what am I, 25 again?

Since moving to San Francisco, I've needed a way to get out of the house and meet people. I work from home and the bulk of my social interaction is with an 8-year-old boy. So what's the solution I find? Join an adult kickball league, of course!

My friend Pamela (who I've known since college, 20 years ago) and I joined the WAKA Kickball League which has 4 or 5 divisions in San Francisco. We arranged to be put on the same team and ended up on the team called Galactic Prophylactic. Yes, it's a very silly name. It was inspired by an Eddie Murphy skit on Saturday Night Live. You can read the script here.

It's actually turned out to be quite a lot of fun. Although I'm 10-15 years older than most everyone on the team, it's actually a very nice group of people. We play every Wednesday night and I've come to really look forward to it. Unfortunately, we're terrible. We haven't won a game and we're in last place in the division and likely to stay there. But it's all about the fun.

I was worried that it would be too fraternity-like for my tastes. And it is a lot like that. A lot of jocks and former fraternity/sorority types drinking bad beer from cans while getting rowdy on the kickball field. But what the hell... it's still fun.

That's me diving for a ball in short-center field. I missed.

I don't know that I'll make any lasting new friendships from this, but it's helping to fill my social vacuum for now. Sometimes Pamela and I even go to the bar with the teams after the game to engage in team drinking games. I never would have thought I would play drinking games at 40. What the hell has happened to me?

"the heat was hot"

Remember that terrible song "Horse with No Name" by America? It contains one of the single worst lines of a song ever written:

"The heat was hot and the ground was dry"

The heat was hot? Really. I'll let someone who actually knows something about poetry comment on that one. (Stella?)

Heat is not something one experiences much in San Francisco. It's generally very mild here, consistently 4-8 degrees cooler than our old place across the bay in Berkeley. And we live in the Outer Richmond, which is milder than the rest of San Francisco, being right up against that frigid Pacific Ocean.

But today it is a different story. It's hot. Hot enough to make me think things like "the heat was hot". Of course it could be this massive head cold that has reduced my thought process to the equivalent of bad America lyrics. But it's still damn hot. Even in the Outer Richmond.

How hot you ask? I'm glad you asked. Since I have this miserable cold and it was too hot for me to sleep, I had nothing better to do than lay around and watch the thermometer. It peaked at 100.6 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm sure it set some records. The average high in May is 65.

The past few weeks, as spring blossoms in our old home town of Ann Arbor, Stella and I have been lamenting the mild temperatures of San Francisco. We have been missing hot weather since we moved here. Well, today we got it. And I'm laid out with a cold, unable to enjoy it. I should have been at the beach. It would have been a perfect day for those surfing lessons I've been thinking of taking. Instead I've got a terrible cold that kept me up half of last night. Oh well... it will still be nice this weekend and I fully intend to enjoy it, cold or no cold.

to blog or not to blog

It has been said that I never blog anymore. True, it has been a while since my last post. There may be a little laziness involved there. But I've also been questioning the purpose of blogging. There are 10,000,000 blogs out there and at least 99.9% of them are pointless drivel. We can count my blog among the blogs of pointless drivel. Do I really have anything to say worth spouting to the whole world in this format? Isn't it just a little narcissistic? I'm not a great writer. I'm not unusually insightful, eloquent or entertaining. I'm just a guy with a laptop. What's so special about that?

So that's my darker, more cynical side posing such questions. In reality, this blog isn't trying to be anything special. It's just a way to let my friends and family around the country know what I've been up to since I moved to California. If you're looking for social commentary, wry insight, political analysis, etc, you're probably in the wrong place. Not that I wouldn't love to offer you those things and more. And perhaps, from time to time, something special actually seeps into this blog. Or not. It doesn't matter. The point is that I'm back and I'm blogging.

We'll see how long it last...