This is a weird place.

The other day I slept in really late--like REALLY late, so late I'm not going to say when I actually got up, because it's a little embarrassing--partly because I was tired, and partly because I was feeling a little homesick. Not homesick, since this is my home at this point, but feeling a little wistful for a place where I knew what the heck was going on. I lived in Boston for so long that I'd gotten used to, and become comforted by, its predictability.

Now that I've been here for a few weeks, I think I can see why California types tend to stay in the east for a few years and head back west...and also why everyone I know from Boston who moves to SF ends up moving back east eventually! The Californa types find Boston boring, and the Boston types find SF to be too much of a moving target. Things are constantly changing. Those of you who work with me know that I've spent the past five years working for an organization that values change very highly, and I do, too--in my work life. The sense of daily uprooting is a little less enticing, but I suppose you get used to it, and even like it, eventually.

So anyway, when I woke up late (let's just say it was sometime in the early afternoon), TCH and I were talking for a little while. During our conversation, we heard a skateboard go by outside, 15 floors down. And then we heard another one, and another one...and then it sounded like 1,000 skateboards. So (for some reason) I said, "Oh, it's the skateboarders," as if The Skateboarders are a known entity, and we went to the window to look out. And you know what? it really was about a thousand skateboarders, rolling down the street in the middle of the day on the 4th of July. Hilarious. [What makes this even more hilarious is that we saw basically the same thing earlier in the week, but with bicycles and about 5 times as many participants. With the bikes, as well as the skateboards, I was struck by the fact that although there were many cars stuck behind the skateboards or bikes as they clogged the roadway, nobody honked. Not a single horn! I'm trying to imagine which mode of transportation will be next: horses? ski-skates? hamster wheels?]

And then things got funnier. See, I've learned that nighttime public transportation in San Francisco doesn't exactly have all the wrinkles ironed out, especially for the train line that goes past my house, because it opened recently and they are still "studying the ramifications" of its route and schedule. Basically, sometimes it shows up right away and sometimes it takes 40 minutes. Since July 5th was TCH's first day in the OR during residency, we figured it probably didn't make sense to stay out really late on the 4th and then take forever to get home. Instead, we would watch the fireworks in Berkeley, which I thought we probably could see from our front windows.

As it turns out, Berkeley has NOTHING on my noberhood. At 9pm the street along the waterfront lined up with cars, and then a big group of SUVs pulled up and a crowd of thugs in long, baggy shorts got out...and proceeded to put on a fireworks show worthy of a small city for the next 90 minutes. By the time the first baggy pants group finished, another group of people with even bigger fireworks showed up, this time rattling the building for another 45 minutes. There were whistling fireworks, multi-colored fireworks, small ones with a big bang, large ones with several phases -- any variation you can imagine. Who needs city fireworks display when you have thugs?