'Bred Crumbs

08:55 AM Why are there now so many commercials with bears in them?

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It's good to know that somebody else hates the new Entertainment Weekly site, too.

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It really can't do anyone's work morale any good that when you leave the office cafeteria, you can't help but see, parked atop the first-aid cabinet next to the door, the prominently labeled BODILY FLUID Clean-Up Kit.

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09:03 AM OK, now that I've aired both my yang and my yin, I'll resume keeping my mood swings off the Web and set out to find amusement. And just in time, here's our old friend: the lack of weather perspective by people in the San Francisco Bay Area, who are now freaking out because snow fell as low as 1,000 feet and the air has turned, as one local newscaster put it, "severely cold" -- which is to say, temperatures have dipped into the mid-30s.

(And sure, I'm snuggling under blankets a lot lately, too. But this ain't International Falls, folks.)

Watching TV news try to report on this "severity" offers much entertainment, as reporters faced with the prospect of talking at length about the weather can't help but expose their lack of finesse in expressing themselves. To wit, KTVU's Bob MacKenzie, straining to describe snow falling on Oakland residents:

"Looking up, they saw a scene out of Star Wars."

Help me, Obi-Wan.

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04:29 PM You know those attempts at optimism I was spouting yesterday? Delusional. Everything just sucks.

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01:52 PM For reasons unknown, I woke up this morning with the word chupacabra stuck in my head like a song.

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To show that, despite my pessimistic leanings, I can sometimes make the best of things: this morning, when I was having to drive at 9:30 (unthinkably early for me on Sunday) to make some technical checks at the beige cube farm in Richmond where I work as of tomorrow, I could have pouted and grumped, as I have and probably will again in many another undesirable situation. Instead, I enjoyed the lack of traffic, took in the beautiful view of Sausalito, and bounced my head to "Come On Eileen." Too rye ay.

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03:13 AM Posts here have been scarce of late partly because all of the things that have been happening this accursed year have kept me busy lately, and partly because the down-ness of it all gets hard to keep at bay, and this 'blog isn't intended to be the journal I brood in. It's just that lately too many good things are coming to an end, and while there are possibilities that those endings will make way for new good things, those hopes are vague at best, and often not convincing.

But I try to count my blessings, which I should realize are numerous, especially in the four years I've lived in San Francisco. And every now and then, I'll have a strong, unexpected reminder of the strange and wonderful route my life has taken -- a flash of realization that some of the small things that bubble up in my daily life are amazing things I could not possibly have seen coming before I moved here. I had such a flash Thursday night, when I was packing my backpack for the next day, which would include a performance by Dojo at the wake marking the end of a great yearlong work experience, as my company gets assimilated and moved across the Bay (see also downturn, economic). The flash of realization was:

I'm packing a gi for the performance by my improv troupe at the offices of the website I work for.

Now imagine me in Kentucky in, say, 1991 trying to even conceive of all that.

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