Anniversary In The City

Ed. – We’re still alive. June was just a busy, tiring month, and the last week or so we’ve either been busy with around-the-house stuff or we’ve been out of town. But we’re still here.

So after two weeks of graveyard, the plant finished apricot season and closed up for two weeks, waiting for peaches to finish ripening and be ready for canning. That means everyone gets laid off for two weeks, which meant Kristi got two weeks off in late June and early July, which meant we got an anniversary! For a long while we didn’t think we would get one. At first we thought the plant would work right through, that she’d be on the 7-days-a-week graveyard until September.

To give you an idea of what that’s like, we sleep in shifts, her waking me at 6am when she comes home from work; I get up, we have breakfast together and then she goes to sleep for the day. I work, tiptoeing around the house all day to keep the house quiet. She wakes at 5pm or so, we have dinner together, she goes to work at 9pm, I go to bed an hour later. Rinse and repeat.

We get, at best, four hours a day together. It’s tough. So when we realized that we would in fact have lots of time together during and around the Independence Day weekend (our wedding anniversary is on the 5th), we knew we would spend some money and get the hell out of town.

We stayed two nights in downtown San Francisco, at the fancy hotel where we spent the first night of our honeymoon. Parked the car at a garage for the weekend, got three-day Muni passes (public transit passes that cover SF buses, rails and cable cars) and armed with a long email from our friend Jen Duarte – a former long-time San Francisco resident – we went out to hunt down off-beaten-path restaurants and sights. I love this town.

The big highlight was the fireworks show over the Bay. The fog was just right, it was cold, and along with fifty thousand other people we found spots out near Pier 39 to watch goofy people do stupid things for three hours before the main event of colorful explosions over Alcatraz. And people-watching entertainment, there was. There was the hoochie-mama party girl in the EXTREMELY tight, short, low-cut dress and four-inch stilettos, waiting freezing in the fifty-nine-degree wind to board a Bay fireworks cruise with her date. And then there was the crowd pleasing, drunk-lesbians-fighting-cops pre-show show out on the pier, complete with screaming and wrestling and relationship drama and incoherent pleadings to be released from handcuffs and to give back MY F’ING IPHONE!.. basically, any time you get that many people together in SF, you’re bound to get some first class entertainment. That’s part of the charm of the city.

The real fun part that night came after the fireworks. All these thousands of people hit the street in search of buses, cabs, cable cars, whatever will get them back to their hotels, homes or cars. And of course all transit options are completely overwhelmed, meaning a flood of warm bodies washing over the streets as people walked home, mostly uphill. After several unsuccessful attempts to find a bus, we gave up and just joined the other Romans on the march back downtown.. it took about an hour, but we finally crawled back into our hotel room just before midnight. Dumped the backpack, locked the door, washed off a days worth of street and collapsed to bed.

The rest of the weekend was pretty laid back. We drove over the Golden Gate, took a spin up around the World War 2 fortifications of the Marin headlands, did some shopping, strolled through the Japanese tea gardens in Golden Gate Park. By Monday morning we were tired and ready to come home and get the animals out of hock.

It was a great weekend. We needed it. We’d barely seen each other for two weeks; we needed to get away together for a few days, reconnect and steel up a bit for the rest of this summer. It’s going to be a long haul.

While Kristi’s working nights, I’ll be pretty much on a seven-day workweek as well. This summer’s been bizarrely, extraordinarily busy for me in terms of client work; the economy’s coming back to life and the phone’s been ringing. I’m also planning to take another serious stab at writing a book this summer – I’ll update here on that as it develops. And we’ll also work on Kristi’s travel copywriting portfolio this summer.

Thanks to everyone who asked after us to make sure we’re okay. My parents, her parents, my brother, her sister, Natalie, Disa, Jen and Matias and Katie, Heather, Mere. Our thoughts, prayers and general good wishes go out to Nate; you’re welcome over for dinner anytime, dude. We’re happy that Nate, Brad and Bob found a good place to live. Our best wishes (and regrets for not being there) go out to newlywed Shannon. We’re glad that Em’s blood pressure is finally getting under control and that she’s in good health. We’re happy that Aaron’s out of the hospital and is healthy; we’re keeping tabs on Wendy through Facebook and hope everything’s going well with her and her family. It seems like we’re all, in our own ways, slogging our way through a rough and tumble 2009.

We’re still trucking. More later.