The Good Man – Page 28 – Oh Fair New Mexico

What Black Friday Means to You….

Posted on November 25, 2011
by Karen Fayeth
6 Comments

…means something else entirely to me.

November 25th isn’t just the day after Thanksgiving, at least not in my family.

Today isn’t shopping in my world. What this day means to me trends more toward apple pie. No, not pumpkin. Apple.

That’s because today would have been my father’s 80th birthday. He was a rather cantankerous fella, and he didn’t like celebrating holidays or birthdays much. He didn’t like cake either.

Ice cream worked just fine. And occasionally an apple pie. That was his favorite. A simple apple pie and vanilla ice cream.

Dad always got a bit of short shrift by having a birthday that was either the day of Thanksgiving, or right nearby. Since he wasn’t much of a holiday kind of guy, I guess that didn’t matter.

Never one to be deterred by crankiness, mom would whip up an apple pie. Then after we ate dinner but before bedtime, we’d each get a slice of pie with some vanilla ice cream. If we were lucky, the pie was still hot from the oven and the ice cream would melt and we’d eat and have something like a nice family moment together.

Not long after I moved to the Bay Area, my mom, dad and sister came to visit me in my tiny apartment. I made Thanksgiving dinner, the full spread, in my ancient kitchen. And of course, I made an apple pie for dad.

It’s at the holidays when tradition seems to matter the most. So even though it was sometimes a little rocky living in the house with the incredibly strong personality that defined my dad, having pie on his birthday is still tradition.

Today, while the world shops and fights over deals on big screen TVs, I’m a little quieter. A little more thoughtful.

I asked The Good Man if he wanted me to make another pie (we already finished the pumpkin pie from yesterday). He said “maybe cherry?”

Yes. Cherry. Perhaps our new tradition begins today.

Photo by Crystal Woroniuk and used royalty free from stock.xchng.

The First Time – NFL Edition

Posted on November 14, 2011November 14, 2011
by Karen Fayeth
6 Comments

Sunday rolled around and The Good Man and I had something special on the agenda. We had a date with Candlestick Park and a dance with the San Francisco 49ers football team.

The Good Man had attended professional football games in the past, but I never had. I’ve spent much time inside Candlestick, but it was back in the late 90’s, watching my beloved San Francisco Giants get brutalized. The Giants moved to their new yard in 2000 and I hadn’t been to Candlestick since.

I wondered how the ‘Stick had held up over the past eleven years. The answer? About how you’d expect.

Once upon a time I was a huge 49ers fan (going back to living in New Mexico where they were my team of choice). But over the past decade they kept stomping on my heart over and over, so I had to break up with them.

But this year…with their shiny 8-1 record…I might have been woo’d back to their side.

I think I’ve finally worked out my issues with this guy (that’s the long suffering quarterback, first round draft pick, Alex Smith).

I gave up on him when I kept shouting at my television “THROW THE DAMN BALL ALREADY!!!” and he wouldn’t throw the ball. And then he’d get clobbered.

On Sunday, he threw the ball. Oh he threw it, indeed. And he ran it, and he handed it off and did everything a calm, cool quarterback should do.

Oh, hello Kendall Hunter. Welcome to the end zone.

This morning, the local sports radio show keeps talking about the amazing atmosphere at the ‘Stick on Sunday.

It was crazy.

Isn’t it always like that?

For the non-baseball fans, I hear a lot of talk about how baseball is so slow, there’s waiting around, blah blah blah.

You know what? There is a lot of waiting around in football too.

But there is an awful lot more blood in football. Yikes.

I guess that tends to happen when your whole intent, play by play, is smashing into very large people. Our seats were great and I sure did see a lot of men crash into other men. Sometimes I had to close one eye and look away. That’s usually when the guys around me would shout “yeeeah!”

Boys. Hmph.

Football is a crazy sport. A crazy, fun, outrageous, holy cow YEAH baby kind of sport.

In short…I loved it. Seeing it live was really something spectacular.

All photos by Karen Fayeth and subject to the Creative Commons license found in the far right column of this page.

Camera Obscura

Posted on November 11, 2011November 11, 2011
by Karen Fayeth
4 Comments

According to Wikipedia: “A camera obscura (Latin; “camera” is a “vaulted chamber/room”, “obscura” means “dark”, camera obscura = “darkened chamber/room”) is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with color and perspective preserved.”

According to me, a camera obscura is one of the fun, wacky, quirky things I discovered in my first tentative days living in the Bay Area.

Down at Ocean Beach, over by the Cliff House, there is a really wonderful camera obscura that was installed in 1946.

Just for whimsy, it’s actually shaped like a camera (the camera obscura was a precursor to pinhole cameras and the beginnings of photography).

The camera obscura at the Cliff House used to be right next to the Musee Mechanique, a mesmerizing collection of vintage penny arcade games. The Musee Mechanique moved to Fisherman’s Wharf in 2002, but the camera obscura lives on at Ocean Beach.

The little triangle mirror apparatus at the top spins slowly, so you get this really enchanting 360-degree view of the beach, Seal Rocks, and the surroundings. It’s all reflected onto this white dish shaped table in the center of the small, dark room.

Between the camera obscura and the Musee Mechanique, I could get lost for hours. Fresh off the highway from New Mexico, it was some of the coolest stuff I’d ever seen in my life.

When The Good Man and I paid a visit to the Cliff House this weekend, I was so excited to see the camera obscura is still there. It wasn’t open that day, but it’s there. And that makes me happy.

It was added to the National Register of Historic places in 2001, and is now under the conservancy of the National Park Service, so hopefully it will project on for many years.

The camera obscura makes me so nostalgic. I adore it!

That’s me. My purse was under my jacket, so that’s why my jacket tails are sticking out at such an angle. That and the fact that I’m simply a dork of epic proportions.

Photo taken by The Good Man, Copyright Karen Fayeth 2011

Photos Copyright Karen Fayeth 2011, and taken with an iPhone4 using the Hipstamatic and the Camera+ apps.

Obessed by Floors

Posted on November 9, 2011November 9, 2011
by Karen Fayeth
2 Comments

There’s this hotel in San Francisco that’s technically in the Financial district but really is so close to the Embarcadero you can taste it (not that you’d actually want to taste the Embarcadero. That’s just ew.).

The hotel is the Hyatt Recency and it’s not only a hotel, it’s also a movie star. The Hyatt featured prominently in the Mel Brooks movie High Anxiety and also served as the lobby for the The Towering Inferno.

I am utterly fascinated by this hotel. It’s a quirky place and definitely has this 1970’s vibe. It was opened in 1973 and I’m guessing it was pretty cha-cha for the time.

It’s odd shaped. The huge atrium is profound. The open hallways looking into the atrium do give a bit of vertigo.

But while that’s all fascinating…it’s the floors that get me. I’m literally obsessed with these floors.

Here’s a couple photos. The patterns just kill me! (in a good way)

I can’t even begin to imagine how long it took to lay all of those tiles in patterns across not only the huge hotel atrium but also on all four buildings of the shopping center next door.

The floors have a seventies vibe, to be sure, but there is something engaging about them too.

I can catch a glimpse of these floors in a movie or old photo and I know exactly where they are.

It’s just another one of those oh-so-uniquely San Francisco things.

Yes, I wrote a whole blog post about floors.

Photographs by Karen Fayeth, Copyright 2011, and subject to the Creative Commons license in the far right corner of this blog. Photos takes with an iPhone4 (I haven’t set up the new phone yet) and using the Camera+ and Hipstamatic apps.

Quality Control

Posted on November 7, 2011November 9, 2011
by Karen Fayeth
4 Comments

You might recall a few months back (July, actually) I posted a story about San Francisco’s celebration for a glass.

A perfect, petite glass, just ripe to be filled to the rim with Irish coffee.

This past weekend, The Good Man and I had much to celebrate, so we spent the weekend rabble rousing from one end of the beautiful City of San Francisco to the other.

It was a magical weekend.

After consuming an insane amount of food at Tadich Grill, a venerable old place dating back to 1849, we set out on the quite stormy Saturday night and ultimately found ourselves at the Buena Vista down on the Wharf.

The Buena Vista is one of my most favorite places in the City. Especially on a cold, rainy night.

I was there in an official capacity, of course. It was necessary to investigate this whole glass issue for myself.

You know, in the interest of quality control and all that.

After the first Irish Coffee, I was intrigued.