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...

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 ...

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...

A thing happened to us in an LA transit station that never-ever happens in San Francisco: a safety officer tried to shepherd the kids... sort of.  I can't say exactly why this has never happened to us in San Francisco, but I've got ideas: frankly, I think San Francisco is just used to us.  We live there.  We're in and out of the stations several times a day every day. Consequently, I'm guessing the same folks who are in the station day after day have noticed the gang plenty of times, perhaps so many times they've completely discounted them at this point. LA on the other hand, seems not to be used to us yet. Our tale starts a few days back.  The kids had spent most of the day doing a seven mile hike up to Griffith Observatory.  We met downtown shortly afterwards to head out on a Metro train.  The journey was pleasant enough—Metro trains are kinda odd for denizens of BART because you can't move from car to car.  The kids ride subways every day, s...

  Public transit…  Our living room activities mostly take place on the buses and trains of San Francisco.  If we get on a bus at an early enough stop, we can consume the entire back row of seats; there’s five of us and there’s five seats.  Our deepest conversations happen there, we talk about things like “How do number base systems work?”  “Why is it not OK to pick up food from the ground close to a train station,” (answer Pee).  “Where do puddles underground in train stations come from,” (same answer.)  Some of our conversations like the pee exploration gather other bus passengers.  A young lady with her one year old strapped to her chest figured she’d have to have the conversation with her kid soon enough, and wanted to get the youths’ take on public pee in the city.  This often leads to utter hilarity—our 4 year-old No. 2 wasn’t sure it was such a bad thing to pee on walls.  Most of our conversations draw more quiet audiences—the la...

The kids climbed this week!  Not metaphorically, although, I’m sure they did that too, but actually physically.  They all climbed things they’d never been able to climb before.  It started, I suppose, with the giant El Cid statue outside the Legion of Honor here in San Francisco, where the kids met their friends to go see the Monet exhibit one last time before it closed.  The statue is a huge brass affair mounted on top of a ten foot high concrete pedestal.  One of the kids started to climb up it.  Soon the other five kids followed suit.  There were beveled curves cast into the concrete that looked to have been created expressly for the purpose of defeating climbing.  The kids, however, quickly came up with a way of wedging their boots onto the concrete while grasping the bevel above and pulling.  They were making it up the side, but it was a bit too tall. Perhaps it was later that night—it might have been a few nights before—we found our...

I'm attending SPESIF 2012 this week at the University of Maryland. I'm learning a few tricks for getting around the area easily since I'm using solely public transportation on this trip. Getting from the Airport to the University: The B30 metro bus leaves the airport every 40 minutes or so [pdf]. It costs $6 and you have to have exact change. It will take you directly to the Greenbelt Metro station. From there, you can ride one stop on the metro train to the College Park Metro station. University of Maryland College Park Shuttle System: From here on out, you can get a remarkable number of places on the UMD shuttle bus system. Make sure to check the complete schedule and maps [really big pdf[ to see if where you're headed is on a route. You can also use the excellent NextBus application on your phone. Just click on the NextBus logo in the upper right corner of the UMD transit web page . To get from the College Park Metro Station to campus, hop on the 1...