Taking a bike on BART during Berkeley rush hour is a bad idea

          Gosh you guys, I'm sorry, I haven't posted in like a week! My bad. In my defense, it's not like anything super exciting actually happened, so you didn't miss anything.

          I made it back to Oakland on Monday. Ben picked me up from the BART station and since I hadn't really eaten anything of substance all day, we went out to this pizza place in Berkeley and had THE BEST DAMN SLICE OF PIZZA EVER. It had cilantro on it and it burned the roof of my mouth because I was so hungry that I tried to eat it as soon as it came to the table. And just a little update, Ben moved into a new house in Berkeley. Here's a picture.

Ok, so he doesn't actually have the run of the whole place.  Just a room and a shared kitchen.

           I spent Tuesday doing laundry and putting my room in order and catching up on stuff. Turned out no major disasters occurred while I was away. Not that I was worried. My coworkers are pretty good at averting crises. So now my room is further livened up by the addition of a four seasons painting, a rainy day painting, and MY NEW SEWING MACHINE. Haven't actually sewed anything yet, but more on that in a bit.

         Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were spent working my butt off, as usual. Thursday was a crepe party at Hannah/Emma/Rosanna's house (hereafter referred to as H.E.R. House). That was a really fun experience. 

Mushroom-spinach crepe filling

          On Friday, I attempted to get to Ben's by BART. With my bike. During rush hour. When he lived in the City, it wasn't a problem, because no one is heading from Oakland into the city on a Friday evening, so there was always plenty of room. But now that he lives in Berkeley, everyone who works in downtown Oakland hops on the BART and goes to their little bungalows in Berkeley. Meaning that the train is jam-packed with LITERALLY EVERY PERSON IN THE EAST BAY. And their bikes, because all the people in the East Bay are hippies that ride bikes everywhere. So there I was, packed onto the BART with everyone and their bikes. I was leaning against the wheelchair-only spot because it was available (because it's supposed to be available for wheelchairs, but no one is ever in that spot). Then suddenly, this guy in a wheelchair gets on and is like “HEY GIRL YOU'RE IN MY SPOT.” And so I had to shamefacedly maneuver my bike out of the wheelchair spot while completely surrounded by lots of people and their bikes. It was very embarrassing, and there wasn't a lot of room. And then I couldn't hang on to anything because I'm too short to reach the overhead grab bars and I wasn't within reach of anything else except the disabled man's wheelchair and I felt like that would be in poor taste.

         Ben and I had been planning to head into the city for a friend's birthday party, but once I made it to the house and we actually sat down and thought “Hey, we'd have to walk half an hour to the BART station, ride the train for half an hour, and then walk for an hour to get to her house... and then do that a couple hours later, when it's incredibly dark out...” the whole idea just sounded less appealing. So we decided to go to Target to buy an air mattress, because Ben's room only has a tiny single bed. When we aired it up, it pretty much filled the rest of the room.

          On Saturday, Ben skyped with Gary and Carla while I took a walk down Shattuck, the street that Ben lives on. It's pretty cool, quite a few interesting stores and very expensive gourmet restaurants. I was looking for a fabric store that Carla had spotted. Ben claimed it was within a few blocks of the house, but it totally wasn't.  But when I did find it, MY HEAD EXPLODED IT WAS THE MOST AMAZING THING EVER THERE WAS FABRIC EVERYWHERE AND IT WAS ALL TOTALLY GORGEOUS SILKS AND SATINS AND VELVETS AND LINENS AND WOOLS AND EVERY KIND OF FABRIC IN THE WHOLE WORLD. 

BEST THING IN MY LIFE.

I could spend a lot of time there, just imagining things that I could do with all of the different fabrics if I had the time and money to do something with all of them. Skirts. Lots of skirts. That's what I would do. I restrained myself, and only bought a couple pieces of striped fabric for a pleated skirt and a knit skirt (I'm not sure if my small frame and giant ass can pull off a maxi skirt, but if I can't, I'll still have a giant chunk of uninterrupted yardage to fiddle around with, so win-win either way). Then we had a late dinner at an Indian buffet place that was pretty cool. Afterwards, we took a walk up into the hills and watched the sunset and it was pretty magical.

          We had to get up super early on Sunday (ok like 730) to get to church on time. Turns out it takes an hour and a half to get to church, what with the walk-BART-walk combo. And that was even when we actually caught the train and didn't have to wait 20 minutes! So it could almost take two hours! That's some serious dedication to Christian education right there. Afterwards, we headed back to the house and spent an unnecessarily long time looking up how to get to Grizzly Peak, which is this mountain thing behind the house. It had GREAT views of the whole Bay. Seriously, we could see clear up north and most of the way south. And it was completely clear out, so we had at least 10-mile visibility. It was a spectacular view. We watched the sunset there, too, and I took way too many pictures.

       Today was full of the Street Level Clinic. Literally everyone had cold and flu symptoms, so it's a good thing I got my flu shot, I guess. I am currently laboring under the delusion that if I'm exposed multiple times in small doses, then my body has enough time to set up immune defenses. I'm not sure if that's true or not (pretty sure not), but hopefully through sheer force of will I can avoid deathly illness. Later in the evening, I went to East Bay Supper Club and hung out with some cool East Bayers from the church while all of their children screamed like little maniacs in the background. They are very adorable children though, so it was mostly ok.