On my mind

The questions plaguing me at the moment:

(1) How do you get onto the White House speech writing staff, and how much does it pay?

(2) How do you ride the trolley in San Francisco ... not the cable car or Muni or Caltrain, but the pretty classic trolley cars I see crossing in front of the Ferry Building? Where do you get on, where can you go, how do you pay and how much does it cost?

(3) How much is a 120-acre parcel of land in an undeveloped, agricultural-zoned Eastern part of Lancaster, located ten miles South of a U.S. Air Force base, worth?

(4) What happened to Sam Seaborn on the West Wing?

So "plaguing" is a strong word. To put these queries to rest, here are my responses:

(1) The time and effort required to get a full answer to this question far exceeds my actual interest. As such, I'm letting this one go.

(2) It turns out they're not trolleys, they're the Muni F-line, otherwise known as "historic streetcars." They run up and down Market Street from the Castro to the Embarcadero (technically stops at Steuart), and along the Embarcadero from Market (Ferry Building) to Jones (Fisherman's Wharf). Since it is the Muni F-line, fares are normal Muni fares, and Muni Fastpasses, passports and transfers are accepted.

(3) Don't know yet, but apparently I have an uncle that owns some acreage out there that I should talk to if I'm interested.

(4) Who knows?!? He falls off the face of the Earth! At least that's what it seems like after it is heavily implied he will lose the California 47th Congressional race. But according to Wikipedia, and my glimpses at the last few episodes of West Wing's final season, it appears he does lose the California 47th Congressional race, but remains out in California, declining the White House promotion and returning to law firm life, only to return for the last couple of episodes to serve as Deputy to Josh Lyman, who is the White House Chief of Staff for the new President.

Now I can go back to sleep.

Vacation Alice

I always seem to possess superhuman strength starting the day before a vacation until a day or two before the end of the vacation. On Monday night, I stayed up until 5am packing, tightening up my itinerary for our trip to England, printing maps to match my itinerary, printing our boarding passes, etc. It didn't help that our desktop computer is really slow.

The maid arrived at 8:30am, and while I could have slept in a little more since our bedroom is always the last room she cleans, I needed to finish our packing before she got to our room so that she wouldn't have to navigate suitcases splayed open on the floor and piles of things that still need to go in the suitcase. So I got up.

I was completely finished packing by 10:30am, more than 8 hours before the flight, and I'm sure a record time for me. I'm usually a last minute girl. I could have taken a nap after the maid left, but I didn't. Instead, I proceeded to tidy up the clothes and knick-knacks that didn't make it into the suitcases, clear and charge the camera, clean up my TiVo line-up (this included watching some of my TiVo'd programming while I ate lunch so that I could delete it), toss food that wasn't going to make it through the week, pick up dry cleaning so that Mark would have pants to wear when we returned, turn off alarms, and otherwise get the house ready for our return.

Next thing I knew, I was off to the airport, we were on the plane, and I had gone 36 hours with only 3 hours of sleep. The flight wasn't the most comfortable (see Travel with Alice blog), and I only slept a few hours of the 11-hour flight. Luckily, the rest of the way to Bath was smooth. When we got to our B&B, it was 9am Wednesday morning in California, and I had slept less than 7 hours in 2 days. It seems hunger is more powerful than sleep, though, so after unpacking a bit, we ate, and I finally crashed a few hours later. It was 10pm Bath time (2pm back home).

You would think I would then sleep for at least 8 hours before waking up bright-eyed, but I found myself fully awake at 4am. I tried unsuccessfully for half an hour to go back to sleep, so I got online and wrote this blog. It's now 6:50am, and I've updated FB and both my blogs.

I can't wait for breakfast at 8am!

One more reason to love living in California

Thanks to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, in which Barbara Kingsolver intelligently advocates for locavorism, I have new reasons to be grateful for California. I've known for a long time that we were the birthplace of the locavore trend (thanks Alice Waters!), but Kingsolver's book provided the factual underpinnings for all the vague, abstract rumblings I always heard in articles, newsletters, and ads, to drive the point home. I finally learned where the buzz words "sustainable," "organic," "grass fed," "free range" and even "local," fit in the landscape of my life.

I also learned that a greater variety of produce grows in California for more months out of the year than anywhere else in the U.S. One of her themes throughout the book is that if you live anywhere East of the Rockies or North of the Sierra Nevada (i.e., her farm in Virginia), and you see produce "out of season" (i.e. fresh greens in December), it likely came from California. Every time I came across one of her “it likely came from California” moments, I rejoiced, because I live in California!

There are many other books on similar subject matter that surely will provide this same "aha!" for people that are interested (i.e., Michael Pollan fans - it was one of his articles that whetted my appetite for the subject), but Kingsolver's book just happened to be the first I got around to reading.

Finally, I’d also like to thank Kingsolver for writing a book that kept me riveted through the last page. Without giving away the ending, let’s just say that I underestimated the drama that could come of turkey breeding. If her novels similarly keep the reader engrossed throughout, I’m bumping them to the top of my reading list. So many other novels I have read recently lacked this important trait (see earlier blog re Nick Hornby novels).

The book is, however, so very rich and compacted with information, that I recommend giving yourself time to digest after every chapter.