d'oh! *embarrassed*
Jul. 16th, 2023 18:36![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ursamajorSorry I confused people with some of my posts this week! I'm currently going back and integrating old posts from various other dying blog hosts/social media into my Dreamwidth so that they're all in one stable place. I didn't realize they were showing up in the contemporary feed on reading pages, though :( Have found the tickeh that needs checking now to prevent that, though, and will do so going forward.
A more general life update - we're coming up on four years in the Bay Area. We've survived the pandemic thus far through whatever combination of vaxxing and masking have brought us, along with I'm sure a decent helping of luck; even our more careful friends and family are more likely than not to have gone through a bout, it seems. We're lucky being outdoors is a good social option for us most of the year. We still need to buy some patio furniture to facilitate this, though; right now, we have two random chairs on our porch and that's the grand sum of our outdoor seating for grownups.
hyounpark and I joined the Oakland Symphony Chorus in January. The masking (everyone at every rehearsal and performance except the conductor) and vaxxing (must be vaccinated) policies convinced us the relative risk was in line with our risk budget, and it's been lovely. We had our first performance with them in May, a commission from Martin Rokeach about the Flint autoworkers strike: Bodies on the Line. Timely libretto by Rebecca Engle, too - we were thinking about Amazon warehouse workers and Starbucks baristas because so many of the same lines about overwork and suffering and solidarity we sang about Chevy autoworkers have prominent modern-day counterparts. I wish it was available to hear more widely; H and I still sing parts at each other around the house.
I'm finding my social slow bike people. I found out about local Friday coffee rides where we meet up at a different BART station every week and then ride a few miles to a nearby breakfast place with a patio, where only about half of us drink coffee while the rest of us focus on food and tea. It's absolutely been a social lifesaver. When we first moved out here, we thought we had plenty of time to start establishing social routines with old friends while making new ones. Seven months later, we found ourselves in lockdown, Zoom and walks our only social outlets. Even after the original rounds of vaccines, most of the people we know nearby are parents, and too tied down by kid needs and schedules to lift their heads above water more than occasionally. Thankfully, I found out about the coffee rides on Instagram, figured out how to get my bike on BART, and now I have a standing Friday morning "there are friendly people who like biking and are being covid-cautious enough for me" meetup :)
It's also been good for starting to piece together the local bike network, patchy as it is. The Ohlone Greenway runs right through our neighborhood, providing a jogging corridor for H and a safer biking corridor for me, but also access for us to local shops and the farmers markets and restaurants and the train into Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco without having to get into the car. I learned how to take my bike on BART just about a decade after BART first put bike storage areas on its trains, and it's opened up a lot more of the area to me. I learned how to ride the Wiggle to get to the Panhandle, Golden Gate Park, and the GreatHighWalkway. I've taken my bike on the ferry. I pester my local shops and city councillors to get more bike parking and safe biking infrastructure, as most of the local cities and towns have proclaimed the importance of addressing climate change and environmental issues amid our housing and transportation crises (whoever coined the "polycrisis" term recently hit it on the head), but are struggling with the political will to make the changes necessary to ensure long-term sustainability. But mostly? I hop on my bike and almost always come home with food, whether that's produce from the farmers' market, pastries from a popup bakery, packages of takeout, or a proper grocery run. Which is exactly how I like it.
I miss late night bookstore dates, though. Our closest indie bookstore (about a 45 minute walk away, or 15 minutes on an infrequent daytime only bus, but not easy to get to on my geared-for-the-flats-of-Boston three-speed) closes at 6 pm, and others near-ish-by not much later than that. San Francisco understands bookstores as nightlife a little better, particularly once you get out of downtown and into the more human-scale neighborhoods, with more bookstores closing at 8, 9, 10 pm, but. I miss Harvard Books, even though I could only make it to 9 pm when I was there in June. Aging, man.
A more general life update - we're coming up on four years in the Bay Area. We've survived the pandemic thus far through whatever combination of vaxxing and masking have brought us, along with I'm sure a decent helping of luck; even our more careful friends and family are more likely than not to have gone through a bout, it seems. We're lucky being outdoors is a good social option for us most of the year. We still need to buy some patio furniture to facilitate this, though; right now, we have two random chairs on our porch and that's the grand sum of our outdoor seating for grownups.
hyounpark and I joined the Oakland Symphony Chorus in January. The masking (everyone at every rehearsal and performance except the conductor) and vaxxing (must be vaccinated) policies convinced us the relative risk was in line with our risk budget, and it's been lovely. We had our first performance with them in May, a commission from Martin Rokeach about the Flint autoworkers strike: Bodies on the Line. Timely libretto by Rebecca Engle, too - we were thinking about Amazon warehouse workers and Starbucks baristas because so many of the same lines about overwork and suffering and solidarity we sang about Chevy autoworkers have prominent modern-day counterparts. I wish it was available to hear more widely; H and I still sing parts at each other around the house.I'm finding my social slow bike people. I found out about local Friday coffee rides where we meet up at a different BART station every week and then ride a few miles to a nearby breakfast place with a patio, where only about half of us drink coffee while the rest of us focus on food and tea. It's absolutely been a social lifesaver. When we first moved out here, we thought we had plenty of time to start establishing social routines with old friends while making new ones. Seven months later, we found ourselves in lockdown, Zoom and walks our only social outlets. Even after the original rounds of vaccines, most of the people we know nearby are parents, and too tied down by kid needs and schedules to lift their heads above water more than occasionally. Thankfully, I found out about the coffee rides on Instagram, figured out how to get my bike on BART, and now I have a standing Friday morning "there are friendly people who like biking and are being covid-cautious enough for me" meetup :)
It's also been good for starting to piece together the local bike network, patchy as it is. The Ohlone Greenway runs right through our neighborhood, providing a jogging corridor for H and a safer biking corridor for me, but also access for us to local shops and the farmers markets and restaurants and the train into Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco without having to get into the car. I learned how to take my bike on BART just about a decade after BART first put bike storage areas on its trains, and it's opened up a lot more of the area to me. I learned how to ride the Wiggle to get to the Panhandle, Golden Gate Park, and the Great
I miss late night bookstore dates, though. Our closest indie bookstore (about a 45 minute walk away, or 15 minutes on an infrequent daytime only bus, but not easy to get to on my geared-for-the-flats-of-Boston three-speed) closes at 6 pm, and others near-ish-by not much later than that. San Francisco understands bookstores as nightlife a little better, particularly once you get out of downtown and into the more human-scale neighborhoods, with more bookstores closing at 8, 9, 10 pm, but. I miss Harvard Books, even though I could only make it to 9 pm when I was there in June. Aging, man.
