Skipping Town

Another nice day in San Francisco. The weather has been gorgeous—blue skies, lots of sun, just cool enough for a coat. Perfect weather for sitting outside in Union Square and strolling around the city blocks. This morning I walked with Lucia to an outdoor café right on the square and had a pastry; then we returned to the hotel for a wonderful two-hour nap (Lucia) and some reading (me). Andrew had a break for lunch, so we got bagel sandwiches at a deli and ate them outside on the square. After a quick return to the hotel so Lucia could have her own lunch (nursing in public just does not work with this little one—she gets way too distracted, even with my nursing cover; she winds up twisting it around in her fists, trying to eat it, entangling both of us), she and I took a walk to the Container Store, where, as usual, I bought a few small plastic boxes. You can never have too many! Lucia fell asleep while we were walking around, right on schedule for her afternoon nap—but sudden city nois...

I think we have a city girl. We took Lucia to San Francisco this weekend for Valentine’s Day—her first taste of a big city, and our first weekend trip with baby in tow. It was a rousing success, and Lucia seemed to love it. We drove down Saturday morning through thick fog, which cleared once we were in the city. It was a beautiful day, warm and sunny, and instead of going right to our hotel we decided to explore the Marina neighborhood and have lunch. Lucia napped almost the entire way down, then began screaming as we searched for a parking place. When we found one, I nursed her in the car, and then we found an outdoor table at a deli and had sandwiches. Then we walked around, enjoying the city atmosphere, passing countless other babies in strollers and generally feeling like we were back where we belonged. It was wonderful. Next we drove down to the water and walked around a bit. I nursed Lucia again as we looked out at the boats; then we took a long walk toward the Golden Gate Bridge...

This weekend Andrew and I went to San Francisco for our “last” weekend away before the baby comes. Now that my due date is less than three weeks away, we’ve decided we should probably keep our radius from the hospital to about, oh, five miles. So we wanted to have one “final” trip before we hunker down close to home. I’m compelled to use quotation marks for words like “last” and “final” because I’m confident we will still take weekend trips once the baby arrives. Not right away, of course, but eventually, especially when she’s still small enough to be more or less easily portable. But this weekend did have the feeling of some kind of closure, ending, a final trip—without quotation marks—of the kind we know. It surely won’t be the last trip we take that’s just the two of us, but it was the last one where we won’t be arranging for caretaking before setting out—and worrying about the baby once we’re gone. In her pre-born state, she’s both with us and not with us, and as long as I can feel...

Our weekend in San Francisco with Andrew’s dad started off on an exciting note for me: with a sighting of the San Francisco Twins. Friday night, Andrew and his dad headed off to a Giants game, and I took myself to dinner at my favorite restaurant in SF, the Nob Hill Café. (Last time I was in SF, Andrew and I ate there three times.) I was sitting at a small table, engrossed in my gnocchi and a book, when I heard some slight commotion to my left. When I looked up, I saw them: the San Francisco Twins, two tables away, happily posing for pictures. The SF Twins, aka Marian and Vivian Brown, are 82-year-old twin sisters who live in the Nob Hill neighborhood; they’re famous in San Francisco for their jaunty identical getups. A quick Wikipedia search has informed me that they eat every meal together, have dressed identically their entire lives except for a brief time in their twenties, and have won prizes as “most identical” at international twin conventions. When I saw them on Friday, they we...

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...

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 ...

I can’t complain about San Francisco—or, more accurately, being just an hour and a half’s drive from the City on the Bay. I can’t complain about the hilly streets, the nice restaurants and shops, the museums, the countless neighborhoods yet to be explored. And I definitely can’t complain about the vestiges of sixties attitude weaving in and out of daily life, like the naked people strolling casually among the runners in the Bay to Breakers race, and the crowd’s unflappable reaction. “It takes all kinds,” a woman said, “and San Francisco just has a larger variety of kinds.”

In my haste to get back to writing Palinisms on Monday, I forgot to include one of the more amusing parts of the Patriots game in my post about San Francisco. Indeed, the fact that this game was in San Francisco guaranteed that it would be just a little bit different than games anywhere else. The stadium was full of the usual array of football jerseys, caps, etc., a wide selection of beer offerings, and the standard lineup of hot dogs, burgers, nachos, and other sporting-event snacks. We were surrounded by fairly normal football fans at the beginning of the game. But then our attention was drawn to a rather motley crew that had entered our section: two men, a woman, and a little girl. One of the men, the woman, and the little girl were more or less unremarkable. The other man, however, was wearing a tall, pointed wizard’s hat topped with fresh flowers and was carrying a “wand” made from a long, thin, fresh-cut tree branch. As he walked to his seat he waved the “wand” toward the field,...

Andrew and I spent the weekend in San Francisco, one of what should be a series of small weekend trips to break up the weeks that remain before Japan (six weekends to go!). We drove down on Friday and met up with some of Andrew’s friends from business school who had come to the U.S. for a wedding and some vacation. We went with them to an Oktoberfest in the city, complete with German music (the band, oddly, played the Chicken Dance several times—like a wedding nightmare), German food (sausages and more sausages), and beer. Elaborate balloon-hats in the shape of beer steins were being created and handed out. There were some German costumes worn by the most dedicated Oktoberfest-goers. I will say that Andrew was sporting a beer-stein-balloon hat by the end of the evening. Saturday was a shopping day, and I found a few sweaters and a dress, all in the name of strategic packing for Japan. We took a long walk through North Beach in the evening; and after a leisurely browse through the City ...