Sutro Tower rising above the fog

My first stop in San Francisco on the afternoon of the Fourth of July was Dolores Park. On the way there I caught a glimpse of Sutro Tower rising out of a bright white bank of fog above Twin Peaks. It was sunny in the Mission (usually the warmest neighborhood in the city, in the fog shadow of the hills in the middle of the city and further from the bay than the neighborhoods further east), but I took this as an inauspicious sign of things to come.

Fourth of July in Dolores Park

I picked up ice cream at Bi-Rite then walked down the street to find a place to sit in Dolores Park to eat. The park was comfortably full of people, with vendors walking through the crowd hawking refreshments. I sat in the grass, eating my ice cream, enjoying the summer day, then headed to the Marina to watch fireworks.

The most direct way to get from the Mission to the Marina was the 22-Fillmore bus, but the buses serving the route were already stuck in traffic in the Marina. (Google Maps' bus tracking in San Francisco is sketchy at best; it often leads me astray when there's any disruption to the published bus timetables. The real-time bus tracking on SFMTA's website is quite good, but it's hard to navigate on a phone. This probably means I need to find a better bus schedule service for my phone, but I don't have this problem quite often enough to need a better solution.) Rather than wait 15 minutes for the very-delayed bus, I walked a few blocks north to Market Street and caught a MUNI metro train a few stops inbound to Powell, where MUNI was staging a special fireworks shuttle to the Marina. There was some confusion among the SFMTA employees in high-visibility vests about where the line was supposed to be (it appeared that I ended up in the shorter line). Before too long an articulated bus pulled up to the curb and the people in line made a desperate rush to get on the bus. I ended up standing right at the front of the bus, just behind the driver, trying awkwardly to grab an inconveniently-placed railing for support as the bus lurched forward, heading in the general direction of the Marina after looping around in the wrong direction to get to Geary. The driver was theoretically supposed to keep picking up passengers on the route all the way to the Marina, but the bus was packed standing-room-only so after a few stops he asked to skip every following stop. Here we actually got to use the red bus-only lanes on Geary and Van Ness to their fullest advantage, without slowing down and stopping every block or two.

The bus dropped us off on Chestnut at Fillmore, around the side of the Marina Middle School. The last two blocks before the bus let us out were crowded with cars, unable to make forward progress in the crush of traffic. The marine layer formed high clouds above; on the ground the air was cool with the lightest hint of breeze coming east down the street. The sidewalks were packed with people, going every direction, crowding into restaurants and cafes. In the street traffic crawled to a halt, waiting for a gap in the endless stream of people in the crosswalks ahead of them. Cars that misjudged their moment got stuck in the middle of intersections, blocking the box and and getting honked at for their troubles. It was complete mayhem; but it was also kind of fun, as a sort-of sociological experiment I had voluntarily joined which I was simultaneously participating in and also observing.

My plan had been to eat supper in the Marina, at a conveniently-located Super Duper a few blocks away. This seemed like it might be problematic given the crowds in the Marina, and the line stretching out the door to order at the kiosk inside. I spent about 20 minutes in line, then another 30 minutes waiting for my burger. When at last I heard my order number I pushed my way through the crowd to the pick-up counter, then took my food outside, to the somewhat-less-crowded sidewalk, to head to Crissy Field before eating.

Walking towards fireworks at Crissy Field

I walked past the Palace of Fine Arts, crossed a gridlocked Marina Boulevard, walked down Mason Street past the entrance to the Crissy Field parking lots, around the south side of the marsh, and past Tunnel Tops. By the time I reached Mason Street the roads were mostly closed, so traffic thinned out; but I could still see a long line of slow-moving cars on US 101 heading between the Marina and the Golden Gate Bridge. Beyond the end of the marsh I reached the grassy expanse of Crissy Field, where people had set up camp chairs and were waiting for the fireworks. I kept walking until I reached the beach, with an uninterrupted view of the Golden Gate, and the thick layer of fog hanging just above the deck of the bridge.

Waiting for fireworks on the beach

I set up my camp chair and camera tripod on the beach at the edge of the bay and ate my supper. As I watched the bridge the bottom of the fog moved a bit on the bridge; sometimes I could see as high as the second crossbar on the south tower. People stood on Torpedo Wharf, close to the bridge. I could see the entire bridge deck all the way across, but almost nothing of the north tower, and very little of the hills in Marin County. There was a bit of light coming under the fog in the bay beyond Sausalito.

Sailboat flying large American flag in the Golden Gate

A sailboat sat at anchor off the beach flying a large American flag from the mast. A Coast Guard cutter cruised on the other side of the channel in front of Richardson Bay. Police boats cruised back and forth along the shipping channel with their lights flashing. Alcatraz lurked in the water under the ominous fog.

While we waited for fireworks, the lights came on the bridge

Sunset on the bay was 20:35, but it was impossible to tell a difference under the thick layer of fog. At some point I noticed the street lights on the bridge had come on, and spotlights illuminated the bridge towers. I saw flashing lights going back and forth across the bridge. Headlights approached the bridge from the north, and taillights approached the bridge from the south. The bridge wasn't scheduled to close to traffic until 21:00, but US 101 looked gridlocked and it wasn't clear how much traffic was going to get through.

Watching Sausalito's fireworks across the bay

At 21:00 I could see Sausalito's fireworks show across the bay. All of the shells were visible under the marine layer, but it was far enough away that the biggest explosions were tiny bright splotches in the distance, hard to notice and easy to miss unless I was looking right at them, unable to capture my attention for very long before my gaze wandered to the people waiting on the beach.

Dusk falls on the crowd at Crissy Field

After civil twilight ended, just after 21:00, it started getting dark quickly. The clouds reflected the lights below. I moved forward on the beach to get a better view, closer to the gently lapping waves at the edge of the bay, and set up my SLR camera on my tripod for the show. It was too dark for the autofocus to work, and I couldn't see clearly enough through the optical viewfinder to focus the camera. I could get an acceptable focus by enabling the live camera on the LCD viewfinder, which was big enough that I could tell when the lights resolved themselves into the smallest possible point.

The Golden Gate Bridge, visible only by streetlights

Someone sitting near me on the beach started singing "Oh Canada".

Behind me, in the dunes above the beach, someone set off informal fireworks. I was worried they might be the best fireworks we saw that night.

A minute before the show was scheduled to start, the bridge's fog horn sounded. Everyone on the beach took this as the sign that the show was about to start; they turned their attention to the bridge, and many stood up to get a better view. The lights on the bridge went out, leaving only the red aviation caution lights on the cables. And then the fireworks started, with a string of shells fired from the length of the bridge deck between the towers, which promptly climbed into the fog and exploded out of view.

Fireworks launched from the deck of the Golden Gate Bridge

Some of the fireworks launched from the bridge in sequence, running down the length of the bridge, eliciting at least one "oooh" from the crowd, as we appreciated the precision of the launch and could imagine what the display would look like if we could only see it. Some of the fireworks launched from the bridge towers themselves; but they were launched at the same height as the bottom of the fog so they quickly disappeared from view. Sometimes the fireworks gave off enough light that they shone through the fog in a blazing flash right in front of the bridge, as if they were intending to illuminate the bridge itself in a parody of "The Star Spangled Banner".

Fireworks light up the fog at the Golden Gate Bridge

More fireworks launched from a barge in the bay almost directly in front of me. Depending on the size of the shell I might see more or less of the explosion under the fog.

Fireworks over the San Francisco Bay

Although much of the fireworks show was lost on us, because we couldn't see most of the fireworks through the fog, I could still see some of the show, and the overall experience was good; though much of that is because I saw the whole thing as an Experience. It would have been a great show, if only we'd been able to see it.

Watching fireworks from Crissy Field

After fifteen minutes the show was over. I packed up my stuff, returning my camp chair to my backpack and mounting the tripod on the side of the pack (using the same side straps that I've used to carry skis while hiking to terrain only accessible on foot).

On the beach, backlit by the fog, after fireworks

I walked back along the beach, on a strip of sand between the gentle lapping of the water at the edge of the bay and the city to my right, backlit by the amber light glowing off the fog. The dome of the Palace of Fine Arts loomed in the middle distance, serving as a waypoint as I made my way back to the city and towards home.

Palace of Fine Arts glowing in the night

Actually getting home proved easier said than done. I stopped to use the restroom at Crissy Field, then picked my way through the gridlocked parking lot and followed the crowds of people walking generally into the city. Marina Boulevard still looked like a disaster, along with every street heading south or east. I found a long line of MUNI buses waiting on Chestnut to serve as fireworks shuttles to carry people back to Powell, but Fillmore Street right in front of the middle school was completely blocked so the buses couldn't move. I walked several blocks east on Chestnut, along the even longer line of people waiting to board the buses. By the time I reached Laguna the line of people snaked around the park to the left. I figured my best way out would be to walk two miles down Van Ness to Civic Center and catch BART from there.

Queue for the buses after fireworks

I was not the only person who looked at the crowds and decided to walk; the sidewalks on both sides of Van Ness were full of people heading in the same direction. By the time I made it to Van Ness traffic was beginning to move, but it was still slow. The protected busway in the middle of the street was not enough to move buses especially fast; I kept pace (on foot) with a pair of #49 buses for a couple of blocks. I finally reached Civic Center shortly before midnight, almost an hour after leaving the Marina; and I still had to contend with crowds of people in the BART station as I caught a train to where I'd parked at Daly City; and then I still had to drive more than an hour home.

This was not the Golden Gate Bridge fireworks experience that anyone intended, but I still had an experience and I'm glad I went.

Then I learned that they were in fact staging a reunion — at the Sphere in Las Vegas in the spring. So of course I had to go.

It didn't take long to decide to meet my sister Bethany and her husband in Las Vegas to see the show. They brought their six-month-old, and brought my mother out for childcare during the show. I bought a fourth ticket for the show, intending to invite Calvin; and when I finally brought it up a few weeks before the show he agreed to come along.

Calvin looks down at the Strip on approach to Las Vegas

I started a new job, returning to Google, the week before the Saturday night show, so I didn't have any extra vacation to burn. (I spent the first five months of the year accumulating vacation at the big-tech company that bought my startup but feeling unable to plan more than a week in advance because I didn't know what job I'd have. But I ended up with a busy June travel schedule inconveniently scheduled just as I'm starting a new job.) I picked flights to leave late enough that I could leave home on Friday after work, and ended up flying from SFO direct to Las Vegas on Frontier. (Since the last time I flew Frontier, while I was living in Colorado sometime in the early teens, the airline has completed their transformation into an ultra-low-cost carrier. On the plane they pushed the narrative that passengers "only paid for what they used", which is one way of looking at the unbundled service provided by low-cost carriers that's more charitable than "you now have to pay for things that used to be included".)

We ended up visiting Las Vegas on a hot early-summer weekend. When we arrived at the airport in Las Vegas and stepped out onto the curb at the terminal to catch a taxi to Park MGM, our hotel on the strip, it was still above ninety degrees outside (at at 23:00 local time), and the air stank of stale cigarette smoke. Just as soon as we stopped at the appropriately-numbered space at taxi rack an air-conditioned taxi arrived and drove us down Tropicana Ave to the strip, past a gas station that was probably expensive by local standards (I think it was something like $4.26/gallon) but seemed like a bargain in California, and the new construction at the corner of the Strip that will eventually hold the A's ballpark (so they no longer have to play home games in an undisclosed location). Park MGM was entirely smoke-free so that was nice. We got a room on the fourteenth floor of the hotel, one of the lower floors in the second bank of elevators, overlooking the hotel pool and the tram station.

Las Vegas hotel towers at night

On Saturday morning we met up with my mother and sister, both of whom had rooms on the other side of the hall, so I got to look down at the plaza in front of New York New York, built with scaled-down versions of the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building. (Just out of view to the right is the arena where, later that afternoon, the local hockey team was hosting one of its playoff games.)

New York New York

We headed down to the hotel lobby and joined the waiting list for a table for breakfast. While we waited for our table I took Calvin on a quick walk outside and across the street to look at the mesh human figure in the plaza. (It was not yet 10:00 in the morning and the outside temperature was already above 90, portending a hot dry day in the desert.) I found the sculpture I had spotted from the hotel window above, a Marco Cochrane sculpture, just like R-Evolution at the Ferry Plaza in San Francisco. This sculpture, titled "Bliss Dancer" according to the plaque in the concrete in front of the sculpture, had the same wire mesh skin stretched over a visible frame, but the pose of the figure, caught mid-step standing on one leg, was considerably more dynamic than the quiet mountain pose of R-Evolution, and I wondered what work the artist had done to make the sculpture stand up on one imbalanced leg.

Bliss Dancer by Marco Cochrane

I took Calvin into New York New York to see how the casino/resort/hotel had emulated a New York city village, with real shops and restaurants squeezed into carefully-constructed buildings on the ground, in between fake cobblestone streets, all permeated with the stench of stale cigarette smoke having been passed through multiple ineffective layers of HVAC filtering. We walked past the casino floor, then turned around to walk through Park MGM's casino floor (better-lit, smoke-free, carpeted with a nice shade of green, but still emanating a sense of quiet desperation behind the clanging slot machines and their bright flashing lights).

Jaeger and Calvin and relatives at breakfast in Las Vegas

We ate breakfast at Primrose in the hotel lobby, then followed it up with a second breakfast at Eatly (I had a pastry; others had crepes).

Mechan 9 at Area 15

Outside Area 15 were a series of weird art projects sitting out in the hot desert sun: a car with chainsaws welded to the front bumper (which seemed impractical in an obvious Mad Max homage), a portal with sparkling triangles of colored glass, a tetrahedron covered in circular mirrors. The biggest, sprawled on its back in the plaza in the middle of the parking lot in front of the building, was a vaguely-humanoid robot figure with the dedication:

Mechan 9 is dedicated to the Iron Giant, R2-D2 & C-3PO, Data, Bender Johnny 5, Optimus Prime & the Autobots & all the other robots who have helped show us that you don't have to be human to have humanity.

Calvin with an animal spray bottle

Inside Area 15 were a variety of entertainment attractions but we spent all of our time at one: Omega Mart, an "immersive experience" that opened with something that looked like a grocery store. We "could buy anything we could pick up", and the store was full of weird satirical parallel-universe products. The cleaning-products aisle had bottle of a fake cleaning product that looked kind of like a horse with a spray bottle head. (The container itself didn't hold anything, but the spray bottle head was real.) For June, Pride Month, they had a "Rainbow Wash" with a "highly performative formula" that "works hard so you don't have to".

Household products at Omega Mart

Most of the products were branded by Omega Mart and looked like they had been created specifically for the installation, as the product of the sort of warped mind (complimentary) that might write for The Onion. There were boxes of breakfast cereal that looked like they might actually be edible but were covered in warped slogans. (I don't think I saw anything advertising itself as "the expendable part of this complete breakfast" but that's about the right tone.) The produce aisle had plush parallel-universe vegetables planted firmly in the uncanny valley. A few of the products looked like they might actually outside of Omega Mart (including a pad of sticky notes in a ramen noodle wrapper that I found at Cliff's Variety in the Castro on my first trip out of the house after getting the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021).

Camel's Sop (Meal Substitute)

The back wall of the store had portals leading to the parallel-universe American southwest town of Nine Monoliths, home to a sinister factory creating the products to be sold in Omega Mart; and the corporate head office filled with computer consoles to investigate the mystery of the town.

The mysterious southwest village of Nine Monoliths

Some of the rooms were just filled with random art: a room where lasers shined through mist and breaking the beam with one's hand meant playing a note; and an infinity room covered in mirrors and giant heads that looked like they had been rendered with low-resolution 1990s computer graphics.

Calvin in an infinty room

At one point, while wandering through Nine Monoliths, we found ourselves watching an actor in an elaborate alien headdress hyping up the crowd to prepare for the "migration of the monolith", which involved a diversion featuring a quartet of strongmen performers who looked like shirtless Chippendales dancers wearing Daft Punk helmets carrying oversized barbells. (It was Las Vegas, so a choreographed stunt show was inevitable.) They performed acrobatic stunts that included lifting each other and standing on each other's shoulders. The audience's applause was enough to bring out the "guardians", masked robed figures who twirled and danced while another actor handed out glowing orbs on sticks to random members of the audience, including Calvin.

Calvin holds a glowing orb in Nine Monoliths

At the right moment more dancers appeared wearing the inflatable glowing costume of the leviathan. The figure in the alien headdress called for us to "follow the leviathan!" from Nine Monoliths to the factory floor, lead by the members of the audience carrying the glowing orbs. The leviathan danced around the factory then disappeared backstage.

Looking down into the factory behind Omega Mart

I picked up story cards from the store's front desk (which cost an extra $3, which seemed like a weird price for something that we'd already paid to enter) that let us pursue a short quest as "employees" of Omega Mart. The cards let us "boop" them on readers throughout the installation to pursue a quest uncovering a mystery in the shadowy corporation that runs Omega Mart. This was the weakest part of the experience; the quest was an exercise in running around between specific places (most of which were already occupied by someone else, so one had to wait); but I scanned everything in the right order and unlocked the last story event, to turn over the company's secrets to a group of internal dissidents. By comparison our last immersive experience, Atlas 9 in Kansas City, had a more expansive and less-linear (and more interesting) story to unlock. The story mode was still adequately entertaining; and the whole experience was a fun afternoon indoors in the air conditioning in the otherwise-hot summer afternoon.

Steampunk google/hat

We emerged after four hours in Omega Mart into the oppressive heat of the Las Vegas summer and caught a Lyft to Lotus of Siam, where Bethany had made reservations for an early dinner and would be meeting us along with the rest of the group. Or at least, she had made reservations at a Lotus of Siam, which we only discovered when I showed up ahead of everyone and the host didn't have the reservation on the list. It turned out her reservation was for the Red Rock location, on the outskirts of town, not either of the locations near the Strip. It was early enough that I was able to get our name on the wait list; and by the time the rest of the group arrived our table was almost ready.

After dinner we got a ride back to the Park MGM to drop off my mother and my baby cousin; then caught a taxi to the Sphere to see No Doubt.

The Sphere lit up at dusk

We arrived at the Sphere at dusk, as the setting sun glanced off the high clouds. The air had cooled down from the triple-digit afternoon high to still-scorching nineties. We bought t-shirts at one of the many the merch counters inside the venue, then lingered on the concourse outside the tunnel leading to our seats to people-watch. There were people (mostly women), mostly around my age, who had dressed up for the show in checkerboard pants or skirts, referencing the band's visual styling from the nineties.

Entering the Sphere for No Doubt

I selected tickets seated in the 100 level, one-third of the way up the stadium-style seats, out from under the overhang of the seats ahead of us so we could see most of the close enough that we could see the band performing on stage.

No Doubt title card in the Sphere

Once we were seated I got a group selfie of us waiting to see the show.

Jaeger, Calvin, Bethany, and Josh in the Sphere to see No Doubt

The show started with the title track "Tragic Kingdom", presented with a vertiginous animation of the band on a rickety roller-coaster on the wrap-around screen behind the stage. At times it felt like the entire Sphere was tilting down the tracks behind the animated band, and we were about to be dumped out of our seats; then I focused on the (unmoving) stage where the band was actually performing and ignored the screen and it all felt better.

No Doubt plays Tragic Kingdom in the Sphere

Each song had its own unique visualization. (One had a giant hand-drawn animation of Gwen Stefani in a short skirt, big boots, and a crop-top with "Gwen" written on it in giant letters, striding towards the audience like she was going to break through the screen and stomp her way through the pit in front of the stage and climb the seats filled with adoring fans.)

No Doubt in the Sphere

At several points during the show Gwen looked out into the audience as the camera focused on people in the audience holding signs in the general-admission pit in front of the stage. The sings said things encouraging Gwen to invite them on stage for a hug (apparently this was a thing that people knew they should do), and she picked out several people several different times, who seemed ecstatic to climb on stage and meet their hero.

Gwen Stefani greets fans on stage at the Sphere

The band focused on songs from their 1995 break-out album Tragic Kingdom (which was fine with me, because that's their album that I listen to the most, and their songs from the album got the best reaction from the audience). But the album is written as a break-up album by lead singer Gwen Stefani from the band's bass player Tony Kanal. The show's intermission videos, played between each of the four sets, lampshaded the album's origins and the awkward tension between the band's members when they had to play the songs live every night; even now, more than thirty years later.

No Doubt recreates suburban Anaheim

Most of the intermission videos featured recent interviews with the band members talking about their experience in the band, and in particular the reaction to Tragic Kingdom. The songs, they said, came from an authentic place and struck a chord with audiences. That audience was present in the Sphere to see them play the songs again.

No Doubt contact sheet in the Sphere

The band played "Don't Speak" at the end of the third set. The visuals started with a hot air balloon floating over an orange orchard, then descended into the orchard for the rest of the song. The entire audience in the Sphere rose to their feet for the song, singing along with Gwen on stage. It was the song we had all come here to see, live in person. It was an emotional cathartic communal experience with 20,000 other people there to see the same thing at the same time.

The entire Sphere signs along to Don't Speak

Guitar player Tom Dumont spent most of the song playing an electric guitar on a strap over his shoulder, but for the classical guitar in the song's bridge, as the golden light shone through the orchard on the screen behind the band and oranges fell from the trees in a riot of color, a stage hand brought out an acoustic guitar mounted on a post, mounted at the proper jaunty angle. Tom walked up to the acoustic guitar and played the critical riff in the bridge, then picked up his electric guitar again for the rest of the song.

Tom Dumont plays the bridge of Don't Speak in the Sphere

The band returned for a fourth and final set, playing "Just a Girl" as the penultimate song. This song also had the crowd on their feet singing along to the line "I'm just a girl in the world".

No Doubt plays Just A Girl in the Sphere

The band wrapped up the show with "Sunday Morning"; and then they took their final bows as the entire Sphere cheered them on, and they left the stage for the last time.

No Doubt plays Sunday Morning under a giant disco ball

We left the Sphere and headed back to our hotel (via the pedestrian bridge to the Venetian, then a taxi down the Strip from the hotel). We'd seen a great live performance of one of my favorite bands, that was significant music to at least the people in my generation (and I think Calvin also had a good time). We left Las Vegas to fly home the next day, wrapping up a quick weekend trip; this time I managed to leave the city before I got tired of the glitter of this fake place that shouldn't exist in the desert.

At the end of March, Julian attended an outdoor science camp organized by his school for the entire fifth grade class. (Like Calvin's fifth grade, the school spent all year talking about outdoor science camp. Unlike Calvin's fifth grade, a global pandemic didn't take over our lives in March, canceling outdoor science camp along with everything else. Calvin is still bitter about that.) They were gone for four days, and Julian seems to have survived the experience.

Julian with the fifth grade class mural

The exterior walls at Westlake are covered in murals painted by fifth grade classes. (The oldest mural I've seen at the school is from 1998, which if I'm doing the math right is the year my brother finished fifth grade.) At the end of every school year I'd see the mural take shape over several weeks, to be completed by the end of the school year. (We live on the central coast in California, with a mild climate year-round, so the separate buildings on campus are connected via breezeways open on the sides, which leaves plenty of exterior walls to paint murals.) It gave me something to look forward to at the end of Julian's time at Westlake, that he'd be able to leave a permanent mark on the school as he finishes elementary school and moves on to middle school. This year was no exception: the mural appeared on one of the exterior walls at the edge of campus, with the theme "We Grow Together!"

Julian's flower in the fifth grade class mural

Each kid in fifth grade designed their own plant for the mural. The the kids had several chances to paint their plant on the mural. Some looked like normal plants; others were more fanciful. At least one was sports-themed, with a basketball ringed by baseballs and footballs. One showed a slice of pizza growing on the plant. Julian's plant looks like a cactus to me, though I'm not sure what he intended it to look like.

In the spring, Julian signed up for an after-school math club that culminated in a math competition on a Saturday at the beginning of May. (This turned out to be the same day that I was riding the D and visiting LACMA in Los Angeles.) A few weeks later (on the same day that I gave notice to quit the tech behemoth that bought and destroyed my startup) we got an invitation to an awards ceremony at the Santa Cruz County Office of Education. They told us that 202 students from fifth and sixth grade across the county had participated in the competition, and of those students 27 were being awarded. They gave out awards for the top three teams, in each of fifth and sixth grade; and the top three individual scores, also in each of fifth and sixth grade. The other team at Westlake got third place for the team (apparently there were enough kids that they could field two teams), and Julian got third place in the individual ranking, for fifth grade. He was announced individually and got to accept a medal and pose for a picture at the front of the room, with the county math contest coordinator on the left and the county superintendent of education on the right.

Julian's math contest award

After the rest of the awards were announced everyone was called up to the front for a big picture.

Santa Cruz County math contest winners

After supper I took the kids to ice cream to celebrate Julian's achievement (and also my quitting my job).

Two days later Julian's fifth grade class held its end-of-the-year music performance at school, in the middle of the school day. (This was convenient for the school, and allowed all of the students to participate, but made it more difficult for parents with day-jobs to attend. Fortunately for me I had already quit my big-tech job so I had plenty of time to head across town in the middle of the morning at at time inconvenient for both drop-off and pick-up.)

Westlake elementary plays recorders

We watched performances by the school band, then all of the fifth grade kids played a few songs on recorders. A select group of kids played ukulele; according to the program they played C, F, G7, and Am chords. The F chord is notoriously difficult on guitar (it requires laying the index finger across multiple strings at once, and no matter what I do I can't get both the fifth and sixth strings to sound right at the same time), so I couldn't help but hope that the F cord is easier on ukulele than guitar.

(The performance was at times a bit disorganized; the music teacher confessed that this was the first time all three of the fifth grade classes had been on stage together (presumably because music is unable to preempt "real" academic classes), and all three classes have music scheduled at different times. I couldn't help but think back to my fifth grade school music teacher, who demanded perfection from her students and usually got it. I still think about my school music performances, and my music teacher, thirty-five years alter. Mrs. Carlisle lives, rent-free, in my head.)

For one of the last songs, the kids sang a song that included the names of each of the states in the country. Julian volunteered to hold up a poster representing a state and got randomly assigned Nebraska. He didn't quite remember why Nebraska is important to our family so I filled him in on the drive home from school. (Kiesa was, at that very moment, in Nebraska to help out with our newborn niece.)

Watching the Westlake Elementary promotion

A week later Westlake celebrated its "promotion" ceremony, which turned out to be just like a graduation (including playing "Pomp and Circumstances", though not while the students were walking in), just for elementary. This was the class that started kindergarten in the fall of 2020, and I wondered whether anyone would mention it. The principal in her remarks opened with "instead of learning to sit on the floor, criss-cross applesauce, they learned to mute and unmute themselves" and there was not nearly as much nervous laughter from the parents as there should have been.

Principal Norton at the Westlake promotion

The ceremony included a number of student speakers, several from each class, who talked for about a minute each. Several of them mentioned starting kindergarten remote in 2020 and only getting seven weeks of school in-person at Westlake that year. (I think Julian had slightly more school in person that year, at our school at the top of the mountain, but not by much.)

Julian's fifth grade class

Then each class stood up, and the classroom teacher read each kid's name as they walked across the front of the field to receive their certificate and greet the principal and the other fifth grade teachers.

Julian meets the principal and teachers at promotion

After the promotion ceremony we dropped by the reception in the school courtyard, then headed back to the car parked next to Westlake Park, where I staged a photo of Julian in front of the sign next to the eponymous lake.

Julian at Westlake Park

Four years ago, when I started working at Rivos, I started working fully remote, without worrying that I was going to get called back into the office several days a week; which meant I could pick up Julian every day when he finished school. (I recall Kiesa being positively giddy that we were able to split school drop-off and pick-up evenly. I eventually adjusted my schedule so I could drive into the office one day a week, on the informal in-office focus day centered around the office happy hour on Thursday afternoon.) Some days, if I needed an extra break in the middle of the afternoon, I'd drop by Westlake Park to take a quick lap around the pond. That era is closing in multiple ways: Julian finished elementary school and will be attending middle school, so I won't have the excuse to drop by the park and visit the pond; and I just started another big-tech job that wants me in the office across the mountain several days a week so we're refactoring our parental responsibilities again.

Julian's time in elementary school has come to a close. Now we're enjoying the summer before he starts middle school.

Wilshire/Fairfax metro station

I rode the D to Wilshire/Fairfax and stepped out onto the station plaza, next to the Peterson Automotive Museum (so one could take the train to the car museum). Like yesterday there were passengers who had come out just to see the new line on its opening weekend, and Metro staff standing around to answer questions and generally support the new station.

I walked from the station along Fairfax, crossing Wilshire at the spot where, a few years ago, I looked into the station box under construction, now covered up with new asphalt. A few blocks north I jogged onto a side street, past expensive single-family homes that looked like they had been built as inexpensive tract houses around the middle of the last century but they were close enough to other urban development that the prices inexorably increased in the intervening three-quarters of a century. Even in front of multi-million-dollar homes the sidewalks were cracked and broken by the trees, which seems to be a problem all over Los Angeles, according to a Los Angeles Times column. (That column shows a guy wearing a t-shirt from local (Santa Cruz) pizza chain Pizza My Heart; I also saw several similar shirts in 48 hours in Los Angeles. Maybe I noticed them because I was out of Santa Cruz, but it felt like I saw more than I do in an average month in Santa Cruz.)

Verve Coffee in Los Angeles

My destination was another Santa Cruz export, Verve Coffee, on West Third Street. Inside it looked just like my favorite third-wave coffee shop back home, complete with the same menu. It was shaping up to be a warm day in Los Angeles so I had a cold nitro flash brew coffee and an almond croissant.

David Geffen Galleries at LACMA

I walked most of the way back to Wilshire Boulevard to LACMA to see the new David Geffen Galleries. (Since it was the first weekend the new galleries would be open to the public, I bought a timed ticket for 11:30 in advance; but I never followed up to check whether the tickets actually sold out.) Like any good art museum, the building itself was a stunning work of modern art, brought into being by first-rate engineering: the museum space was a sandwich between two giant slabs of raw concrete suspended above the ground on a massive pedestal. The edge of the flat concrete roof curved organically, stretching along Wilshire then reaching across the four-lane boulevard in a single clean span, touching down on south side of the road with a second entrance. From the end it looked like a UFO had touched down in the plaza; but seen in the plan view on the brochure I got the impression of a rather confused pancake.

Stairs ascending to the David Geffen Galleries at LACMA

Inside the brand-new galleries the space was divided into rooms separated by concrete walls stretching from the polished concrete floor to the concrete ceiling. (Somehow all this concrete did not echo endlessly, but I don't know how.) The featured pieces of art stood out against the austere surroundings they were displayed in, but the industrial concrete was always there in the back of my mind, like the unavoidable foundations of modern life.

Inside the David Geffen Galleries

The art itself represented a broad cross-section of thousands of years of human artistic history, in a kind-of-random assortment that felt like grazing because there was everything from pre-Colombian pottery and textiles to Arts-and-Crafts industrial design and medieval sacred art and photography and Buddhist sculpture, and just about every gallery had something new and interesting and almost entirely unlike whatever was in the adjacent galleries.

Indian sacred art at LACMA

I walked the length of the building, grazing from the breadth of art on display, and departed the galleries feeling like I'd seen a little bit of everything.

Departing the David Geffen Galleries at LACMA

I walked across the plaza to the contemporary art buildings and saw weird modern art: works by Picasso and Mondrian; an installation that recreated the feeling of an old garage filled with junk on a languid summer evening; dirt scooped up and dried in squares and mounted on the gallery wall; and a video projected on a wall that reenacted early contact and misunderstandings between the Hawaiian people and European explorers. The biggest installation, located on the ground floor (probably to support its no-doubt massive weight) was "Band", by Richard Serra, a ten-foot-tall ribbon of raw steel running back and forth across the floor, curving in and out and forming room-sized interior pockets of steel.

Band (2006) by Richard Serra at LACMA

Opposite the building's lobby from "Band" was Sueño Perro: A Film Installation. A half-dozen movie projectors stood in a darkened gallery, lit only by the projectors themselves, presenting an endless loop of film onto the walls. (I was fascinated by the structure of the endless film loops; I watched the loops to figure out how they worked.) The air was hot and stuffy with the heat from the high-power projector bulbs, with a static charge from the constantly-moving film. Each projector played the raw audio from each scene, competing with each other and with the clacking of the projector and the whirring of the fans. The scenes came from the raw film shot for a Mexican movie twenty-five years ago; the filmmaker discovered the film carefully preserved in the Mexican archives (rather than lost on the cutting room floor, as he expected that it had been) and put it together in a sort of meditation on filmmaking. The whole effect was chaos; it was hard to tell what I was even looking at, or where I should be looking. But it was impossible to look away, and that's the whole point of cinema (and of art).

Sueño Perro: A Film Installation

I looped back to see Metropolis II in action, with the conveyer belts bringing matchbox-sized cars up to the top of their raceways to descend on separate looping paths back down to ground level, only to start the whole cycle over again. The conveyer belts themselves seemed like hurry-up-and-wait traffic congestion, an unavoidable part of the Los Angeles experience. A human attendant stood in the middle of the miniature chaos, watching the mechanisms to keep the whole thing moving. This, too, was a chaotic mess, but at a different scale; and it was hard to look away.

Metropolis II in action

I departed the museum complex and returned to the new metro station, where pictures of the museum's art covered the walls.

Station concourse at Wilshire/Fairfax

I ate supper at Redwhite Boneless Ramen in DTLA, a vegan fast-casual ramen place that served my bowl of ramen under a clear plastic dome infused with smoke. When I removed the dome to eat the smoke drifted over the table and permeated the noodle, which was an interesting experience.

DTLA skyline from Pershing Square at dusk

I walked back to my hotel past Pershing Square a few minutes after sunset, just after the last light left the US Bank building in DTLA.

(Because of the uncertainty surrounding my job, I spent the first four months of the year unable to plan very far in advance because I didn't know what I was going to be doing more than a couple of weeks in advance; at almost any moment I might make it to the end of an interview process and accept a job starting in a matter of weeks. That wave function finally collapsed at the end of April, and I'm excited to report that I'll be starting a new job at the end of May.)

I decided to fly from SFO to LAX on Friday, which meant I got to see Santa Cruz from the air as we climbed. My neighborhood is visible in this picture, as a smudge of urban development surrounded by forest on the outskirts of town.

E-175 wing flying over Santa Cruz

LAX is now finally testing their brand-new people-mover that will transport people from the terminals to the LAX metro transit center (and a big new combined rental car facility), skipping the notoriously-clogged horseshoe road connecting the terminals, World Way. The transit center itself is now open, with indirect rail service heading in the general direction of downtown. I decided to lean into the metro on this phase of the trip, so I caught the correct shuttle bus from the curb in front of Terminal 4 to the transit center. (The transit center itself is relatively new, having just opened last year; the K line opened in phases starting in 2022.) At the station I added money on my local stored-value transit card, before I realized that the entire metro system would be running for free all weekend in honor of the new D line extension.

LAX/Metro Transit Center Station

(I am reliably informed that the locals prefer the Flyaway bus running between the airport and Union Station, but I wanted to try the transit route because I was visiting on a transit-involved trip.)

The K line took vaguely north-east from the airport, running mostly along dedicated right-of-way on the ground next to streets, with railroad crossing guards for the at-grade street crossings. The line descended into a tunnel and terminated in a neighborhood I didn't recognize, across the street from the E line platform. Many of the people on my train were transferring to the E to head towards downtown. When we arrived at the crowded platform for the inbound E line announcements told us that there was some delay in the line towards Santa Monica but the train would be coming soon.train would be coming soon. At some length the train arrived (just as I got around to complaining about it on social media, which means I think I manifested a train with my post) and we crowded onto the already-almost-full train to ride towards downtown.

By the time I reached DTLA it was seven hours after I left home. This, it turned out, compared unfavorably with the time I might have spent driving from Santa Cruz (according to Google Maps, 5.5 hours if traffic cooperated, but highly variable depending on traffic). Somehow it didn't occur to me that I could just drive to LA; it feels so far away even though it's really not. (This is obviously when I need to mention the promise of California's still-under-construction, distant-future high-speed rail system, which of course ought to make it easier to get to LA from the greater Bay Area. But we're still tens of billions of dollars and decades away from that. Imagine how much better the passenger train service we do have along the coast could be if we bothered to invest any money in it. Imagine how much train we could have if Meta had spent the $80 billion it lit on fire to develop the Metaverse, only to pivot away from that particular boondoggle to the next big thing, on something useful instead.)

I checked into my hotel in DTLA then nipped around the corner to Pershing Square to catch the westbound D. I boarded the next D train and rode through DTLA onto Wilshire, through the last station where the B and D lines run together (where the two platforms were stacked vertically to make it easier for the track to split and cross over each other west of the station), through the station that was (until today) the western end of the line, Wilshire/Western; and onward onto the new stations opening today: Wilshire/La Brea, Wilshire/Fairfax, and the new end of the line, Wilshire/La Cienega.

D line map showing new stations on Wilshire

As I rode I listened to the announcements to make sure I knew how to pronounce "Wilshire". (I made the assumption that the recorded announcements for passengers would correctly represent the local pronunciation for names on the line.) As I expected, the announcements pronounced "Wilshire" as "WIL-sure".

Passengers photograph the train arriving at Wilshire/La Cienega

I disembarked at La Cienega. The station was new and shiny; nothing had begun to accumulate the dirt and grime from operating an urban metro system. Even the concrete between the tracks looked clean. If new metro stations had a distinctive smell, like new-car smell, this station would smell like that. On the station platforms Metro employees customer service jackets waited to answer questions about the new stations. People milled about the platform taking pictures of the station. On the station concourse, in the open space outside of the fare gates where ticket machines lined the walls, other Metro employees loitered in high-vis vests, talking to each other and other people in the station.

Wilshire/La Cienega station plaza

I rode the escalator up to the ground level, on a new plaza at the intersection of Wilshire and La Cienega. People milled about, looking at the new station and the mid-rise buildings surrounding the intersection. Workers were dismantling and removing tables and awnings that had been set up for the opening festivities, which I had missed. I watched a guy walk out of the station narrating a vertical selfie video about the station; when he stopped recording he mentioned that the video would be on Instagram in a few days.

Wilshire at La Cienega

I walked around the blocks surrounding the station. I spotted an equestrian statue across the street, in front of 8484 Wilshire. The statue itself was unlabeled but my phone indicated that it depicted John Wayne.

Mounted John Wayne statue on Wilshire

Next to the station I saw a building numbered 8447 Wilshire, which seemed suspiciously close to the number written in seashells that got James Comey indicted by the regime. I walked two blocks up Wilshire to see if I could spot the apparently-threatening address; I found several other addresses starting with 86 but not number 47.

Descending the steps into Wilshire/La Cienega Metro Station

I returned to the station at the end of the line (at least for now; Metro has already dug the tunnels continuing the line to UCLA and is now fitting out the tunnels and stations for two additional phases planned to open next year) and rode two stations east to La Brea. This station looked much like La Cienega but with different art running the length of the wall along the tracks on either side of the island platform.

Station platform at Wilshire/La Brea

I looked around the station at ground level, which had the same crowd of transit enthusiasts. There were fewer mid-rise buildings around the station, but there were several empty lots (some of which were filled with construction equipment, which might have been used to build the metro line) immediately adjacent to the station, which seemed like prime opportunities for higher-density infill development to take advantage of the proximity to the metro line.

Wilshire/La Brea Metro Station

On social media I saw a picture of a "Send D Pics" banner, attributed to the vicinity of the Wilshire/La Brea station, so I set out to find it. I walked around the streets surrounding the station until I spotted the brick apartment building behind the station, with the banner still clearly visible hanging out of one of the third-story window facing the station. (It's not entirely obvious in my picture, but the "D" on the banner is contained in a purple circle, referencing how LA Metro represents the D line on its maps and signs.)

Send D Pics

I saw enough people wearing "Ride the D" t-shirts that I felt like I was out of uniform without the shirt. LA Metro first intended the shirts to be a one-off promotion, but they were surprised by the demand and resumed selling the shirts. I ordered my own, and received it a week later; I'll be ready next time I Ride the D when the next phases of the line open.

Looking down into the station box at Wilshire/La Brea

I returned to the station and rode the D inbound to DTLA, then headed to the food hall at Grand Central Market for a late supper. I ate a plate of vegetarian tacos from Villa's Tacos, which seems to be a local institution (and, according to their sign, they appeared in Bad Bunny's halftime show). The tacos were good, as was the spicy mango habanero salsa.

Villa's Tacos at Grand Central Market

While eating a guy walked up with a bald head, bushy beard, hoverboard, backpack, cyberpunk clothes, and a small black cat with a frilly neckerchief riding on the top of his backpack.

I returned to my hotel in DTLA for the night, after riding my state's newest subway line on its opening day, which feels like an accomplishment and an adequate endorsement for my transit nerd credentials.

I took more pictures from Riding the D at Photos on 2026-05-08.

I picked up my rental bike (a Trek Marlin hardtail) on Saturday morning, the 25th of April, on a cool muggy overcast day at the end of a week with the winter's last rain storm. (The week's rain had triggered the state park to close the trails during the week, which I forgot to check when I reserved the rental, but by the weekend the trails had dried out enough that they could reopen.) I drove to Wilder Ranch State Park, just west of Santa Cruz on highway 1, parked along the highway, and started climbing into the hills above the coastal plain.

(I grew up in Boulder where Walker Ranch was a popular mountain biking location, so it's at least slightly confusing that Wilder Ranch is a mountain biking location in Santa Cruz.)

I turned off the fire road climbing a valley onto the West Englesman Trail. The trail climbed a ridge between two minor creeks, with broadly-spaced towering oak trees standing by themselves on the grassy hillsides, and bay trees lining the narrow gullies above intermittent creeks. It was spring, and the hillside was still green after winter rains, before turning golden for the summer. I climbed easily, finding the right gear; the bike's 12 gears gave me all the range I needed. My bike's fat knobby tires gripped the ground effortlessly and ate up the distance.

West Englesman Trail at Wilder Ranch State Park

My caption for this photo identifies it as the "West Englesman Trail", but I have three different maps that give the trail three different names. My printed Trails Illustrated map from 2017 (#816, Big Basin, Santa Cruz) appears to identify this segment as part of the Old Cabin Trail. The printed map on the sign at the trailhead calls it the Wild Boar Trail. The online GIS map provided by the state park calls it the West Englesman Trail; and I've decided to use the GIS map on the theory that it's probably the most up-to-date.

I reached a junction and tried to find my place on my printed map, and descended the single-track Old Cabin Trail into Peasley Gulch, descending towards intermittent Meder Creek. Redwood trees grew in the gulch. The trail descended steeply to the creek at the bottom then climbed just as steeply up the opposite side. I took the descent slowly and cautiously, getting the feeling for how my rental bike behaved. On the ascent there were a few places where I lost my balance and stopped and then had trouble getting started again because I was in too low of a gear: I had so much torque that my rear wheel would just spin out while I was trying to mount the bike before I had a chance to bring the other foot up and clip in.

Old Cabin Trail crosses Meder Creek

I emerged on the other side of the gulch and hit the Eucalyptus Loop Trail. Here I turned uphill and climbed along the edge of a broad meadow, with the trees along the gulch to my right and the flat green grassy meadow to my left. At least one of my maps represents this as a fire road, but this seemed less like a road and more like a couple of tracks running in the same general direction that were being quickly reclaimed by the grasses and ferns encroaching from both sides. At the top of the meadow were the burned trunks of several tall deciduous trees, and I wondered if they were all that remained of the eponymous eucalyptus.

Eucalyptus Loop Trail

I stopped to eat lunch at the top of the meadow in a group of picnic tables. I wasn't sure if I ought to be able to see the ocean (the geography of the meadow suggested that the horizon might be below the trees), but the low clouds that hung over the hillside limited my visibility beyond the end of the meadow.

Meadow at the top of the Eucalyptus Loop Trail

After eating I biked up the Chinquapin Trail and descended the Long Meadow Trail. Both were marked as fire roads, and they both looked better maintained than the Eucalyptus Loop. On the descent the low clouds began something between a heavy mist and a light drizzle, just enough to obscure my glasses.

I turned onto the Old Cabin Trail and descended into the gulch again, following the same route as earlier. The almost-rain made the trail a bit muddier, but this time around I was a bit more confident on the more-technical portions of the trail. Near the top of the trail I spotted fresh horse droppings, and on my descent I caught a glimpse of a rider on a horse at a walk ahead of me in the trees. They spotted me, and sped ahead at a faster gait (a trot? canter?). I knew I was supposed to yield to horses, but it wasn't entirely clear how to resolve a situation where I would be faster than a horse and might want to overtake them.

Trek Marlin rental bike

I stopped at the trail junction at the other end of the Old Cabin Trail to catch my breath and take a picture of my bike, then turned downhill down the Eucalyptus Loop. The trail narrowed to a single-track through a forest of bay trees. The rain might have picked up while I was on the trail, or the leaves of the trees above me were condensing more of the moisture out of the saturated air and dripping it down on me below.

Eucalyptus Loop single-track

I made a series of turns to start heading back to the base of the mountain where I came from, and at one of the junctions I found the horse and rider waiting for me, pulled off to the side to let me pass. "You caught up with me," the rider said, and I nodded in acknowledgement as I biked past.

Presently I joined the Wilder Ridge Loop, a broad fire road, for the long descent to the bottom of the hill. From the road I could look all the way down the grassy hillside to the ocean below, just visible below the clouds. The descent was fast and easy, with gravity to help me; but the ground was just wet enough that my rental bike ended up plastered in mud and gravel from the road.

Looking down towards the ocean at Wilder Ranch

I returned to my car and returned the rental to the bike shop, after a great ride in the mountains, confirming my interest in buying my own mountain bike (but I need to make sure I can fit it in the garage and transport bikes on our cars, and it'd be a good idea to make sure my younger child can bike reliably as well).

I recorded the whole ride on my fitness watch so I have the full track, minus a couple of places where I didn't remember to resume my ride at the right moment:

This turned out to be the day that the Super Bowl was held in Santa Clara, down the street from my startup's chip bringup lab and across the freeway from the main office. (At Levi's Stadium concerts last summer, while we were working away in the bringup lab, event traffic spilled out from the stadium onto into the nearby office parks. Spots in the office parking lot were going for $50, and cycle rickshaw drivers peddled up and down Patrick Henry Drive offering rides to the stadium.) I checked the road closures to make sure I didn't get too close to the stadium; and I drove one station further north, to Warm Springs/South Fremont, to avoid game-involved congestion at Milpitas BART station.

The streets in Downtown Berkeley were practically deserted when I arrived to eat ahead of the show, but any bar or restaurant with a TV looked like packed to watch the game.

Wednesday 13 at the UC Theatre

The first set was a metal band named Wednesday 13. Ahead of me in the audience I saw a kid, maybe 6 years old, wearing giant over-the-head ear protection, sitting on their parent's shoulders throwing devil horns. The kid stayed in the show until half-way through the second set. I was impressed, since I can't reliably get my kids to come to shows with me (though my favorite local venue, Catalyst, is 16-and-up).

The Birthday Massacre at the UC Theatre

The second set, co-headlining the tour, was The Birthday Massacre. I hadn't heard of them before, but I sampled their music before the show and immediately knew that I liked their music. It was just about the archetypal ideal of my favorite music in the intersection of rock/metal/industrial, guitar-driven but backed by synths, driven by melody with a strong beat, with a traditional verse/chorus/bridge song structure.

Partway through the set I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a disturbance off to my right in the crowd in the first tier in front of the stage. At first I thought a mosh pit had broken out; but it also looked like the crowd wass restraining one or two people and keeping them apart from each other. The song ended and the lead singer looked into the audience and asks, concerned, “Is everything alright friends? We’re all friends here?” The crowd jostled a bit and one of the belligerents seemed to be hiding but security spotted him and a line of five or six security people make their way through the crowd and escorted him out. The lead singer said “I legit still don’t know what happened” and the set resumed.

But in the confusion the singer lost her wireless monitor earpieces (they had fallen out of her ears and were hanging down her back out of reach) and she spent the bridges of the next two songs writhing awkwardly around trying to reach them, while still holding her cordless mic, and eventually succeeds.

A few songs later a guy who had, earlier in the show, been standing somewhere in front of me pushes back through the crowd to take his place and then starts to dance, drunkenly, bumping into the people around him. The crowd begins to notice and inches away from him. Almost as soon as I notice the problem and wonder what if anything could be done about it, security comes through the crowd again to escort him off too.

Lord of the Lost at the UC Theatre

After that extra excitement, co-headliner Lord of the Lost was almost tame; or at least as tame as one could expect from a gothic metal band.

Lord of the Lost on stage at the UC Theatre

I enjoyed the set, though it seemed slightly more subdued than I remember from their earlier show. Overall it was a fun night out, and I got more out of it than I would have watching the Super Bowl.

Snapshot of Jaeger's desk at the end of an era

The most prominent feature on the desk are the two identical 27" 4k monitors, hooked into a KVM that lets me drive them from the M2 Mac Mini hidden on the desk or the powered USB-C dock that (approximately) works with both my work MacBook and my personal Thinkpad running Linux. (I say "approximately" because the MacBooks aren't able to drive the monitors hooked up to the dock, while my Thinkpad works fine.) I got the little pride flag at one of the pride events I attended and it turns out that it's visible in the back of my video calls, along with the (not pictured) California pride flag that I hung up on the door and then covered with a Rivos logo blanket that's thin enough to work like a banner.

(I bought a M2 Mac Mini because I wanted to have one piece of Apple hardware that I worked on.)

On the day that I turned in my Rivos laptop I went to one of the many office liquidators in the Bay Area to pick up an expensive desk chair to replace the one I had been sitting in for 25 years. The office liquidator one of my colleagues recommended had a selection of the nicest office chairs up front and a large warehouse in back filled with chairs and desks and conference tables and lab benches and all of the things one would need to fully outfit any office. I was briefly possessed with the urge to buy lab benches to set up a home electronics lab.

Office liquidator

I ended up with a good price for a lightly-used Steelcase Gesture chair, one of the highest-rated office chairs on the market. It fit in the back of my Rav4 but wobbled around a bit until I tied it down with bungee cords to the cargo mount points on the floor of the cargo compartment.

Uplift file cabinet

Around the same time I got a small file cabinet for my desk to fit most of the stuff that was otherwise cluttering the surface of my desk. I now have a place for my pens and headphones and notebooks and folders so I don't have to look at them all day, and when I need them they're within arm's reach (I don't even have to move my chair, just reach down and open one of the top two drawers).

I expect that I will be spending less time in my home office in the future, and more time in a work office on the other side of the mountain; but my home office is now in better shape than it's ever been.

Chinatown street festival

We took MUNI to Chinatown and walked past a group of elementary school children dressed as mahjong tiles on the sidewalk. Grant Ave, running the length of the neighborhood, was closed to traffic to make room for a street festival. There were booths from community organizations and vendors selling various things. We walked down to the Chinatown Gate to get a selfie at the gate, then headed back into the festival.

Jaeger and Julian at the Chinatown gate

I saw a booth roasting chestnuts on a propane fire, so I bought a bag and then tried to figure out how to eat them. Someone on the street saw me struggling to open one of the nuts and pointed out a small plastic tool on the booth table; it was roughly the size of a guitar pick but with a toothed edge that would cut into the tough shell of the nut. I could crack the nut open and scoop out the edible fleshy heart of the nut. It had a mild, earthy flavor; somehow I got the flavor profile of winter squash. I gave Julian a couple of nuts and he wasn't quite sure what to make of them. I didn't really get the hang of opening the nuts, and I barely made a dent in the lunch bag of nuts I bought, but it was an interesting experience.

Chestnuts roasting on a propane fire

We walked up Grant Ave looking for snacks and didn't feel especially inspired by the booths in the street, or the shops lining the sidewalks (and it was hard to get a good look at everything with the crowds of people) so we ended up walking the length of Grant Ave and heading around the corner on Columbus Ave to an ice cream shop in North Beach.

Properly fortified we headed back into Chinatown and walked down Kearny St to find a place to watch the parade. It was almost an hour until the parade was scheduled to start, and there was plenty of space a few blocks down the street at Pine where we could stand right at the crowd-control fence lining the street for an uninterrupted view of the parade route. As we waited I watched an SFFD ambulance ATV pull up from the side street, open the a hole in the fence for it to drive through, then close up the fence behind it. Some time later it returned and ran the whole process in reverse to exit the parade route through the fence.

Waiting for the Chinese New Year's parade on Kearny

The crowd lining the street behind the barricades filled out as the parade approached. We were near the end of the parade, though it appeared that many other people had the same idea I did, to take MUNI to Chinatown, visit the street festival, and then walk up the parade route to find a space to watch. Finally the front of the parade approached us, escorted by a pair of SFPD police motorcycles.

Police motorcycles lead the Chinese New Year Parade

I took pictures of many of the parade entries; rather than try to recount everything I'm going to share the highlights:

State Senator Scott Wiener in the Chinese New Year Parade

State Senator Scott Wiener, now running to replace Nancy Pelosi in Congress. All of the politicians in the parade were carefully identified with their current roles, not any other offices they might be running for.

Old SFPD car in the Chinese New Year Parade

An old SFPD police car.

Oakland Fire Department engine in the Chinese New Year Parade

An old Oakland Fire Department engine.

Grand Marshal Eileen Gu in the Chinese New Year Parade

Grand Marshal Eileen Gu, recently returned from the Winter Olympics, waving to the crowd from the back of a convertible, surrounded by security.

San Francisco mayor David Lurie showed up somewhere in the middle of the parade, walking ahead of his official parade vehicle that actually bore the sign identifying him, in the middle of his security detail. He walked past so fast and I didn't recognize him in time (until someone in the crowd next to me made a comment about it), so I didn't have the chance to get a picture.

University of California Marching Band in the Chinese New Year Parade

There were a number of high school marching bands from around the Bay Ara (and, I think, at least one middle school); but I only saw one University of California: Berkeley, which didn't need to come very far across the bay.

San Francisco Public Library bookmobile in the Chinese New Year Parade

San Francisco Public Library decorated its bookmobile for the parade.

Up close with a lion dance at the edge of the parade

There were many lion dance groups in the parade; one of them ran past my side of the parade route for some crowd interaction so I managed to get a fast photo.

Garfield Elementary School dressed up as mahjong tiles

Garfield Elementary School dressed up as mahjong tiles.

SFO in the Chinese New Years Parade

SFO advertised all of its direct flights to Asia.

BARTmobile in the Chinese New Years Parade

BARTmobile dressed up for the parade.

Cal Poly marching band in the Chinese New Years Parade

After more than two hours of watching the parade, Julian was clearly getting bored (which I finally noticed when he laid down on the sidewalk) so we started walking up the parade route. We were on the west side of Kearny, so we were cut off from the direct escape route to Market Street. We ended up walking all the way along the parade route to Union Square; and along the way I saw the Cal Poly marching band.

Salesforce Tower displaying the Year of the Horse

We ate a late supper at Super Duper on Market Street; and along the way I saw that Salesforce Tower was showing an animated flock of red horses galloping around the LED screens on the superstructure above the roof, representing the Year of the Fire Horse.

The march met at the San Lorenzo Park at 10:00 on the morning of Saturday, March 28. I ended up parking on a side street off Branciforte Ave (behind Whole Foods), after looping through downtown and deciding the best place to park was in a neighborhood side street. I walked down the hill down Soquel Ave, past a road closure at Ocean Street, and found the end of the crowd on Dakota Ave. By the time I got there the park was full and I couldn't make it very far down the street. The street was packed with people, many of them carrying signs with a variety of clever slogans. There some speeches in the park that I couldn't hear very well, and some attempt at chanting and singing; and then the protest started marching down Dakota Ave and turned on Soquel Ave heading downtown.

I ended up near the front of the march because I had recently come in from the beginning of the route; it was a last-in, first-out arrangement. We crossed the San Lorenzo River on Soquel Ave, then turned south on Front Street, west on Cathcart Street, and north on Pacific Ave. (I don't know what quirk led to our jog down Front and Cathcart. Given how many people were in the march it might have lengthened the route just enough that we didn't loop back on ourselves at the park.)

In the No Kings protest march on Pacific Ave

We marched down Pacific Ave for the length of the downtown core, between shops and restaurants, crowded by trees hanging over the road, with people standing on the sidewalks cheering us on, until we reached Water Street. (Counting blocks on Pacific Ave is an exercise in futility because the downtown grid splits in half at Pacific; to the west there are a few blocks of a regular grid but to the east most the blocks are larger and most of the streets connect to arterials crossing the river. The irregular grid makes it hard to cross downtown without skirting it to the north or south.) On Water we turned east, heading back over the river; I was close enough to the front of the group to see a single police motorcycle ahead of the march clearing the way.

Police escort ahead of the No Kings protest march on Water Street

On the bridge crossing the river the road widened up so I could get a better view of the crowd behind me.

No Kings march crosses the Water Street bridge

While crossing the bridge I looked down the river and saw the march continuing on the Soquel Ave bridge, 500 meters away in a straight line, further on the route we had traveled.

Looking down the San Lorenzo River to the No Kings protest march

We turned off Water Street onto the path along the side of the river, behind the county office building. In the park the march broke up; people left, or spread out on the grass to hang out, or to promote their own adjacent causes. (I got one flier from a group trying to unseat my local congressional representative; though since California uses a jungle primary, the threat to primary a representative from the party base is much less salient than elsewhere.)

No Kings march enters the San Lorenzo Park

I walked back across the river to watch the march, still in progress down Pacific Ave.

No Kings protest on Pacific Ave in Santa Cruz

After watching the march for a while I looped back to my car and headed home, after taking part in my local protest against the wannabe dictator trying to rule the country by decree, 250 years after my country's predecessors declared independence from a different king.