sfo

There are 3 posts tagged sfo.

a few people I met, remet, or just enjoyed seeing in SFO

Hey, that photo that I put up yesterday was on Serious Eats, check me out! It may also interest you to know that MetaFilter was one of Time magazine’s top blogs and that I was interviewed for an article on Ask MetaFilter that was in Slate this week. Here’s another AskMeFi story you might like.

The big difference between hanging out up in Vermont and hanging out in San Francisco is that most of the people I met or hung out with have URLs I can point people to that are live active websites. Most of my friends here have websites that are sort of functional. I am somewhere in the middle. Here are some URLs that go to people that I met.

  • Peter – his website has been the same pretty much since I’ve known him but now he’s married and has a kid.
  • George – actually a lady, she is looking for work after doing cool things at Flickr for a long time.
  • Mike – I sort of met at SXSW and now we’re twitter buddies enough so that when I had a few free hours I could tweet “you free?” and he was like “sure” and we chitchatted about drupal and web nonsense and it was totally fun.
  • Judith – my long time friend and owner of Lyle, who always shows me a good time.
  • Bryan – probably the person I’ve known online the longest without actually meeting. His indy junior map graced my travel page for a while. Now I use DOPPLR.
  • Courtney – I met her briefly at Burning Man but got to eat burritos with her She created the cloud bed, she is a genius.
  • Liz – is at the Berkeley ischool, we talked about library stuff. She knows my friend Aaron.
  • Mike – used to work at Adaptive Path with a bunch of people I know, we yammered on for a long time about… transportation systems.
  • Mike – another Mike who, towards the end of the party when I finally said who I was, said “oh, from MetaFilter?”
  • Erika – went to Dartmouth and is taller in real life than she seems in her headshots.
  • Molly – I met again at SXSW this year and we talked about academia and Princeton and pneumatic tubes.
  • Jennifer – gave us a sober ride home from the party for which I am eternally grateful.
  • Yorvit and Roswell – part of the household that took me home when I was trapped at the airport and fed me snacks and watched the Oscars with me. Wonderful folks, maybe without websites?

That’s who I know off the top of my head. I figured I’d drop this all here in case people were curious.

noisy

while some merely see a dried beef tendon...

I have this idea in my head that the city is noisy and my place in Vermont is not. This is probably true in a general average sense, but I stayed on Vermont avenue in a third floor apartment and it was pretty silent except for the ocean-like noise of distant traffic. Today, because there was a snowstorm over the last few days, Terry the roof guy is here taking snow off the roof any way he knows how. So, my little treehouse is all BANG BANG CRASH CRASH as snow and ice get broken up and hurled a few stories to the ground. Like me, Terry doesn’t get started too early, so this is mostly fine.

This photo is a beef tendon that was in the pet food store near where my friend Judith lives. I’ll do a longer bla bla “what I did and who I did it with” post about my trip to San Fran, but I liked this photo and my alteration of it. When I go to San Francisco I get to hang out with people who laugh at all my stupid nerdish injokes (“oh hey they said Craigslist at the Oscars!”) and always have the “hang with friends or stay in?” option in a more real way than I do here where sometimes friends are not an option due to the short number of people who are a reasonable drive from here.

Every time I visit the city I feel like it’s a bit of an interview process where the question in the back of my mind is “would I want to live here again?” I’m still at the “not really, no thanks” point but I can feel that tipping ever so slightly towards “not yet”

wolf!

sunny day

So, I know you’ve heard it before, but Ola’s coming back to Bethel. At some point. I got an email from her saying she was leaving Botswana tomorrow and I’m sure she’ll show up here eventually. So. I am having my friend Jill over to help me clean the house. I am moving stuff around, consolidating mainly. And I am thinking if there might be some place else I would like to live. I’m pretty sure I can stay here if I want to, but the sweet free rent deal would vanish. I am curious if I could find another one.

I like it here a lot. I like Ola a lot. However I also like living alone a lot. Living with Ola isn’t just not living alone, it is like the opposite of living alone. While she is great company, our sleep schedules are about 90 degrees off. She’s disorganized (she says it, I’m not calling her names) and I’m… not. I like it quiet or quiet-ish, she frequently has the TV or the radio or both going. She likes strongly smelling stuff in the bathroom, it makes me sneezy. So, unlike last time I thought she was coming back where I was a bit more handwavey and OMG about it, now I’m more reflective. I also have a more regular job — my MetaFilter work has me as an official W-2 employee as of 2008 — so I’m less worried about money. This is a good opportunity to ask myself what I’d like to be doing for the next few years, in case what I AM doing isn’t quite it. I have a few interesting options and some more prosaic ones. As always, I’ll keep you posted.

This past weekend I was in San Francisco. Sometimes I swear I go on long trips just so I can take a red eye flight home and have that amazing experience of going to sleep dead tired at 7 pm and sleeping til 9 am the next day. There’s nothing like it, to me. The trip was fun, I wrote a bit about the meeting I was at over at librarian.net. I saw some librarian friends, saw my friends’ new baby, went to a MetaFilter meetup, went to a good friend’s birthday party, slept (well!) in a Murphy bed, went birdwatching and didn’t drive my car for nearly five days.

I miss the West Coast in a general sense, and it’s odd to me that I miss San Fran more than I miss Seattle. I felt like I had time to get sick of Seattle and watch many of my friends move away. Now in San Fran my friends are all moving closer to one another so that I can walk to a whole bunch of their houses without too much trouble. It was neat to do and I’ll have to do it again really soon. As I told James and Shinjoung, having a free rent option figures high on my list of “desirable qualities” in a place to live. Not like I’d move straight to Atlanta for free rent, but if a place I otherwise like — especially the way-too-spendy West Coast — had some weird live-in caretaking opportunity present itself, you can bet I’d be listening.