Heat Wave=Ice Cream+A New Find

Earlier this week, we San Franciscans experienced a rare treat:  true ice cream weather.  Ice cream weather demands temperatures that are so warm that you only crave two things:  big, sweating glasses of ice water and cold, cold foodstuffs.  We got that on Monday and Tuesday: mornings so sunny and warm that you didn't need a jacket to leave the house; soft breezes making their way through downtown streets at lunchtime; and the inevitable (not so enjoyable) late afternoon bus rides home on unairconditioned MUNI lines.

San Francisco is not a city that's prepared for heat of any kind.  Most apartments and even a lot of the stores and restaurants don't have air conditioning.  So it's rather wonderful that the temperature only rises to 80 degrees about twice a year.  When it does, though, watch out.  Everyone acts like it's the end of the world and begs for the fog to return.  To me, it just means that ice cream can be enjoyed as the refreshing treat it's meant to be.  {OK, OK, I did complain a little.  But only on hot buses, really.}

On Tuesday night, Cole and I headed into the Mission to Humphrey Slocombe, which you may remember from the fabled Shira Ice Cream Tour of June 2010.  It was a perfect, balmy evening, and damned if we weren't going to take advantage of it.  The Mission was busy with everyone out on the streets, fans blowing in windows, music wafting from markets.  Cole sampled the Balsamic Caramel ice cream (she liked; I didn't) and I had the strange but delicious Red Hot Banana.

As great as Humphrey Slocombe is, what piqued my interest on Tuesday evening was this old diner/soda fountain/ice cream shop called St. Francis, which we passed on our way down 24th Street. 

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This place looks spectacular at night, with all of its neon signs lit up, including a big, awesome vintage sign up higher on the building, screaming out the name in red neon.  It's got an old school soda fountain counter that's been serving up delicacies since 1918.  That's what I love about this city:  almost every place you stumble upon has a story to go with it.  You don't find the cookie-cutter chain restaurants that a corporation threw up in a week in a strip mall.  People worked hard to get these places started, and even when they're later sold to new owners, as in the case of St. Francis, there is an enduring respect for history and what has come before.

Turns out that St. Francis no longer makes its own ice cream (boo hoo); they serve Mitchell's (which was the first stop on our ice cream tour and my favorite, so I can't complain).  In any case, I have a feeling that the sundae combinations on the menu are all special St. Francis creations, not to mention the wide variety of diner food available.  In the running list of new restaurants to try that I keep in my head, St. Francis just jumped to the top.

{More} Entertainment from the Hood

I'd been wanting to capture this house and vehicle with my camera because they are both so over the top.  The faux street sign off to the left of the house proclaims it to be the crossing of "The Love Shack" and "John and Sandy Lane," and these people decorate to the nines for holidays.  The vehicle advertises some sort of mobile DJ service, and always sports this egregious amount of bling, along with various flashing lights.

I'm all for these people's self expression, but please remove the "It's all good!" sign immediately.  NOT A FAN.

Entertainment from the Hood

I've seen my fair share of front yard shrines, but this one takes the cake.  Did they bury Jesus up to his shoulders on purpose?  Did the bottom half of a once-whole statue break off in an unfortunate accident, prompting the owner to just stick the remainder into the ground?

Either way, I think it looks pretty awesome.  Almost as if Jesus is going to start rising from the white gravel at any second.

Livability

Not just any quote makes our chalkboard in the kitchen, but this one did.  This came from a contest that SFMTA held to define livability in six words or less.

I really like the winner; hence, my ensconcing it in colored chalk in our kitchen.  In fact, I think this six-word definition is pretty brilliant and perfectly describes San Francisco livability:

--accessible places = pretty damn good mass transit, bike culture, entirely walkable city
--natural spaces = tons of parks (including Golden Gate), beaches, woods, hills, community gardens
--minimal traces = SF's landmark laws regarding mandatory composting, green building, energy conservation

How would you define livability in your neck of the woods?

Our Little Cordyline

We have a tree well outside our building.  When we first moved in, there was a sizable stump in it.  One day, our downstairs neighbors removed that stump.  Ever since then, the tree well has been filled with a variety of weeds and grasses, along with some potatoes that our other downstairs neighbor planted there.  [I would never, ever eat anything that grew in a tree well on a city sidewalk.  I don't really care to have my fruit and veggies nourished with cat and dog urine, you know?]

[The offending tree well.  I told you it was unattractive.]

Anyway, on Sunday we finally made good on our plan to revamp that tree well.  We went to my favorite garden center in the entire world, Flora Grubb, and found a nice looking cordyline (in the sale section, no less!).  We chose this plant because it actually grows quite large and doesn't require much water.  Also, it meshes with the Spanish look of our building.  It would have been cool to get a full-size tree, but we were operating under the constraints of what the Volvo could hold.

Before we got started, we had lunch on our front steps in the sun.  We mused that yard work is much more tolerable when it's not 100+ degrees outside.

After assembling our tools, we got to work clearing out the weeds and grass.  Along the way we found several shards of glass, some coins, different sized potatoes that our neighbor didn't dig up, some trash, and lots of worms and bugs.

We added quite a bit of nice, healthy soil, plopped the cordyline in the hole, and covered the whole area with shredded redwood bark.  

We plan to put in something around the edge to finish it off.  Also, once the cordyline gets larger, it'd be cool to start a succulent garden around the base.

Care for a Fore Shank?

Even though I rarely eat meat these days, I really enjoy this informative and nicely designed poster in the window of our neighborhood butcher.  We went into the shop for the first time a couple of days ago and it is so cute.  Besides large hunks of dead animal, they also sell locally made jam, pickles, baked goods and fresh produce.

The sign outside the shop is pretty awesome too.

Mortified

If you kept a journal or a diary during your formative years, and if you ever go back and look at it, then chances are you’ve shaken your head and/or shuddered at the thought of anyone ever reading what you once wrote.  I know that’s how I feel about my elementary school diaries, one of which is patterned with pastel-hued ballet shoes and the other a Ramona Quimby theme.  Luckily, I did not keep a diary in high school.  If I had, I would have burned it long ago to protect myself and anyone else who had the misfortune to come up in it.

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So imagine if you were ever asked to stand up in public, on a stage, and read passages from your very own personal stock of embarrassing entries.  Would you do it?  [My answer is no, after going back and reacquainting myself with my diaries.  A big, fat, resounding no!]  Well, plenty of people do.  And it’s one of the funniest things EVER.  It’s part of a show called Mortified.

A few weeks ago we went to this show at the Make-Out Room in the Mission.  It was, as mentioned above, a progression of 7 or 8 people getting up on stage, reading passages from their elementary or high school diaries, and occasionally providing some commentary on what they’d been going through when writing the entries.  For most of the participants, a photo of them from the time period of the entries was projected on a big screen behind them, allowing you to see what the person looked like when s/he put pen to paper.  And, as you’d expect, most of these photos were nerdy, awkward, or both.

It was THE FUNNIEST thing I’d seen in so long.  I have not laughed that much in eons.  It was just what I needed that night.

The entries that everyone chose were so hilarious on their own that the readers didn’t even have to work much on delivery.  The things they wrote were poignant, embarrassing, earnest, overly dramatic, and just plain funny.  One woman who had been a teenager in the early ‘70s had written about her friends who had started drinking alcohol, railing about their newfound addiction to “fools’ poison.”  A guy who had clearly been goth in high school and had the book of original poems to show for it had an entire poem dedicated to how he considered grey to be the only worthwhile color.  “Do not speak to me of pastels,” he wrote.  The show started with a girl reading entries from her freshman year bid to get on the marching band’s drum line (a cause close to my own heart), and the photo projected behind her depicted a completely geeky band nerd, in stark contrast to the striking woman on stage.

I admire anyone who can look back at herself and poke fun at the person she used to be.  That’s the other thing that makes this show great, I think.  While it’s beyond hilarious, there’s also this element of “I can read these entries and laugh about them and let you laugh about them too, because I’ve grown up into someone pretty awesome.”

Crayons!

Watching this now, at 32, makes me just about as happy as it did when I was five.