I'm hideous; you all are gorgeous.

I'll say this about the west coast. A lot of y'all will drop by out here. That's just the absolute best. I've got an all-star list of folks I've seen in the past couple of months, and some of them were unplanned spottings. For example: I went to lunch one day the other week and nearly ran right into Bruce and Molly. And, even though Andrew Deutsch and I had planned to meet up for some yummy dinner (Mission Chinese, fools, it's good, put it in your mouth!) one night while he was on the wrong coast, a few days later I was late for work and ran into him again on the street. Nice. Who else have I seen out here? Tom Sullivan, Alan Seigler, Sherrie Edwards, Bob Kaputof, Trevere Thomas, Brian Leo...uh, I shouldn't have starting rambling on about names because now my mind has gone empty. Let's blame that on the steroids.

What steroids? Who's writing insane run-on paragraphs with barely any transitions? Funny you should ask.

This past weekend while I was suffering a serious face malfunction more commonly know as a sinus infection, I had the pleasure of hanging out with the fine folk behind the Travelogue Appreciation Society. Ramming and (another!) Molly are in their third month of vagabond awesome adventures and even though I'm a health hazard, I managed to meet them out at Hobson's Choice Punch House --and enjoy a half-used bowl of punch we acquired after some less thrifty co-consumers wandered out of the establishment--shortly after they arrived (which was right after I left Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. More on that in a moment.) Naturally, that led to late night Mission burritos at Taqueria Cancun.



They got a sweet parking spot for their truck right in front of my house, so I got to play a weird sort of Mission Lodge role where I invited them in for internets and launderies, but they slept outside. I managed to hit Brunch Drunk Love at Bruno's with them on Sunday before I admitted defeat and went home to sleep and wish them well enjoying SF without me. Hope they had fun, it sure was nice to see them.



Ok, back to Hardly Strictly. I wanted to see so much of it, but I only heard some of it. I heard Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson while sitting on a blanket with Charity and the other Nancy under some trees off the beaten path at Golden Gate Park. We made friends with a European dad who was hanging with his kids, letting them climb tiny trees while we shared a beverage with him. (The forget-me-nots were collected by his daughter, who made a number of nice little bouquets while we were there.) Later, we transplanted our little camp over to another little hill to listen to and not see Gillian Welch and Steve Earle. It was good times. I wish I'd seen more acts, but if that's my only complaint about a free festival, then I think we're all doing ok out here on the west coast.

Especially now that I'm all 'roided up.
I think I have to go walk really fast up a very steep hill now.