, really, any moving parts, and b) being taken out on a body of water with no waves and little traffic, kayaking is somewhat damaging to my well-being in addition to being potentially harmful for small, electronic devices. The Bay itself was beautiful: we saw a seal and a shipwreck, and we irritated the inhabitants of the estuary (which may not be wise in the town where Hitchcock's The Birds was filmed). But somebody (my sister) didn't row very much, and trying to move a tandem kayak on your own apparently results in a tweaked wrist. It's getting better, but right now it's excruciating to hold anything approximating the size and shape of a kayak oar... like a trapeze bar. Hopefully this will be better by Tuesday, when classes start.
I also got sunburned on my knees, which is like having a terrible rugburn and, stupidly enough, is keeping me from practicing splits or anything else that involves knee-friction. In my defense, I smothered myself in sunscreen before
we went kayaking, but I had to roll up my pant legs in order to deal
with the rising tide within our boat. (It didn't help, we were both
sopping and muddy by the time we got out, and not just because a certain sibling of mine pulled the boat forward as I was disembarking, causing me to flail about and drop one of my shoes into the Bay.) From now on, I do not intend to go out
in the sun without the aid of a large, black parasol. I may also be cautious approaching kayaks, next time. Those things are dangerous.
Earlier this week, I was unceremoniously booted out of the gym when I came in to use the trapeze. I was somewhat mollified when I learned that the space was being used by the US Olympic synchronized swim team. Mollified, but mostly puzzled.
So instead of practicing, I walked into the park and checked out the botanical garden.
When you first walk in, there's also a meadow, habitat for the rare North American Traffic Cone.
Then yesterday I came in for class and found the gym free of Olympic athletes (nerve of some people...). Free, in fact, of anyone who might be bothered by the flash on my camera. (I figure it would be a blight on my trapeze career if I distracted someone and caused them to fall...) So I snapped a couple of pictures, and then labeled them, because even though I know what I'm looking at (mostly), it's kind of hard to make sense of:
And then, panning to the left...
Since it was first thing in the morning, a lot of the crash pads and panel mats had been set up to air out overnight; they're not usually standing up against the Chinese poles or at the back of the gym like that. The flying trapeze net, when it goes up, covers the center of the room from end to end, and everyone else works on the sides. (You can't walk under the net once it's up. At the beginning of every semester, some hapless newbie does it and the trapeze guys shout at him. Fortunately, I was/am a hapless newbie who had hung around a flying trapeze rig before, and knew better.)
I'm not 100% sure what school or institution the building was once part of, but it was pretty clearly a gymnasium in the usual sense of the word. There are funny wooden brackets on the wall which seem to have once housed basketball hoops, and underneath the mats, the floor shows markings for a basketball court, along with generations of scratches.
So, when I say "the gym," now you know what I'm talking about. Only imagine it with more people and chaos. And less sunlight. (Circus people are kind of like vampires. I never see anyone else around until the sunlight is gone...)
And I close with the best sidewalk graffiti in San Francisco, found a few doors down from the Circus Center:
You know, as amazing as it is that I can carry around a small, picture-taking computer in my backpack, for which I paid only $30 on eBay, modern photography still can't convey how torn up my hands were last week.
I mean, you look at those pictures -- taken on Wednesday and Thursday nights, respectively -- and you think "oh, has she got something stuck to her palm?" No! That's the tear! The one that caused me agony! (well, not agony.) Pictures can't show the pain and the blotchy redness and the bruising under the callouses and the oozing and the weird blister-things-- sorry, maybe we shouldn't talk about this. You might be eating.
Let's talk about The Most Beautiful Tree I've Ever Seen.
There, that should wipe those hand pictures from your mind.
I encountered this tree while looking for the official city tree on my lunch break. (Yes, I went looking for a landmark out of my Not For Tourist guide during my break. Don't pretend you don't do the same thing.) Allegedly, it's somewhere in the part of Golden Gate park nearest Circus Center, but I didn't find it. If the city tree is competing with this tree, though, it's got its job cut out for it.
This tree even smells good. And those petals are huge. This is one of the medium-sized ones:
I sustained several direct hits from falling petals while taking my pictures. They deliver quite a thump, for flower petals. But it's not art if you don't suffer, right?
In the name of art, I tried to assemble a panorama of the tree (failing to learn from previous efforts at panoramas) and let me tell you, it was a job to align all those branches. I don't think it's quite right:
Anyway, my "circus week" starts again tomorrow-- I have classes Wednesday through Friday, which is beginning to look like a poor scheduling decision-- and my hands are still in not-so-good shape. The tear has more or less healed over, but I can see that it's going to rip again tomorrow; one little one-arm hang and BAM! hole in my hand again. In the mean time, my hands are both peeling fiercely and there are little pokey bits that keep snagging on clothing and towels and... and it's getting gross again, isn't it? Sorry. Quick, look at this beach art made out of driftwood and a buoy:
Is it helping? Wait, try some sunsets (all the same sunset, actually, at different times). Those always cleanse the palette:
Ahhhh. That's better.
nataliedee.com
No, no, not circus school. I quit at Starbucks! And I managed not to do it gleefully. On Wednesday, the nice folks at the yoga studio decided to give me a whirl, which means no more getting up at 2:30 in the morning and making frappucinos for people. (Actually, that's not true: I have only a very vague idea of how to make a frappucino, as I have spent the past month chained to a cash register. It's unusual for me to get within two feet of the espresso machine, much less the blender, and, honestly, that's probably best for everyone.)
The fabric is looped around each foot so that you can rest weight into them from different angles (i.e., not just standing). It looks simple, but I had been taught to get into it using the "aerial dance method," which is complicated and silly and requires the ability to whirl your feet around in enormous circles to wrap the tail around your legs. (I do not yet have this ability.) Turns out, if you go one foot at a time, it's not so bad. From that position, I learned how to do two things I've seen in virtually every silks act or video in the whole world:
I also learned a few neat things on trapeze, but try as I might, I can't find pictures of them anyway. (I promise that, by the end of the semester, I'll find someone to take pictures of me so that I don't have to pillage the internet quite so much.)
The down side to all this trapezing and rope-climbing and so on is that my hands and feet are blistered and bruised, respectively. The foot bruises are odd (it must look like I dropped someone on my feet... both of them... symmetrically) but the hands are problematic: the calluses that are forming are like little pebbles right where I need to grip. Fortunately, my aerial skills teacher acquainted us with a whole arsenal of slightly arcane hand-preservation techniques.
And finally, some pictures from my week:
This post was supposed to be about going to see the New Pickle Circus, but due to a sudden onset of illiteracy, I thought that my ticket said 4pm instead of 2pm. [slow clap]
Since I was all set to go someplace, I decided to go forth and Have A Small Adventure, instead. In spite of the ominous weather, I headed out to Chinatown. I've been before, years ago, and rode the bus through a few times in the past weeks, but Lonely Planet assures me it is a neighborhood best tackled on foot.
I came in through the dragon gate on Grant (I think it's on Grant) and only remembered that my function here was to take pictures. So this is a picture looking back down the street toward the gate:
The Chinese New Year is some time soon, apparently, because there are red lanterns hung over the street. The lampposts are also pretty cute in this stretch of road: they're green and have dragons on them. Why I neglected to take a picture of them, I don't know.
I'm sure this is all very pretty when it's not DARK OUTSIDE, but that was something I didn't consider when I headed out. All of the shops around here were either putting out hunger-producing smells or were filled with touristy junk.
Then I made a wrong turn and magically ended up in the financial district, next to this monstrosity:
I wonder what that thing is sticking out of the side.
And that pathetic display, readers, is all of my photographs. I made my way
back to Chinatown proper, but it was beginning to sprinkle and the sun was going down, so I marched back to the bus stop and headed home. I'll have to go back on, say, a sunny Saturday morning to capture the hustle and the bustle and the getting elbowed off the sidewalk.
In the mean time, I am a bundle of nerves as I wait to hear back from two companies who might (maybe? please?) want to employ me. They both said I'd hear from them early this week, which I hope means "first thing Monday morning." The waiting is killing me. Stay close: I may have to go have another small adventure today to keep myself from checking my phone every sixteen seconds.
Yesterday afternoon I finally got bored with using my days off to hang around the house and sleep (I never thought that would get old). So I decided to Have A Small Adventure and take the bus north along the coast to Cliff House. This, it turns out, is that odd-looking white building I can see looking north from the beach near my house.
So the view from my beach looks toward Cliff House and Point Lobos, not, as I originally surmised, the Presidio (although I think you can see that, too). This is the view of the Presidio:
There are a few restaurants inside Cliff House, plus the obligatory gift shop, but I was there for the views.
For some reason, there's also a totem pole.
Walking north from Cliff House, you pass by Sutro Baths, separated from the Pacific by some hazardous-looking rocks. I consulted the Not For Tourist guide, which identified the baths as "a well-masked history lesson." So well-masked that NFT did not elaborate on what that lesson was. Back at home I looked it up in the Lonely Planet, which explains that the same dude who built Cliff House built a huge baths/spa/swimming pool complex, which was never very popular in spite of the scenic neighborhood. Following it's partial demolition-- completed by a fire-- it has become a hangout for seagulls. (There are also alleged seals in the neighborhood, but I didn't spot any.)
The first picture is the view from Cliff House, and the second looks back to Cliff House:
Down at the bottom of that same path, there's a neat little cave/tunnel
that leads through to, yes, more views of the rocks and the Presidio.
It was seriously windy, but even so, it smelled good. There are these little white flowers growing all over the side of the path on the way up.
And that's where I got my "panorama" of the Presidio, and a few more. Looking out at the sea, and then looking down,
down,
down,
at the water. My day isn't complete without a little vertigo, either.
Thoroughly chilled, I caught the bus back down and stopped at the Northeastern corner of Golden Gate park to see the windmill. Because... there's a windmill there.
It was nice to go out and take some pictures, and seeing that the weather has abruptly turned into, like, winter or something (currently: 44 and raining), I'm glad that I took the opportunity while I had it. Once I cracked open the Not For Tourists (other than to find my nearest Walgreens, that is) and Lonely Planet, I noticed that there are a few other spots that I can check out on the cheap (total cost: $1.50 for the bus) next time I have a sunny day off. I'll leave you with my favorite picture, from one of Cliff House's lookout spots. I think this shot is worth $1.50 and some cold fingers all by itself:
It's the official one-week mark of living in San Francisco. I've been working quite a bit, but I've still had time to investigate a few areas of the city, mostly in my neighborhood. Here are my favorite and unfavorite things about my new town.
The three worst things about San Francisco (so far) (I was going to do five, but I could only think of three):
1) It's kind of cold, guys. I realize I'm a baby, and that I come from a state full of babies, but when it gets cold in Texas people turn on the heat. (They sometimes also shut down the city, which isn't quite as awesome.) Here, the weather never really changes, so nobody ever really gets miffed about turning the heat up (or on). My roommate, who grew up in this neighborhood, seemed a bit surprised that I suggested turning on the heat when the house was 55. Luckily, there are heating pads and blankets and socks.
2) Rent! I got off relatively easy, but this should not be news to anyone. Everybody wants to live here, so we all get to pay for it.
3) Hurricane-style winds and rain drenching me on the way to work? What is this, Houston? But they tell me that Friday's weather doesn't happen too often (as the number of downed tree limbs, fences, and billboards can attest), so I won't put it too high on the list.
But why dwell on the negatives?
The five best things about San Francisco (so far):
1) It's close to the water. On three of four sides, yes, but my house is four blocks from the Pacific. In fact, I just got back from my almost-daily walk to the beach, just in time to catch that event for which my neighborhood is named
How can that not be the best thing?
2) My neighborhood. Look at it again, it's cute:
3) The buses. Not so much because they run all night and all over town and seem to be fairly reliable (in spite of what I had heard to the contrary), but because some of them are secretly trains/subways. The N-Judah isn't the most convenient to my house, but I ride it because it's a superbus that goes underground and runs on screechy rails, and it makes me feel special to come up out of the subway, like I live in a big city or something. I'm not particularly embarrassed by this.
4)The other neighborhoods. I spent my first day off doing nothing, but I intend on exploring a little. On Saturday I went to Fisherman's Wharf (it was for a work training, not to be a tourist... although I probably would have been a tourist if it hadn't been rainy) and the bus passed through Chinatown. For about ten blocks I was one of the only people on the bus speaking (or, um, thinking) in English, and the view outside of the slightly-damp produce markets and shoppers with their pink plastic bags and storefronts stuffed with souvenirs and imports felt a little like another city. The changes are abrupt and sometimes breathtaking, and I want to explore some more.
5) The social and ecological consciousness. I guess this isn't terribly surprising, seeing as San Francisco has always been known, to me at least, as a liberal mecca. Austin is a pretty eco-friendly city, but it's Texas. Here in San Francisco, Starbucks is being penalized by the city because they don't recycle (and they're currently remedying the situation), we have compost bins that get picked up along with the garbage, and the city wants to make most of its waste recyclables within a few years. Not to mention that there are mandatory 30-minute breaks for every five hours worked in California (I think that's how it works) and the minimum wage is close to what I was making after a promotion at a job which already paid an above-minimum-wage rate (though this may be because of Problem #2, above, it wasn't a gesture they necessarily had to make).
Of course, circus classes start tomorrow (geez, I should, like, stretch... or something) so hopefully I'll have a bright and shiny new #1 best thing tomorrow. Until then, a few more sunset and Sunset pictures.
On your left: a view of my neighborhood from the dunesy part of the beach.
On your right: this is the one downside to living close to the ocean. I don't worry about it too much, though, cause hey! I'm on the evacuation route! I can totally outrun a tidal wave!
On your... below: a few more obligatory sunset pictures (I'm starting a collection):
And finally, a kinda-cool picture of some fog in the distance. I believe that this is looking to the Presidio, north along Ocean Beach:
I'm in San Francisco! Yesterday was travel day, and shopping essentials day. I spent the night in a hotel (easier to start rent on the 1st) not far from the beach. So let's start with more beach photos: the weather was clear and beautiful, so these do the beach more justice than the last ones.
I know I'll be singing a different tune in the summer, when my neighborhood fogs over for a few months, but right now I can't imagine why you wouldn't live in this part of town.
What part of town, you ask? Why, the Sunset: all the houses are pastel (with the occasional shocking blue) and squished together in a way which seems... ill-advised, considering the region's position over a fault line. But it's cute, it's very quiet (although I'm across the street from a school), and someone once told me that the west side of town is the smartest, vis-a-vis earthquakes. (The fault line, according to my source, runs underneath the Bay, making Berkeley and the east side of town the most dangerous. I'm skeptical that this is really going to save me in the event of The Big One, but whatever.)
As usual, all the airports and time changes and naps on the plane interrupted by babies and getting up at four in the morning (two, actually) left me feeling a little crazy. So I skipped on the venerable tradition of getting drunk and shouting at midnight (in Texas, add: shooting off guns at midnight. Ah, Texas.) and instead engaged in the other venerable tradition of turning up the heat, eating junk food in bed, and watching about three hours of Bravo. And then sleeping for twelve hours.
Refreshed, I set about stocking my new room and then unpacking everything. Once again: here's "before"...
And here's "after"..
You are not blind. There is no bed. Yet. (There are no desk, chair, or dresser, either, but I like it that way.) Right now I'm camping out on my new quilt (which, combined with the exciting patters of my wall hanging and my rug, is a little dizzying) until my futon ships out here.
I only ever visited the house at night (twit! not supposed to do that!) so I had no idea that the house has a yard, and that my window looks out over it.
Privacy is a concept with which the architects of this neighborhood were unfamiliar. Look left or right and you can see
clearly into at least three other yards.
Whatever. I just won't be sunbathing nude on the porch. Your loss, neighbors. Your loss.
Finally, the kitchen is pretty cute. The yellow tile is, according to my roommate, the original tile from when the place was built in the early 50's. The sun comes in during the morning and the whole place lights up.
I like the new place, so far. I appreciate that the neighborhood is quiet and safe, and that roommate 1 (no sign of roommate 2) is sane. Tomorrow I have a few other trips to buy things to make after my first day of work. I'm not sure if we'll actually get into training or just set up schedules, fill out paperwork, etc. More on that tomorrow.
As promised, my "before making my belongings travel-ready" pictures. Turned out my camera just needed a new set of batteries...other than the new batteries I'd just given it. Ahh, technology.
I took a few more of these, like the kitchen and the closet, but I don't especially want to seem like I live in a complete disaster area, so I'll leave it to your imagination.
And this bed is the best napping bed ever. Mmm. But it's gotta go, too.
And, finally:
It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
