WhimsyLand

Yesterday morning found us awakening at the Fisherman's Wharf Holiday Inn Express, then breakfasting with Peet's coffee at the Boudin mini-bakery, restaurant and gift shop on the pier.  The City was generally quiet, save those who have to work for a living — women in business suits, men carrying briefcases, city employees (some in Santa caps) policing the parking lot.  We decided to drive around aimlessly and then head across the Bay Bridge, which was pretty much the same activity as getting on the bridge requires no small amount of backtracking and wrong turns.  For the next half-hour, we toured neighborhoods of wonderful new and old domiciles, and I kept wondering if we were near CDY's house (of which I think he displayed a photo earlier this year).  We headed into Berkeley (a mandatory stop for the authors of the Travel Guide for Lefties) and promptly got lost among the sari shops and Cambodian cafes.  I actually had to get back on I-80 and head north so that I could turn around and hit University Avenue again.  At the end of that long street we found Cal and meandered around the various buildings, many of them dedicated to Lawrence (as in Lawrence Livermore Labs), though I confess to ignorance about the gentleman.  Having circumnavigated Berkeley twice, I still failed to find Chez Panisse, but I did find the Berkeley Bowl, which is best described as Whole Foods on steroids wearing Birkinstocks.  It's a grocery store housed in what used to be a bowling alley and has the most amazing produce section I've ever seen.  They had 5 kinds of eggplant (including Japanese and Filipino), a dozen varieties of mushroom, exotic Asian lettuces, five or six kinds of banana (babies, red, plantains), and equally diverse selections of just about everything.  Also a killer bakery aisle, fresh soup and salad takeout aisle, organic everything, sushi bar, to-die-for fish market, natural grain-fed beef, free-range poultry and, well, you get the idea.  I had wanted to do a drive-by on Alice Water's famous Chez Panisse, just to show Junie where I once had dinner with only 18 hours to make a reservation (in a joint which is usually booked up a month in advance).  That was 5-6 years ago, when an online poet buddy, Coreybelle, got me a rez on short notice with only my pleading email as motivation.  But, I digress.  Berkeley doesn't seem to have changed much (nor had Santa Cruz, come to think of it), which is not what you can say about the increasingly upscale Boulder.  Junie and I drove back down I-80 and ended up at a client's shop in Sunnyvale, where after a short meeting, we headed over to the Winchester Mystery House.  The Mystery House is a mansion reportedly under near constant construction for decades by the heir to the Winchester fortune, which lady was convinced that all the victims of Winchester rifle mayhem were out to get her, spiritually speaking.  The biggest mystery about The House was finding it, which we did after the usual ping-ponging between freeways.  Then, back to Casa Paulsen for a dinner with the fam-fam at Maurizio's, our collective favorite Italian restaurant in Morgan Hill.  When I last saw Junie, it was at SJC waving to me as I got ready to board a Frontier flight, and she slightly later a NWA hop back to chilly Eau Claire.

I see that 17 boxes of the new MMM issue has arrived in the Many Mountains Moving Storage Facility, so it's time to get contributor copies out.  Also, a new Poetry is in the gigantic pile of mail, including a poem by Mary Ruefle, whom I always like to read.