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I’ve decided to follow Loobylu’s lead on this. After all, when have you ever seen her do anything that didn’t look like loads of fun?

Hot:

1. Open Studios! Brian’s were this past weekend. It was a bit chilly, but great having all the work out, and having people tromping through. Plus, a spider built a web that went just perfectly with Brian’s latest sculpture. Photos to come.

2. Visiting Aunties! This was my aunt Ruby’s first time in San Francisco. She was only out for the weekend, so most of her visit was spent hanging out around the studio, but we managed to squeeze some fun in, including an expedition to:

3. Alcatraz! It’s really the prettiest view of San Francisco you’ll ever see. And we even saw a harbor seal frolicking beside our boat on the way home. The tour is a bit grim, but I think it’s fascinating. Military history! Prison history! Native American History! Add WWII, and you’d have an afternoon’s programming on the History Channel.

EDITED TO ADD::
Not:

HEADCOLDS. I’ve had this one over a week. I’m coughy, my sinuses hurt like a mofo, and I it’s got me so scatterbrained I forgot to add a ‘not’ section to my blog post for nigh onto 14 hours. Boo, common cold virus!

So, I had errands to run this morning, a big shopping trip to a big-box store down by the freeway overpass.

It didn’t start out well. I was on my way to grab a cup of coffee when I saw a bus approaching, and decided just to hop right on, never mind the coffee for now. It was at least four blocks before I realized I was on the bus going in the wrong direction, which just goes to show that coffee first is a good instinct to follow.

Anyway, when I finally got off the bus and back on the right bus and off the bus again, I wasn’t feeling very confident about my navigational abilities.

The directions I got off the internet said to head right on Harrison, but I was pretty sure I needed to go left. I even made an ‘L’ with my thumb and forefinger to make sure left meant what I thought it meant. Yup: lllllleft. Left toward the freeway. I had a really good feeling about left.

But the directions from the internet said right, and without coffee I wasn’t sure how trustworthy my instincts could be. I very nearly asked an older man, who was wheeling a grocery cart full of rags through the morning fog, what direction 14th street was in. (That’s where I was headed: 14th and Harrison). I even picked my out accent (I like to pretend I’m from someplace else when I ask for directions): a sort of Julia Child-ish nasally thing, maybe from Europe, maybe not. I figured I had a cold, so it’d sound convincing.

But then I looked up, and saw that Harrison St. actually ended on the corner where I was. So there was no going right. Llllleft it was. Left on Harrison and then left again on 14th, where, sure enough, I found my big box store.

So there, Google maps.

Jason and I were talking today, and somehow we got onto the subject of Disney World, which somehow led to road trips, which inevitably led to ‘I Love Lucy.’

“You need a boyfriend so we can go on humorous car trips as a foursome,” I said. “How about a personal ad: ‘Fred seeks Ethel for double dates and hijinks.’”

“I think Brian’s the Fred.”

“So I’m the Ethel?”

“And I’m the Lucy.”

“Ok, so you just need to find Desi.”

“Oooh! A Cuban band leader!”

“And every date could be something from an ‘I Love Lucy’ Episode!”

“Yeah — we could squish grapes with our feet!”

“And make flour sack dresses!”

“And every date would start with an argument.”

“It would be awesome if you didn’t tell him at first, just spring it on him a few weeks in.”

“Desi, sweetie…. I’ve got something to tell you…”

“…. I got us jobs at a chocolate factory.”

So, Not only is this the most well-documented cold in the history of ever, it’s also the most tenacious. Here’s hoping I don’t get Brian sick before his Open Studio.

Tonight, Brian and I headed over to the SF Open Studios opening gala. We ran into and chatted with a ceramic artist who we’d met at last year’s open studios, drank free wine, and best of all, I got to wear one half the bridesmaid dress from my cousin Molly’s wedding last month. Fancy!

Though I gave up Massachusetts’ autumn orange-trees-against-a-blue-sky for San Francisco’s dead-grass hills many years ago, New England still holds a special place in my heart. Which is why I especially like the newest collaboration between Franz Nicolay and the Dresden Dolls. Dunkin Donuts! 495! Live Free or Die! Pissah, Dude!

You’ve had a cold for the past two days. All of a sudden, as after noon edges toward evening, you feel better: You can leave the room without toting a tissue box with you, you no longer crave orange juice like a whirling dervish craves whirling. Your mind isn’t quite able to conjure up workable metaphors yet, but there it is, working, no longer gummed up and sickly-feeling.

So what do you do? Take the dogs for a sunset ramble on the hill, or buckle down on your neglected schoolwork? Or do you sit there, as hours tick by, sloooowly deliberating?

C. Obviously c.

I’ve signed up for 31-for-21, my friend and former roomie Tricia’s blog-every-day challenge for October, but I’m afraid this might be all you get for day one. Nose runny. Right eye suddenly a spigot. Fly buzzing around the dining room. Is it too early to go back to bed?

Now that I’m a student again, I decided to take advantage of the Mechanic’s Institute’s student membership rate. It’s a nice place to work during the day, and besides, I’m the opposite of Groucho Marx: I’ll gladly join any club that’ll have me as a member.

So, I was browsing the shelves today, putting off working on an imminently due school project by looking for a copy of Ulysses to draft into service for my cousin and my oft-delayed reading group, when I ran accross an intriguing title: The Ghost Epigrams.

Now, I’ll read almost anything with the word ‘ghost’ in the title. I think it’s the same thing that makes me so compulsively drawn to anything with a layer of dust on it: I love forgotten things, fantasize about opening doors that have been shut for centuries and finding someone’s forgotten hairpins or the foundations of a long-ago dismantled wall.

So I pulled the book off the shelf. I was expecting something only tangentally related to ghosts. Maybe a series of poems devoted to memory, or maybe something Caspery about a house or, I dunno, death. But it was better than anything I could have hoped: a book of epigrams by Oscar Wilde “taken down through automatic writing by Lazar.”

That’s right: they’re Oscar Wilde’s thoughts from BEYOND THE GRAVE. Which I seriously doubt Wilde would have approved of, considering he had such a great exit line.

But he apparently had a lot more to say. Such as:

“To become an optimist close one eye and believe with the other.”

“Paradoxes: Thoughts that do not go to church on Sunday.”

“Vulgarity is the rich man’s modest contribution to democracy.”

“Mathematics are the bell boys of all sciences.”

A note at the front of the book helpfully (if a bit agramatically) points out that these epigrams “have never appeared in any book of epigrams or aphorisms from the work of Oscar Wilde these are set down as they came from the master.”

Just in case you confused it for An Ideal Husband.