At Home in Noe Garden Travels Dance and Music Writing Community Ru Temple Design Studio Some Archived Traipses July, 2001 NY-MD, Jan 2002 moderngypsy tour Nov 2002

Hospitality is big on our list of favorite pastimes... Our friend the moderngypsy had planned to bicycle the coast from Seattle to Mexico this Autumn, but was waylaid early in the trip by a knee injury, having fallen along a rainy patch of the road. Instead of passing by in mid-December, she rented a truck, made it down to Riverside and necessary arrangements there, and driving back north to Seattle, visited with us the day after our return from Maryland. Here are a few of the snapshots, illustrating my LiveJournal entry recapping the day, plus a few additional notes to string it all together! Arrival: The image of parallel parking on the hill across the street from our house is tilted just slightly, to give you the true impression of how it FEELS to do so on a San Francisco Hill when one isn't used to it, and truthfully, some days when one is used to it... Here's the first grinning greets - I love how this turned out to be a double 'portrait' of meeting this correspondent friend in person finally! It was a delightful 25 hours with Elizabeth, traveling through on her way back to Seattle -- we hardly stopped talking and bouncing ideas back and forth long enough to tip over and snore for a while. We walked a little around the neighborhood, I took her to the Lucca Italian Ravioli Company and pointed out the Ferlenghetti poem above the door while we got Tiramisu, nut bread and things, after lunch/brunch at Boogaloo's (nearly an SF answer to Santa Cruz's Saturn Cafe where she'd been the day before, only the waitrons are more cheerful) Boogaloo pique-asiette Boogaloo, with Lucca out the window wall art and Ru ... showed her one of the in-the-middle-of-the-block mercados, some few of the amazing incredible murals in the near neighborhood (and cleverly remembered to put the camera in Eliza's hands, again post Boogaloo, so you can see what caught her eye...): on Bartlett, between 21st and 22d Streets. at the corner of Bartlett and 21st, looking toward Valencia. and then back home -- fortunately this is all within a one-block radius, on the flat except for the block I live on, so we didn't wreck her knee horribly in the process. I HOPE! After more babble and a few phone calls with folks, we drove up to Flax to drool on/at the papers, puttered over past Pearl art supply that actually had the thing she was looking for but only in the too large size (Portland art supply stores await the person who is hoping for the Rembrandt oil pastel crayons), got gaffer tape for making duct-tape books and showed me how to make those this morning (fun!), swung by the California Institute of Integral Studies to show her where Lise works as well as the current installation of art in the hallway next to the library there, and thence back home. I trotted off to yoga class, the last in a series, and arrived home to find at least one of our in-town art pals was free this day, and had arrived to chat and visit; we tossed together salad, ravioli, along with some mushroom tomato sauce we had in the freezer, and had Good Things along with the decadent chocolate cookies and the tiramisu...*sigh*... Got well into a one-off zine capturing some of the day's conversations, and upon Isabella kitty's strong recommendation, finally retired to our beds. (Isabella has claimed the front room, and thus is hostess to guests on the futon-couch/bed. She takes her hospitality duties Quite Seriously and will arrange her guest human-pillows Just So...) The next morning after tea and stuff-cakes, a wee tad of email, laundry, and poring over books, we took off for SCRAP, the Scroungers' Center for Re-Usable Art Parts and found paper, cloth, each a tote-bag for a buck, a pile of old Macworld envelopes, and oohed and Ahhed over Various Wonderful Things. There's all kinds of fennel growing wild along the fence there; I plucked a frond and a head of the seeds, munched and gave her to munch and blessed her with safety on the road, because the only time I had an accident on the road, I walked away and had only to change the tire and replace a 40-cent lightbulb, because fennel caught me...and thus fennel has always since been among my magical protector plants. And thus after a good grounding hug and blessings of the road, we parted ways. For further adventures, you must just check out Eliza's