Shannon Phillips

Too excited about our new house (omigawd) to sleep, I went through Sam’s camera and pulled off a few pictures of Robin to share. Here they are: he’s wearing a hoodie sent by his Nonna and Pappy, which, by the way, he loves. We let him wear it for three days straight, waking and sleeping, because he’d cry whenever we tried to take it off him.

Then we took it off and washed it, because we are big softies but we have our limits.

I don’t know what that is at the corner of his mouth. I hope it’s not a bug.

Today I got up, changed Robin’s diaper, got Robin dressed, got myself dressed, made coffee, put on an episode of Sesame Street, wrote a blog post, chatted with my BFF, made some phone calls, went to the bank, took Robin to the park, came home, and bought a house.

We signed the papers tonight! A notary and a representative from the title company came over and we signed a huge stack of papers, had our fingerprints stamped, and handed over an eleven thousand dollar cashier’s check (that was why I had to go to the bank)! The sellers have already signed, so as soon as all the money changes hands between the title company and the banks, the deed will be ours.

At some point when I’m less exhausted, and possibly a little less loopy with joy, I’ll write an outline of the whole long saga. Meanwhile, I put a bunch of pictures of our new house up on Flickr; you can see the whole set here. We love it so much. I still can’t believe it’s really going to be ours.

This article is ridiculous.

“We offer a kind of grittiness you can’t find much anymore,” said Randy Shaw, a longtime San Francisco housing advocate and a driving force behind the idea of Tenderloin tourism. “And what is grittier than the Tenderloin?”

Uh, try Hunter’s Point.

I live in the upper Tenderloin. It is in no way the “domain of the city’s most down and out.” It’s a normal middle-class neighborhood with nice apartment buildings, restaurants, bars, coffee shops, bookstores, ethnic groceries, clothing boutiques, hair salons, etc. Oh, and bunches of hotels—there’s three hotels on my block alone—meaning that we get scads of tourists already. We’re adjacent to the theater district and all the art galleries: for crying out loud, most of the youth hostels are in the upper Tenderloin. There’s nothing the least bit “unlikely,” let alone “highly unlikely,” about tourism in the upper Tenderloin.

The lower Tenderloin, by contrast, which is apparently what this guy means when he writes about the “Uptown Tenderloin” (“uptown” being a word that I have never once heard applied to the Tenderloin in my eleven years of living here: who knows where Mr. McKinley pulled that one from) houses most of the city’s methadone clinics, shelters, and soup kitchens, and is as a result clogged with homeless addicts, the drug dealers who sell to them, the low-end prostitutes who are hoping to get enough cash together to buy something off the drug dealers, the pimps who collect the prostitutes, etc. It’s a pretty depressing place to stroll through, but it’s actually not dangerous: it’s right next to City Hall, it’s well-policed, and there’s lots of clubs, bars, and inexpensive ethnic restaurants, leading to lots of foot traffic. Some of the bigger musical venues are in the lower Tenderloin. It also includes the quite-charming stretch of “Little Saigon” or whatever they decided to call those two blocks that have been claimed by Vietnamese immigrants, and are now full of bánh mì sandwich shops and phở joints. The lower Tenderloin sees less tourism, but still gets its share of budget-minded travelers looking for a cheap lunch or a night trawling through dive bars. For Jesse McKinley to write about this neighborhood as if he’d just made some kind of daring discovery is patently absurd. Where did they find this guy?

In the interests of absolute fairness I just went back and gave the article a second, closer read, and I have to admit that it’s not so much any specific factual inaccuracy that pisses me off so much as the general tone of pearl-clutching fear and astonishment. The Tenderloin! It exists! And people might actually go there on purpose!

Lines like “Deranged residents are a constant presence,” may be true, but could equally well describe pretty much anywhere in San Francisco, especially the places where tourists—and hence panhandlers—congregate. As for “after dark the neighborhood can seem downright sinister”: a prime example of the pearl-clutching I find so annoying. The Tenderloin streets are plenty safe, at least until 2am, when the bars close: if you’re wandering around dark alleys at three or four in the morning, I guess you may be taking your chances. This would be just as true in Chinatown, by the way, which McKinley describes as “decidedly less seedy.” A description which leads me to suspect that McKinley has never been to Chinatown, but nevermind that.

There are genuinely bad areas of San Francisco—places where tourists truly don’t go—but they are apparently invisible to New York Times travel writers. Next time I look forward to Mr. McKinley’s breathless article detailing the undiscovered “reality tourism” opportunities of the Bayview.

Today in our veggie box we got: kale, red chard, asparagus, radishes, two bags of baby lettuces, four spring onions (red this time!), four leeks, a bag of snap peas, four kiwis, and about a pound of yellow fingerling potatoes. Snap peas! The seasons are changing in our bellies! Oh man, I am craving fresh tomatoes so hard, it will be like a miracle when they show up.

Last week I forgot to account for Easter in my meal plan. Whole Foods has the local, grass-fed lamb at the butcher counter right now: it’s only here a couple times a year, and it’s so good. The rest of the time the lamb is from New Zealand (and isn’t grass-fed, and isn’t as good). So last Sunday I got some cubed lamb and roasted it with honey and saffron, using the Silver Spoon recipe for “agnello all’araba” that I discovered last year. As a result, we still have a bunch of chard in the crisper: it is not as lovely as the new chard, but it’s not bad yet, so I’m going to go ahead and use both bunches in that polenta dish tonight. I’ll use the leeks too.

Tomorrow night our doula is coming over in the evening (we’re hiring a labor doula this time around) to discuss our birth plan, so I’m not planning on cooking: we still have some leftover lamb, so I’ll just reheat that quickly before the doula shows up.

But I do want to get to the rest of the veggies while they’re still fresh and gorgeous, so Friday we’ll have a big salad with the lettuce, radishes, snap peas, and green goddess dressing. I might put in some bacon too, and/or the hardboiled eggs left over from Easter.

The weather’s turned beautiful again after a brief spate of rain earlier this week, so over the weekend I’m planning a picnic lunch in the park: I’ll make potato salad and the roast beef and blue cheese sandwiches described in this article (item #5: I can incorporate the red onions from our box!) I’ll have to do at least some of the prep work for that on Friday, but maybe Saturday morning I can whip up a batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies to add to our picnic. Then dinner will be…oatmeal cookies. Along with whatever’s left over from lunch, or can be scrounged from the fridge.

Sunday night I’ll make asparagus risotto, and Monday, braised kale crostini—probably with something to accompany or follow it, like maybe fruit and cheese: there are lovely local strawberries at the store right now. And Tuesday will be for leftovers, as usual.

This is such a great idea! I’d love to do something similar with Robin and Davy when they’re older.

Right now Robin and I are reading the original Thomas the Tank Engine stories by the Rev. W. Awdry. They’re good! There’s a lot of genuine railway geekery that comes through, and I learned in the preface that Rev. Awdry wrote the first stories for his son, when the boy was the same age that Robin is now. So it’s not surprising that Robin really likes the book. It’s big and heavy for him, but he’ll often toddle around with it clutched to his chest.

We’re also reading a lovely book that Nonna and Pappy sent, Full Steam Ahead! by the wonderfully-named Benedict Blathwayt. It’s about the adventures of Duffy Driver and his little red train, which Robin identifies as “James.” (James is his favorite Thomas character, and also red.) There are lots of “Little Red Train” books, apparently, and the big draw for this series is the artwork. The pictures are huge and wonderfully intricate. Robin loves picking out the sheep, birds, doggies, babies, balls and other little pieces of the background action.

Oddly enough, even though these are hardback books with regular paper pages, Robin seems to be gentler on them than he is with his board books. Our collection of board books is increasingly ratty, and some of them Robin has actually ripped in half. But so far both the Thomas book and the Little Red Train book are undamaged. I wonder if that’s just an accident of them being relatively new additions to his library, or if it actually has to do with how much he likes them?

This is the first year we really “did” Easter with Robin, and he actually got into it to a much greater extent than I expected. We almost didn’t dye eggs this year; we thought Robin wasn’t old enough to do much besides make an unholy mess and get frustrated by our attempts to restrain him. Instead we thought we’d go to one of the city’s organized events, like the Union street parade and petting zoo, or the Children’s Easter event with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. After all, nothing says “Easter in San Francisco” like egg hunts with drag nuns!

Then we woke up to a cold, windy, rainy day, and decided to come up with a Plan B. I hardboiled some eggs, mixed up some food coloring cups (we only had yellow, green, and blue, but we made do), and set up a dye station. As it turned out, Robin “got” the project immediately: he was quite happy to drop the eggs into the dye, and see them come out a different color. After they dried we let him put them in his basket, and let him have some fun handling the colored eggs for a bit.

Then I spirited the basket away and went out to hide eggs in the hallway. Most of them weren’t hidden very well:

But some of them were a bit harder to spot:

Then we called Robin out and encouraged him to find the eggs. Again, he figured out the routine pretty quickly, although his first instinct was to clutch all the eggs to his chest as he went running down the hall. We convinced him to put them back in the basket:

He needed some hints to find all the eggs, but eventually he got them all:

We gave him a big round of applause when he’d collected them all. Then he wanted to count them, and practice naming the colors:

All in all it was a lot of fun to be gotten from a dozen eggs and some food coloring, and Sam and I were really pleased by how easy it was to have a nice Easter afternoon with a two-year-old, even in the rain.

Today in our veggie box we got: collard greens, chard, russian red kale, lettuce, asparagus, a small head of cauliflower, two leeks, a bunch of spring onions, a bag of small yellow potatoes, and bunch of fresh oregano.

A quick review of some of the new recipes I tried out lately (links in previous posts): none of them were so hot. Actually, I liked the New York Times recipe for farro with collard greens, and Robin seemed to like it okay too, but Sam said it tasted like oatmeal and he would not be particularly keen on seeing it again. (I overcooked the farro a little bit, but for the record it was not the consistency of oatmeal.)

Anyway, this week we’ll go back to old standbys: I never got around to cooking a chicken last week, so I’ll get one tonight and roast it with the potatoes and oregano. Then tomorrow we’ll have the bulgur with kale and salami recipe that we always like, along with roasted asparagus, and Friday cauliflower cheese with a salad on the side.

Saturday is gaming day, but Sunday I’ll make polenta with chard, leeks, and cheese. Then Monday I’ll do pork chops smothered in spring onions and spicy collard greens, and Tuesday will be for leftovers as usual.

Robin and Sam and I went down to Niles Canyon today for their Spring Steam Weekend, and we got to ride behind their Southern Pacific No. 2472 steam engine from Sunol to Niles and back. I was about to describe this locomotive to you as “a very serious piece of engineering,” but then I suddenly had qualms: maybe I was just so impressed by this hulking, churning collection of wheels and pistons and smoke because I’m a train novice, and anybody who was really serious about steam engines would say oh that’s nothing?

So I asked Sam, hey, how would you describe the SP 2472?

“As a big black smoking monster of a machine that rumbled down the track like Zeus himself was driving it,” Sam said, immediately.

So there you go. Here’s another picture, with a human in it for scale:

They had a restored Pullman car for the first-class passengers, but our family rode coach, in one of the open-air cars. The scenery was lovely, although I was too busy keeping an eagle eye on Robin to take many pictures. I got this one when we were going through the yard:

Afterwards the boy got to clamber around on some of the cars that were parked on a side track:

“Look,” I said when Robin grabbed the wheel-thingy, “he’s driving the train!”

“Yeah, not from that end,” said Sam. “That’s a caboose.”

Then it got late, so we went home. Robin passed out in the car. It was a long day for a little engineer!

Today in our veggie box we got a veritable rainbow: purple kale, red chard, green garlic, and a handful of yellow fingerling potatoes, along with spring onions, collard greens, asparagus, a bunch of rosemary, one huge leek, a few small heads of lettuce, two little cauliflowers, and a bag of kiwis.

Tonight Robin’s Pappy is coming back from a trip to Ethiopia, so Nonna is in town and we’re all going out to meet him at the airport. We’ll probably go out to eat afterwards, if Dave isn’t too jet-lagged.

Tomorrow night I’m looking at this recipe for greens and potato gratin—I could use the kale and the chard, as well as the potatoes. I might toss the lettuce in some dressing for a small accompanying salad. And Friday night I could try out collard greens with farro, maybe with roasted asparagus on the side: I know I like farro, and I don’t cook with it often. Between those two recipes I’m pretty sure I could also work in the green garlic, spring onions, and leek.

Saturday will be cook’s night off; Sunday we can have a chicken roasted with rosemary-garlic paste. Monday I’ll use the cauliflower in a spaghetti dish (I seem to be finding a lot of New York Times recipes this week)—and then Tuesday will be for leftovers as usual.

I hate rock ‘n roll songs that are about rock ‘n roll. Meta-rock. By this I don’t mean songs that merely express a desire to rock (Kiss, “[I Wanna] Rock and Roll All Nite”) or announce the band’s intention to rock in the immediate future (Queen, “We Will Rock You”). Exhortations to rock, claims of having rocked in the recent past, narrative statements indicating that the singer is currently in the process of rocking: these are all fine. I also give a pass to songs that express simple enthusiasm for rock music (Joan Jett, “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll,”—yes, she didn’t write the song, but nobody associates it with The Arrows). Rock music is about immediacy and passion: it’s well-suited to songs that purely take joy in the act of rocking out.

I don’t even mind songs that tell us how the rocking is in a particular place or time. The Ramones, “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School,” Elvis Presley doing “Jailhouse Rock”—we’re still cool. One of the things a good rock song can do is tell a story. I don’t mind a little scene-setting mixed in with my rock ‘n roll.

Where I get itchy is with a song like Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll.” Here the singer is no longer expressing a simple and pure emotion, as Joan Jett did: he’s commenting on the state of rock and roll in general. This is meta-rock territory, and it irritates me. It’s a violation of the genre. Rock songs encapsulate the feeling of a single moment; I don’t care whether it’s driven by a primal and timeless urge or whether it’s set in a very particular place and time, but I do care that the emotion evoked by the song be immediate and unadulterated. When rock songs twist in on themselves to become reflective, self-referential commentaries, they cease to work for me.

Exultation, despair, anger, need, sexual yearning and the wild aimless energy of youth: these things are the proper subject matter for rock ‘n roll. “Bob Seger is cranky about the albums the kids are making these days” doesn’t cut it. He might as well have written a song called “Get Off My Lawn.” It probably would have made for better rock music.

And Huey Lewis, this goes double for you and The News. “The Heart of Rock & Roll” is a terrible song. If you have some critical insights about the state of the industry, write an essay. Give an interview. Start a blog. Don’t make me listen to your stupid whimpering meta-rock.

I could think of other examples, but I don’t want to. I realize this pet peeve of mine is fairly crazy; I have others that are equally crazy, and I figured I could amuse you, The Internet, with a catalog. Next up: Cars That End Up in the Crosswalk After the Light Changes.