I saw my first Zipcar on Saturday, as I pulled into the Trader Joe’s in Daly City. It instantly struck me as a brilliant service: a car you can borrow (that is, rent) quickly in urban areas for all those tasks you miss a car for: such as buying up groceries or other supplies, taking [...]
I’ll say it right up front: I love hybrid cars, and if any one person is guilty for turning hybrid car owners into smug bastards, I could take some of the responsibility. Back when hybrid cars were still fairly rare (that is, before California gave hybrid owners carpool permit stickers), I would approach hybrid car [...]
Peter and I considered it almost immoral to sell my old car to someone else. Sure, it still ran, but I’m convinced it ran mostly out of loyalty to me, and my almost constant praying and urging for it to go on. I had this confirmed this morning when I wanted to use to for [...]
Loretta was the first of my friends to tell me I need a new car. But then, she’d also been my navigator on a trip to the San Diego Comic-Con during which my car’s thermostat malfunctioned and we had to manage by turning the heater on full blast driving through Los Angeles in the middle [...]
Peter called me this morning as I was writing about Green Gulch Farms. “Did you get my picture?” he asked. I’d received nothing by phone or email. He’d sent me a picture of his now-crushed car, and asked me to pick him up on the freeway with the possessions he’d been able to salvage from [...]
Lately, as we’ve been enjoying a fairly comfortable existence, at least compared to most of the world, and all of history, there’s been sort of a nutritional nostalgia for eating old food, the old way, whether that means slow food, pesticide free farming, or the Neanderthal diet. The latest entry to this line is the [...]
I did a very daring thing yesterday: I dug up a patch of dirt behind our spa and planted vegetables. If plants were people, I’d be in jail for all the plants that have died in my neglectful, inept care. If I brought every plant that has died on my watch back to OSH, I’d [...]
I’ll admit that I am smug about my bicycling instead of driving. I like the exercise, I love never having to hunt for parking, and most of all, I’m having fun. But the smugness can go too far. To wit, here is a letter from today’s Mr. Roadshow column in the San Jose Mercury News: [...]
For all I know this phenomenon may be nationwide, but I think I’m pretty special and lucky to live in a neighborhood where, during strawberry season, a man appears on a street corner just a few blocks away selling farm-fresh strawberries at a below-market price. It’s always the same guy, though I have yet to [...]
Biking, reading and researching has taken up time I used to devote to blogging, but there are a few tidbit musings I thought I’d throw out to regular readings. First of all, my friend Shelly managed to get her mother, the guru of the “IHHEBY” philosophy to make a more in-depth appearance on her podcast. [...]
