The year 2001 has been a year of both important changes in my life, and things that did not change at all. Among the things that did not change was my inability to get a satisfactory haircut within the city limits of San Francisco. Among the things that did change was, after a brief period of insanity, I came to my senses and realized that “The Fusco Brothers” is, indeed, a really moronic comic strip, and I no longer read it. (Meanwhile, I became a big fan of “Sherman’s Lagoon”, which, unlike “Fusco”, really is funny.)
As the year draws to a close, we find that the movie “Lord of the Rings” dominates at the box office. This movie is based on a trilogy of books written by J. R. R. Tolkien. The word “Tolkien” apparently comes from an ancient Greek word, meaning “he who has an excess of middle initials”. I was thinking of publishing a book myself, under the pen name of M. K. K. Valenza; it would be an epic story of a person who saved up a stash of cherries, and it would be called “Hoard of the Bings”.
Anyway, the past year began on a couple of bright notes:
JANUARY 27. I rode my bike for the first time since the accident on December 11. My collarbone was healing, but it still hurt, and my range of motion in my left arm was not fully recovered. But it was a sunny, relatively warm day, and I wanted so desperately to get back on my bike. Cindi rode with me for a couple miles, and then we headed to the beach and watched the shorebirds running from the surf and fighting over territory amongst themselves.
FEBRUARY 1. I rode my bike to work for the first time in seven weeks.
Then things became a little more unpleasant:
MARCH 29. At work, I was called into a room with dozens of other employees, given a packet of information, read an official statement of regret, and then I went to my desk and packed my things. The dotcom crash had hit home, and I was now officially laid off. This was a disaster; not only was I not sure when the next paycheck would arrive, but I also no longer had any way of accessing the large collection of mp3s that I had downloaded from Napster onto my work computer.
MARCH 30. As a drastic cost saving measure, and with the help of Cindi, I began cooking my own meals. I was very confused by some of the technical cooking technological terms that she used, such as “bake” and “freezer burn”, but it was important to try to spend as little money as possible. She showed me how to make a tuna fish sandwich, and how to put french fries on a “baking pan” and put them in a large device called an “oven” .
EARLY APRIL. I went to a job fair in downtown San Francisco. I was there when it opened, and when I walked back outside an hour or so later, there was a line into the building stretching well around the block.
Then things got better:
APRIL 16. I started my new job at the University of California in Berkeley.
APRIL 17. I stopped cooking for myself and began eating out again.
The total commute time for my new job was an hour and 15 minutes: 40 minutes on my bike to the downtown BART station, with most of the rest of it involving a BART train across the bay to the downtown Berkeley station. I made use of my time on BART by listening to French tapes in preparation for the bicycling trip to France were planning for the summer. To get in shape for the trip, Cindi and I also some sponsored bike rides:
APRIL 22. Cindi and I rode our bikes 70k on the Primavera 2001 bicycle ride, near Fremont in the Bay Area.
MAY 20. Cindi and I rode 100K in the Strawberry Fields Forever bicycle ride near Santa Cruz. The night before, we drove down to Santa Cruz to spend the night. We weren’t sure if our bikes were allowed in the hotel room, so we parked a discreet distance from the office when we checked in so the bikes wouldn’t be seen, and then we snuck our bikes upstairs to the room.
Then came the fun:
MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND. Cindi and I flew to Ashland, Oregon, to patronize the Shakespeare festival there. We stayed at a lovely Bed & Breakfast, just up the road from downtown, and saw two plays: Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and a non-Shakespeare play, “Fuddy Meers”. We also spent time just enjoying the town. We walked along the river front downtown where there were booths set up for people selling things, and we found a women there who was giving henna tattoos. Both of us got one. We looked very cool with the henna tattoos on our arms, but they only lasted a couple of weeks. The second day, we stopped at a bar one evening and sat outside, watching local folk musicians jamming. We also found three different stores downtown that had cats living inside the premises, and I managed to pet every single one of them. It was a wonderful trip.
LATE JUNE/EARLY JULY. One day while bicycling in France, Cindi and I stopped for lunch at a creperie in the town of Chablis. There were no crepes on the menu.
...We spent some time in the city of Dijon, where we ate mustard and I got a haircut. It was actually a pretty good one, but before going into the hair salon I had to ask someone at the tourist office how you say “trim your hair” in French. It turns out to be “refrechir”, as in to “refresh”. Those French are so cute. Even so, the stylist asked me just to make sure: “Pas court?” he asked me--not short? “Pas court!”, I said emphatically. Thus my hours of listening to French on the BART trains helped to avert a haircut disaster.
...In the evening in Dijon, we went to a movie theater and watched the movie “Annie Hall”, which I had not seen in over twenty years. The French people in the audience laughed the loudest when Woody Allen told a joke about Maurice Chevalier.
...Our last evening in Paris, we took a boat ride at dusk down the Seine, along with our friend Melissa, who we had met on the bike trip. We saw Parisians eating and reading and dancing the tango along the waterfront, and I said to my companions, “It doesn’t get any better than this.” And it didn’t.
More bicycling came after we got back from France:
AUGUST 19. Cindi and I did the Holstein Hundred bike ride. We rode the shortest route, which was 34 miles. That distance was just fine, as near the end there was the nastiest, steepest hill I’ve ever tried to ride up (and I gave up and walked it the last half mile or so of that hill).
Right before Labor Day Weekend. I got a fairly decent haircut in Berkeley, which is not San Francisco.
LABOR DAY WEEKEND. Cindi and I flew to Colorado Springs, a city where I used to live. I did not try to get my hair cut there.
SEPTEMBER 10. Nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever happened. Life was mostly just as it had been.
OCTOBER 27. Cindi and I attended the Halloween themed wedding of our friends Matthew and Hava. We dressed like Renaissance characters. We were really, really cute in our outfits.
NOVEMBER 22. Cindi and I had our traditional Thanksgiving turkey in the form of turkey burgers, and then saw the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”, which was having a limited national re-release in honor of the fact that the year is 2001.
DECEMBER 24. Mike sends out his annual end-of-year holiday greetings.