Office Hours Are Now Closed

This was one of my favorite days of the end of the year, by far. My best friend, her daughter and husband came by my little apartment to visit me while they were in the area for a couple hours or so. On a Sunday. Thinking this is a long shot, I threw out the idea to have the new little family stay the night, (offering them my bedroom, while I would sleep on the couchbed.) I must have forgot who I was asking. Michelle is up for anything spontaneous. So the rest of the night was consumed with drinking wine and beer, and catching up. Kevin was a good sport that night, being a part of the night but leaving the girl talk to the girls.
The next morning, we woke up kind of late (it was already decided that they would head home early in the morning).
But I think we were all thinking the same thing.
'Work?' pssht!
We all had work to do yet all independent contractors.
So we made a grown up decision (like Michelle and I would do rather often 10 years ago), and skipped out on grown up responsibilities for the day.
Lucky for us, it was also one of the warmest days in November.
So, we grabbed breakfast and coffee, walked around Lake Merritt, then decided to grab lunch in San Francisco. Somewhere new, but first thing first - we had to get lost driving in San Francisco. It just wouldn't be the same otherwise.

We ate at this little hole in the wall Thai restaurant. I couldn't even tell you the name or where it was. Needless to say that hole in the walls are the best places to eat. We drank some beers, then headed to the beach near the Golden Gate Bridge. It was really fun, cause it was baby Kaiya's first time putting her feet in the sand. And since I'm totally head over heels in love with Kaiya, she was my focus for most of my photos that day.

This day was good for my soul.

Anti-War Peace Rally in SF 2007

See...I told you that I would bring back some old photographs. This next set of images are ones that I took at an anti-war peace rally last March 2007. It started from Embarcadero, and we walked down to Civic Center park where there was a huge festival going on afterwards, with food, speakers, performers, vendors, the whole nine!
That day was really cool for me. I got up fairly early and headed off to Bart with only my camera, and a few bucks. Since I was trekking it by myself, it was nice and easy to weave my way through the crowd. I have been to a couple anti war peace rallies, and this by far was the largest I have ever seen, it actually gave me goosebumps, and tears (of joy, of course!) seeing so many people come together, literally one-by-one to form a sea of people. I was climbing on top of trash cans, and steel frames outside of tall buildings ( I think used for earthquake retrofitting?) and I'm afraid of heights!! Then ended up with the crowd at Civic Center and I did some speaker listening, people watching, hot dog buying, and just hung out on the lawn for some alone time.
So! Getting to my photos, but finishing my story first: I uploaded hundreds of photos on an old laptop I was using last year, then I uploaded most of them to kodakgallery. Since then, the laptop failed me and died. completely. And back then I didn't back up my photos like I do now, so I pulled these off my site, hopefully the quality is okay. Since I'm missing a bunch of photographs, I am posting my favorites (that I have left) from this day. Looking at the images, it was awesome reminiscing about that day. There were so many bright colored homemade signs, and there were some genius creations, but I decided that it wasn't about the colors or even how 'bright' the day was. To me, it was more the reason we were all gathered together that day; the message we were trying to get across....to bring our troops home and end this war.
So I am posting all my photos in black and white. I thought it made a bolder statement.

except for this one. I like this one in color.