Displaced

After two weeks of warm winds and roses on our deck, autumn has finally arrived in San Francisco. Rain. Hooray! I’ve been homesick for the fall in New York – flat light, falling leaves and rain. It was lovely to come home this afternoon to our studio apartment, light a candle and know that the deck was damp and the sky grey. Things are as they should be.

To start us off in this new month, let’s think back to Ken Blackwell who said, “It’s not who casts the votes, it’s who counts the votes.” Oh no wait, that was Stalin. Sorry.

I’ve joined what appear to be hundreds of others in doing a blog post every day for the month of November. Why? Because it’s National Blog Posting Month! Eden at Fussy.org came up with it. See details here. Who can resist the logo? Certainly not me.

“Biblical Disaster” brought to you by Threadless T-shirts.

I’ve lived in California for six years. It’s no secret that I haven’t liked living here for any of those years, from the first day when a man was shot two blocks from my apartment through the three times that my car has been stolen. When I read today that California is ranked the 47th (out of 50, for you 47th placers) smartest state in the country, I wasn’t sure how to feel. On the one hand, I feel vindicated in my opinions: the root cause for the unremittingly terrible customer service and the mind-numbingly slow pace has been ferreted out! On the other hand, I live here now and am presumably counted in that statistic, so what does that say about me?

In other news, Vermont came out #1 but David Mamet lives there, so they have an unfair advantage. Massachusetts, my home state, is #2, so perhaps they’ll take me back someday if I study up a bit.

Or maybe I’m just taking this whole thing way too personally…

So here I am, cruising around iTunes Music Store on a pleasant Sunday evening and what pops up as a suggestion in my Podcasts window but “Owl and the P***y Cat,” a “Kids & Family” recording of the classic children’s story plus some songs. Based on the title, it looks like they’ve added some racy bits since I read it twenty-five years ago. Kids these days are so mature.

Still the best Colbert Report interview I’ve seen: Dermot Mulroney. What a nice surprise that he’s clever. I just wish he had a better agent.

Bayley Hazen Blue is a cross between a Stilton and a blue and it shows in the yellow hue of the cheese. Because I love blues and I love Stilton, this seemed like a perfect bet and it was…sort of. I was hoping for a stronger blue flavor and a slightly creamier texture but the Stilton won out. Result: a blue-ish Stilton with a strong, rural, oak flavor and a texture verging on crumbly.

Available in San Francisco: Cowgirl Creamery, Ferry Building

Following another trip to New York last week, life has become something of a narrow trainwreck here in San Francisco’s sunny autumn. It is one of those moments during periods of transitions where everything you’re looking at closely because that’s what you’re supposed to do during transitions – jobs, schedules, aspirations, friendships – goes from being entirely up in the air to being on its way down to earth. Sometimes it all falls into its rightful place. In this case, however, gravity’s yank was too sudden and several bits have hurtled toward my head and then crashed into tiny pieces on the pavement, just as I was trying to juggle the whole thing towards a soft landing in some pleasant nearby grass.

These things happen, of course. And when they do, it’s comforting to read Simon Winchester and have him quote a sampler he had on his wall as a child: Today is the Tomorrow You Worried About Yesterday. And all is Well.

On Monday, after having lunch in SoHo at Rice, my friend Sharon and I looked around for dessert. Our first thought was gelato, but then she thought of Rice to Riches, a rice pudding emporium right around the corner. Having just consumed a large bowl of rice with lemongrass chicken, the wet bowls of rice and cream in shades varying from cream to fawn to brown didn’t pique my appetite, but I liked the place anyway. It reminds me of the old-school New York diners I miss so much in California. Rice pudding is honest. It has about four ingredients, none of which are on the Atkins list and all of which taste excellent. So I’m taking the unorthodox step of recommending a place second-hand. (Reviews from Sharon, Time Out, the Times and New York Magazine are all glowing.) I will note, however, that large bowls of rice pudding just are not visually appealing, especially after a substantial meal, so arrive hungry if at all possible. Or drunk, as I hear people often do.

Rice to Riches is open all hours (until 1AM on weekend nights, 11PM other nights) and serve every imaginable flavor of rice pudding. Actually, they have several that I wouldn’t have imagined, including French Toast and Tiramisu. For an extra fifty cents, you can get whipped cream or coconut on top, among other things, and for a dollar, you can have oven-roasted fruit with your six, eight or fourteen-ounce (or, if you’re awfully peckish, eighty-ounce) bowl of niceness. The décor is hip retro-modern with wavy surfaces, a few tables and a curved bar. What’s not to love about this place?