Copasetic Flow

 Just a quick note.  My partner and I went to see Robot Dreams with the 11 and 9 year olds about a week and a half ago. First, the movie is awesome! It stays almost true to the book in that there are very, very few words at all. More in the movie than there ever were in the book, but still. The whole thing was a lot of fun and I highly recommend it. The oldest kid wasn't there because she was attending summer camp up on the orthern edge of the penninsula.  After the movie, my partner and I went off to do errands in one direction, the 11 and 9 year old headed  towards the house on BART. And! Guess what? They ran into their older sib on the bus home. There routes coincidentally linked up for the last leg and they hopped on the sam bus she was on. About a stop later, they all realized it. Public transit and independent kids are pretty awesome! We got to do our errands. The kids got to go do what they wanted, and they ran into each othere anyway! Without transit, I doubt...

One of the safest things for us to do, pandemic-wise, is stay outside, but you gotta get places right? For many of us that involves taking MUNI across town.  For many of us that involves taking MUNI across town. Thankfully, with the windows and the roof-top emergency door all open, a bit of breeze blows through the bus, but is there an even safer way? If you’re traveling east to west downtown, there is: the California cable car line! You can sit on the outside benches of this—usually—uncrowded resource, enjoy the fresh air, and reach your destination in style. For adults with MUNI passes, it’s free. And! MUNI is free for all youth in town under the age of 18 ! But, for cable cars, there’s a catch you need to be aware of… Cable cars aren’t automatically included in the free MUNI for all youth program. To ride cable cars for free, you’ll need a youth clipper card that says it’s OK. You can’t buy these at Clipper Card offices like the one at Embarcadero Station, (the kids and I tried...

 Fatherhood is hard! Wait, no it isn’t: I’m literally drafting this missive while quaffing a beer in downtown San Francisco (the Mission actually), waiting for the kid to finish up a class. *Thinks back* Wait. maybe fatherhood is hard? So, “What the hell am I even talking about,” you ask? Here’s an example. It starts with car seats. Car seats are a nightmare! They especially were for one of the kids. I’d plop her in the car seat and she’d start to scream. She hated it! She’d continue to scream until we reached our destination. So, ok, that was hard. Here’s the thing though. In the middle of that we moved to a city with phenomenal public transit, and I quit driving. After that, I just had to hop on the bus with the kid in a wrap. She loved it! I loved it! Except… Some bus rides are forty-five minutes long. And, sometimes? Sometimes the kid wanted to be bounced through the entire ride. That was hard. But other times? On the same ride. The kid abided. The kid snuggled into her wrap up...

Telling kids what they ‘can do' is way more freeing than asking them what they’d ‘like to do’. tldr; if you’re not comfortable with the kids in your house running off’t, don’t read this. A few days ago, at home, my partner mentioned to the kids that in 20 minutes or so they should meet up because they needed to go to the market at the bottom of the hill. 40 minutes later, she got a text from them, "Where are you?" "In the house, where are you?" "At the market!" — antigrav_kids (@thord_ee_r) July 22, 2022 Just thought of this: is 'running off’t' a contraction for “running off withouT me/us”? This is a brief, brief post, and frankly maybe I should do more of these, but anyway. We have insanely yummy dumpling bakeries down the hill from us in three directions here in San Francisco. They are firggin’ delightful! They’re locally owned. Some of them only take cash. (Fuck the Man.) And—excuse the religious platitude—God they sell crazy good, ch...

 We got back to transit this week! We were out of town for a month hanging out in Montana. The state’s pretty awesome, but in the small towns we were around, transit wasn’t really a thing, and  we missed it! If nothing else, just getting to zone out while someone else drives is a huge privilege . There’s not much to this post, but transit makes me smile, and I’m smiling again writing about it, so here goes. On Tuesday, I had to turn in our rental car, so I made a quick jaunt to the airport. My mood improved as soon as the car keys were out of my hands. No more worrying about someone else’s incredibly expensive property and the huge load of regulations surrounding all things driving. Even more happily, a leisurely stroll through the airport put me in front of the SFO museum’s (there are several mini-museums in SFO) new exhibit about Victorian wallpaper! All cultured up, I headed for the BART platform. The ride was simplicity itself, dumping me back close enough to the house to ...

What it is A number of campsites sprinkled along Pass Creek as it winds through Blue Jay Canyon paralleled by National Forest Road 122 off of US 93, with an occasional pit toilet restroom. Pass Creek is accessible from each of the campsites. Tall canyon walls shatter the ground, rising above the creek on either side of the road. Last Visited:   June of 2022. Last Reviewed: June of 2022 Getting there: As you travel along US 93, turn north onto National Forest Road 122 aka Pass Creek Rd. Drive about six and a half miles to reach the canyon itself, although you’ll find campsites dispersed along the road beginning as soon as you enter Salmon Challis National Forest . Review: The campsites sit along Pass Creek as it winds through the canyon. One of the campsites we passed was across the road from a pit toilet. The other six or so campsites which were a few tenths of a mile away from each other would require a walk back along the graveled road to reach the facilities, (or you coul...

 Happy June! I got to hang out in a new place with the gang and my parnter yesterday: a beautiful place full of flowers, a place with access to a mountain stream that ultimately cascades into a reservoir, and a place I had absolutely nothing to do with discovering. A few days back, while headed out to fish at a reservoir we've been to dozens of times, my partner suggested that the 11, 9, and 7 year old gang of kids should take our two dogs on a hike back into the forest above the lake. The gang heartily agreed. We dropped them off at the inlet to the lake with the understanding they'd explore upstream before meeting me back at the spot in an hour and a half. I dropped my partner off in a meadow next to the stream that flows away from the lake. I went to fish on the lake (and I didn't catch a thing.) An hour and a half later, I went to pick up the gang. Then, lots of things happened: As I pulled down the road to travel the two miles to the inlet of the lake, I ran into the g...

Two things happened today that could have been bummers, but weren't: one in the morning, and the other in the afternoon. In both cases, as a parent, I could've thrown a fit. One of the things was way easier to deal with than the other though, and because of that, I got to learn something about myself, and that was also kinda nice in addition to getting to have a pretty cool day. In the morning, we got to fish for a bit. The nine year old got the second fishing rod out of the car, and started making his way around the lake. The fish were biting, the dogs were staying generally out of the way, and things were fun. Then, the nine year old wound up with a twisted up, near to knotting line.  My heart rate went up, adrenaline started to pump, I really did not want to mess with the knots. I breathed deeply, I kept my mouth shut, and soon the situation was reolved, and we were both catching fish. In the end, I'd tamped down my reaction, bit my tongue, survived, and we'd wound u...

 Soon, I’m going to launch into a series of posts for new dads, expectant dads and thinking about being expectant dads. These posts will contain ideas about the things that worked for me. Emphasis on me, since we’re all different people, that, by inference, means my spiffy ideas might not work for you. At all. And that’s OK. They might just not be your thing. Everyone parents differently. Before I do that though, there’s one other implied tip in the above that is completely hidden, what with all my talk of ‘I’ and ‘me’. I think—no, I believe, deeply—that this hidden tip can help everyone who identifies as a dad. Everyone. This one is important, so I’m going to lead with it. I talked to my partner about all my parenting plans before I put them in motion. We started talking about plans before my partner was pregnant, and eleven years in, we still talk about them a lot. Talking about plans works on tons of levels, so I’ll list the ones I can think of now, and plan on adding others in ...

The gang and I are getting ready to go camping across the Western United States. Just recently,  the bigger kids graduated to larger backpacks, so they can haul a bit more stuff, (they’ve been hauling their own tent and sleeping bags for years, but now they can take more food, water, the collected works of Elf Quest Vol. 1, and whathevs.) There was a bit of a conundrum though. Even though the gang has larger packs, it behooves one to practice with the heavier weight for a bit to get used to it, but there’s a pandemic, and therein lied the rub.  The pandemic has—perhaps paradoxically—actually thinned out the number of camping trips we take each year. You’d think out in a forest would be better during a pandemic right? I agree, but our camping route, no matter how we’ve tried it so far always involves a bus ride for the last leg. Even if we walk to the ferry terminal in downtown San Francisco, even if we take the ferry—where we sit outside—across the bay rather than the bus over...

We’ve been playing at the idea of psychogeography for a few years. The gist of the study is to wander about an area of town—the same idea could of course be applied to the wilderness, but I don’t see it mentioned as often—paying attention to what you see, hear, smell, and how that makes you feel.The idea, broadly, the way I understand it, is to search for the transitions on your walk, paying attention to how you identified them. It works out great for getting the gang out into the world. They get to go explore for themselves, and as if their every sense wasn’t already peeled on exploring a new place just because it’s new, they’re also focused on measuring the world around them as they experience it and relating those measurements to how they feel. The whole thing is also very useful for getting neighborhoods used to the kids. I can anchor  myself somewhere I want to be, then the kids can explore out in every widening radii that we both feel comfortable with, bringing back their exp...

  An interesting question came up a few days ago, should parents provide their kids with broad exposure to the world, or try to protect them from things that the parent sees as either ‘dangerous or immoral’? I come down pretty squarely on the side of broad exposure.  Our hometown, San Francisco, winds up on the news frequently, (or at least I hear from acquaintances from out of town that it does), for things like open drug use and homelessness. I wish our town did more to help the people who are victims of these two issues—by that, I mean of course, the people who are drug users and the homeless, not the frequently pearl-clutching newscasters.  I’ve seen both open drug use and homelessness in San Francisco. I’m not here to tell you that it doesn't happen. I am here to tell you that it’s not a lifestyle that anyone chooses. I am hear to tell you that the people experiencing it aren’t having a good time with it. I am also here to tell you that contrary to whatever myths th...