these days of leiderhosen

My friends Bianca and Jon are doing the AIDS Lifecycle Bike Ride ( 7-day, 545-mile bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles). Should you feel the urge to make a donation to the effort, just follow the links. My kind of valentine . Pass the climbing rope. After work I'm meeting The Steven in the City for some theater at the ACT in San Francisco . It's a comedy, just when I am in the mood for one! Despite not buying into the whole Valentine's thing, there will be special eats tomorrow (if for no other purpose than to avoid the over-perfumed crowds): creme brulee and osso bucco (nothing says "I tolerate your mood swings" like twenty six bucks worth of meat.) If I am very lucky: We expect to (cough. cough.) hit the San Francisco Annual Pillow Figh t tomorrow, if I can just find the seam ripper and the old feather pillows. I'd love to have you all there. ummmmmmmm... This one particularly creepy. Is it a balding child in short pants or an adult wearing boxer...

A Leiderhosen Alert has been sent in from Catmum in scenic Monterey. (She's knit 1.83 miles so far this year.)

It's a shiny clear cold morning with the moon setting over the bay, with our bright orange bridge right smack in the middle of all that beauty. With the rain yesterday it's all shiny and nice smelling. On the way to work (for some unknown reason, I got off the bus early and walked through the empty campus to get my eucalyptus fix. Nothing says San Francisco like the smell of eucalyptus leaves. The rug I am knitting is out of Heather's Special Olympics tee shirts. I have about 50 pounds of tee shirts, all of them large or extra large so I can cut a lot of mileage out of them. It's been a year and a half since she died and when I am indulgent, I sit on the living room floor with my face buried in the smell of these shirts. It's still hard. Joining: I've gone and joined the Lazy Stupid Godless group on Ravelry . Inspiring bunch of knitters and uninhibited with their expressions. Loooooaaaaads of fun! Today they are talking about their fathers (past/present), both...

It's raining again; the sunset was fantastic. Listening to: Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, sensitively read by the velvet voiced knitterati Brenda Dayne of Cast-On Podcast. Scorsese gets the Leiderhosen Seal of Approval for filming such an detailed novel in 1993. Just the furtinure details outs Wharton as an interior decorator. Knitting: A rug made of Special Olympics t-shirts. Big project....Big! Itching to make: Souffle, chocolate or otherwise . Reading: Pagan and Christian Rome (Lanciani) on Gutenberg.org. Someone posted up the whole book complete with images links and maps. Love love love the web. Jess just called. The tragedy of being young sweet and beautiful must be so many clueless dudes perpetually trying to pick one up when one is obviously trying to write one's dissertation. In Emeryville. At the Mall. In celebration of Darwin's birthday, The Voyage of the Beagle is available for your listening pleasure at Librivox.org; a significant chunk of this ...

Our department is home to the World's Worst Administrative Assistant. This Morning's Drama: Exploding coke can in the freezer, Part III. "Oh. I like it real cold." (Thank gawd I have a change of clothes.) I will not go out and beat her senseless with my red stapler. I. Will. Not.

The Vatican has announced temporal indulgences are back , with a limit on one per day. I can't help but think this is some kind of sin oriented boy scout merit badges. If a guide book is required you can buy the Manual of Indulgences on Amazon.com for $13.95, but that's only if you're into the self-flagellation of delegating your relationship to the Divine and need the Catholic Church to intercede on your behalf. Which, honestly, I can't see round to as you are plenty clever and too interesting to outsource your soul like that. So go out and do some something that would give His Prada Clad Holy German Squishiness a case of the vapors. And then tell your Aunt Leiderhosen all about it. I love this ceramic artist. The "ants in my creamer piece" is such a bit of understated genius: Elegant and creepy. Valentine's day is coming up (speaking of flagellation) or Singles Awareness Day. Typically I'd grouse AGAIN about my loathing of this particular day, b...

Tracy Kwan writes about post crash domination at the Daily Beast. Tracy's great, although not much of a novelist. In the perfect world she'd teach domination basics to every female then we might be getting somewhere as far as getting the opposite sex into listening to us. Outside: Raining and dark. Smells nice. TCM Rotation: Moonstruck . Steven's first Zen Teacher Genki's favorite movie was Moonstruck. Cher was never more charming and Nicolas Cage was never more itchy and endearing. Big eighties hair all 'round. Drinking: Highland Park 12 year Single Malt Scotch. It's nice. Not too peaty which can make a perfectly civilized scotch into slurping on moist burnt earth. This was recommended on the San Francisco Spirits Award in the search for an alternate to the now elusive Trader Joe's 15 year. Big event: floors mopped. The house smells of rain, rhubarb and cinnamon and it all makes bare feet worthwhile. Noshing: the homemade ricotta w/ a little maple sy...