Weekends at Westbrae Wash 'n' Dry

The guy who manages the laundromat I go to is a little... off.  The Yelp reviews refer to him as the Laundry Troll, which is not entirely inaccurate.  He's kind of old, grizzly, and very crotchety.  He has a gruff and gravelly voice, and he likes to bark orders at people, telling them not to overfill the machines, or not to leave their dry clothes in the dryer too long, things like that.

At first I was a little intimidated by him, because he's kind of mean, and he's a little creepy when you're a young woman going to do your laundry and he's the only other one there, sweeping the floor and giving you side glances.  But now that I've been going there a few months, he's actually grown on me, in a weird way.  I think he might have some sort of learning disability or something, because he talks a little strangely, and he repeats himself a lot.  My impression of him now is that he just takes his job very seriously, and he likes to take good care of his laundromat, and he also kind of likes to tease people in that way that crotchety old men with a twinkle in their eye do.  I had to go to the bathroom a few weeks ago, and the bathroom door was locked.  "Is there a key to the bathroom?" I asked.  "Uh-huh," he replied, deliberately being as unhelpful as possible and seeing how I would respond.  "Do you have it?" I asked, catching on to his game.  "Uh-huh," he replied.  "Well, can I get you to let me in, then?" I concluded.  And I think he's liked me ever since.

This morning when I showed up to do my laundry, the Laundry Troll was nowhere to be seen.  It was nice and quiet on a Sunday morning, so I loaded up my laundry and sat down to work on my knitting.  Another lady came in, and as she was loading up her laundry, the machine next to her started spewing water.  A big puddle was spreading across the floor, and not showing any signs of stopping.  "Is that yours?" I asked, motioning to the washer.  "Nope!" she said, clearly relieved.  I looked around and whoever's clothes were creating the problem had disappeared.  I set down my knitting and went out the back door to the parking lot, where the Laundry Troll can sometimes be found sweeping or working in the garden.  No luck.

The maintenance closet door was open, so I poked my head in and found a mop.  As I came out and headed for the puddle, an old guy in a tracksuit came in the front door.  "Do you work here?" he half-grumbled at me suspiciously.  "No," I said.  "But this washer started spewing water, so I thought I'd see if I could find a mop."  I started sopping up as much water as I could, but there wasn't much I could do without a bucket.  The old man stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me, watching me swish the water around, looking slightly bemused.  "Hnh," he grunted.  "Where's Larry?"  "I don't know," I replied, assuming he was talking about the Laundry Troll.  In any case, I hadn't seen anyone but him and the Asian lady, so I was pretty sure I hadn't seen anyone named Larry.  "You know Larry, right?" said the old man.  "Larry Lasagna?"

I didn't even know what to say, so I just stared at him.  "Yeah, Larry Lasagna!  I don't know where he is today."

"Me neither," I said.

"You need a bucket," the old man continued, after a pause.  "Where'd you get that mop?"  "In the closet," I said.  "The door was wide open."  He glanced at the door, then back at me, then shuffled across the room to the maintenance closet.

A few clangs and thuds later, the old man in the tracksuit emerged victorious, awkwardly carrying a five-gallon bucket.  He set it down next to me, and I gratefully set the mop in the bucket, letting the gray water collect in the bottom.  Bits of dirt and debris streamed from the mop, but the water was coming out the bottom of the washer faster than I would ever be able to get it into the bucket.  The old man looked at me waiting for the water to drain from the mop.  "You're gonna have to squeeze it out with your hands," he said.  Dude.  No way.  I was already going above and beyond the call of duty by getting a mop of my own accord.  No way was I going to squeeze dirty floor water out of it into a bucket with my bare hands.

I stood there letting it drip for a few seconds, and the old man stood there watching me.  The Asian lady was bustling around doing her laundry, trying her best not to get swept up in the drama of the malfunctioning washer.  The old man looked at me and harrumphed again.  "A shovel.  We can squeeze it out with a shovel."  And he shuffled off back to the maintenance closet.

Forget it, I thought.  I've done more than my fair share.  I propped the mop against the washer and sat back down to work on my knitting.

The old man now had a purpose.  He set to work mopping water and squishing it out into the bucket with the shovel.  He seemed quite satisfied with himself, and also not at all bothered that I had abandoned what had started out as my work.  After a short while, my laundry was done washing, and I was grateful to have an excuse to concentrate on something else.  As I was moving my clothes from the washers to the dryers, the Laundry Troll made an appearance through the back door.

"Steve!" said the old man.  "You got a problem on your hands!"  So the Laundry Troll was apparently not named Larry Lasagna, at least.  Whatever his name, I was glad the old man was the one sloshing water around when he arrived.

Steve/Laundry Troll/not Larry Lasagna took one look at the water and broke out his stash of beach towels.  He was much less angry than I expected.  All in a day's work, I suppose.  I tried to look inconspicuous as I pumped quarters into the dryers, wondering what would happen next.

As Steve was finishing mopping up the water, a pot-bellied man came into the laundromat and headed straight for the problem washer.  The old man pounced on him.  "You overfilled it!" he half-yelled self righteously.  "Look what happens when you overfill the washers!"

"No, no," said Steve the Laundry Troll.  "When there's too many people on the rinse cycle at the same time, 's too much water for the pipe.  Pipe's only 'bout yea big," he said, making a small ring with his hands.  It was the longest sentence I had ever heard him construct.  "Not enough room."

The old man seemed a little disappointed, and the pot-bellied man seemed like he just wanted out of there.  The old man and Steve continued talking about something, and a few minutes later, the old man came over to me again.  "How'd you say you got in the closet?" he asked.  "The door was wide open," I repeated.  He studied me for a moment, then walked back to talk to Steve.

I finished loading the dryers and sat down to work on my knitting.  A minute later, the old man was back.  "You're very industrious!" he exclaimed, apparently quite pleased that not only did I have the chutzpah to look for a mop in a water emergency, but I could knit too.  "What are you making?"  "A hat," I said, not really wanting to engage in conversation with 24 minutes left on my drying cycle.  "Well, it's a nice color," he said.

"Steve wanted to know how you got in the closet, and I said karma!  Ha ha!"  I couldn't help chuckling a little bit.  "She opened that door with her karma, I says!"

"Well, when there's water leaking all over the floor and an open closet, I figure the least you can do is look for a mop," I said.

He looked at me for a moment.  Then: "A very industrious young lady..."

Do things like this happen in State College, Pennsylvania, do you think?

I'm going to miss this town.

Henry W. Coe State Park

It's Spring Break!  Jevon and I had been talking for a while about going camping over Spring Break, but there's still snow in Yosemite, and we didn't want to be gone for too too long anyway, so we opted to explore a park in our own backyard: we packed up the tent on Sunday morning and drove down to Henry W. Coe State Park, which is around 90 minutes southeast of here.  I had no idea what to expect going in, but it was really beautiful, and we had a great time.  We went for a long-ish hike after we arrived yesterday afternoon, ate a camp food dinner (apples, peanut butter, cheese, hardboiled eggs, and a few hunks of bread), and then read until the sun went down, at which point we promptly crashed.

Then we woke up this morning, ate more camp food, and went for another short hike before packing up and driving back.  It was a great little trip!

There's our little orange tent, on the left.  What a campsite!

The barn by the Visitors' Center.

Looking down the Visitors' Center steps on the fog this morning.

More morning fog.

California poppies on our hike.

Cool tree!

Beautiful weather yesterday.

Look at this huge turkey!!

Parked at the campsite.

Morning fog, and Jevon sitting at the picnic table.

The fact that I'm leaving California soon makes it all the easier to appreciate trips like this.  This is a beautiful state, and I am so happy to have called it home for a time.

But it's time to see my other (real) home soon - I'm leaving for Illinois on Wednesday, and I hear a small mountain of snow awaits me!  See you all soon, my Illinois loves!

weekend excursion

Thursday was a pretty rough day for me, obviously.  Nothing bad happened, is the thing; I just have a day every once in a while where I feel especially awful and sad and crazy, and Thursday was one of those days.  I've been forbidding myself from blogging on those days, because no one really needs to read about me feeling like a crazy person, right?  But I did decide to publish that blog post on Thursday night for whatever reason, so I'm not going to take it down.  I do feel like that sometimes, and I do think it's normal and healthy and part of moving forward.  And just to clarify, I don't feel that way all of the time - not even most of the time - and I am definitely moving in a positive direction, emotional well being-wise.  It's just a very slow process, and it's two steps forward, one step back, that sort of thing.  So no one needs to be overly concerned about me or worry that I'm miserable or anything like that.  I'm generally okay, and getting better.

Ok, enough of that.  Yesterday, a carful of us drove up to Tomales Bay, to this little oyster shack where they fish the oysters out of the bay and serve them up to you on ice.  You choose whether you want them cooked or not.  So we got 24 raw oysters for the 5 of us, served up with white wine vinegar and herbs, and we brought our own bottle of wine and some crusty bread and cheese.  It was tasty!  We also got 4 grilled oysters, which each had a dollop of melted chili butter in them, and they were super good, but I might have been mostly into the butter. ;)

Grilled oysters with chili butter.  Image by Emma Christensen, at TheKitchn.

So at this oyster shack, they have communal picnic tables, and while we were finishing up our tasty lunch, this older Filipino couple came and sat next to us.  They were really cute, and the guy was just talking up a storm.  Talking talking talking, he wanted to be an 'agriculturalist' in the Philippines, but he wound up getting an accounting degree instead, Tagalog is the easiest language in the world, this is how you plant a pineapple, one time his son did this one thing, yadda yadda yadda.  It was fine at first, but we were all about ready to leave, and he just. kept. going.  Then he started to talk about how the only presidential candidate he believed in was Rick Santorum, because he watched his facial expressions, and he was the only one speaking truly from the heart.  My friend's husband said, "That's because he's crazy."  And we got a good laugh out of that, but it was clearly time to get going.  Thankfully (?) I was getting pretty sunburnt by that point, so I was like, "Man, I really have to get going, I'm going to be a tomato tomorrow!"  And they thought that was hilarious, so it was a semi-graceful exit.

Anyway, on the way back, I snapped some shots of the landscape from the car window, some of which turned out decent.  It was a gorgeous summer day, and it was so, so nice to get out of town, see some countryside, and have a little adventure.

Oh, I forgot about our pitstop.  On the way back, we stopped in this teeny tiny little town to check out the bookstore, and most of us picked up a little souvenir.  I got a $3 calendar that has beautiful pictures of coffee drinks, and for each month it details the history of coffee drinking in a particular country, and gives a few recipes for a traditional coffee drink from that country.  Jevon got a book published in 1827 that was written by a former slave, and it has a bunch of household tips, tricks, and handyman-type things, like how to make 19th century style recipes, or how to mix your own stain for woodwork, weird stuff like that.

When we came out of the bookstore, we saw this little market across the street, and we went in looking for snacks.  We ended up getting some chocolate, coffee, and amazing strawberry peach crostadas, and then we sat down at the picnic table in front of the market to snack for a bit.  Well, there were three of us on one side of the table, and two on the other side, and when the other two stood up, the table tipped right backward and dumped us on the ground.  It was really, really scary for about half a second, and then once we realized what had happened and we were all okay, it was really, really funny, and the guy sitting behind us got a really good laugh out of it too.

Well, it's 11:00 and I could probably use a shower.  Then it's time for groceries and reading, then maybe some dog walking, and then some frisbee this evening.  Love to all, and I may even see you soon - barring unforeseen circumstances, the plan is to leave on our road trip in about a week and a half, which puts us in Illinois sometime in mid-July.

Annular Eclipse

I had a great day yesterday.

Yesterday there was an annular solar eclipse that was visible from the western half of the U.S., and we're about 2 hours south of the zone where it was a "total" annular eclipse, meaning the moon was positioned squarely in the middle of the sun, so there was a perfect ring.

We drove straight up from San Francisco, into the gray zone on this map.

If we had been able to look straight at the sun while it was happening, this is what we would've seen.

A small group of us decided to drive the 2 hours north so we could get the full effect, and it was such a fun trip.  Our original "plan" (or lack thereof) was to drive up to the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, because it was just across the border of where the total eclipse happened.  We got there around mid afternoon, walked around a bit, and still had a bunch of time to kill, since the eclipse didn't even start until about 5:15.  We had all completely forgotten that once you leave the immediate Bay Area, it gets hot in the summer, and it was so nice to feel the hot sun beating down and be sweating a little bit.  I'm used to 60-65 degrees temps year round now, but I still miss seasons!

We didn't see too much wildlife, but I did snap some photos while we were walking around.  It was really nice to be on a little mini hike-adventure with friends.

Jack rabbit!  (Or something like it.)  Look at its long ears!

When you gaze across a California landscape, you can usually see some mountains in the background.
It's still pretty weird to me, even after several years.

Action shot.  Melanie reading about California wildlife and Jevon looking slightly skeptical.

There were little lizard guys everywhere!

Then, because everyone I know has iPhones, we discovered that just a few miles further north, there was a county fair going on!  So we decided to hop back into the car and spend the afternoon at the Glenn County Fair.  That made it really feel like summer.  It was hot and sticky and smelled like livestock, and we ate funnel cakes and corn dogs, listened to the live music, and played around at the fair for a few hours.

The baby goats.

Melanie doing giant bubbles in the kids' play area.

Eventually it started to get noticeably darker out, so we knew the eclipse was happening.  We brought some index cards with little holes poked in them, so we could project the image of the sun and see where the moon was covering it up.

What we weren't expecting was all of the awesome shadow projections everywhere!  I had no idea this happened during an eclipse - when the light gets filtered through leaves or other small openings, there are tons of projections of the image of the sun all over the ground, so we ended up being able to see the eclipse everywhere we looked.  It was so cool.

Then as we were leaving, there was a group of people that had brought a welder's helmet for people to look through, so we all took a turn looking at the sun and we could see the moon still covering up part of it.  It was really cool.

Yay Glenn County Fair!  Yay Eclipse!

Ok, I get it, dog, you're a coonhound!

Oh my god.  I'm awake at 1:31 a.m. because Roger let the dogs out to pee and Rye massacred a possum in the backyard.  And I guess after he shook the crap out of it, Roger told him to drop it, and he did right away, because he would apparently make an amazing hunting dog if we would actually take him hunting.  So the possum made its way into the corner of our yard, behind the shed and under a bunch of logs and crap, and Rye cornered it and barked.  And barked.  And barked.  And barked.  And barked.  At which point I woke up and realized something must be very wrong, because he was barking his friggin' head off in the backyard, enough to wake me up inside the house.  So I threw on some shoes and ran outside, and there's Rye, standing his ground behind the shed and barking his head off because hey!  He treed that possum, by golly, and there was no way in hell he was gonna let it get away.

We ran inside and got a leash, and some treats, and Roger had his flashlight, and I was able to hook a leash on his collar and drag him out from behind the shed.  He was actually very, very good.  He wanted to make sure everyone in the East Bay knew that that possum was TREED and he did it, but when I told him to come to me, he did, albeit very reluctantly.  Then we got him inside and Roger was finally able to tell me what the hell was going on (because at that point, all I knew was that I had just been woken up by Rye barking a lot, and there was apparently something hiding behind the shed), and we could see that the little guy had a little bitty spot of blood on the side of his snout.  So we swabbed it with some iodine and gave him lots of treats and told him what a good hound dog he was and put him in his crate to help him settle down.  He actually was really, surprisingly good, all things considered, just visibly preoccupied by the one thought he can successfully hold in his little coonhound brain: there is an animal in my yard that I cannot let escape.

So now he's asleep, but we called the emergency vet to make sure we were safe on rabies.  Apparently the only animals in the Bay Area that ever carry rabies are bats (good to know!) and especially since Rye just had his rabies booster last month, he should be totally and completely fine even if the thing did have rabies, since he apparently didn't get bit (he just attacked and shook the crap out of the thing) and his vaccine would have protected him anyway.

Holy moly.  How am I ever going to get back to sleep?

It's funny, though; I had just been thinking this past week about how I might want to rename my blog.  I mean, really, they're not actually the only coonhounds in Berkeley.  That was just a commentary on the fact that not many people in the Bay Area move out here with coonhounds.  But I guess Rye ain't havin' none of that.

An Adventure

The older I get, the more I relish a good adventure. I used to be kind of timid and hesitant to really break out of my comfort zone, but these days I really get a charge out of it. I like doing slightly crazy things, just to keep people guessing and to keep myself feeling alive. There's something very invigorating about doing something you've never done before.

I've been mulling this over for a while, and today I took the plunge. It all happened faster than I thought it would, but it was quite the adventure, and I even took my camera along so I could show you a little bit of what I saw today. Come with me on my adventure and see if you can guess what I did before you get to the end!

* * * * *

I left the house at 9:00 this morning, even though I've been fighting a little cold and going to bed around 8:30 the past few days. I went by the ATM and took out several hundred dollars, then I got on the bus and went to downtown Berkeley. I was kind of nervous with all that money in my pocket!

In downtown Berkeley, I got on BART and took it across the Bay to San Francisco.

Once in San Francisco, I walked down from the BART station and picked up this awesome little car from City Car Share. It's a Scion xD - I really loved driving it! It has quite a bit of pep and is a great size. Maybe if we get a car I can convince Roger it's a good one... plenty of room for doggies in the back!


I drove all the way through the city. (That was an adventure in itself.) Here I am on Broadway Ave, if I remember correctly.


Once I got to the northwest edge of the city, it was time to get on Highway 101. That is - the Golden Gate Bridge! You can't see it too great from here, since I was being a not-entirely-unsafe driver and wasn't actually looking through the camera when I took the picture. I just turned it on and blindly took a shot out the window.


Just in case you didn't believe me, here I am driving across the honest-to-goodness Golden Gate Bridge. It was amazing.


I don't have any pictures of Marin, but you'll just have to believe me that I drove up into Marin county, where I got lost. My Google Maps directions were wrong, and I had to wind around in the hills for about an hour before I arrived at some very nice people's house. We chatted for a long while, they gave me some tea, and eventually I got back in the car and was on my way home.

I got stuck in traffic in the city, but it really wasn't so bad on a day like today.


I was waaaay late bringing the car back. Between the hour of being lost, the nice nice people in Marin, traffic, and then having to stop for gas and getting kind of lost again (this time in the city), I was an hour and a half late. I called City Car Share three times to try to extend my reservation, but their system was down every time. I did find out no one needed the car until 1:30, which is when I got it back, so I didn't feel bad, at least. I just hope I can talk them out of charging me a bajillion dollars because I was so late.

After I dropped the car off, I headed back to BART. A really cute French guy stopped me and asked me where Chinatown was. I could tell he was French by his accent, so I started talking to him in French. He thought I was French too!! I totally still got it. That made me feel even happier.

I finally made it back to BART and headed back into the East Bay.


Then I made it home, cargo intact, around 2:30, I think. Huck and Rye were playing it all cool, but I know they missed me.


I took a look at our living room and noticed how asymmetrical the area by the door looked. I was glad I went to retrieve my cargo, because now our living room will be just about complete.


Did you guess what it is yet??

Ok, here, look what I got from those nice people in Marin:


Pure awesomeness is what. This baby goes for almost a thousand dollars new, and I got it for waaaay less than that because their 13-year-old son had outgrown it and he just wanted to get a reasonable amount of money for it to offset the cost of his new one.

I am a speed demon, baby. I'm going to ride this thing all over the Bay Area. It is so fast and light and totally worth however much City Car Share charges me for bringing their car back so late!

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