I must still be jetlagged; it's 9am here and I'm wide awake. Bah. That whole time zone thing weirds me out anyway. What business has the earth got, moving around like that? It's all that bugger Galileo's fault. Remind me to have a word with him.

Anyway, though I hate writiing the kind of laundry list entry that goes "first we did this, then we did this, etc..." I'm going to have to write one, if briefly, if only in order not to forget anything we've done in the last few busy days!

So here goes...

elgecko picked us up--gah, 2 and a half hours late!--at the airport and whisked us "home" to Fremont, where we stayed for our first two nights. Friday, after lunch with celticmoni, we took a field trip to San Jose to see the Winchester Mansion, home of the late, zany Sarah Winchester, who thought the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles were haunting her and demanding that she keep building a house that resembles a D&D adventure. The words "kooky old bat" have never seemed so appropriate. After successfully avoiding the grues, we had dinner at an overpriced, overly trendy sushi restaurant. It was one of those places that was so trendy it hurt--but the sushi wasn't in any way spectcular. :P

But wait, that wasn't the end of our Saturday adventures! No, forsooth, there was a filk con! We made it into Milpitas in time to hear adamselzer play a set with vixyish and surrdave, an unparallelled treat. This was followed by two other concerts, and we were met by elgecko and danea. Unfortunately, what with the long day and jetlag, we were too tired to stay up for any of the open filking, so although we said hi to telynor in the hallway, we missed getting to hear her sing. :(

All that, and only now am I finally up to the actual San Francisco portions of the trip! Yesterday was a long day, but after riding to the city with celticmoni, elgecko, and thesprout and checking into the hotel, we met up with danea again for lunch and a walk through Chinatown, where a street festival was going on. It was wall-to-wall people, and usually I hate such crowds, but when I've planned for it, it's kind of fun. Besides, I was taller than almost everyone, so it was easy to see! I made myself easier to find by purchasing an auspicious pinwheel--an absurd confection of plastic gilt and spinning foil that made me quite foolishly happy for the rest of the day. :D

We found our bleacher section for the parade early, which was rather unfortunate, since the parade started over an hour late--and went on forever. Wow, it was amazing. Marching bands! Floats! Dancers! Dragons! Lots and lots of dragons! Local politicos in cars! (Uh, those weren't very amazing, really, but when you've been sitting on a hard bleacher for an hour waiting for a parade to start, you'll cheer anything.)

But wait, there's more! Aaoron's friend weezyl also lives in the Bay Area, so we took the BART a couple stops north to escape the dragony madness and met her and her bf Michael at the appropriately named Pork Store. (They had other things on the menu, but where else would you eat on the night of the Lunar New Year for the Year of the Pig?) There we were entertained at least in part by elgecko's tales of his misspent youth, and tried to figure out how it is that he's still alive.

Oh, there's more, of course there's more...that's just the bare bones. I still need to tell about the melodramatic hookah, the door to nowhere, and how I foiled a pickpocket by having an empty pocket.