It's amazing to me that we were able to do all of this without going very far -- all of our trips have been only an hour's drive away, and the food is a minor walk from home. We do so much more here, and it really has an effect on our moods and our outlooks. We were both feeling a little antsy the other day (I from having sat in front of the computer for a few days job-hunting), so we hopped on our bikes and rode for 15 minutes to the Golden Gate Park Botanic Garden. There are majestic, grand old trees there twisting upward amid the fog, we walked through the primitive plantings of ferns, cycads, and horsetails, saw a pair of quails gathering food (or nesting materials?), two fat squirrels that walked right up to us, and we basked in the rich smells of eucalyptus, pine, fragrant flowers, and ocean mist. Then we happened upon a Japanese restaurant that served us more food than would fit on our table and the steamy miso warmed us up. We weren't quite ready to go home yet, but not in the most energetic mood, so we watched out for a café to stop in for a while. We found Café du Soleil in Lower Haight, which was a quiet, charming place with warm wainscoting, plenty of tables, an extensive (and affordable!) menu and French-speaking staff. I think I know where we'll be studying French from now on...!
In other news, we're finally almost settled in to our liking in the apartment. I planted some lettuces in our garden box outside (which is only half-planted because we didn't get enough soil.. oops!), we got a tv and some speakers, some rugs, a nice shelf with doors to store our linens upstairs (there's only one closet, which is in our bedroom, so lots of things have been in floating piles or cardboard boxes..), and I'm going to put together another work surface for a craft area today. Hopefully it'll be great for bag-making, clothes-making, print-making and book-making!
And as a post-script, I'll add these great pictures of costumes found in our home *after* Halloween:
Our neighbor Jen (who works at ReadyMade mag - yeah!) enticing us to join a clothing swap down the hall....
Vanessa sporting her fashionable eye patch, plundered from our local pirate shop to help her bothersome case of pink eye (oh, that pesky ER and its communicable diseases!) Our local pirate shop, by the way, is just that -- 826 Valencia is McSweeney's storefront featuring pirate booty of all sorts to raise money for the writing workshops it hosts for kids in SF. It sure came in handy!
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