Ridin' that train

Oh, I'm sleepy! To no one's surprise, the train up to Portland is running an hour or so behind schedule, so I'm camped out in the waiting room of the Emeryville station, a large ,clean but dull place. During the daytime there's a nice little Peet's coffee station, but in the evening, it's nothing but rows of grey molded chairs and across the room, a bunch of vending machines. I'm crouched in a corner next to the industrial-sized fan that I've unplugged so as to power up my laptop. For a little while there was a random wireless connection floating around, but just as I was about to check my pal Shuna's blog for all her good Portland recommendations and musings, the connection got sucked back into the ether. So I'll have to wait. Don't think trains can have the wi-fi, though.

I am D-O-N-E, done, with all this travel and stumping around in the cruel shoes all over the city to get from here to there, dragging my life in suitcases around with me. It's time to settle back down in a real house of my/our own. I want an address, my own coffee cup, my own bag of decaf on the shelf. I've woken up on a lot of other people's couches and guest beds over this last six months, and I'm really done with this peripatetic life. The most rooted I've felt was that 2 weeks where I was house-sitting on Olive St, with the record player and the purring kitties, the apple tree, the quilts, the familiar books and my own civilized dinner parties, with cloth napkins and roast chicken and cake plates. Apple gingerbread , lard-crust apple pie, mmm.

Pig salad! That was the best thing I had today. It came from San Francisco's South Park Café: Frisee lathered up in a pungent mustard-and-horseradish dressing, layered with sliced apples, and then tossed with crunchy-chewy deliciouso pork chunks. If carnitas ever craved a salad, this would be it.

Other good things: banana-chocolate-chip and pear-and-fig muffins from the bakery-café behind Liberty Café, in Bernal Heights. And a bite off Jen's orange-spice Dove dark chocolate bar, pretty darn good, in that cinnamon-spicy-orangey way, like Jacques Torres' Wicked Hot Chocolate with a shot of Grand Marnier.

Ah, le train est arrive! Off to ride the rails...