Chris Bjuland’s blog

Thursday

Woke up late. Did not go to Dolores Park like we planned. Spent the afternoon working from home (trying to find a new DSL provider for the school I now work at), and looking at way to many sites for video games that I’d like to play – such as Champions Online and Star Wars: Force Unleashed.

Went to Sugar Cafe with Elli and we got a nice window seat on a comfy leather couch. Read a few chapters of my book, drank way to much caffeine (refills were free today), and then headed to Blockbuster to replace the badly scratched copy of Knocked Up that we rented. The half of the movie I saw was funny, can’t wait to go back and watch the scenes my DVD player skipped over because of scratches.

Dinner was a vegetable lasagna (I love my wife and her amazing talents in the kitchen) while watching 27 Dresses. (Yes, I like movies).

AT&T was acting up today. Internet felt like I was using a 300 baud modem from 1985. Way to go AT&T.

More reading and then an early lights out in preparation for a day at Dolores Park and a visit to Tartine Bakery.

Wednesday

Uneventful day. Spent cleaning the apartment and organizing the closet. My two cats generate an amazing amount of hair, and it ends up under the bed or in the corner. The closet needed help in that we just shoved things into it when we got here, but didn’t make good use of the space. After all the organizing, cleaning, and washing, we headed out to go bowling. But the bowling alley was closed for a private party. They paid for the whole place, but were only using half the lanes. So wasteful. I would have been happy to use the unused, and eating their massive pizza buffet would have been a plus, too. I would have been doing them a favor by saving them from a greasy death. Alas, it was not to be.

Walked to Whole Foods after that and bought some cheese and soda ($7.00 for 4 bottles! Got to love the market…) and sat in the cafe and read with some coffee.

Ate dinner while watching I Survived a Japanese Gameshow. I should have been on that show.

Watched Juno on DVD.  Great movie.  Wish I could write like that.

Late night to bed, after many Tetris battles.

Tuesday

Elli had a job interview today. She used to be a middle school English teacher, and was looking for something different, but like me, she was having trouble finding something. She’s more than qualified to work at the San Francisco Public Library (sfpl.org), but lacking a Library Science degree, they won’t hire her. I know that librarians do more than shelve books, but almost anyone with a college degree could do the entry level jobs. A magic piece of paper isn’t going to change anything, but that is the way of the City. It’s all about what you did in college. Knowing your ABC’s and being about to count to 1000 won’t take you far in the library skills you already possess department.

She rocked the interview, got the job, and is now employed. Her schedule is great (3 half days, and 2 full days). I know she’ll be putting in a lot of coffee shop time with all her time off.

Another late evening of watching Knocked Up (but it was scratched and we missed a lot of the movie). Tetris battles and finally to bed.

Monday

Woke up for a Keifer and peaches breakfast and an online episode of Kim Possible. When are they going to put the entire series on DVD? ITunes is incomplete; they don’t carry all the episodes. And then your computer might crash and you’ve lost all your ITunes purchases. Cheaper and safer to buy the DVDs.

Ran out the door around 11:30am to hit the library and the clinic to confirm that I am TB free. Amazingly enough, I was. I should have been a doctor. I didn’t need a $35.00 shot to tell me what I already knew. Maybe it was the lack of coughing and pain in my chest, but I’m not a real doctor, so what would I know?

I received a phone call at 1:30pm from the school I interviewed with to see if I was still interested in the job. I was, and a short bus ride later, my new teacher contract was signed and I’m employed in the City of San Francisco (but not by the city).

Watched another online episode of Kim Possible while eating the lentil and sausage soup that Elli made.

Afterwards it was time to head to Borders for reading & hot chocolate. The book of the week is Shinjuku Shark by Arimasa Osawa. Hard-boiled, no-nonsense cop book. I love this stuff. Thankfully I never saw anything remotely like the action in the book when I was in Japan.

Elli has an interview tomorrow, so she spent the evening preparing for that. I tried to help, but wasn’t much use beyond printing out things for her. She is an amazing woman, who should be paid a billion-jillion dollars a year for putting up with me and my stuff.

Off to bed with more Shinjuku Shark.

Sunday

Woke up to the soothing strains of apartment 402 and their dj contest. To bad their taste in music was awful. They think Loud equals Good. Sorry to say, but it doesn’t. Apartment 402 is in the race with apartment 501 for most annoying neighbor of the month. There are others in the contest (most especially Loud Talking Annoying Girl), but I can’t pinpoint their locations yet, just listen to the soothing strains of their obnoxiousness echo off the closely packed buildings.

Ate breakfast of egg sandwiches while rocking out to Kim Possible online. Grabbed Elli and headed to the Farmer’s Market. We bought some fruits and vegetables (much better prices than the grocery stores around here), stopped by the library on the way home to pick up Yes, Prime Minister, and headed home for lunch.

In the afternoon we went to the ultra hip Sugar Cafe (where refills were free last time, but were $1.35 today). Found a comfortable chair near the window and finished reading Powers issues 21-24. Sadly, that was the last published graphic novel, so I’ll have to wait until the collect issues 25+ into book form. My friend Kevin says I am a bad consumer in that I don’t buy many single issues of comic books, stating that if the single issues don’t sell, they won’t bundle them into graphic novels. He has a point, but I’ve yet to be disappointed. I do have to have patience though, in that I’m usually six months behind the comic book curve.

Spent the evening looking at the new Lego site and the new Star Wars: Clone Wars Lego sets. I’m a big kid in that I still love toys. My wife isn’t much of a fan, but she tolerates me and my obsession for plastic consumerism.

Apartment 402 started band practice at 7:45pm, filling our tiny abode with the sweet strains of a Cold Play knockoff. The actual music was nice, but they could not manage to get through a song without stopping and starting several times. I suppose that is why they practice.

Elli challenged me to another Tetris battle, and just like before, she won – three games in a row. My Tetris skills are severely lacking.

Ate dinner of stir fry tofu and episode 5 of Hopkins. I think it ends next week. I’m enjoying the online TV experience, but the streaming part has not been perfected yet. Video quality is still choppy and often laggy. I still prefer DVDs. I have not heard much chatter about the online movie rental business, but with my AT&T DSL connection, it would take 3 hours to download a 7GB movie – not sure what they would compress it to, but no way am I patient enough to endure download times like that.

Band practice ended promptly at 10:02pm. Not to shabby, and much appreciated.

Ended the evening with Kim Possible: So the Drama on DVD. No download wait time, although the patrons at the library are hell on the DVDs they check out. This is one of four disks from the San Francisco Public Library that I’ve gotten to play on my DVD player. Most look like they have been used to polish the sidewalk.

Beautiful and warm Saturday. We decided to head to the beach and watch the water.

Hopping on the 38L bus, we got to the oceanside park in about 30 minutes. It was the first time I’ve seen so many trees together in one spot at one time. On the other side of the park was the ocean. It was big and beautiful. We sat on some rocks and I read Powers 17-20, while Elli rocked out the phone with her mad conversational skills.

I call my friend Scott to see if he wanted to go to Toys R Us at midnight for their Star Wars: Clone Wars toy release event. Of course he said yes.

Then we walked to the sand, put our feet in the icy, icy (icy!) water, and sat on the sand for a short time. The wind had picked up, and we were quickly being abraded by sand. We then left the beach and walked to the Burger King across the road and indulged in an iced mocha coffee drink. This was the smallest Burger King I have ever seen. Five tables and a tiny ordering counter. Mc’Donald’s in Japan and Paris was bigger. So much for the American mantra of “Bigger is always better”. The coffee drink was good though.

Went into a surf shop and I bought a button up shirt, and Elli bought a sweatshirt to wear on the cold days (which turned out to be the very next day).

From there we went back to the park and sat on a bench overlooking the ocean. A lady with two little dogs was sitting on the other end of the bench. One of her dogs looked just like Jennie, our beloved dog that passed on Jan 25, 2008. It was weird to see a Jennie look a like, but I think we both enjoyed the chance to see her again, even if it wasn’t her. I miss Jennie so much. I wish she were here in San Francisco with us, even though we’d have to find a different apartment because we aren’t near any parks.

Came home from the beach, went to Bangkok in Union Square to eat. Waited fifteen minutes for a table, but the food is always great, so worth the time waiting.

Then it was home for sleep for Elli and off to the BART station to catch a train to Oakland to meet Scott. We drove for 30 minutes and pulled into the Toys R Us parking lot, only to find an empty and closed up store. Seems I can’t tell time or read a calendar… The event was the night before… Sad and embarrassed for the mess up, I offered to buy dinner at Denny’s down the road. We were the oldest people (not counting the staff) in the restaurant. There was an over-abundance of high schoolers who looked just like high schoolers from a 1976 yearbook. Every trend that is old is suddenly new again.

We both ate buffalo chicken strips that weren’t quite nuked properly, but it was good to hang out with the only person I know well in the city (other than Elli).

Scott drove me home, paying $4.00 to cross the bridge into the city. You only have to pay on the way into San Francisco. No one cares if you leave, only if you enter.

I arrived home at 2am to find Elli still awake and fuming at the 400 people that live in the one bedroom apartment next door. Seems they decided to hold a family fun night at 1am and showed no signs of stopping anytime soon. I’m not sure what the occupancy laws in San Francisco are, but they were in violation of all of them. Not to mention rude and more rude. I’ve never understood why people that live in apartments think that everyone around them wants to hear their music or smell their cigarettes. People act like they live in a single family house, but they don’t. Grow up and join society, people.

Woke up early so Elli could have a phone interview for a Title One teacher job. Ate breakfast with an episode of Wipeout. After dancing around the apartment for a bit, we ate lunch (squash soup) and headed outside.

We braved the San Francisco weather and headed to The Travel Immunization Clinic to get a TB test for a whopping $35.00. I had to have a TB test in order to get a job with a school. The administration is always worried that teachers are carriers, when it’s a commonly known fact that it’s the children that are little petri dishes of infection and sickness waiting to be unleashed upon the faculty population because Little Timmy didn’t stay home from school like he should have. From there it was off to a coffee shop to play some Unspeakable Words and drink coffee. An oatmeal raisin cookie managed to find it’s way onto our table somehow. Must be because I ordered it. Two games later it was time to head to Whole Paycheck and buy some groceries.

On the way out of Whole Foods, our old lady grocery cart that we purchased from The Container Store lost one of it’s main wheels. Near disaster of spilled groceries narrowly avoided, we used a paper clip and a twist tie to fix the wheel and made it half-way home before the tire of one of the smaller front wheels popped off. I think we overloaded the cart and exceeded it’s weight limit. Fortunately, we were close to home and brought the cart in on it’s back two wheels.

Dinner was a salad and and grilled cheese with the last online of episode of Wipeout (there will be another next week). Online Tetris battles followed the food, and Elli won all challenges, leaving my scores in the dust. If only we had the TV and the XBOX here with us, then I could show her…

Following my humiliating defeat we both surfed the web for 2 hours (oh, dear! where does the time go?!) before realizing that we just spent 2 hours surfing the web. A bowl of popcorn and two episodes of Kim Possible was our answer to the web surfing time lost. Then it was reading time (Powers, vol. 2, issues 14-16 by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming for me and The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner for her). Lights out sometime after midnight in preparation for an outing to the ocean on Saturday.

Kim Possible. Still waiting for the complete series to come to DVD…

Woke up early (8am-ish) to head to DSW to buy some new shoes for my job interview today. I wasn’t planning on being a school teacher anymore, but so far it’s the only interview I’ve gotten. It is surprisingly hard to get a minimum wage job in San Francisco…

So shoe shopping done and clothes ironed I braved the public transit system and rode the bus (somewhere) and spend an hour and half talking the new principal through his outdated computer systems, that amazingly still work. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a G3 Macintosh outside of a computer history museum, but I saw a school computer lab with over fifty of them, networked together. Agonizingly slow but astonishingly working. The job would be teaching computer skills to K-8 graders part time, and part time providing tech support and band-aids to the computer system. It pays decently, which is all I can ask for at this point.

Ate squash soup and cabbage and chicken legs while catching up on Wipeout, crashed out after a sugar coma of Beardpapa eclairs. Lights out, but only after finishing my current book reading obsession, and losing in online Tetris to Elli (who is gifted in Ms. Pacman and Tetris skillz).

Woke up late (I could get used to this), ate breakfast and grabbed the wife and headed to Gamescape to try to find some minis game players. Found a store full of clerks (how do I get a job there???), but no players. Asked about the new Star Wars minis set, grabbed the bored wife from the corner and headed a few stores down for some couch sitting, coffee drinking, and book reading.

One pastry, three coffees, and fifty pages later, Elli and I headed home for a dinner of tofu and peanut sauce.

Watched Wipeout, battled it out in online Tetris (I lost big time), and read a few more pages. Crashed out and went to sleep after watching another episode of Hopkins.

Woke up sometime later to the most annoying girl in the world talking (not my wife) somewhere outside.  The closeness of the buildings makes a great sound funnel, and it would appear that there was a party that we weren’t invited to, but seemed to be everywhere all around us.  Without a jet pack and a bucket of water balloons, we could only shut the windows and wait for her to fall hoarse, sometime in the wee hours of the morning.

Woke up at 9:15, read Soon I Will Be Invincible for about an hour, then ate some Keifer and berries (from the SF farmer’s market at Civic Center). Elli filtered back to reality around 10:15am and joined me for breakfast.

We then went to the bank to get quarters for laundry, stopped at Sugar Cafe for some coffee (free refills! Plural!), and read our books outside until nature’s calling brought us back to our apartment.

The cats made a mess of the litter box while we were gone, kicking litter all over the kitchen. They lost interest in my cleanup chores, and retired to a sunny patch on a chair for another nap.

I should be applying for more jobs, but the noise filtering in from the street is annoying. There is some children’s tambourine choir dance noise tamborine happening somewhere nearby. Those crazy kids.

It’s 4:39pm, and I have spent the last two hours making a blog, and my application to Viz Publishing is still unfinished.

Ate a dinner of green peppers, onions, and sausage on a bun, watched an episode of Hopkins on abc.com,helped Elli with her blog-tardness, read a few issues of Powers and called it a day.