Snoqualmie

Miss the kiss of tragedy.

When I came in to work this morning the first thing one of my co-workers said to me was, "So, no strike, then?"

I spent most of yesterday staring glumly at bus schedules and ferry maps and doing calculations that always seemed to have final answers like "7:15 a.m.". My spiky-haired upstairs neighbor and I nervously agreed last night to try to catch the same miserable early transbay bus this morning. I set my alarm for 5:45 and still got out of bed at 2:00 to see if anything had happened yet. The front-and-center this-just-in headline on sfgate.com was, "No news yet on BART strike". I guess there's no better way to find out how important a transit system is to a city than to threaten to take it away and watch people scramble.

There's no better way to find out if two people are geeks than to present them with a fridgeplay Go set and watch them spend an hour sitting in the corner of the kitchen playing it. We actually got two sets, the fridgego and the fridgechess, and Jacob pleaded with me to have both matches going simultaneously. If there were ever two games that were meant to be played with exquisitely polished wood pieces in a setting of elegance and concentration, instead of with magnets on the fridge while eating macaroni and cheese and sitting on cat food canisters on the floor, well, they've sure as hell fallen into the wrong hands now. I'm kicking Jacob's butt in the Go game, which I think is almost over, and he's guaranteed to trounce me in the chess game, which just started. They both make my head hurt in the most delightful way; I can't think far enough ahead to figure out half of what's going on, but I get these flashes where one little section of the board will start to make sense and then I think I know why people love these games so much.

This from a girl who can't concentrate long enough to follow the plot of an hour-long TV show.