A week in

Yesterday my roommate's house started leaking rain, the office was infested with ants and my morning train was infiltrated by pigeons -- as brazen an assault across the line between the wild and civilization as I've seen. I suspect the Bay Area has unwittingly become the first front in Nature's war against mankind, and that this first salvo was but a warning shot across our collective bow.

I tried going Salsa dancing last night but the venue was inexplicably closed, and on its most popular night. As I stood in the rain pondering the half hour I'd gone out of my way - through seedy neighborhoods and dark alleyways - to get there, I made myself feel better by imagining that this closure, clearly unplanned if their web site was to be believed, was due to the weather. Why did this make me feel better? Because as I stood in the rain in my t-shirt and jeans I remembered walking - not so long ago - to the Iron Horse. In a blizzard. And finding it packed to the brim with people. People, like me, who were not pansies that closed their club because of a little warm rain. People, like me, who didn't thrust their quivering thumbs into their mouths and curl up into a ball smelling faintly of urine when confronted with a child's rendering of a snowflake.

On many streets in San Francisco there are signs demanding that all cars park perpendicular to the sidewalk.

Once, in my youth, I was driving down a suburban road when a car backed out of its driveway right in front of me.. and then rolled into its neighbor's driveway, then back to its driveway, and so on, like some wildly expensive version of a newton's cradle. I finally realized that this wasn't some person who'd forgotten which house they lived in, but a person who'd forgotten to set their emergency break. This probably happened in San Francisco, once.

As I stepped off the train today I came up with the idea to document my commute by way of stop motion photography. I spent most of the walk to the office taking ten steps, stopping, snapping a picture, and walking ten more steps before taking another. I'd really like to have been a fly on the wall in some of those cars that had to stop for me on the freeway intersection. I've determined that 10 steps is too far for a nice movie, but that 3 works just great. I'll have to leave for work early tomorrow morning.

Work is good, if all encompassing. I have two contracts outside of Storm8 that I'm completing, so it's many hours of work and no play (unless you count a failed attempt at salsa dancing). Soon those should be done, however, and I'll have a chance to spread my wings in California.

That is, of course, if Nature's war against civilization allows it.