3 March 2002

Hi.

I've been up for awhile and already had lunch. I'm just draggin' today. We walked and walked and walked yesterday -- up the Embarcadero, all around Alcatraz, over to Ghirardelli Square, back down to the Embarcadero BART station. Much walking. Which was fun and cool and all, but I haven't gotten much sleep all weekend, and Scott had to get to the airport for a 7:56 flight this morning. And BART doesn't go that way yet (and probably wouldn't go that early on a Sunday if it did). So by 7:15, I had been to the airport and returned and was a zombie. Beat-down, dog-tired, and half-daid, as Jen would say. But it was definitely worth it.

Talked to Michelle this morning so far, and I'm waiting for the folks to call. Finished reading Island of the Sequined Love Nun and I'm going to start The Glorious Ones by Francine Prose. I really need writing time, but I'm not quite up to it right now, being as how my head is wrapped in a sleepy stupor.

So I did the pictures from this weekend, and you can look at them while I get my head together. We went to the Rodin Sculpture Garden at Stanford on Thursday.

This is called "Prayer." I liked that association.

Here's Scott at the gates of hell. Good place to take visitors, gates of hell.

Here's me with the Caryatid. This is the statue from Stranger in a Strange Land, for those of you who keep up with such things. I took the picture to say neener neener to Michelle, who is home reading Ulysses even as I write this and thus needs no further torment from me or anyone else.

On Friday we went to the Bay Model. Go there. It's cool. This is only a small chunk of it; this is where we noticed that my batteries were not so good. Scott was taking pictures, though, and he said he'd get them developed on CD, so I hope to have some of them soon. (Scott is not reading Ulysses and thus is fair game to torment.)

And now we're up to yesterday. I didn't take any pictures of the stuff on the Embarcadero, because I didn't want to encourage most of the people in thinking that they were doing anything remotely cool. I did miss the barfing duck signs once again, but I think my Alcatraz pictures are much better than the barfing duck signs, and I had run out of room on my camera.

As we're coming in....

Here's Mark and Scott with Angel Island visible behind them. We're going to go to Angel Island before we leave the Bay Area. The history there is fascinating, and I can do my little Chinese immigration history rant at people, which is always a happy thing. For me, anyway. The other people, the rantees, one might say, perhaps not so much so.

The East Bay from Alcatraz, with the Bay Bridge showing (if your monitor is big enough).

We went inside the cell block at that point.

People lived in there.

Mark with a cell. This was in the block they didn't use for actual prisoners -- we speculated it was because the cells were so spacious. Bigger than the dorm rooms in Wahlstrom!

Those of you who didn't go to Gustavus might think I was joking, but we each have lived in 6x10 cells, plus closets.

This is the view the prisoners would have seen as they went out into the recreation yard, spreading out below.

The Golden Gate Bridge as seen from the recreation yard.

Here's me with the burned-out remains of the warden's house. It burned when the Indians of All Tribes had taken over Alcatraz for 19 months. Which is a really nifty story and has sparked a science fiction story idea that has nothing to do with Native Americans at all, but it's still pretty neat.

The Alcatraz lighthouse. Story idea here, too, but it's Timprov's, not mine.

Here's Mark with the Golden Gate behind him.

The City and the Bridge. This is another of the "Oh, yeah, this is really where I live" moments.

The ruins of one of the houses the guards lived in. Look! We have ruins in America, too! Really! It's kind of old. Sort of.

Early spring is a good time to visit Alcatraz.

Fence and bridge and stuff.

I liked this point, too.

Yerba Buena Island, the bits of the Bay Bridge, and so on.

So. It was a good day, we had ice cream but took no pictures of it, and we found a little garden off the Embarcadero on our walk back. It was definitely worth going. I'd recommend it.

I'm going to go be tired now. I just realized this is a really picture-heavy page. I'm sorry about this, for those of you who had to wait forever and a year for the page to download.

Oh, hey. It's my parents' anniversary. 29 years. Be nice to them.