I didn’t particularly love my time at UC Santa Cruz. Aside from its small but devoted journalism department, my experience at UCSC was more summer camp with extensive journaling than rigorous academics. But I stayed in Santa Cruz in large part because I got a job at Bookshop Santa Cruz.

Bookshop Santa Cruz is a Santa Cruz institution. It’s been on Pacific Avenue since 1966. It survived the 1989 earthquake (it continued operating out of a tent when the quake destroyed its building) and it survived the infiltration of chain bookstores that attempt to put it out of business.

Bookshop is an unofficial information center for Santa Cruz.  In summer, people from ‘over the hill’ would call the store to ask about the weather or the surf. People stopped in to ask for directions or for restaurant recommendations. Just about anyone who visited Santa Cruz made their way through Bookshop Santa Cruz. I once ran into my 6th grade teacher while I was working there.

It wasn’t necessarily an easy job. Working with the public is always a challenge, but it was even more difficult in Santa Cruz, where the store, like the town, attracted crazies like moths to a flame. (A customer once told me I looked like a ‘peaceful dolphin’.) But in the 10 years since I left Bookshop, I’ve looked back on it fondly. My work there felt more meaningful than any job I’ve had since, certainly more important to me than making wealthy people wealthier. I believed in Bookshop, in the importance of  an independent bookstore, a place with personality and determination. It’s an endangered species these days.

It isn’t nostalgia that’s made me look back on my days at Bookshop Santa Cruz, though. Rather it’s the news that my old employer is ‘going rogue’ (to quote a certain Alaskan nutter) and selling copies of Sarah Palin’s new book with a pack of nuts — and not just any nuts, “Sarah Palin’s Just Plain Nutz”. The online offer states that the nuts are also sold separately: “A bag of Sarah Palin’s Just Plain Nutz is also available for $3.98 to those who can stomach a 1 ounce bag of walnuts, but can’t stomach 432 pages of Sarah Palin’s writing.”

This isn’t Bookshop’s first stab at creative bookselling, but it is one reason that I’m proud to be an Bookshop alumni.

On this one year anniversary of the election of Barack Obama, I’d like to highlight one of the things I appreciate about this administration. It isn’t Michelle’s focus on fresh, local food or her awesome sense of style, nor is it the President’s commitment to health care reform or repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Instead, it’s decidedly less political: it’s their willingness to have their life and work at the White House documented and shared with the public through The White House Flickr photosteam.

It doesn’t sound exciting, I know. I had pretty low expectations myself. The day-to-day workings of government seem kind of boring, even if you’re the president. Cabinet meetings and speeches don’t seem like they’d make for compelling photos, but this administration doesn’t just show us the official events or meetings with world leaders. Peppered throughout the  Flickr photosteam are pictures like this one that show such a human side to the President.

President Barack Obama bends over so the son of a White House staff member can pat his head during a family visit to the Oval Office May 8, 2009. The youngster wanted to see if the President’s haircut felt like his own. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza).

Of course all U.S. presidents have had a life of their own while they were in office, but for the most part, we the people didn’t get to see much of it and that’s part of what makes The White House Flickr photosteam so interesting. There are the meetings, of course, and then there are the pictures that show the President is just another dad playing with the family dog or watching his kid’s soccer game.

Some of the pictures give the sense of seeing the DVD extras, the outtakes from the Presidency, like Obama joking around in this picture, or the unusual interview, shown below.

If you haven’t seen the pictures yet (or even recently), head on over. I can almost promise that you’ll be charmed.

• 9:46 a.m. — A caller reported feces was smeared on an office door.
• 10:11 a.m. — A caller reported seeing a loose buffalo in the area.
• 1:27 p.m. — A caller reported a chicken on a fence.
• 4:54 p.m. — A caller reported a man with a beard and a Santa hat was passed out in the laundry room. He was gone when officers arrived.
• 11:08 a.m. — A caller reported a large yak by the road. The owner was to attempt to corral it. {this is very strange: neither yaks nor buffalo are common in the area.}
• 4:45 p.m. — A woman reported a man possibly casing her house. When she looked out the window, he gave her the finger.
• 2:54 p.m. — A man reported his estranged wife tried to throw a deep fryer at him. It was off and the oil was cold. She also struck a female friend of his. The woman called and reported her husband poured oil on her and hit her. Neither party wanted to press charges.
• 10:42 a.m. — A man reported his neighbor was yelling that he wants to die. He said his neighbor yells like this often.
• 9:44 a.m. — A caller reported a “Mexian” wearing “Mexian clothing” was sending money by the mail.{I assume this is a typo and they meant Mexican}
• 2:47 p.m. — A caller reported a man in the street with a large hat and dreadlocks, dancing to his own beat.
• 2:51 p.m. — A caller reported two severed deer legs in the road.
• 7:52 p.m. — A caller reported someone went into a barn and moved a bale of hay.
• 12:55 p.m. — A woman reported she thought there was a bear in her basement. An Animal Control officer could hear a snoring sound, but no bear was found.
• 10:37 p.m. — A man reported hearing a woman screaming, It was found to be a loud TV.
• 11:40 p.m. — A woman called to say she stopped for a man in the roadway who then threw himself on her car, crawled up the hood and growled. She said the man seemed disoriented.
• 4:22 p.m. — A caller reported a neighbor was harboring five skunks that play with the neighbor’s cats. The smell was very strong and “chewy.” The person was advised to call Animal Control.
• 1:26 p.m. – A caller said that while he was walking, an elderly driver’s vehicle struck him without injury, but the man who was about 80 got out of the vehicle, shoved the caller to the ground and drove away. Officers are investigating the matter.
• 4:03 p.m. — A caller reported a man possibly wearing a Halloween costume that included a gas mask and bloody clothing was following people to their vehicles. It was a group of juveniles from the high school drama club trying to sell tickets to a haunted house.
• 9:11 p.m. — A woman reported three people running down the road. She believed it was a little too late to be jogging at this time of night.
• 12:32 p.m. — A man reported being the victim of credit card fraud. He said this had happened to him 22 times in the past.

When asked why I moved back to SF, I hardly know where to start.

There was the lack of density in the East Bay, and the distance between neighborhoods and commercial areas required more driving than I liked.  There was the lack of decent local grocery stores and the fact that so many local stores, even corner markets, closed so early. There were the deserted streets, how I saw more cats than people on my 10 minute walk to BART and BART was such a long haul and expensive to boot.

But the simplest explanation, and the reason that encompasses so many of the others, is that I realized the value of living close to the things I love.

During this first month back in the City, I’ve returned to many of the places and events I love in San Francisco.

We moved back right in time for our favorite outdoor music festival, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and, of course, we stopped by Arizmendi Bakery while we were in the neighborhood.

We ate at Nopalito and bought books at Green Apple. We browsed the vintage furniture stores on Valencia Street. We saw Dave Eggers interview Nick Hornby at City Arts & Lectures. We got a Mariquita Farms mystery box, dropped off right across the street from our house. We ate a lot of ice cream.

Everything is close by now. After work one day, I picked up bread at Tartine (we’ve bought Tartine bread at least once a week despite the fact that our SF apartment lacks the counter space necessary for Tartine’s giant loaves). Then I picked up some groceries at BiRite, spontaneously popped into Pizzeria Delfina for dinner and still had time to catch a movie downtown.

And there are always new places to go, too. The Sunday Inner Sunset farmers market started while we were on the other side of the Bay. I got to Four Barrel Coffee at long last. A visit to Flora Grubb Gardens brought me to an area of the City I’d never been before. At Contigo, we found a friend from the farmers market manning the flatbread station and were reminded that SF can be like a small town at times.

It’s all here. And now, so are we.

In San Francisco, any time is a good time for soup. Even warm days here often end with cool, soup-worthy nights. On one warm Friday afternoon, I enjoyed a margarita on our front steps and when the fog rolled in, I went inside and had a bowl of Tuscan ribolita.  Here summer and winter are often just a few hours apart.

As well as good soup weather, we also have lots of good soup fixings. At the farmers market, I’ve been buying thick, gelatinous chicken broth from Marin Sun Farms or the rural folk at Mountain Ranch. This stock is completely different from the boxes of broth I used to rely on. You have to scoop this stuff out with a spoon; it doesn’t ‘pour’. It’d be icky if it wasn’t so delicious.

We also have shelling beans available this time of year. Dirty Girl sells fresh cannellinis or cranberry beans (borlotti beans). Shelling beans are delicious cooked up on their own and doused with olive oil. They’re also a lovely foil for Fatted Calf’s tonno di maiale. But I especially like using shelling beans for soup because they cook up so quickly.

This not to say that dried beans are to be avoided. dried beans have inspired most of the soups I’ve been eating lately. Heirloom Beans, the cookbook by Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo, is to thank for the ribolita, minestone, and the white bean and chard soup served with a poached egg and crispy bits of stale bread.

Stale bread is now something I consider an essential soup ingredient, and it’s an easy way to use up the last, somewhat stale bits of Tartine’s country bread. A slab of buttered bread will always be a delicious accompaniment to a bowl of soup, but a chunk of stale bread at the bottom of your soup bowl, broth-sodden and disintegrating, offers something else entirely. It adds body and texture, and if you rub it first with garlic, it adds flavor, too.

One of my go-to soups and a soup that first got me hooked on this delicious stale bread trick is Mark Bittman’s white bean and escarole soup. It’s a dead-simple recipe that I keep coming back to — something about the base of anchovies, garlic and chiles really elevates it. I’ve edited the recipe and listed it below because his list of ingredients includes items like duck or port that are never mentioned in the cooking instructions.

Escarole, White Bean Soup

• 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1 tablespoon sliced garlic
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
• 4 anchovy fillets, or to taste (Bittman says this is optional. It’s not. It’s essential.)
• 1 fresh or dried chili, stemmed, seeded and minced, or 1 teaspoon dried red chili flakes, or to taste
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 pound escarole
• 3 cups chicken stock or water
• 1 cup (or more) white beans, such as cannellini
• Salt and pepper to taste

Put half the oil, half the garlic, anchovies and chilies in a pot over medium heat. Stir occasionally until garlic begins to color.

Add escarole and stir; add beans and stock or water and adjust heat so mixture simmers steadily. Cover and cook about 15 minutes.

Stir in rest of garlic and cook another minute. Drizzle with reserved olive oil, and serve over slices of stale bread, rubbed with garlic or showered with parmesan cheese. (Bittman includes the bread as a “variation”. Pay no attention to Bittman. The bread is a crucial element of the soup).

With our trip to Italy and our subsequent move back to SF, I wasn’t sure that I’d have time for what had become one of my favorite late summer rituals: making and freezing tomato sauce for the tomato-less months ahead.

We were still overseas when Mariquita Farms had their annual tomato u-pick. Although the farm drops off produce in SF fairly regularly, nearly every time they were in town, we weren’t able to pick up 20 pounds of tomatoes, much less prepare few quarts of tomato sauce.

One problem with our SF apartment has been the stove, a gorgeous old Wedgewood with four burners, two ovens (something I never thought necessary until I had one) and a persistent gas leak. After three visits from PG&E, after having the gas to the stove turned off twice because the stove repair person wasn’t, initially, able to eliminate the leaks, our stove appears to be back in business (fingers crossed).

And just in time: last week, Mariquita made their last SF tomato delivery of 2009 and I was lucky enough to get a flat of their San Marzano tomatoes (and lucky enough to have Mr. WholeHog to go pick up the tomatoes).

By the weekend, we found that for the first time in weeks, we had some free time and a working stove so we set to work making sauce. We rewarded ourselves with with pasta with the homemade sauce that night for dinner, while the rest of the sauce went to the freezer.

I haven’t been feeling ready for fall lately, but making tomato sauce and seeing those bright red jars set aside for the winter months, I felt like I was starting to shut the door on summer.

“I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal.”

From the excellent McSweeney’s essay, It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.

This essay put into words exactly what I’d been trying to write about for the past few weeks. What is it that causes people to bust out their pumpkins as soon as the calendar turns to October? What is it about fall that inspires such devotion, such a need to acknowledge the season?

Other seasons don’t get the same attention. No one hangs decorative icicles from their SF home to mark the onset of winter. No one runs outside in SF wearing shorts when June arrives. But if it’s October, then Decorate Gourd Season takes hold –  and SF doesn’t want to miss out.

When you’ve suffered through months of hot weather, I can understand that you might welcome a new crispness in the air. But in San Francisco, there’s little sign of fall in October. Sure it gets dark a little earlier, but we don’t have trees turning vibrant colors. We don’t hear fallen leaves crunching beneath our feet. October is the end of San Francisco’s short summer so temperatures usually rise in October rather than drop.

But a lack of fall elements doesn’t deter the Decorative Gourd Army. If the calendar says it’s fall, then they have to mark it. As the McSweeney’s piece says, it’s about looking ’so seasonal’.

When I see fall decor appear in San Francisco in October, I get the same uncomfortable feeling I get when Christmas cards appear in stores this month. I thought I was alone in this feeling, that maybe I was some sort of fall scrooge, until I read the fantastic McSweeney’s piece (and laughed until I cried).

Another excerpt, because it really is a masterpiece:

“I may even throw some multi-colored leaves into the mix, all haphazard like a crisp October breeze just blew through and fucked that shit up.“

Go read it now.

Officially, our new SF neighborhood is Noe Valley, or maybe even Outer Noe Valley. But a more accurate name for our new neighborhood might be Outer Ice Cream Triangle (shown below).

View Larger Map

We are just a block or two off the hypotenuse that stretches from BiRite Creamery to Mitchell’s and it’s almost too easy to slip down to Humphry Slocombe.

Since we moved to Outer Ice Cream Triangle, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting each establishment and indulging in some truly memorable cones:

• Mexican Chocolate (Mitchell’s)
• Brown Sugar Yogurt (Humphry)
• Apple Pie (BiRite)
• Brown Sugar Ice cream with ginger-caramel swirl (Birite)
• Pumpkin Five-Spice (Humphry)
• Rosemary’s Baby (rosemary, pine nut and sea salt – at Humphry, of course)

(Now I know that list looks like complete gluttony, but a single does come with two flavors at BiRite and Humphry.)

If you are headed to Humphry Slocombe (you should be on your way already — did I mention that the lines are far shorter than BiRite’s or Mitchell’s?), other WholeHog-approved flavors include: Secret Breakfast (bourbon and cornflakes), Salt and Pepper, Salted Licorice, Rootbeer, Ancho Chocolate, and Peanut Butter Curry.

Many San Francisco homes have fireplaces. Or at least they have the makings of a fireplace: the mantel and the hearth are still there, but the actual place where a fire would burn is just an empty space.

In our last SF apartment, we put a shelf in our empty fireplace and used it to hold some of our books. My sister uses her fireplace to hold her record player. Perhaps because they had so many grandkids, my grandparents kept a crate of dolls in their fireplace.

Our new SF apartment, however, has what may be the best replacement for a fireplace: a working gas heater.

It looks right, providing that essential image of fire, and it actually does provide some heat without filling our place with smoke (although I do miss that satisfying crackling sound that comes from a real fire).

It’s just one of the many things I’m appreciating about our new apartment, especially as our nights turn colder.

Vacation us one of the few times of  year that I read as much as I used to. I’ve read five books since Tahoe in July: Olive Kittredge, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Farm City, Zeitoun, and My Life in France. (I also got about two-thirds of the way through Don DeLillo’s Falling Man but I’m not sure I’ll pick it back up. Although I loved the excerpt of Falling Man in The New Yorker, the book has mostly confirmed that I’m not a DeLillo fan.)

My favorite was Olive Kittredge. I’m a sucker for interconnected stories, and I also have a real weakness for books that I think of as “quiet books”, books where the drama stems from elements of everyday life: a parent coping with a child that chooses a different life than they expected, maybe, or the confusion of finding oneself alone after many years of marriage.

Olive Kittredge doesn’t have to create drama through a traumatic event like a kidnapping, a drowning, or some sort of abuse, instead Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel makes normal life riveting. The stories that make up Olive Kittredge offer a  look at marriage, shown from many different perspectives and at many different stages. The book also focuses on the often-lonely lives of older people, people who are no longer defined by their roles as mother or wife, daughter or son. (Reading Olive Kittredge made me much more sympathetic to some of my older relatives.)

My other fiction choice, Oscar Wao, was ultimately disappointing. Those who haven’t read much Latin American/Caribbean fiction will probably enjoy it more than I did, but aside from the copious Eggers-style footnotes, I found much of the storyline similar to that of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, or Edwidge Danicat’s novels and stories.

I thought I’d already heard every hell that Hurricane Katrina wrought — and then I read Zeitoun.

Zeitoun tells a story that the media missed: the story of one man, a pillar of the community, who stays in New Orleans despite the calls to evacuate because as a popular local contractor, he feels responsible for his home and the many homes in the area that he worked on. But what unfolds after the levees fall sends Zeitoun and his family on a totally different American journey.

Dave Eggers latest is nowhere near as brutal (or as moving) as What is the What, but it’s just as compelling a story. Worth reading.

As a farmer-obsessed reader, Farm City was an easy choice. I was charmed initially by how the first part of the book echoed moments of my own childhood. (Like author Novella Carpenter, my parents were novice farmers for a time. Like Novella as the book begins, we had a cardboard box of baby chicks under our kitchen table.) But Novella took her farm far beyond poultry: she harvests honey from her bees. She raises rabbits and eventually struggles to keep up with the appetite and the strength of two huge pigs. While my parents brought chickens to their rural one-acre “ranch-ette” as my grandfather called it, Novella’s farm is in Oakland — and her adventures as an urban farmer are entertaining and inspiring.

I love the idea that a perfect meal or a trip to a new place can change one’s life but I don’t often think of it as reality. Julia Child, though, had just this experience as she documents in My Life in France. Her life was changed by a meal (sole meuniere) and a place (France).

I felt a little strange about bringing it with me to Italy (shouldn’t I be reading something called My Life in Italy?) and I still cringe at buying a best seller (especially at a time when so many other best sellers are vampire books), but My Life in France turned out to be a perfect travel book because it celebrates all the things one hopes to find when traveling: new people, new foods, and, often, a new lease on life.