From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XIV

Introduction

This is the fourteenth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, and Volume XIII is here. (The different volumes have nothing to do with one another and can be read in any order, in a house, with a mouse, in a box, with a fox, and/or not at all.)

What are bits and bobs? In the context of albertnet, they’re mostly excerpts from emails, letters, etc. that I wrote to friends and family before blogs were a thing. Read on if you’re too tired to watch TV. Better yet, read this aloud to your pet or your plants.

February 2, 1990

I spontaneously decided I was through wearing old bike race t-shirts etc. Among these were the polo shirts I got from being a media liaison at the Coors Classic, and some other polo shirts (the bright red ones) that Mom got from somebody who’d marshaled at the Coors Classic. It’s a ton of shirts. Simultaneously, my art studio roommate, C—, whom I call Dithers (for reasons I don’t myself understand), and who calls me Dithers as well (ditto), decided he was tired of wearing nothing but grey and black (which was, and probably still is, the unofficial uniform of the starving artist). So I offered him virtually my entire wardrobe, and that is all he wears now. Buzzard to peacock literally overnight. Naturally, the fact that every single garment promotes cycling, in which he has zero interest, has not escaped him; I guess you could say he wears the shirts ironically. Every so often he complains to me about some nerdy cyclist type who quizzed him eagerly about his involvement in the Coors Classic, and who was disappointed when C— replied, “I was never a marshal for anything and I don’t even know what the Coors Classic is.”

January 19, 1991

[Reminiscing to my brother.] And so, a job at a factory. Underwear. Cans. Crates. Cardboard. Time clock, big bell that rings for break, picnic tables and vending machines. The factory like a giant hive, hundreds of sewing machines going at once, turning out underwear. You and I sticking endless size/color labels on the cans, crating them, stapling wooden lids, packing boxes, filling out shipping forms, noting on invoices where an order—seemingly every order—is short because the factory cannot sew underwear fast enough.

You speak fondly of the experience. Fighting together against the oppression of our (rightfully disgruntled) factory floor colleagues, underpaid immigrant laborers. After-hours hijinks. You and I singing “G— W—” [the factory owner’s name] to the tune of “Richard Corey.” Disabling the safety mechanism and firing the high-powered compressed-air staple gun out over the factory floor. You grin, laugh, reminisce, and what do I do? I sit back, real cool like, maybe mumble a little bit. Do you know why? It isn’t because I don’t cherish those memories. It isn’t that I didn’t enjoy it. It’s that my ambitious preoccupations are censoring me from admitting to having enjoyed a factory job. Yeah, god damn it, it paid the rent. No it wasn’t a stepping stone. Yeah I did it but only because I’d been unemployed. No brass plaque from that one to hang on the wall. It wasn’t a part of my plan. But these are all only delusions of dissatisfaction. I was afraid to admit that I enjoyed it. Afraid I might never transcend it. Gotta getta outta here. Gotta move on. Drive, man, drive.

I have this vision of driving that ‘52 Ford, the closest thing the factory had to a work vehicle, down to the warehouse, unloading all P’s and G’s personal shit because they were too cheap to rent a storage locker. This is not important company business. This is something others are too lazy to do. No talent here. But we were talented in a way, weren’t we? We taught ourselves how to enjoy it. I took half an hour rolling down the screwed-up window so I could coolly hang my arm out and try with one hand to steer that horribly misaligned truck in a straight path down the driveway of the factory, all the time checking out the tits ‘n’ ass of the girlies in little round pictures mounted on the dash. You’d have a book of human sexuality on your lap (found among P—’s stuff), reading aloud with fascination at all this scholastic explanation of the carnal. Written by experts.

But at the factory, we were the experts, making it all a big joke, stumbling through our work recklessly, giddy like little kids left with a babysitter who lets us cuss. Fuck, shit, god damn. Look at my crazed smirk when I say that. Hey G—: fuckin’ shit bitch hell. Laughing so hard we’re dribbling spit down our chins which we wipe away with the back of an arm. After a while the babysitter says, “Hey, quit cussin’, it sounds like shit,” and we are back on the floor, rolling with laughter. Laughing so hard we can’t even make our lips shape the next obscenity. That was our factory life, in all its true glory. It was like a science fiction role-playing vacation, not Westworld or Futureworld, but Factory World. We knew it wasn’t our life, it wasn’t our destiny, but a few months of living paycheck to paycheck, no lofty ambitions, standing in line to punch the clock behind a fat ‘n’ sassy waistband technician. It was like a vacation. But now I’m in dangerous territory. I better shut my trap before I say something stupid like “I’d like to go back.”

April 3, 2000

Next week we’ll be putting an offer on another house, also in Berkeley, that’s ugly on the outside but really groovy on the inside. We should have a bit better chance on it, I reckon, due to its ugliness. (How far we’ve fallen since we started this seemingly doomed house hunt!) It’s on kind of a sketchy street—generally nice, but with a couple of totally derelict houses. One of the houses is abandoned, and the other ought to be condemned whether it’s occupied or not. It looks like it would collapse if you blew hard on it. There’s this big old truck out front that looks like it was driven through the fires of hell. It has a really bizarre mural painted on the sides and back, that looks kind of cult-y. We asked a neighbor what was going on, and he said, “Oh, that’s Mike The Mover. He’s been here since the dawn of time and always will be. He runs an illegal moving operation out of that house.” Fingers crossed … Mike The Mover could become my new neighbor!

January 16, 2001

Oh yeah, I’ve heard of the Stinking Rose, and in fact I ate there once. It’s somewhat famous, probably because of its name and its gimmick (which is, of course, gobs of garlic). It was written up in a “Smithsonian” article on garlic (and is probably mentioned in every other article on garlic as well). It has a prominent location on Columbus Ave, not far from House of Nanking. E— and I took a couple of friends from out of town because they specifically wanted to go there. It was a bit overpriced, and they didn’t really do anything fascinating or brilliant with garlic other than, well, using too much of it. They also had these order-placing devices that looked like phasers, so they could shoot your order into the kitchen rather than walking there. Neat idea, and fun for the diners, but it seemed to actually slow things down. The most memorable part of the evening was when our gay, bald waiter said to me, sternly, “What’s your name?” I told him and he said, “Dana, let’s get one thing straight. I would kill for your hair. Kill!” (My hair was shoulder-length at the time.) Anyway, if they had a Stinking Rose in Phoenix I might go there during a business trip, but you can certainly do better in the Bay Area.

April 26, 2001

Quick question for you. Any tips on child care? E— is due in September and we’re having a hard time finding good day care. Some of these places fill up a year in advance (I guess the couple gets on the list before even trying to conceive) and we don’t want to end up having to settle for one of those places where a chain-smoking ex-hippie sits forty-five kids down in front of the TV, puts her pit bull in charge, and then heads into her bedroom to work a psychic hotline.

I think you guys said you had a nanny back when C— was a toddler? Gosh, that brings me back to a nanny my brothers and I had. I didn’t learn her name until years later but the whole time she watched us, we called her “Darlin’” for reasons we ourselves probably didn’t understand. Probably she called us “darlin’s” and we got confused. We actually thought that was her name. Not that we thought it was her first name—we would never call an adult by her first name—but more like she was a Cher or Madonna type who had only one name. Darlin’ was a very old lady, and very cool because she would let us watch “Adam 12,” and would occasionally give us Trident gum. The only downside was, she absolutely forbade us to suck our thumbs and would always threaten to cut them off if we persisted. In fact, once she chased me under the bed with the kitchen scissors. I remember peeking out from under there, terrified, watching her stick her head down under the bed and say, “Stick out your thumb! I’m going to cut it off!” Such an exciting lady. We always looked forward to having her over. Reading over what I’ve just described, it doesn’t appear that this was top notch child care, but in fact it really was.

Is having a nanny way expensive? Day care places are running about a grand a month and that’s what we’re expecting to spend. It seems impossible anything could be more expensive than that but then you’re probably already laughing at my naivety.  I’m thinking I could just drive down to Fourth Street and find one of the nameless workers that gather down there to get picked up for day labor. For $5 I’m sure a laborer would find childcare easier than digging trenches or putting up sheetrock. Of course, if I suggested this to E— our daughter would end up being raised in a single-parent home (assuming E— beat the murder rap). So I’d appreciate any advice you could give.

September 4, 2001

Thanks for the advice about strollers, particularly the bit about how newborns can’t ride in them because their heads will flop around, frightening Mommy. Someone advised I start with a pram. Near as I can tell, a pram isn’t a terribly useful device, as it only gives the baby a view of the sky. There’s probably a lot to see up there, but not as much as if the kid is facing forward. We’re borrowing a “Baby Bjorn,” which is some kind of frontal baby seat that you wear. Our birthing and bondage coach insists that they’re terrible for the baby’s back, and we should use a sling, but with a sling the kid can’t see much of anything. What do you think? I’ve always had a terrible slouch, giving me a “vertebrae be damned” attitude, so I’m not completely sold on the Baby Bjorn prohibition. I’m tempted to ignore the birthing teacher’s advice simply on the grounds that she’s a radical post-hippie alternative type, but I’m anxious to get the birds-eye low-down from people who know such as yourself.

I was trying to remember what model of Maclaren stroller youse guys had there in the Netherlands. If you’re still using the original one I saw when we were out there, and that you brought out when visiting us, that alone speaks volumes for its durability, as does the fact that you can get replacement parts for it. I also like the British in the web-page descriptions, particularly “colourway.” Some of these look incredibly fancy. Needless to say I won’t be getting the titanium one; if I don’t have a titanium bike, my daughter’s not getting a titanium stroller.

January 21, 2005

E— and I took the youngsters to House of Nanking on Sunday, and in the midst of L— detonating and doing her best impersonation of a fish out of water—in fact, an alcoholic fish out of water having the DTs—no, make that a fish out of water having the DTs combined with a generalized spaz attack—a guy at the next table noticed my Gaastra pullover and got all excited. (Only once before did somebody recognize the Gaastra brand on this garment; it was my friend D— who does a lot of windsurfing, and he asked, “Why do you have that?” to which I replied, “Why, whose is it?”) Our dining neighbor was a kind of nerdy, kind of . . . well, European-looking guy, and he asked, “Hey, are you into kites?!” It was all I could do to keep L— in my grasp—she was on the verge of launching herself out of my hands, and as I was standing up, she could have landed right on the guy—and so instead of having him on, which I might have been tempted to do (“What makes you think of kites?” / “Your Gaastra pullover. They make kites.” / “Is that what they make? I thought they made that heartburn medication!”), I only stammered that I don’t have a Gaastra kite, but rather a brother in Holland. The guy was crestfallen.

January 23, 2009

You asked about the wounds on my finger. They’re from a farming accident—my arm got caught in this big threshing machine we call the Mangle. Oh, wait, that’s how I lost my arm. The finger cuts were from a freak dishwashing accident.

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume X

Introduction

This is the tenth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, and Volume IX is here. (The different volumes have little or nothing to do with one another.)

As with the last few installments, these are taken from ancient emails, back when I archived them as simple text files in the mistaken belief I’d be able to keep up with the practice. It didn’t last long, but has yielded some fun finds from a bygone era. I wrote all these when I was living in San Francisco, before moving to the burbs and becoming a parent.

December 26, 1994

[Having recently finished a 9-month bike tour] I’m still interviewing for a proper corporate-type job. In the meantime I’ve been working odd shifts at the bike shop in Berkeley, just to feel like I’m not a totally hopeless unemployed person. It’s a pretty ridiculous commute, first biking up and over California Street which has got to be at least a 15% grade, and then all the way under the bay on the Bart, for the typically paltry pay you get at a bike shop. Still, it’s diverting and often fun. For example, on Christmas Eve, a bike builder named Daniel, who has been on suspension without pay until further notice for sloppy work, brought in a 12-pack of Heineken, probably as a brown-nosing move. We threw it in the fridge, and brainstormed ways to get the owner, M—, to let us drink them on the job. M— was in a holiday mood, which was good; earlier, I’d “reminded” him of a policy of always buying lunch for members of the staff who wore staff t-shirts on Christmas Eve, and he went along with it. Well, by mid-afternoon the mad Christmas crowds were getting to me and the boys, and I proposed to M— the idea of discreet alcohol consumption to carry us through. M— said, “What, there’s beers!? Cool, gimme one.” Alas, it appeared we’d have no way to open them, lacking a bottle opener, but I grabbed a Maillard Helicomatic lock-ring tool and it worked great. In fact, it soon dawned on me that one half of the tool does the lock-ring, and the other is in fact nothing else but a bottle opener. You gotta love the French. Well, M— proceeded to walk out on the sales floor, beer in hand, and sell a bike. Needless to say it was a free-for-all after that.

January 1, 1995

I guess I forgot to give you my (kinda) new street address: it’s below. I had some fun moving in here. Our street is fairly flat, but our-cross street, Filbert, is crazy steep. They don’t call our neighborhood Russian Hill for nothing; our hills are as oppressive as Russia herself. Trucks and tour buses are prohibited on Filbert but that didn’t stop me from driving up it in the 14-foot U-Haul I rented. Its diesel engine was taxed to the limit, and I had this breathtaking, terrifying, yet oddly giddy feeling of impending doom. Halfway up—and too late to turn around—my inner ear started giving me (non-verbal) warning messages that the truck was about to pitch over backwards and tumble down the hill, end over end. It was such a fearsome feat that I almost got an erection. I held my breath and reassured myself with the fact that this time, I’d bought the full insurance. Anyhow, I made it over, down the other side on compression (the engine shrieking like it was gonna throw a rod), and then, as a final flourish, proceeded to parallel-park that baby in one of the toughest neighborhoods for parking in the entire city.

March 13, 1995

I am very gratified to get your response. The kind of honesty I indulged in via my letter to you, calling you out as I did, was admittedly dangerous—the recipient of such a letter can either take the painful, self-effacing route (which you did), or delude himself and continue to hide behind the falsity of his social veneer. This latter type, like a blindfolded tyke who has yet to learn object permanence, will assume that because he can’t see the truth, that it can’t see him. Of course such behavior is completely pathological. Right now I’m thinking of J— S—, whose insatiable desire to be cooler than me back in high school took the form of dissing me, like some kind of human sacrifice to the gods of cool. I thought to myself, “J—, can’t you do better than that? It’s not hard to be cooler than me—why don’t you try to be cooler than somebody who actually is cool? Like the Fonz? I mean, seriously … cooler than me? What kind of ambition is that?” I was originally drawn to J— as a friend, back in elementary school, because he was such a bold, unapologetic nerd. Unfortunately, it couldn’t last. Through what he probably thought was a social apotheosis from lowly dork into “happening dude” (his favorite phrase), I witnessed the slow, cancerous death of a personality.

May 2, 1995

Thanks for the warning about the virus! I’ve always wondered whether those anti-virus programs can detect viruses that come over e-mail. Fortunately, almost all my e-mail comes from trusted friends and relatives anyway. I did, however, receive a “junk mail” message at work. I guess business solicitations are frowned upon on the Internet, but on CompuServe [how I get and send e-mail], who knows, maybe anything goes. Anyway, I forwarded your warning message to everybody in my e-mail list (about 20 people).

So, yeah, e-mail sure is cool. It’s been wonderful to be able to write my brother Geoff without waiting for the normal three weeks or so it takes the postal service to carry physical mail to the Netherlands. Maybe I’ll get a sound card for my PC and record my actual voice, and send the recording as a binary file; Geoff could hear a reasonable computer facsimile of my voice on the other end! Of course that would be more of a parlor trick than anything useful. You know, the strangest thing about e-mail is that my dad, who by all means ought to be a master of this technology, has not actually joined up. And yet he has the computer, and the mind, for it. Bizarre.

August 6, 1995

You know what? Every time I make my Mexican rice, I think of the time I made it at your place in NYC, and scorched it. The horror! I am certain that you threw away the leftover rice, because it was, well, inedible. I only hope you didn’t have to throw away the pot since I’d blackened it so badly. I keep thinking about what a disaster that was. I say all this to my shame. I guess what I’m saying is, you should really come out to San Francisco so that I can try again with the rice, and show you that it really is good when the right ingredients and familiar kitchen equipment are on hand. I could send you back with a new pot, even. So if you get the chance, please come. Until then, I suppose you can just curse my name.

October 24, 1995

Using the formula f=mgh, and my stopwatch and altimeter data, I have calculated my power output for the climbs I biked up today: over a period of 16:30, I averaged 0.37 horsepower. But what does that mean? Does it mean I have a third of the strength of a horse? Well, not really; I don’t think horsepower applies to horses in the real world. But we do use horsepower to describe certain things. For example, my output was .0037 times the horsepower of a 1985 Volkswagen Jetta, I happen to know. And it would be more than enough to power a Hoover Mighty Might vacuum cleaner. If that’s not interesting to you, consider that 0.37 horsepower translates into 272 watts. That tells us my output is enough to power one of our chandeliers and a desk lamp.

November 1, 1995

Why yes, I’ve been to House of Nanking many times, and thanks for asking. I guess I can’t really recall what my favorite dishes are there, as I try to mix it up each time. Until recently, my strategy was to spend my time in line asking everybody else what they usually get. But the last time, I was in the mood for chow fun and asked the waiter, who is also the owner, if they had it. (In my experience, you can ask for just about anything, including chili mac, at a Chinese restaurant and they’ll have it, even if it’s not on the menu. Not that I have ever actually asked for chili mac. I’m just sayin’.) Well, the owner looked at me as if I were some kind of uncultured rube (which I may well be). “No, chow fun is white-man food!” he laughed. “This your first time here?” I said, “Uh … no.” He nodded and said, “I’ll set you up.” What then transpired you can well imagine, as you described your own Nanking dining experience so well in your last epistle … I need say nothing more. I love that place. It’s always worth the wait. I like the strange vegetables that they use—yams, for example. Totally unique (plus I normally hate yams). As far as the place being greasy, sure, it’s greasy, as Chinese food tends to be, but compared to most places, it goes down (and stays down) pretty darn well. Man. Now I can’t get that place off my mind.

August 27, 1996

How cool, I just figured out how to hook the CD-ROM in my computer into my boom box. It works great—so it looks like I bought computer speakers for nothing. Oh well. Now I can play CDs, which I never could before. Only problem is, I only own two CDs and they were both freebies that E— got from her work. I guess I could check out CDs from the library and tape them. Or of course I could do like everyone else and just go to the record store and buy music, but E— and I are trying to save up for a house one day, which is no easy feat in this area. We looked at a 2-bedroom condo a few doors down and it’s $250,000! There are 1-bedroom condos on top of Russian Hill for $1 million … as if! Sausalito is probably only slightly cheaper than San Francisco, and we’d have to pay $3 a day to commute in over the Golden Gate Bridge (not to mention fighting the traffic … no thanks). So we have to be pretty frugal while we figure out where, one day, we might be able to afford a place.

December 2, 1996

Just had the stomach flu. As if in some awful parody of the three-squares-a-day rule, I deposited my Thanksgiving dinner, in three installments, into the toilet (out the front end). Damn!

December 23, 1996

In reply to your question:

>>You’re set in Internet EtheReal Estate, hottest property going 
>>(the new frontier). But still one question: where do you put 
>>the relatives when they come to visit?

Well, it’s really pretty BASIC. First, I should say that my family members aren’t exactly queuing up to visit me. But when one or two of these characters feels the need to offload, I’m happy to let them nest in any free partition in my home. I help download their luggage (we have a little cache to store any valuables they might have). If they stay the night, I have a strange kind of cot I fashioned out of a kind of braided fiber (a web, you might say) that I’ve stretched over a mainframe. I have a nice spreadsheet for the cot, and some other soft wares, to make guests as comfortable as possible. Usually I keep the bedding compressed, but sometimes I set it up just for CIX and floppy down on it myself.

I’d really like to keep my domain open, but I normally limit it to friends and family. I mean, entertaining is a real effort for me—I guess I’m just not a natural-born server. Multi-tasking is hard for me so I just can’t monitor everyone all the time. I struggle to be a good host sometimes, and some guests I don’t like the slightest bit. Most are basically OK, but many just don’t observe the proper protocol. I can handle it if they’re not PC, but I won’t tolerate bad language. In fact, the next time I get a cursor, he’d better be ready to run, because I swear I’ll boot him!

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Welcome to Albany, California

Introduction

I live in Albany, California. If you’re not from around here, you probably haven’t heard of it. When I talk to people in other states who ask where I live, I usually just say “Berkeley area.” Well, perhaps it’s about time you learned about your blogger’s town.

This post is inspired by a great travel book I picked up recently: Roz Chast’s Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York. Of course there’s been more than enough written about that famous city, but Chast is a very funny writer and cartoonist. Not so much has been written about Albany and I’ll do my best to give you a chuckle or two.

(I’ve laid out this post according to Chast’s chapters, but that’s about where the similarities will end. I cannot do cartoons, but I did get some nice sketches from a budding local landscape architect on condition of anonymity.)

Let’s start here

Over a century ago, Albany was an unincorporated area where Berkeley people came to dump their garbage. One day in 1908 an angry band of shotgun-toting local women turned them away. This triumph inspired the residents to incorporate as the City of Ocean View, which (thanks to people’s good taste) was changed to Albany (after the city’s first mayor, who came from Albany, NY). The story of the armed women is acted out every year by students at our local elementary school. I suppose it wouldn’t be so charming if it had been men wielding the guns. Nobody knows where the men were on that day, as this was before video gaming and televised sports.

When I was in college I was aware of Albany, but only vaguely. I thought maybe Albany was the name of a district of Berkeley, like Westbrae or Elmwood. After living in San Francisco for about five years, my wife and I decided to head back to the East Bay where we could more realistically afford a house. “How about Albany?” my wife asked. “I hear they have good schools.” I shrugged and was like, “Yeah, sure, okay.” After a mere nine months of open houses every weekend and having more than forty offers rejected, we finally got a place and became Albanians. I’m not sure that’s what we’re called, actually … makes it sound like we’re from Albania. So … Albanites? Albanyites? Albanyans? Albanyone?

Basic layout

You don’t need to know that much about getting around Albany because it’s not very big—less than two square miles. You could cover it on foot in a day, but why would you, when it’s a great place to bike? Here’s a bike path map.

That green north-south route is the Ohlone Greenway, a bike path well off the street with a separate walking path. That east-west thoroughfare shown in white, Solano Ave, is where the cute shops are. There’s a busier, wider thoroughfare called San Pablo Ave that runs north-south and is more industrial, where you’ll find some solid restaurants, garages, and the Hotsy-Totsy Club (more on this later). Another bike path goes all the way out to the ocean.

Walking around

Albany, like its surrounding community, is a great for walking because it was built up before the Second World War, so it wasn’t designed around cars. This means it has wide sidewalks separated from the street by a median, so you can really enjoy a stroll without feeling like you’re always about to get run over. A lot of these sidewalks still have the imprint from the construction company that built them, showing the date:

Good sidewalks may not strike you as such a big deal, but not all communities have them. In this regard Albany is the polar opposite of Irvine, California, which caters to cars so completely it’s essentially illegal to walk there. (I think the city planners down in Irvine have given up and are just waiting for the kind of natural disaster that would require the whole city to be evacuated, so they can blast off, nuke the entire site from orbit, and just start over.) In Albany, by contrast, city planners are forever thinking of new ways to be cool, like installing bike lanes, allowing restaurants to build patios out into the street, and putting button-activated flashing lights up at our zebra crossings to help distracted motorists understand that “Hey, I’m walkin’ heah!” Nobody seems to mind that our houses have tiny garages built for Model-T Fords.

The subway

Okay, we don’t have a subway exactly, not like NYC. But we do have the Bay Area Rapid Transit line running through town. The stations and tracks are underground in Berkeley, because those guys wisely insisted on that, but in Albany it’s elevated. When you take the Ohlone Greenway you’re pretty much right under the tracks, so occasionally a train goes by overhead and your fillings rattle. 

The North Berkeley station is just a twelve-minute walk from the southern border of Albany. BART can take you to useful destinations like San Francisco and San Jose, and to the Oakland and San Francisco airports (and I mean all the way—no stupid shuttle bus required).

Stuff to do

Look, I’m not going to try to go toe-to-toe with Roz Chast’s list of goings-on in NYC. Obviously that’s your place if you just dig museums and live theater and such. That said, there’s a lot of culture in this region, such as the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents in Berkeley, the Museum of Paleontology on the UC Berkeley campus, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Lawrence Hall of Science in the Berkeley hills. Needless to say San Francisco has all kinds of world class museums and stuff. (Don’t expect to see King Tut, though, even if they claim to have built an exhibit around him.)

Among most residents, the most popular pastime in Albany is ghost whips. This is where you head out to a large, empty parking lot, get your car going in a straight line, and then jump out and walk next to it. Okay, I confess, we don’t actually do this—our parking lots aren’t that big. I have it on good authority that for ghost whips, you need to head to Turlock, about 100 miles east.

Albany does have a couple of unique attractions, such as Golden Gate Fields, the only racetrack (horses, not dogs) in the Bay Area, and the Albany Sauna, one of the oldest Finnish-style saunas in the country (dating from 1934). According to Wikipedia, its “original furnace and rooms have been maintained to produce one of the most authentic sauna experiences outside of Finland.” I guess I should mention I’ve never actually been; saunas are not really my thing. But here’s a tip: if you want to sound impressive, pronounce it “SOW-na” (first syllable rhymes with “now”).

I’m a cheap bastard so I have a lot to recommend here that’s free. First off, our regional parks are phenomenal. Just head toward the hills and your options are endless (Wildcat Canyon, Tilden, Sibley, Huckleberry, Chabot, Briones), or head toward the water to the Albany Bulb, Berkeley Marina, or Point Isabel. 

Hiking, road cycling, mountain biking, they’re all great in these parts. We even have the fully paved Nimitz Trail running along the ridge of the Berkeley hills with spectacular views of the bay, so even a dweeb on a Segway could have a good time. Here is some eye candy.

Walking around in town is fun too, because we have great weather. Winter is not depressing here, like in places where the cold is biting and/or everything is brown and grey. Winter is our green season and all kinds of trees are blossoming right now. And plants grow so well in this area, most homeowners become part-time gardeners.

If you favor walking with a  purpose, this is a great community for a pub crawl. Start at the Westbrae Biergarten (in Berkeley, just five minutes on foot from Albany), where you can enjoy some choice local draft beer and greasy snacks.

Then proceed down the road ten minutes to Gilman Brewing (delicious Belgian style brews), then stroll another four minutes to Fieldwork Brewing Company, which in my opinion makes the best IPAs on the planet. After all this you’ll need some exercise, so fortunately it’s over a mile to an old standby, the Hotsy Totsy Club (slogan: “Keeping Albany tipsy since 1939”). The best thing about the Hotsy Totsy is that it has an awesome taco truck next door.

On the way home, swing by Schmidt’s Pub, an Albany fixture since 1978 that kind of feels like a house (because it is) and always has great beers on draft, plus some nice original art.

Nerdy stuff

If you decide to live here, let me dangle this nice bonus in front of you: Albany residents get to use both the Alameda County library system and the City of Berkeley library system. That’s fifteen locations! Not that you’d visit all of them, of course, but it means a ton of inventory, and you can have books or movies sent to your local branch for free. The main Berkeley library is a beautiful old building with five floors of goodness. And the gorgeous North Branch, which is the closest to Albany, is a designated historical landmark, having been built by the famous architect James Plachek and funded by the Federal Works Progress Administration.

Now, if you’re sneering at that last paragraph thinking I’m some kind of total nerd, well of course I am! But this area might rub off on you in a good (i.e., intellectual) way. After all, lots of UC Berkeley faculty live in Albany (particularly if they want to raise children in a good school district), and Albany is also home to the University Village, which houses Cal grad students and their families. According to US Census data , Albany has a highly educated population: about 87% of our adult residents have at least some college education; 5% have an Associate degree; 32% have up to a Bachelor’s degree; and 40% also have a Graduate degree.

What does this mean? Well, if you want expert guidance in literature or film, look at what videos were recently returned to the library and not yet re-shelved, or what’s on the hold shelf. You can also get advice from bookstore employees, such as at Pegasus Books (which is technically in Berkeley but a stone’s throw away), who are as stoked on great books as you are. And if you’re looking for free books, we have scores of those little libraries along the sidewalks—I mean, they’re everywhere, and the books in them are top-notch (not just the crap you see in airport newsstands).

What’s more, your book club can occasionally invite, as a guest, the writer of the book you’re reading. We also get pretty good lectures; I’ve attended readings by Tobias Wolff, George Saunders, and David Sedaris. And when chatting over your back fence with your neighbor, you can switch seamlessly among English, French, and Latin. (Okay, now I’m exaggerating.)

Flora and fauna

I know I already talked about the flora but let me add that it’s a true Mediterranean climate, which is one of the rarest climates on earth. According to the Atlas of the Biodiversity of California, the only other places on Earth with this climate are the Mediterranean Sea region (duh!), Australia, South Africa, and Chile. In this climate, everything grows amazingly well. Spit out a sunflower seed and you’ll have a giant yellow flower in what seems like mere seconds. Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit, but really, all kinds of groovy stuff grows in abundance here. The only thing we don’t have a lot of is lawns, because we refuse. They’re so vulgar.

In terms of fauna, the Albany area is great for bird watching because it’s along the Pacific Flyway, so we get all kinds of cool birds: ospreys, great blue herons, terns, and all manner of shorebirds. Up in the hills I see hawks and falcons and even the occasional owl. Check out this great horned owl that perched one day in our neighbor’s tree.

In town here we get lots of songbirds and a surprising number of wild turkeys, which fearlessly stand down cars, sometimes at major intersections.

We don’t get the alligators in our sewers like in NYC, but I have seen plenty of coyotes up in the hills, and a couple of bobcats. I haven’t seen a mountain lion but we do have them, and I’ve seen the remains of their kills. Twice during bike rides, at dusk, I’ve been hit by a bat. (Their echolocation actually isn’t all that good and they dart around crazily, like moths.) We also get cute little newts, and in fact one of my favorite cycling roads, South Park Drive, is closed to cars five months out of the year for the annual newt crossing.

And, of course, we get deer wandering the streets with oddly little fear of anything. The expression “deer in the headlights” doesn’t apply because they never seem to even look up.

Food

Suffice to say there is all kinds of good food either in Albany or a short walk or bike ride away. The dim sum in Albany is very good; the dim sum in Oakland’s Chinatown is great; the dim sum in San Francisco (a BART ride away) is surely on par with anything in NYC. We have an embarrassment of Sushi places, great taquerias (even Calvin Trillin, writing in The New Yorker, admits San Francisco bests NYC in this regard), and top-notch pizza. (I’ve had both Giordano’s and the original Uno, arguably the most famous pizza places in Chicago, and find them identical to Zachary’s and Little Star, respectively, which are competing places on either end of Solano Ave.) Of course restaurants come and go so I can’t go down a huge list other than to say dining out here is legit. And in terms of famous restaurants that aren’t going anywhere, Albany is walking distance from Chez Panisse, where California Cuisine was invented.

We also have a number of top-notch bakeries. Not far away is Grace Baking, a well-loved place, and in Berkeley there’s Cheese Board, which has lots of tasty baked doodads but is particularly known for pizza. They’ll sell you the dough so your pies can come out great at home, too. Albany’s newest place, Pâtisserie Rotha, has such great pastries, people will stand in line for hours for them (or so I’m told). A friend brought us some of Rotha’s stuff and it was darn good. (Had I waited hours for it, I’m sure I’d have liked it even more.) 

There’s also Semifreddi’s, which I always thought was the best in the business for baguettes and such until I tried Acme Bread Company and realized it was vastly superior. Technically Acme is in Berkeley but it’s a short walk from my house.

I grew up in Boulder, Colorado which is at too high an altitude for baking, so I am just blown away at the great baked goods here. When I’ve traveled on business I’ve tried in vain to get good bread, pastries, etc. Of course I’ve had great stuff in France (though no better than here, honestly). I will concede that for bagels, there is absolutely no substitute for NYC. And, having racked my brain, I realize also that the Vogel’s sandwich bread my family had in Glasgow is better than what we get in the grocery store here. But still: Albany is a great place for foodies.

Apartments & housing

Housing is really expensive here. I could go on about this, but it would be boring.

Final stop

You may be wondering why I chose this topic. Well, I figured if you live in a place where winter is harsh, you might like a little escapist travelogue. On the other hand, if you live near Albany—i.e., anywhere in Alameda County—property tax is due in about a month. This is a good time to count the many blessings we have here!

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Adventures in Dining - Sichuan Peppercorns

Introduction

If you’ve never heard of Sichuan peppercorns but are a curious person, read on. If you know a little bit about this obscure ingredient but would like to learn more (such as about them having been banned for import), read on. If you know all about them and would enjoy discovering the flaws in my brief exploration into the topic, read on. If none of this seems interesting, click here.

First encounter

Years ago, my family was in Fremont and we found a Chinese restaurant that looked promising despite being in a strip mall. (It’s Fremont … everything is in a strip mall.) We were starving (in the privileged American sense). The first dish arrived … some noodle thing. For about five seconds we were all like, “Pretty yum!” But then frowns rippled through our ranks. “There’s something wrong with this,” my wife said. One of my daughters pushed her plate away. I had to admit, something seemed off.

The noodles tasted fine. Great, in fact … different from anything I’d had before. But something complicated was going on, something that transcended flavor. It wasn’t as dramatic as when my wife got a mouthful of cockroach at a crappy dim sum place in San Francisco; it just seemed like something was happening in my mouth that shouldn’t. It brought to mind Pop Rocks action candy, but it wasn’t quite that … this was more of a buzz than a fizz. Have you ever had a bit of subtle mouth numbness from eggplant or walnuts? It was kind of like that, I guess, but not as astringent, if that makes any sense. More than anything I was reminded of a meal I had as a kid, at the salad bar at the Red Barn, where something in the fruit salad bubbled and buzzed on my tongue, in a bad way, and my dad (who’d sampled the same thing) announced it had fermented and was not safe to eat.

My wife and both daughters wouldn’t eat any more of the noodles, but nothing else had arrived yet and I was torn. I was really enjoying the noodles despite having decided some ingredient in them had turned, and I was weighing my hunger against the possibility of being poisoned. My mom is a microbiologist and raised my brothers and me to push the envelope on questionable food. Sour milk, for example, turns out to be perfectly drinkable and won’t make you sick—you just have to plug your nose as you drink it. So I finally decided, “Screw it—I’m eating this.” (Nobody tried to stop me. I’m kind of famous in my household for rescuing perfectly edible stuff from our compost bin.)

I got through most of the plate of noodles before the waiter arrived with our next dish, and my wife questioned him. I can’t remember exactly what she said but the gist was, “Is this dish rancid or something?” The waiter wasn’t very fluent in English but said something about peppercorns, and something about ash, and assured us the dish was perfectly fine. I asked if my mouth was supposed to tingle; he smiled and said yes. My family was still dubious—I mean, what waiter would admit to spoiled food?—but I was sold, and thus got all the noodles to myself. Score!

What are Sichuan peppercorns?

I didn’t get the full story on this strange ingredient until at least a year later when I was having coffee with some bike pals after a ride. (At least) two of these guys were total foodies. One of them, T—, whose wife emigrated here from China, spoke (and later emailed) at length about the Sichuan peppercorns, what they do, what they’re called in Chinese (“ma,” spelled 麻), and what local restaurant he recommends that features them. (As described here, the Sichuan peppercorn is also known as Chinese prickly ash, Chinese pepper, rattan pepper, and mala pepper.)

So why had I never heard of these before? Well, the other friend, D—, had the answer: they were illegal for import to the US for decades. The fear was they could bring a certain citrus canker into the US and endanger our crops. D— actually know a guy who kept a personal stash, purchased from lawless importers. (Now that’s a foodie … imagine, buying your ingredients on the black market, from smugglers!) Then the ban was softened: the peppercorns could be imported after being heated in a certain way; eventually, the ban was lifted entirely. (Alas, as I learned from this video report, nobody informed the Chinese exporters that the ban had ended, so these peppercorns are still somewhat rare in the U.S.)

How would you find these peppers?

If you live in a place with a Chinatown, like NYC or San Francisco, you could surely find an open-air market where these peppercorns are sold. The video I linked to above has some pointers. But really, who among you does enough Chinese cooking to even bother? For most of us, Chinese food means either dine-in or takeout. So I did a little online searching of local places and settled on a pretty good strategy for determining if a restaurant cooks with Sichuan peppercorns: just search the online reviews for “peppercorns,” “ma,” “mala,” or (best of all) 麻. This not only ferrets out this ingredient, but helps establish the cred of the restaurant: if the reviewers know all about these peppercorns and their various names, they’re not just uncultured rubes who would praise a restaurant for its Coca-Cola.

As with taquerias (click here for details), I take it as a good sign when a restaurant serves things most native-born Americans would never eat. For me, another sign of authenticity in an ethnic restaurant is poor spelling and/or translation on their menu. Here are some website features that inspired me to try out Chendgu Style restaurant in Berkeley.

Check it out! They have both best food and good food! I get the sense that there’s some list in play here of English words that have positive associations, and thus are sprinkled around like garnish. Now check this out:

Yum, I love rice sick! Here again, there appears to be nobody on staff who is sufficiently fluent in English that this error wouldn’t stand out like a sore thumb … so this is as far from Panda Express as you can get. Onward:

Can I have mine well done?

Just like Mom used to make!

Okay, I guess I should get us back on track. Here’s the first sign of the Sichuan peppercorns:

The description of that sauce strikes me as a heroic effort to communicate what this sauce is all about. It would appear that whoever came up with this didn’t grasp the subtleties of connotation here—that is, that this description is highly scientific as opposed to mouth-watering. Wikipedia more simply describes Zanthoxylum Schinifolium as mastic-leaf prickly ash, aka Sichuan pepper.

Now, you’d think somebody dining on “Dumpling In Zanthoxylum Schinifolium Etzucc Sauce” would appreciate the precise, if perhaps overly technical, description. Not necessarily. Consider this review: “Boy oh boy did we make a bad call here. We saw dumplings and wontons in some kind of sauce with 3 long and intense scientific words we couldn’t understand… We had no idea it was the mouth numbing stuff…  Neither of us were fans of the smell, flavor, or the feeling.”

That reviewer would do well to heed the advice of another patron: “For westerners: ask someone in back to suggest your order...if you’re going to a Chengdu specialty place, DAMMIT, ORDER CHENGDU FOOD… And for god’s sake, please don’t get the General Tso’s chicken: that’s not a real thing...it’s only on the menu to keep the gwai-low happy.”

Another Chendgu Style reviewer wrote, “Folks, the ‘numbing’ (麻) effect is the hallmark of authentic Sichuan cuisine. I’ve visited the actual city of Chengdu in China a few times, and this Berkeley restaurant recreates the flavor very well. Your mouth is supposed to get numb. If anything, I wished the dishes had more numbing spice… Really enjoyed their Fu Qi Fei Pian. Also enjoyed their Tan-Tan Noodles made with a bonafide numbing/spicy sauce --- truth is, any other ‘Tan-Tan Noodles’ made with peanut-based sauce is like making pasta with marinara and calling it ‘pesto.’”

But does 麻 enhance the food?

Do Sichuan peppercorns actually improve Chinese food? This seems like a tricky question. After all, if a restaurant’s cooks don’t know what they’re doing, they can cause all kinds of problems by over-seasoning. Consider The Stinking Rose in San Francisco (slogan: “We season our garlic with food®” and yes, that’s actually a registered trademark there) which has really lousy food because—guess what?—putting way too much garlic in something is a great stunt for pulling in bonehead tourists but has nothing to do with good cooking. So we had to find a Chinese restaurant (and preferably more than one) that is really good and uses these peppercorns properly.

We headed over to Chengdu Style and though the ambience was strictly barebones, we did enjoy our meal. I was too busy eating to bother snapping a really good photo (as I hadn’t even contemplated blogging about this), but here’s a snapshot:

That dish in the foreground is their famous Toothpick Lamb, chock full of Sichuan peppercorns, which we all really liked. (One reviewer wrote, “I would suggest to the owners to drop the toothpicks from the ‘toothpick lamb,’ which is EXCELLENT. It’s literally a choking lawsuit waiting to happen.” I have to agree.) The Garlic Eggplant in the background didn’t have the peppercorns and was also great.

Again I (rhetorically) ask: do the peppercorns improve the food? I was surprised when I asked my family this question today. My younger daughter claims they “dominate the flavor.” My wife says “they distract.” My older daughter said (via text, since she’s off at college), “It’s a cute gimmick for a sec but it distracts from the taste. They taste like I’m being electrocuted LOL.”

Not long ago, my wife and I went to another recommended place, Wojia Hunan in Albany. To establish its cred, and because it’s fun, here are a couple of their menu items:

So … they throw the recipe right into the pot with the feet?

Luncheon meat? Like that weird rubbery Oscar Mayer stuff in the plastic package? Man, that is adventurous!

But this dish must be their real pièce de résistance:

I guess if you nibble the frog gently enough, he doesn’t realize he’s being eaten until it’s too late?

We didn’t try any of those things. But we had the Fried Glutinous Rice Balls (really tasty), the Sautéed Eggplant with String Beans (great), the Homestyle Noodles (solid), and a fish dish, I think the Boiled Fish with Rattan Pepper (delicious and numbing, but with a lot of little bones). The photo below  is from that meal; as you can see, this place is more upscale than Chengdu Style. Again, I dug the numbing business but my wife and younger daughter didn’t (though it didn’t ruin the meal for them either).

Now, it could be that we newbies are just not used to the numbing effect, right? Well, my older daughter asked one of her Chinese friends for his opinion of the peppercorns, and he replied, “My mom used to put them in soups and chickens and such when I was a kid, and I hated it. Always ruined my day when I accidentally chewed them. You can generally find them lined up on the side of a finished plate.” So it appears they’re just not for everyone.

Next up…

There’s one more Chinese restaurant I really want to try for its peppercorns: Sichuan Fusion in nearby Richmond. This is the place my friend T— originally recommended. I have just discovered that its website looks eerily similar to Wojia’s —and Chengdu Style’s too, for that matter:

Does this mean they’re all the same—basically a small chain? Naw. I’ll bet they just hired the same low-end company to build their barebones, humdrum websites. I think this is a plus: these restaurants are putting their effort into the food, not their brand and “online presence.”

If I discover anything really remarkable at Sichuan Fusion, I’ll be back to post an addendum. Watch these pages!

Addendum

My wife found Sichuan peppercorns at a local supermarket:

I made Mapo Tofu at home a couple of times and it came out pretty well. The first time I toasted the peppercorns dry in a hot pan and they bounced around like popcorn, and then I removed half of them, ground them up with a mortar and pestle, and sprinkled those on the top. The other half I cooked in oil with the rest of the stuff. It came out pretty nice and tingly.

I made it again the other night and didn't put any peppercorns in the dish itself, because my daughter does not fancy them. But I ground some for the top and that gave a decent level of tingle. I will keep tweaking this and if I ever make a real breakthrough I will append again.

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