Skipping Town

Though we love the charm of our current apartment, readers of this blog know it falls short in two major areas: no central AC, and an abundance of mosquitoes thanks to ancient, inept screens. We suffered through these for one summer but cannot do it again—or, rather, I, the pregnant girl, cannot do it again. Fortunately, Andrew seems to be on the same page, even though all the box-lifting during our upcoming move will be on his shoulders this time. Our requirements for our next California apartment are clear: central AC, a washer and drier (or hookups for them), good screens in the windows, and not next to a highway, in a complex that will send me into a Valley of the Dolls-style meltdown. This time around, we’re willing to sacrifice the charm in favor of conveniences and comfort we’ll probably appreciate with a newborn—we’ll get back to charm when we get back East. We’ve begun our search. At first, we decided to expand our reach beyond Sacramento into suburbs like Natomas and Rosevill...

Last night at Trader Joe’s, I spotted a discarded grocery list on the ground in the parking lot. On a cheery piece of notepaper, in bright red pen, were scrawled the following items in a feminine script: GROUND TURKEY RAT POISON That was it. Ground turkey and rat poison. This is funny on so many levels, and alarming as well. Was this shopper planning to put the rat poison into the ground turkey and feed it to her husband or some other unlucky soul for dinner? Was this shopper planning to set out a few rat traps while preparing some wholesome turkey burgers? If there are rats in this shopper’s home, then why would she be cooking/eating on the premises at all? Wouldn’t she want to purchase something neater—say, a box of crackers—that she could eat while locked safely in her car, away from the rats? Furthermore, if you have a rat problem, do you really need to make a list to remind yourself to buy rat poison? Isn’t that something that would be at the forefront of your mind as you set out ...

I’m trying to convince Andrew to Send Me Away, to remove me from the curious public eye like they used to do for girls who got “in trouble”—a brief stay with an “aunt” somewhere just far enough away so that there would be no visitors and no rumors. I myself am not exactly “in trouble”—though when I see screaming children and over-burdened parents I sometimes wonder if I am—but still, I think this idea of being Sent Away makes a lot of sense. Now that I’m pregnant, I’d like to make a formal request to Andrew: that I be Sent Away to San Francisco. I’m actually in San Francisco right now, riding on the coattails of Andrew’s nearly weeklong business trip. Why not tag along, with my ridiculous feed bag to stave off my alarming hunger? Why not tag along, with my laptop and my very portable work? Why not tag along, especially when we get to stay at the Intercontinental Mark Hopkins on Nob Hill, one of the city’s swankiest hotels? Looking out our hotel room window now that the sun has gone dow...

It’s a beautiful time to be in Northern California. There are so very few times of the year that I can actually say that—and these rare days and weeks are among those times. Last weekend, Rachael came to visit, and we took her up to Sonoma and Glen Ellen, where we spent the night at the Jack London Lodge and had dinner at The Fig Café—our favorite wine country weekend itinerary. It had been raining for much of the time preceding Rachael’s visit, and everything was lush and green. The grapevines are still barren, but the spaces between them are bright with yellow mustard plants in full bloom—driving through wine country, the hills are as much yellow as green. The California poppies are in bloom by the roadside (they’d be blooming on my terrace, too, if the squirrels hadn’t eaten them down to the roots). A visit to Beth and Nate in Napa finished off our weekend. And a stomach virus began the week for me and Rach. Nonetheless, we managed to visit the Crocker Art Museum and Sutter’s Fort i...

A more responsible blogger would have found something—anything—to blog about over the past week of so, but I’ve been lax. We’ve been shopping at Ikea, eating Mexican food, ordering Domino’s, paying taxes. We’ve been watching L’Auberge Espanol (and I now agree that it was wise for Andrew to forbid me from seeing this movie until our long-distance relationship was over—I still shot him death stares throughout). We’ve been playing Scrabble, and cooking baked ziti. We’ve been replanting a plant for Andrew’s office, adding to our wine collection, sweeping up dust bunnies. We’ve been buying ten-pound bags of oranges at the farmer’s market for $4. We’ve been grocery shopping and buying an emergency 9x13 pan at Target (how did we get through a shower and wedding with every size but the one we most needed?). We’ve been ordering books online and baking chocolate chip cookies (well, Andrew’s been baking). Normal, busy life stuff. More interesting things to report soon, I hope.

During the long, hot, dry, fire-infested months of summer here in Sacramento, it’s hard to believe that rain has ever fallen—and, indeed, will someday fall again. But here we are in the rainy season, with steady downpours from mid-morning through the evening. Everything is lush and green; as we drove to San Francisco this weekend, we marveled at the verdant green hills, the vibrant farmland. In just a few months, those hills and that farmland will be a parched golden brown, and instead of skies gray with clouds we’ll have skies full of ash and smoke from wild fires. For now, though, I’ll enjoy the sound of rain on the rooftops and sidewalks, the cozy feeling of security that comes from being warm and dry, out of the elements. It’s not a snowstorm, alas, at least not here—but snow is falling in the mountains, and perhaps this will be the weekend we finally get up to enjoy Lake Tahoe in winter. We shall see.

What a lovely weekend we had in San Francisco. We drove down Saturday morning and immediately had lunch at Taylor’s Automatic Refresher in the Ferry Building, which means we’ve now been to all three Taylor’s Automatic outposts. Our burgers and chili cheese fries fueled our trek to our hotel (not really a trek, since we took a trolley), the Huntingdon Nob Hill—a luxurious place where we had an enormous room, turndown service, and the use of the very nice spa. Thanks, Hotwire. Thanks, Andrew’s uncanny ability to sleuth out what the Hotwire hotel listings actually are. Though we were hankering for a swim, we went to Japantown first—I was and am on a quest for more kapibaras , the extremely kawaii hedgehog/mole-like creatures I found in Japan, a quest that was, unfortunately, unsuccessful. The heart of Japantown is the Japan Center, a shopping complex full of Japanese restaurants and stores selling Japanese crafts and goods. One of the stores is as close to a 100-yen store as I think it’s ...