San Francisco, CA: Thoughts on the West Coast of America.

What can I say about the City By The Bay that hasn’t been said countless times before? Lots.
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What can I say about , , aka, the City by the Bay? It's very cool, and I mean that both figuratively and literally. After spending the last year and a half in the balmy tropics of Miami, San Francisco weather was a rude awakening.

San Francisco is very cold, don't let them kid you.

Sure the sun shines a lot, but the temperature is usually only 55-65 degrees out. So the minute you step into the shade, you freeze your ass off. While in the sun, you fry like an ant walking past a 6-year-old with a magnifying glass.

Fog City, indeed.

It's usually cold in the morning while the fog burns off, then it's sunny all day until the fog rolls back in around 5pm. Then it drops like 150 degrees, and fast. The locals call it, “Nature's air-conditioning.” Hilarious.)

The key to surviving San Francisco's stupid is wearing layers. You can't decide what to wear going by anything the weatherman says because they go way out on a limb and predict temperature ranges like “50-90 degrees.” Sure they're accurate, but what help is that?

So I don't even listen to the weather reports anymore. I just dress for every type of weather imaginable. It's a pain, but otherwise, you'll either freeze or fry—most likely freeze. San Francisco has a lot of hills too, but I think I wrote about that when I first visited this fair city.

Going to SF? Use my Self Driving Tour of San Francisco.

I score free tickets to a Niners' game.

One of the guys in our media department scored some tickets to the Niners/Patriots pre-game at “The Stick,” and he couldn't go! So he gave the tickets to me: fifth row center behind the end zone. Sweet!

We took the Ball Park Express straight from downtown San Francisco to Candle Stick Point and 3Com Park (the park that proves even an obscure computer networking company can become a household word if you have enough money). Despite free tickets, we spent lots of money on $5 beers and $5 cokes and $5 hot-dogs, etc. You get the picture.

Naturally, you could get all sorts of gourmet as well, but what's the point of that? Sitting only five rows back from the end zone, we could've spat on Steve Young. We wanted to, but didn't. We saw Drew Bledsoe, too. Got to see Ty Detmer air it out a few times. Not much else. But since it was pre-season, we hardly paid attention to the game anyway. It was pretty boring.

We were just hoping to get on TV. So we cheered stupidly whenever the ball was near our end of the field, which was not very often. It was just cool to go to “The Stick” finally. No big . Not like going to Disney as a kid or anything. Just fun. It was hotter than Hades, and we were in the sun the whole game. Good thing we had SPF 100,000 on.

We survive our first earthquake.

Just lived through my first earthquake. The epicenter was a 5.3 in Gilroy, CA, about two hours south of us. And it STILL shook San Francisco. Man, that's some serious earth moving. I find it mind-boggling that the motion of the continental plates shifting can shake entire states.

Shock of all shocks, it hit a home park. (Seriously, what does fate have against those places? Are they like some kind of magnet for natural disasters? Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, you name it. You couldn't pay me to live in one of those death traps).

It hit at about 7:15 in the AM. Luckily, I was in a state of semi-consciousness in bed listening to the radio when it hit, so I didn't have time to panic and scream like a little girl. Shook the whole freakin' building for about 10 seconds. It was like a train drove by that grabbed the building and shook it hoping to get things to drop out. Like people.

I woke Amy up and said, “Ohmigod, did you feel that?” The DJ's on the radio station we were listening to chimed in seconds later with, “Ohmigod, did you feel that?” It was very weird. Almost like they were talking to us. Nyikes! No damage to the place or our psyche, fortunately. Just weirded us both out (…like we can afford that.)

Our apartment is really expensive.

Here are some interior shots of our $2,000/mo. apartment—I hope you like them. We've finally gotten the pad into reasonable shape, so it looks like we actually planned it, instead of adhering to the Goodwill School of Design we've used to so far in life.

In hindsight, we had a pretty sweet deal since our apartment was a 2bd 2ba with garage parking and a patio out back for only $2k a month. People today would kill for that deal. Should‘a've bought the place when we had the chance. Ah, well. Maybe we'll move to Lisbon, it's practically the same place.

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