Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Ai Wei Wei Pins

The week after July 4th was rather quiet.  The express busses were empty and many people in my life—friends, managers and the like—were out of town for a few extra days.  This and the fog made my time way out here in the outer Sunset rather drab.  I went to Max’s 540 twice this week to see if Joe the bartender was working.  He wasn’t but I did get to see the A’s play against the Giants.  I also went to the art galleries downtown for a belated First Thursday Art Walk.  I ended up with some Ai Wei Wei pins one of which I bequeathed to a friend who works at Visuvio.

I also went to East Bay Bike Party.  I was careful to send out messages to all of my cycling friends about the event.  There were these two people I had met at SF Bike Party, a couple of Twitter friends, a coworker and even a friend that I know via the old fashioned telephone.  Maybe someday I will even use Face Book.  I had intended to attend Oaklavia on the twelfth but couldn’t get my head together enough for a trip to Oakland.

On Saturday the parents went away for two weeks to Canada and gave me a lot of chores to do.  I had to water plants and take trash out.  I had to look forward to going to the DMV of all places.  Most of all I would have space to myself.

While over the last few months on Sunday had been going to Marin, I had been thinking about going elsewhere.  I noted that in time I might be able to visit to other parts of the Bay Area like Silicon Valley or Alameda.  I have been looking over Craigslist for a cheap foldie to look at and both of these places have come up at least once.  I am partial to Palo Alto because of its proximity to the 101.

I wanted to go on the 13th of July but Sunday Streets was in the Richmond.  However, I got a message from a twitter friend that he was on Arguello.  I was at Park Chow reading the paper and had anticipated going.  I decided to quit reading and met him and his wife at Velo Rouge.  As we rode through Sunday Streets I noted that the venue wasn’t as big as the year before.  I heard that the businesses had complained about it.  However, there was still a farmer’s market.

We climbed into the Presidio and descended to the Main Post.  I was amazed as I passed the speedometer on my way down Arguello Boulevard—I had topped 35 mph.  We locked up and walked around Off the Grid which is basically a food truck event.  It is well named because all of the tents and trucks were using gas generators.  We ate lunch and tried out the selection of drinks and ice cream.  We even visited a doughnut truck where I think the girl behind the counter may have been checking me out.

We then went to the visitor center and children’s museum.  We saw a great exhibit about an artist named Blair who did early Alice in Wonderland sketches.  I took a picture of the bike path there.  From there we looked for and found the Goldsworthy sculpture in the parking lots.  I struck up a conversation with the docent program intern talking at length about about Ai Wei Wei and the Haines gallery.

After this we got the bikes and looked at the Ecology trail on the south side of the park but we ended up climbing Arguello instead.  We split up at California where it was pretty obvious that Sunday Streets had already been mostly broken down.


This is an occasional series chronicling my life. I started writing this Notebook Analysis on 070714.  This series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.

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