Archive for the ‘Doves’ tag

Lots of walking

I woke up Monday morning after a great weekend and as I stood up I immediately felt all the walking I did in my legs and feet. Public transportation is not something that guy who’s existed in suburbs all his life is accustom to, but it’s something I could definitely get use to. It felt great to be out doors all weekend and even better to not be tied down to a car on crowded streets.
I got off my flight at SFO Friday just after noon and proceeded to take BART into the Haight. We had a couple beers at a cool pub called Toronado and ate some Vietnamese sandwiches. I love walking into a bar that has beers on tap that I’ve never heard of. Toronado had beer from Belgium and California that I had never seen, from breweries I never knew existed, it was glorious. Evidently Greg got my departure and arrival times mixed up, so he had been waiting around for me since I walked onto the plane back in Phoenix. The beers helped.
We went back to his place, which was bigger than I anticipated. The building he lives in once housed one family (and probably some staff) but now has five apartments. They have one half of one of the three floors and it makes a very comfortable one bedroom apartment. I can’t imagine having the whole building, much less paying for it.
Naomi got home from work and we set out for the Giant’s game. The best thing about Baseball is being outside and leisurely cheering for your team, the worst is paying $9.75 for a Stella Artois. Even in a neighborhood market in San Francisco you can get a six pack for that. The game was fun, the Giants played terrible but I’m not a Giants fan so I was over it pretty quickly. Again, the beer helped.
Chris, a guy Greg and I went to High School with, had just days before moved to SF and was supposed to meet us at the game. He decided to just come late and meet up with us with his car. In the chaos of the game ending that obviously didn’t pan out. We walked down to the restaurant that Greg works at and he soon found us. The Thirsty Bear Brewery was pretty cool, an odd mix of traditional craft beer and tapas. I’m sure the menu looks pretty odd to most people expecting to get pub food, but trust me it was delicious.
Saturday morning I was a bit slow to get started but we headed up to Twin Peaks and had a nice view of the city. We then walked through the Castro and down into the Mission neighborhood. After standing in line for some sandwiches we settled down in Dolores park and had a nice lunch. The sandwiches were well worth the wait even if I wasn’t able to finish mine. Walking and consuming a fair amount of liquid makes me pretty protective of my stomach. I certainly don’t eat like I use to, and that’s fine, but having to be constantly aware of my digestive system just gets annoying.
That night we hopped a bus to Hayes Valley to this great German restaurant called Suppenküche. The Oktoberfest beer was amazing and so was my Schnitzel. We walked through the Haight on our way back and had a couple more pints. Chris got back to the house before too long and like the night before my eyes were shut for good a little after midnight.
This trip was fun but it pretty much cemented my suspicions about being an old man. Even with traveling and beers and food you’d think I could manage to stay up past midnight to hang out with people I hadn’t seen in a couple years.

It was a great trip, you can see some photos I took on Facebook.

Work has been interesting this week, but all in all it’s really just par for the course.
There are also a lot of things in the planning stages with Praxis creative. Concepting the Advent video series has proven to be much harder than I anticipated.