Fall! Fall?

So, it's officially Fall now, with the first day of the autumnal equinox being, well, yesterday. Not that you'd know it. Because here in Sacramento, it's hot. Like, 98 degrees. And no, that's not a 1990's-era boy band reference.

So instead of sweltering away in the the valley dust bowl, I went last Friday afternoon to (where else) San Francisco. What a change! As it always is. It was cool. No, cold. I actually put on pants at one point. Um...in place of shorts. I swear I wasn't wandering around in my underwear. Not that that would seem much out of place there. It shouldn't be out of place here, it's so hot. 

But as usual, it was a lovely day by the bay enjoying the fresh coastal air. I hit Ghirardelli Square for my usual Nob Hill Chill, hit the Sports Bar on Columbus Avenue for a $4 happy-hour beer, and generally just tottered around the city trying not to look like a tourist. I shouldn't be, after all the time I've spent there. I'm practically a local. In my mind anyway. I could get used to that weather, anyway.

It was even so cold that on the way back towards my car, after dinner at a sit down pizzeria, I stopped and got a hot chocolate at Starbucks. A large hot chocolate. Quite a step up from my normal medium-sized order. Starbucks, incidentally, has moved into one of the little container shops that have been erected a little ways down from Pier 39. I'm not sure if anyone is aware of it, as there was no one in the store but me.

Unfortunately just a little while later, I spilled almost the entire hot chocolate while trying to get a nice photograph of the antique fishing boats. There's a small window at dusk where the light just pops on your photos, turning things otherwise commonplace in something almost ethereal. And you just have to stop what you're doing and take advantage of it. Even if at great expense. But I blame the wind for my mishap, in all honesty. 

So, the hot chocolate was a loss. I drank maybe a quarter of it before The Accident. A seagull made off with the lid. I have no idea what he intended to do with it. One man's trash is another bird's treasure, apparently. The cup, I salvaged for the nearest trash can.

And the walk of shame back to my car was otherwise uneventful. Actually, I don't think anyone actually saw me spill it. Except for a homeless man camped out on the boardwalk. He muttered something incomprehensible to me. I didn't stop to try and interpret. 

It was dark by the time I started for home - the downside of the fall season is its increasingly shortening days. It's now dark when I get up at 6pm, and dark long before Connor's bedtime at 8:30pm. And hot in-between. But we did get some rain at the beginning of last week. Yes! Actual moisture from the sky! It does in fact exist, and has not fallen into the realm of legend. At least that is a sign, of sorts, that the Fall is nigh. Hopefully, just around the corner. 

If nothing else, I'm so ready for the daytime temperatures to drop below 90. Where are you Fall!

Decompression

Here's a picture of a silhouette of trees. Because, why not? Honestly, I wasn't even going to post a picture on this one. Nothing I've seen lately has seemed worthy of a photograph. No moment worthy of being frozen in time, immortalized in digital format. Everything has been kind of...blah.

Thank goodness iPhones have such poor color matching; the dull blue and faint haze of smoke in the distance turned into a really orange to lavender transition here. So it goes.

Anyways, I went for a walk, as I so often do, mostly to decompress tonight after two full days of school back in session. Not that it was that trying, really, but it's certainly a change from the past year and a half. And it was a nice cool evening, the first in a long time where temperatures dipped below 80 at sunset. Thank goodness again. 

It hasn't been difficult to tell that the world is not quite back to normal. An don't because everyone everywhere on campus is wearing masks, and everywhere you turn there's another hand sanitizer dispenser staring you down. The traffic has been noticeable lighter than it was. Before Covid. Parking has been much easier on campus than it was. Before Covid. Less eateries are open on campus than there were. Before Covid.  Seems like a pattern, doesn't it? This marker will be a benchmark for the state of society for awhile. 

So, yeah, the first two days of school were mild by comparison to what I've been accustomed to as being "the norm" in previous years. We're there, onsite, as we have been for years. But it's not quite the same. And maybe it's just me, but the students seem to have gotten even younger. Or else I'm just getting older. Surely that's the real cause, but I prefer to waver in my sensibilities and cling to a smidge of denial.

The mind is younger than the body.

But just three more days before the first week will be in the books. And three more weeks till the start of fall. And maybe in three months there construction will conclude on my new townhome, and I can be moved in before the holiday season begins. Maybe maybe maybe.

For now, I'm relaxed, at home, in bed, and about to call it a night. And day three will greet us soon enough. 

So It Begins

Well, here we are at a juncture in time that we knew would come. That we knew must come. Sometime. Eventually. We've been waiting for this for over 15 months. It's the eve of the start of the fall semester, and we are finally returning to something resembling normal. Well, more or less.

Tomorrow students will flock to campus to begin their baccalaureate adventures at Sac State. It won't be quite like it was before, as there's still a smattering of classes being held online. And students and staff and faculty will be required to wear masks indoors. And who knows if all the campus features will be open and available. Yet.

Last week was a dry run for us, more or less, as marching band camp returned for the first time since 2019. Students returned! Dozens of people graced my office in search of lockers and keys and so on. Round Table and Jamba Juice and Starbucks were open in the Student Union. Students began moving back into the dorms. Progress!

We'll see how long things last. The world still isn't quite right, and people still spook easily at the slightest hint of a cough. A lot of people think it will shut down again, as soon as people start contracting Covid again. And they probably will, just like they contract the flu and the common cold and on and on. Every year. That's our normal.

But for now, some amount of positivity permeates the clouds of doubt (though those could be clouds of smoke from the fires in the Sierra). We're planning on offering live concerts with live audiences this fall, and tickets have gone on sale. Ensembles will be rehearsing with a more or less normal in-house capacity. And I have returned to full time onsite, for two weeks now already. Boy, is it tough getting back to normal! We all got soft this past year with reduced workloads and working from home. 

But come tomorrow morning, we'll see if things looks and feel like normal. I've been watching a slow but steady stream of emails arrive at my inbox all weekend, students needing lockers and keys and volunteer paperwork and parking permits and on and on. So I expect it will be a busy day tomorrow...just like the start of a semester used to be. Before Covid.

Here goes year 23!

Wannabe Farms

I'm writing tonight,
though not much in prose.

I'm not much a poet,

as everyone knows.

I went to the store

and found a new book.

It seemed rather funny, 

so I took a look.

The book was of animals

who lived on a farm.

They had great aspirations,

but meant no one harm.

The animals, you see,

they had great big dreams.

To live more like humans

would be great, so it seems.

They tried to achieve

but it always went wrong.

They were just regular animals,

it did not take long.

But what they did find

at the end of the day.

Was a great sense of calm;

and they went on their way,

Such is the synopsis of a book I found randomly in a bargain bin at the local supermarket: "Wannabe Farms" by Brian McCann. A nice little hardbound book telling stories of animals with wild dreams of being more like humans. And of course, it went wrong. And yet, they found peace and tranquility at the end of the day and found peace in their own way. Kind of a nice narrative on chasing dreams and finding something good at the end of the road, even if it wasn't what you expected when you started. 

I suppose it would be most correctly characterized as a humor book, yet it also works well as a children's book. I've been reading a chapter each night to Connor.

The thing that sold me on it? A little blurb from a review on the front cover: "...comedy that a seven-year-old and a middle aged man will both find hilarious." Well, that describes us to a tee. Not that age in itself should be the best criteria for appreciating a book. But it is pretty good, actually, and for $5 I really can't complain. 

Tonight's chapter: "The Day the Sheep Wanted to Become Barbers (It's Literally Impossible, By the Way, So It Was a Huge Mess!)" Tomorrow's will be: "The Day the Horses Decided  They Could Make the Farm More Successful (Did You Guess Total Disaster? You're Right!)"

I can't wait for bed time tomorrow!

 

Hot Hot Hot

So, I'm sitting up late on a Tuesday evening, relishing in the fact that I'm not currently melting into the sheets of my bed. It's been hot, ladies and gentlemen. Damn hot. We hit 109 last week! Today was an aberration in the trend, as it *only* got to 88 today. Last week there were several days in a row well over 100, and it appears next week we'll return to that again.

It's a great time of year for ice cream, which of course I procured on my regular mecca to San Francisco last week. Where, in fact, it was only 74 degrees. And breezy to boot. And yes, I know this ice cream cone looks small. My hands are big...that must be it.  It was from that little classic VW bus that hangs out around the Marina District, selling their home-churned flavors. They called this a "double smidge"! There's actually two sizes smaller below this...but it's okay. Being this small, I felt justified in getting a Ben & Jerry's milkshake later on. After a 12 mile walk which included a round-trip trek across the Golden Gate Bridge.

It was almost too cold for ice cream in San Francisco. Can y9u believe it? Almost too cold. It's hard to imagine as we sit here sweltering in the Sacramento heat. 

When did it get so hot in the central valley of California?? I don't remember this as a child. It never seemed that hot. So either I was cheerfully delusional in my youth, or we've become a poster child of sorts for global warming. It seemed easy to demonstrate global warming just by looking at the receding ice and glaciers in places like Alaska, which I've seen firsthand. But this is a little too close to home. And yet no one seems to really catch onto this, how it's just warmer and drier and the winters are shorter and on and on. At least they don't seem to notice. Maybe they're afraid to notice.

And of course, the planet ebbs and flows naturally over the millennia, despite our interference, as it has for millions of years. Ice ages come and go. I remember in school years ago learning about how we're basically at the hind end of the last ice age, in the grand scope of things. Or at least we were. Not sure if we've passed over the threshold where we're no longer waning, but rather waxing into something else. Oh, if only I could be immortal, to exist long enough to see the return of the next ice age. Though such extremes should not be needed just to get a reprieve from the Sacramento summer weather. 

Well, there's always San Francisco. It's just too hot here.

End of the Month Already?

Well I felt I just HAD to do a post today. Not just because it's Memorial Day and the end of a holiday weekend. But really because it's the very last day of May, and I realized I haven't written all month. Where does all the time go?

Well I suppose this will end up being a recap of sorts. We're still deep in the Covid bubble, but things have been improving steadily as of late. We're expecting that by June 15, restrictions will be eased up significantly and we may be able to plan for a normal fall semester. Well, closer to normal anyway. At least, not as ridiculous as the last two semesters have been.

But yes, the semester is over at Sac State. We made it through, somehow, and students still did their recitals and graduated and went through Carmencement - the drive through commencement organized by Sac State. I'm not entirely sure how this summer is going to go, as once again we have no summer camps going on. So the workload, which plummeted in March 2020, continues to sit near the bottom of a chasm. 

Today was hot. Quite hot. TOO hot. It was the first 100 degree day of 2021 I believe, and it sure felt like it. We haven't gotten much rain this season, so I fear this summer will be long and dry and full of wildfires. Great. Just what we needed.

 

But I started off this morning bright and early at 7:00 AM with a 4-mile bike ride to Old Town, followed by a 5 mile walk along the River Walk in West Sac and around downtown Sacramento a little bit. I had never actually done the River Walk on that side of the Tower Bridge, so it was a new experience. And although the day promised to be impossibly hot, the morning was still quite nice, at that early hour anyway. But I was actually looking for a little breakfast. Finally found a Subway that was open, after passing by a couple that were closed. And then I finished off my early morning escapade with a 4-mile bike ride back home. I was actually home by 10:00 AM, and even at that early hour, it was hot. Quite hot. TOO hot.

So, I regret to admit that I've spent the rest of the day cooped up at home with the air conditioner conservatively set at 79 and yet struggling to keep up. I did do laundry, so that was something. And I read a bit. Napped a bit. Ate a bit. Typically holiday repertoire. 

And now, as the sun is dropping low on the horizon and the temperature is plummeting to a less balmy 99 degrees, I suppose I should show some initiative and get outside for so (more or less) fresh air and exercise. I'm still admittedly a little sore from the two days in a row of bowling, first on Connor's little playdate and then with just the two of us (he really really really wanted to go again). It's amazing sometimes how your body protests things it used to do with regular gusto. Lack of consistency mixed with getting older, I guess. I am not going to age gracefully, but rather kicking and screaming. 

Well, unless I'm too sore or tired for all that, in which case I'll probably just take a nap.

But that about wraps up May, now onto June! The month I should be moving into my new townhome, which was delayed from the end of March, and is now postponed to the end of October. But that's another story for another time.

Goodbye May!