This morning Jon and I grab a cup of coffee at one of the two Starbucks in Orinda and then took a long hike/walk with the dog in Tilden Park. Tilden is beautiful, green with rolling hills, fog moving in over the Berkley Hills. We went back home and then into the city for the day.

SF started with lunch at the Brick house near Jon and Stef’s office, which also happens to be next door to the company SixApart. After lunch we drove a few blocks over to where they were both getting hair cuts about a block off of Union Square. While Jon got his hair cut I walked over to Union Square where they were celebrating Indonesian Day. Indonesian day was interesting, but I decided to walk from Union square over No Hill to North Beach in search of photographic opportunities, as well as Juice Lucy’s. The amazingly cool looks organic juice bar that Jennifer Esperanza and Hansi Lebrect visited just a few weeks ago on their road trip up the nor thing coast of California. It proved to be worth the walk. The atmosphere isn’t is serene, and the juice is fabulous. Having just had lunch I passed on the food, but wow did it look good. I don’t know if I’ll make it back while I’m here to sample the food, but if I get into the city again I’ll certainly try. After Jon’s haircut he came and picked me up about a block away from Juicy Lucy’s next to Coloma park and we headed towards the Ferry Building on embarcadaro to pick up some food for dinner. We parked at the north end of the Emarcadaro and walked down the the ferry building and back. It was a beautiful day for a walk.. which is good since this was the third long walk I’d taken today. The smells inside the Ferry Building, which is sort of an indoor food mall. Not a food court, more like a food court crossed with a permanent farmers market. Everything from fresh produce to gourmet cheese and mushrooms to fish and meat and all sorts of stuff.

Before we left we’d barricaded Tucker in the guest room€ by places a couple heavy boxes in front of the double doors… Tucker being the suborn strong willed dog that he is though, managed to push the double doors open anyway. No harm done, he ate the cat’s food, but that’s about it. He’s getting along well with Memphis (the more outgoing cat) and I don’t think Pooka (the shy cat) has actually poked his head out of hiding to be seen by Tucker yet. Other than Pooka hiding, which he does 23.9 hours a day anyway, they don’t seem to mind Tucker and Tucker having learned form Elena’s cat that he’s suppose to stay away from the cats hasn’t really bothered them either.

(check back in a few days for photos, until then check out flickr)

Finally, after many many delays I am on the road. It feels wonderful. Really really wonderful. Which means there should now be lots of updates to the blog because lots of exciting stuff will be happening.

For those reading this that don’t know why I am months behind schedule there are two major reasons. First, my house hasn’t sold yet… I’m still trying, but I’ve decided I just need to go regardless and deal with it from the road. If it doesn’t sell very soon I’ll again consider leasing it. However, the delays have backed me somewhat into a corner. Paying a mortgage for much longer than planned has eaten into my travel funds, leaving me the choice of using a small portion of the proceeds from the sale to fund my travel or if I lease it to take some equity out of the house and use that. Either way I think I’ll be running short on funds in about 3-4 months if I don’t figure something out. Second, is that two months ago I made the decision to “just go” and worry about the house from the road, but it seemed prudent before heading across the country in the middle of a heat wave to get the air conditioning fixed on my Volga. Mind you this wasn’t a simple proposition since the air conditioning hasn’t been hooked up since I put a new motor in the car five years ago. Mind you the motor I put in wasn’t the stock vanagon motor, so none of the existing hoses, wiring, etc… plugs directly into the air conditioning compressor mounted on the new motor. Needless to say it wasn’t a small job and a really only trusted on air conditioning mechanic I’ve know for a long time that does a great deal of custom work to do the job. Well what was supposed to me one weeks work turned into eight. I expected it to really take two weeks, but two weeks in my otherwise excellent mechanic clipped the door of his garage backing my vanagon into his shop. He did the right thing. He called me immediately to look at the damage and immediate said “you don’t need to worry about anything, we’ll take care of everything, but I wanted you to see it first”. He also relayed the the body shop had already looked at it and thought it’s take three days. However, he still had a weeks worth of work before it could go to the body shop, and then he’d have a few days after it came back to charge the system and make sure everything was working right. I didn’t believe the three day figure from the body shop and and figured it’s probably be a week at the body shop. Well, it was closer to two weeks at the body shop, but it came out good and I’m happy with the repair, and then it was over a week after it got back from the body shop. So, two month later I have my van back, the body work looks good, in fact my previously dented up bumper has been replaced and looks better than ever; and, my air conditioning works fabulously.

The lack of updates isn’t to say that nothing has happened worth note in the last couple weeks. Most significantly Seema and Tim got married in a beautiful ceremony. Seema and Tim are both friends who used to work for RBF before Seem a went back to school for her masters at Colorado State Univ (where I went for 2.5 years) and Tim later followed her to Colorado as well. They are really great people and clearly both come from great families too. The ceremony was a fusion of Indian (mostly) and Christian (a little) traditions. I’ve been to a lot of weddings. It comes from the philosophy that you always go to weddings and even more so funerals, more on this some other time, but I also feel honored to have been invited to and been in as many weddings as I have. Regardless one thing is clear to me. The average American doesn’t party… There are no absolutes, but really the amount of celebrating going on at the Indian, Jewish, Chinese and other ethnically flavored weddings just shames the white Christian/Catholic weddings I’ve been to. White Christian weddings seem to be a ceremony followed by a pleasant dinner and a little dancing. Ethnic weddings are grand celebrations where everyone dances with wild abandon from grandmothers down to little kids. Where families celebrate the coming together that is occurring