Santa Barbara, that is.
I’m here for the day for a meeting, and very pretty it is too. The flight down from SF is along the coast all the way, and makes me want to do the drive again.
Santa Barbara Airport is, well, small. I sent this photo to The Mrs, and his response [...]
Happy Election Day ‘08!
They do things differently in this country. My British sensibilities were reared in a country where mostly polling stations are in schools (remember the days off?) or other public buildings.
This morning I woke up to discover that the polling station for my neighbourhood is…
… our house.
I kid you not. The garage underneath [...]
Happy Hallowe’en for yesterday. Hope you had a good and safe one. And Happy November.
Despite living in a fairly residential area and having seen several groups of Trick or Treaters up and down the street, they seemed to keep avoiding our place, so the big basket of sweet things on the hall table was mostly [...]
Last week I spent a morning at my local Social Security office, and today, I have a Social Security Number. I feel oddly like I’ve really arrived and yet also like I’m betraying the old country.
As I waited in the office last week I mentally composed a posting I never got round to that was [...]
Anna’s inspired, Martha Stewart-inspired posting about Halloween kicked me into finally mentioning it myself, more than a week after I originally intended to.
As I’m sure anyone not from the US already knows, Halloween is HUGE in the USA. As Anna did, I started seeing the big bags of seasonal sweets and the plastic pumpkins from [...]
I’m not sure if this is a purely San Franciscan thing, because my attention to fashion trends is somewhere on a level with my attention to Scientologists wanting me to take their ‘personality tests’, but someone, somewhere along the line, seems to have flipped a switch that says “it’s okay to wear sweaters with big [...]
I always thought that was Churchill, but having checked, both Wilde and Shaw offered close approximations earlier.
Anyway, on Friday evening I had my first “oh my god, San Francisco public transport can occasionally be as bad as the London version” moment when the Muni train stopped at a platform for ages with no explanation why. [...]
So my realisation that I’d forgotten about Folsom Street Fair came Sunday afternoon as I sat on a Muni train heading hime after buying a few bits and pieces we needed in the new pace. At Civic Center station a load of people got on and several people looked up as a man in military [...]
One of the things that inevitably comes with moving into somewhere new is learning how everything works; the oddness of light switches in unexpected places, the intricacies of the heating system, the exact position for a cooker dial that will get the pilot light to light the ring, the fact that one key in the [...]
There are some ads that have been running on TV here in the run up to voting in November on the subject of California being an activist state, where people speak out on subjects that exercise them, and I think it’s particularly true of San Francisco.
The reason I mention this is, believe it or [...]
