The other night a couple of friends and I were sitting around talking burritos because if you live in San Francisco, this just happens. Mexican food is major to us but burritos are our everything. If you live in the Mission, you can discuss burritos for hours. Everyone has a favorite spot or two and […]
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My dog ReeRee’s seemingly super natural ability to have explosive and unpredictable diarrhea throughout the day, saved her life and brought her into our care. Her tormentor, the abuser that she lived with in a small studio apartment, couldn’t take it anymore. When she finally realized that cursing and hitting ReeRee wouldn’t put a stop […]
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San Francisco is dirty. Really dirty and it’s only gotten worse during the pandemic. When the tent city was up on my block during the lockdown the trash got really bad. For some reason SF didn’t think they should put up a dumpster to collect the tent people’s trash so the people living in the […]
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Years ago I broke my two front teeth snowboarding. I wasn’t doing anything rad and awesome, I was actually guffawing at a joke my brother had made. I threw my head back laughing as we walked, carrying our boards to the lift, then threw my head forward right into the metal edge of my board. […]
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A few weeks ago my friend Andrea called to tell me about her crow. She could see him from her bedroom window. He was living in her neighbor’s yard. He was hopping up and down and flapping his wings but was unable to take flight. “I think it’s okay.” She told me. “He’s surrounded by […]
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Sometimes, when I walk by a barking dog waiting outside a grocery store, I’ll stop and keep him or her company until the owner comes out. It calms the dog’s anxiety down and allows the owner to shop in peace without worrying about annoying everyone in the neighborhood with their barking dog. A couple of […]
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It’s summer, time for berry pie! For a few years I had an illegal pie cart called Pie Fridays http://www.piefridays.com) . I’d wheel it out onto the streets of San Francisco every weekend. I made all sorts of pies from Key Lime to Double Chocolate Raspberry Crumble. But I always loved the berry pies in […]
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If you’re going to have a household accident that causes facial disfigurement or scarring, I would suggest that you should have that accident during a worldwide pandemic. Recently, while making Pupusas, hot oil splashed out of the pan and scattered all over my face, barely missing my eye. I now have large purple blotches and […]
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I knew the virus was coming for us. It started in China in 2019 and by February 2020 it was in Europe. Italy and Spain were completely in lockdown. Public health officials kept warning that San Francisco was two weeks behind Italy. In two weeks we would have more sick and dying than Italy if […]
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I’m a loud talker, my voice just travels. It’s probably not genetic though, my family jokes that it’s because the sister closest to me in age became hearing impaired in childhood so I subconciously just started talking loud so she could hear me. In the 70’s and 80’s some butcher doctors invented a surgery for […]
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Back in the 1800’s, when the pioneers trudged across the Great Plains to build their new life on their homestead, they had to survive any way they could, they were on their own. When a woman got pregnant, she’d just have to get through it and pray for a safe delivery. Injured? Whelp, you’d better […]
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For a few months I had been reading on Twitter about some kind of epidemic over in China that doctors and experts that tracked that sort of thing seemed to be really freaking out about. They’d tweet out statistics and graphs trying to alert us regular people about how dangerous it was and how there […]
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Every year in San Francisco there is an “Escape From Alcatraz” triathlon. The athletes start on Alcatraz island and swim 1.4 miles in the bay’s icy waters until they reach a beach in the Marina District where a crowd of on lookers form a runway of receiving lines that the swimmers run through high fiving […]
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I’m not proud to admit that I worked for years at a bar/restaurant that was so seedy that we employees nicknamed it “The Rat Spot”. I won’t say what street it was on because anyone that has lived in SF will immediately know the actual name of the place. When I worked there, the Mission […]
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So Britt recently had a very unfashionable day and I’m pretty much totally to blame. He walked in from work after a full day as an electrician and I ask him, “Is that what you wore today???” He’s like, “Ya, I met with clients.” Met with clients??? Oh my god. “What??” He asks me. I […]
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I pulled into the alley and stopped at my apartment’s back gate to load my boards into my truck. I sighed when I saw a guy at the fence, a few feet from my gate, squatting down and hunched over something on the ground. “Oh gross.” I thought to myself, assuming he was a drug […]
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James was a bartender at the restaurant where I worked as a dishwasher and line cook. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. He was like a sculpture or a model. He was the only person I had ever met that actually worked out in a gym and was compulsively healthy, always […]
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I was still a teenager, maybe 18, when I was living in San Francisco in a large Victorian flat on the third floor. My roommates were all adults in their 30’s and all except one were lesbians that were cool and powerful and fixed their motorbikes on the sidewalk downstairs. I was very intimidated by […]
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While jogging on the beach last week I noticed a seagull standing alone, further up on the beach than the other seagulls that were all eating big crabs left over from high tide at the water line. As I ran past I realized that he was holding his foot up, just resting his toe on […]
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I hate lettuce on sandwiches and hamburgers because it is always applied wrong. When done wrong lettuce is a second thought put on in the rush of burger and sandwich making. “For the crunch.” People mumble to themselves as they stick a leaf of limp, veiny, green, solidified watery vegetable onto the mayonnaise of their […]
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The first time I saw someone get shot I was about 16 or 17 and had moved into my San Francisco neighborhood the year before. SF’s Mission District at that time, was a little bit like the wild west. Gangs, shootings, stabbings, trash everywhere, needles, heroin addicts nodding off standing up, while trying not to […]
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I went to move my truck for street cleaning this morning a little before nine. In my peripheral vision I saw what seemed to be a homeless lady that was maybe a little bit nutty, walking towards me in a pretty rose colored short bathrobe and white slippers. Well those aren’t going to stay clean […]
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Last week Britt and I went to a wedding. It was a quintessentially American wedding in that it joined two people, with two different cultures and heritages together. At this wedding a first generation Chinese/Vietnamese American bride was marrying an Irishman that had only just arrived here a few years ago. Speaking with a strong […]
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On Thursday Britt woke up with a sore throat. “God Dammit,” he said. “I’m sick.” “What??? It’s summer time. Get away from me though.” I told him. “You know who gave it to me?” he asked. “ A little kid?” “Dr. Coolum.” “The root canal dentist?” “Ya, he was coughing and had sniffles the whole […]
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We kept ReeRee for Jasmine’s sake. Jasmine loved her obsessively from the moment she met her. Ree Ree helped Jasmine to forget all her fears. When they were together Jasmine no longer refused to go down stairs, or get out of the car at the beach, walk down a city sidewalk, frozen with fear. With […]
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It’s been a difficult few months for me for a bunch of reasons that I think I’ll get into as time goes on but for now I’m looking for some input from anyone who feels they grew up in a fairly stable and loving household that helped form them into a stable and kind adult. […]
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How do you figure out you have no self esteem if you have no self esteem to tell you? I started a plant and garden care business at twenty one because I hated working for people and also I was never going to get hired for anything other than low paying, soul sucking jobs. At […]
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First of all, I hate crowds so I really can’t stand crowded yoga classes. But I’m really trying to do two yoga classes a week because it calms my mind, makes me more focused and reduces sports injuries. So today, since I hadn’t done my second yoga class, I forced myself to go to a […]
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The police would always come up behind me and quietly stand in my blind spot, waiting for me to notice them. I’d follow my suddenly silent pie customer’s eyes and turn to find them standing there. They were always very polite and kind but it would kill my business for that night. My line of […]
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Everybody talks about fresh cut fries like they’re a good thing but in reality, almost always, they are just okay. Ya, if you get them seconds out of the fryer when they are still soft and piping hot then they’re fine but that is rarely what happens. Or, what if you’re like me and want […]
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I walked by an inspiring blackbird in a parking lot the other day. His foot was perfectly severed and had healed back cleanly, with no clumpy scar left over so his leg looked like a piece of dry spaghetti, except it was black. And he didn’t care at all. He was just hopping around in […]
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On New Year’s Day, my husband Britt and I drove our dogs out to San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. We parked next to a guy that was about to go surf the jumbly, stormy waves. Out of the back of his truck he pulled out an orange soft top board. Britt and I exchanged eye rolls. […]
Read more »A couple of years ago, outside of my apartment, a pigeon flew past me frantically flapping his wings but barely being able to fly higher than about my shoulder. A pink plastic bag was attached to his foot. With each attempt to fly, just as he was becoming airborne, the bag would fill with air […]
Read more »I saw this dad walking along Valencia street one morning. The giant toddler he was carrying was actually bigger than I drew him because I thought it would look like I was exaggerating. I don’t know if the dad was short or the toddler had exceptionally long legs but I swear to god his legs […]
Read more »I woke up to an orange sky and a heavy brown haze hanging over the city. Smoke from a fire a few hundred miles away was pressing down on San Francisco. For the second year in a row I dawned my dust mask every time I left the house and a coating of ash settled […]
Read more »Last week a couple of American cities were wiped out from a giant hurricane. The people in Florida are still in desperate need of help so please visit AmericanRedCross.org if you’d like to help. I watched Hurricane Michael on TV as it was coming to shore. It pulled sheets of steel off of gymnasiums, uprooted […]
Read more »I took a walk early one morning in a nice neighborhood up the hill from mine. Half way through, I came upon two crows eating a rat. Of course I was totally grossed out but also worried because maybe the rat had been poisoned.
Read more »I used to take care of a lonely cockatoo named Buddy. His home was a greenhouse in the backyard of his owner’s house that was rarely there. I was supposed to clean his glass house and feed him when Tony, the owner, was out of town. At first I was terrified of the big bird […]
Read more »Pitbulls were once known as the Nanny Dog and the dog of the working class people. It was the most common type of dog in America. The pitbull’s warm and sensitive nature and interest in pleasing their owner is why they are beloved pets but it is also why they are taken advantage of by […]
Read more »In celebration of our new leader, Vlad, and also as a refreshing relief from the long hot summer, here is a recipe for the delicious adult beverage, The Moscow Mule! I reached out to the recently indicted Russian spy—oops I mean student, Maria Butina in her DC jail where she is awaiting trial and she […]
Read more »San Francisco has a poo problem. Not a dog poo problem, we have a very large dog poo police force here where you can be bending down about to scoop up your dogs poo and some poo policeman will ask, “Are you going to pick that up?” Or more passive aggressively they’ll ask, “Do […]
Read more »A guy on a motorcycle passed me yesterday by driving around me on the wrong side of the road. I glanced over at him and saw the he was wearing a helmet, a leather jacket and flip flops. The flip flops made me cringe. My mind flashed back to the motorcycle accident that happened outside […]
Read more »***I am not a doctor! This is not medical advice, just my personal life experience! Please just go to a doctor, thanks!*** ___________________________________________________________________________ I didn’t have health insurance for about twelve years. During this time I tried to eat right, exercise and prayed I wouldn’t get into an accident. I became really good […]
Read more »I consider my high top Vans to be my dress shoe and my Adidas shell toes to be my casual shoe.
Read more »Britt and I were enjoying one of the last warm days of fall, sitting in the water at Ocean Beach, waiting for a wave, when we saw it. At first we thought it was a rogue local storm raining down in the water south of us. But it was moving and reshaping itself unlike any […]
Read more »I recently witnessed the greatest moment of work rebellion ever. You know when you’re at work and you’re like, “No one’s the boss of me. You may have my physical body for the next 8 hours, but you can’t have my mind.” ? It was basically that sentiment being acted out with a six wheel […]
Read more »I’ve had a dream of growing grass in my mud pit of a backyard ever since I got my big, glorious dog Jasmine. Her two favorite things to do are relaxing and luxuriating and relaxing and luxuriating on grass. So this September I dug out all the useless clay soil around my patio and replaced […]
Read more »One morning last year, I got up before dawn to move my truck so I wouldn’t get a street cleaning ticket. I swung the door open and gasped. There he was, my neighbor’s raccoon. She had told me recently that there was a family of them living under her house. He was sitting on my […]
Read more »I was waiting at a stop light one afternoon when a big hawk dropped out of the sky in front of my windshield. He snatched a pigeon out of mid air and landed with it on the roof of a car next to me. The light turned green and I drove away still watching the […]
Read more »Years ago a little Brazilian shop opened up next to the place I do yoga. The owner happened to live down the block from me and I would see her and her little black and white dog, PePe walking to the store each day. He was a blocky little Chihuahua mix that liked his freedom. […]
Read more »This weird thing happened a few months ago near my apartment. I saw a butt. It was shining in the sun on the sidewalk about a block away from me. People were walking by, glancing curiously at the butt and then moving on. A few gross guys were lingering, standing too close and discussing the […]
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