And, within minutes, I am hit with a million billion decisions to make. There is really only one decision I can make in the couple of hours after waking: the one about whether I actually need to get up or not. Anything else, I wish to run to some kind of well-oiled schedule. (Can schedules be oiled? I just imagine slimy pieces of paper when I say that, but you know, slimy paper isn’t always a bad thing, right?)(I don’t know what that meant. I didn’t even know while I was typing it. Sorry). ANYWAY.

In the land of a thousand choices there are, I have discovered, a thousand choices within each choice, and sometimes a few more thrown in for good measure.

And that applies, of course, all over the place, in every meal, retail experience or any situation you can imagine. But one of the best examples of this can be summed up within the simple meal of breakfast.

Simple meal indeed. She said, in a disbelieving yet knowing tone.

You know what’s simple? Cereal. I used to eat cereal at home: that was simple.

I was never particularly a breakfast person before I moved to San Francisco. I was pretty boring about the whole thing, in fact. Only started eating breakfast at all a two or three years ago, and stuck rigidly to a small set of staple things: Special K with dried fruit of trail mix spinkled on top; ryvita and vegemite and, at the weekend, something fancier, like a full cooked breakfast or something brunchy - a variation on eggs benedict, most often. Or, in fact, always.

And it was another one of the things that I didn’t think I’d have to think about to much. The cereals I knew seemed pretty universal; they would be over here too, right? In fact, I knew I’d seen them in supermarkets; it would all be very simple.

Ha. Again with the word ’simple’… I really should know better by now.

Fact is, you can’t rely on anything to be the same. Everything’s tailored to fit the tastes of whatever market it’s being made for, and everything is made with the resources most plentiful. Special K, the thing I seized upon on my first shopping expedition, feeling relieved to have my hands on something familiar? Familiar, but not the same. It’s sweeter, and quite possibly made out of corn rather than rice.

So. I started a big journey through breakfastland, in search of something that was either familiar, or that I could make so, because it was so yummy. I’ve had grains, breads, meats, eggs and various forms of batter.

And I’ve ended up eating porridge every day. Plain. Made with water and only a pinch of salt. But that’s not for lack of imagination, I promise. It’s by way of:

CEREALS

American supermarket aisles, as a rule, are very, very long. American cereal aisles are very long, very brightly coloured, and very tightly packed with cartoon characters you’ve never seen before promising you nutrients you never even knew you needed.

“400,000% of your daily requirement of flopsaflavin B!” says a speech bubble coming out of something that could be either a parrot or a banana.
“Oh” you think “I didn’t even realise I was lacking in flopsaflavin B” - quite correctly, as it turns out, since it turns out to mean ‘plastic toy dust’ or something as nutritionally unnecessary.

There are boxes that seem to be entirely composed of things you shouldn’t eat for breakfast: miniature chocolate chip cookies that you pour milk on and eat with a spoon. Little brown and orange balls that taste of chocolate covered peanut butter cups and contain more sugar than if you simply cast a bowl made out of chocolate and peanut butter and munched down on it. And that’s probably available: I just haven’t found it yet. There are things with marshmallows and with nougat. Real chunks of fruit, real chunks of muffin, god knows there’s probably one out there with real chunks of the Berlin Wall in it, I just haven’t found it yet.

No, wait, I have. I have, and it was called granola.
I actually went through a granola phase earlier in the year. How MUCH of that phase was due to the fact it was called ‘Aunt Fanny’s’ and the word fanny makes my inner-child giggle, I cannot say.
But quite a lot, basically.

Granola has something in common with museli, in that it’s made out of recognisable natural foodstuffs, but in granola they’re clustered into little groups, rolled in honey or syrup solutions and then baked in the fifth circle of hell until they’re hard enough to kill a person if dropped on their skull from a second floor balcony. I used to marvel at the Barbican because someone told me the towers were so tall, you’d split someone’s skull in half by dropping a penny off the top. Drop granola, and not even dental records would identiify them. I like granola, don’t get me wrong. Most have the benefit of feeling good for you, though only if it’s because you had to work to damned hard to eat them.

Speaking of hard, Grape Nuts are another crazy phenomenon. Taken from castrated grapes and deep fired in kilns for several years to reach their famous consistency. “They won’t soften in milk!” exclaims the box, excitedly. No. They won’t, and for good reason. They’ve been developed by dentists for nefarious profit-boosting purposes.

That may not be actually, technically true. But I imagine evil dentists do love them for the the tooth cracking side effects.“Grape-nuts? Profit-raisins more like!”, they must joke, at their EvilDentistCon parties.

And this is not to say that these things aren’t nice.
Everything’s nice. Mostly everything. Mostly everything tastes like it was engineered with a hyperactive eight-year-old’s favourite boost-foods in mind, but in a nice way.

Sugar pervades. You’d think they were sweet enough already, but a cheerful national character is not, apparently, an impediment to having just a little more sugar. In everything. Even savouries are sweet, the sneaky bastards. Just when you’re expecting them to be when you’re expecting them to be entirely savory - even boring things like Sooper Dooper Fiber Hoops and Bran Platters and Shredded Wood and other things that are meant to be invigorating for body, mind, heart and bowel alike - a sweetness will pervade, no matter how little you might expect it.

That’s not to say that there aren’t benefits to be found in pop tarts or bowls of chocolate chip cookies submerged in milk, and I may yet explore that in multimedia form. We’ll see.

MILK

Milk comes in these giant breezeblock-style cartons which you modestly try to resist until you realise that a) you don’t have to go to the shops as often and b) the fridges are all designed for such things and anything smaller looks a bit pathetic, like it’s hanging around in the fridge door waiting for its mum to come and pick it up.

So, as it turns out, it’s actually a lot more convenient. Thought if you’re used to the idea of popping down to the shops for a carton of milk, a couple of cartons of juice (same size), some fizzy pop (generally even larger), and perhaps some wine (annoyingly standard in size (though much larger bottles ARE available (am I in multiple quotes right now? Oh, yes, how dreadful of me (Sorry) I’ll stop it) if you should want them), and in a glass bottle which is heavier to begin with) and if you are used to, perhaps, the crazy-insane habit of walking home, then you can expect to look like some kind of knuckle-dragging ape after a couple of weeks. These things are HEAVY.

So, if you drink milk at all - or any milklike substance, you have choices. More than you’d think you would need. You’ve got milk, plain and simple; then half&half, which I think is half cream half milk; then you’ve got 2%, which is semi-skimmed; 1%, which is half way between semi-skimmed and skimmed (so that would be skimmed-semi-skimmed on a milk compass, I suppose); and non-fat, which is skimmed, and pretty self-explanatory.

If you can’t drink milk at all, there is soy milk, rice milk, nut milk and, bizarrely, normal milk that manages to be lactose free.

In my house, where we have a conflict of dietary requirements and allergies, we started off getting different milk, until we realised that was insane in terms of volume, and ended up getting lactose-free non-fat milk. Which, some would argue, is, in fact, non-milk. It is milk with all the things that make it milk taken out. It’s basically a carton full of milk-void.
Tastes quite nice in coffee, though.

COFFEE

Clearly, if you live here, you will make coffee to your own taste.

But, while out and about, in diners, restaurants and cafes, you will be amazed and delighted at the concept of completely free refills, as many as you want, and generally without asking for them. You will be amazed by this until you realise you’re basically drinking sequential cups of red-hot brown water. I’m not sure if it’s just the west coast (though other places I’ve been have been as bad), but I’ve powered through about seven cups per sitting without it having a noticeable effect on my level of wakiness. That’s just wrong.

It’s coffee. It’s meant to wake you up, that’s kind of why you drink it. If it was spectacular-tasting, people wouldn’t mask the flavour of it so often with cream, milk, sugar, syrups etc. You drink it to wake up. Thus, making it piss-weak and super-hot, as they do, defeat the object. For me, at least.

It’s one of the benefits of going to otherwise dreadful just-the-way-you-like-it chains. There I can say ‘with THREE EXTRA SHOTS OF ESPRESSO, DAMNIT!” and not look like I’m asking for something alien, or wrong. Unless I actually shout. And/or use the word damnit. While shouting. That would almost certainly be rude.

TEA

If you’re a tea person, and I know a lot of you are, then you’ll be presented with a whole different deluge of choices when requesting a brew.

“Can I have a cup of tea?” will result in a laundry list of exotic place names, colours, and flowery sounding concoctions. You’ll probably want English Breakfast Tea - and be sure to ask for milk if you want it, it probably won’t come as standard.

I don’t drink tea. Outside the house. I drink vats of iced green tea at home, but that’s a different topic (one for my ‘How To Pee Like A Racehorse In Ten Easy Steps’ chapter). Other than that, I don’t drink tea.

If I did, I’d go a little crazy, every time they, at the fancier establishments, brought you a cup of hot water and a box of teabags to choose from on the side. “Look here, matey” I would say, in my best Queenly accent (and yes, she would totally say ‘matey’ in this situation, I guarantee it) “I would like this here teabag, right?… But can you take it away and pour some actual boiling water over it? This off-the-boil tepid shit simply won’t do at all” (Please stop grousing at the back, I have it on good authority that this is how her maj talks all the time).

Iced tea’s nice though. I don’t know why we don’t drink more of that at home. I always did, but that was mainly because I’m too forgetful to remember to drink anything at all while hot, so had to find a way to redeem it. Iced Tea is nice - though unless you are the honeymonster (and depending where in the country you are, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb all the same) I’d advise you to get unsweetened and sweeten it to taste afterward.

COOKED BREAKFASTS

The american standard - or at least the one I’ve come across most often - comprises of eggs, bacon, pancakes and toast. And then there are the other things. I’ll break this down some more…

EGGS (ANY STYLE)

Or just eggs. TWO EGGS, the menu will say, usually with a confusing (ANY STYLE) following it.
They won’t explain the available styles, of course, they’re so generic that they think there’s no point. It’s one of the chief mysteries I had adjusting to life in my first year in America. The fact that there are a known set of rules to many things. And they’re strict, and people will look at you funny if you don’t know them. But if you don’t* know them, there’s no real way of finding out what they are. Because they’re sometimes particular to the region, the situation, the time of day: and even if they’re NOT, people find it hard to understand they might need explaining to someone what they are, or why they’re so weird.

For some reason, it reminds me of the time I was in a train station in Bologna, passing the time waiting for my friend, who was trying to find the bathroom. I read the only book on the bookstand that was in English, which happened to be the Italian to English phrasebook, for use by Italians travelling abroad (most likely to the UK). I remember one page, that had the indispensable phrase for any tourist in London:
“Excuse me, where is the nearest tube station?”
And the indescribable follow-up question, which only comes (for a Londoner) with a side order of the image of someone’s face if asked it:
“Why is it so far away?”

It’s not exactly the same question, but it does sum up the disparity between “questions every tourist wants to ask” and “questions no local will know how to answer”.

The thing is, if you say “Hello! Wwhat do you mean ‘any way’, exactly?” the answer you’ll get most often is “Oh, yaknow. Like, “Any Way”.” which doesn’t exactly help. Feels like a poor Italian tourist having to deal with the answer “Eh? It just IS. That’s where it is. What’s wrong with you?”

So. here are the few ways I know to order when the menu says TWO EGGS (ANY STYLE)

Sunny Side Up: - Just fried. Generally, be aware, fried eggs are fried very lightly, so expect not only the yolk runny, but often some of the white too.
Over: - Fried, then flipped, so the yolk is sealed in, and the whole thing cooked through.
Over easy: - Same as above, but much more lightly cooked: The yolk (and possibly white, as above) will be runny.
Scrambled: - You know what scrambled means. Can be many variations, from egg-salad-lumpy to almost like puree and packed with cream. I have no sense of the rules for being able to request one type or another though. Sorry. I’ll look into this.
Poached - Means poached! Yay. V soft though, obv.

Omelettes are also available. Any omelette can be made with egg whites (because you get the protein but not the fat or cholesterol), or with “beaters” which, as far as I can tell, appear to be egg whites, with the yolk left in but some yellow colouring, so they feel more like you’re eating proper eggs.

One of my favourite breakfasts is Green Eggs & Ham, which I kind of made up myself, but is basically just a mash-up of other things. For two people, it’s made with one egg (sometimes two) a bunch more egg whites, some torn spinach leaves, some thinly sliced lean ham, a spoon of wholegrain mustard and some salt and pepper and things. It’s really good, especially if served with nice granary toast and a couple of spoonfuls of salsa. Salsa Verde (made out of tomatillos rather than tomatoes) is nicest with it. But it’s not a breakfast if you’re going to the gym or otherwise being active. Not enough carbohydrates. Anyway.

FANCY SCHMANCY EGG DISHES

First, and almost only, there is Eggs benedict - which I’ve long been planning not only a post about, but a whole blog about. The rest will follow. In fact, we’re barely there on breakfasts - we’re yet to touch on biscuits, waffles, the crazy non-puritan attitude toward booze at brunch, or home fries or the lovely, lovely pancakes I call “yes”.

I don’t call them “home”, clearly. And I don’t call them right: not with the lashings of bacon and maple syrup I pile on top of them. But wholeheartedly, and homeishly, and with all the love in heart, I call them Yes.

And more about that in part two. three. Whatever. This post is only SOME of what I have to say on the matter. Sorry, I was planning on sitting down and writing things because that’s what a blog is, and I thought I should publish it, perfect, finished or no, because that was the point of my exercise. So the next part will come. Sometime…

I was really going to have a feature called that, you know. On this blog, or more accurately, on the podcast I sometimes think it might be a great idea to make.

I was going to do a weekly feature on the podcast-that-isn’t in which I would try a different wacky American cereal and then review it for your pleasure.

But I haven’t done a podcast. So it isn’t on there. So I’ll stop saving ideas up for that and put them here in a chapter for the book I’ll never write instead.

Also, seriously? The noise of someone eating - and particularly eating cereal - is one of my top ten most hated sounds in the whole wide world. It actually makes me want to hurt people. So why would I ever have inflicted that on you? It makes no sense. Particularly as YOU might all want to hurt somebody, and the person you would want to hurt would probably be me, and so all I would have ended up doing is would be setting up my own death mobs. Hoardes of them, roaming the earth, slathering at the mouth at the idea of silencing once and for all me and my big cereal chomping gob.

Or perhaps the rest of you aren’t as aural-sociopathic as me. Or perhaps you’re just not willing to admit it.

So maybe I should just do it - or maybe I should do it in writing. But then, you know, “And now, number 7: Froot Loops. Number seven. Froot Loops.” Doesn’t work quite as well with words as it does in multimedia, perhaps. Maybe a short video series. Actually, that’s not too shabby an idea.

Anyway. I should start the actual post.

The Weekly Cereal: or Breakfast of Chamignons.

Actually, not that sub-title. Mainly because I don’t think there’s going to be anything in here to do with mushrooms, so it’s slightly mileading. It IS a good title for something, though, so I should save it for the moment an idea worthy of it rises up to deserve it. Or a cafe. If I ever get to run a cafe I will have a whole brunch menu based on literary puns. And that, my friends, is why no one’s ever going to let me run a cafe.

I should start from the top again.

In fact, I should just start this whole post again, it’s got a bit unfocussed slightly quicker than usual. Not that much quicker, but… Never mind, I’ll be back in a minute. In a different post.

I appreciate there are innumerable explanations for trousers pulled halfway down (/up?) legs. Signals of toughness, weight lost in jail, guns stuffed in trousietops.

I have never seen men with breeks slung so low. Watching another shuffle onto the bus, his belt around three inches above his knees, useless, his hand forced to hold them up anyway, I averted my eyes, for fear of laughing. You must not laugh. They look so completely idiotic, they MUST be terrifying. My only thought was:

a) Is the challenge to find a style SO STUPID that you look tough despite of of rather than because of it? What next when this passes? A nice polkadot dress? Gangsta y-fronts outside your trousers? A rubber penis strapped to ones head?

b) You’re not that tough if escape from a crimescene makes you waddle like Jemima Puddleduck, pal.

It’s not just the decorating of houses, gardens and windows - inside and out, there are orange and black decorations that hit the shops sometime in August, alongside the ‘Back to school’ things, all fangs and claws and cheap sweets and all those kinds of things.

And costumes. Oh so many costumes. Where in the UK most costumes tend to be ghoulish or in some way morbid - at least traditionally, here they appear to be wish-fulfillment or just costumes for the sake of it - a giant cavalcade where people get to dress up like they wouldn’t dare to the rest of the year. And boy do they seize the opportunity - with both hands, and a leg lock and a mouth full of hair, do they seize it. They seize it hard.

And the pattern seems to follow the usual when grown up people are allowed to dress up in costumes, the normal thing: men are superheroes, celebrities, animals, fictional characters, inanimate objects. For women, the main costume appears to be a variation on ’slutty’. Slutty nurse, slutty cat, slutty firefighter, slutty bee. If you can take a costume, reduce the skirt to something resembling a belt, squeeze the top into something resembling a very small fruitbowl filled with over-ripe melons, then you have the perfect female halloween costume.

Then there are just random ones, ones that COULD be a vampire, or a robot, or a character from a popular American TV show of yore that I’ve never heard of. And they wander the streets, NOT just on the night of halloween itself, but during the day of it as well, and, in some cases, at the end of the week adjoining halloween because they’ve been wearing their costume to work as well. To their job. Their proper, grown-up, real live job.

Last week on the bus home one day there was a Luigi (from Super Mario), a vampire, a robot, a slutty something, and a woman wearing a white cardigan and jeans and carrying a Storm Trooper helmet, which frankly isn’t trying hard enough.

And there were several others, but the great thing about San Francisco is that the coming of Halloween affords the opportunity to play an unending game of ‘Halloween Costume or Everyday Wear?’ Because any day of the year, rugged individualism thrives in the San Francisco dress sense, and you stop noticing it so much until you try and work out whether people are dressed funny for the occasion, or just because that’s what they always wear.

“Halloween costume or Every day?” we hiss at each other, walking down the road and spotting a gentleman dressed like a particularly unconvincing version of Amy Winehouse. “I say Halloween”.

“Actually no” comes the reply “I saw him in Safeway last week”.

“Halloween or Every day?” we hiss, seeing a woman dressed in bright yellow shiny trousers, a tight black top, yellow cropped leather jacket and with yellow threaded through tiny plaits in her hair.

“It’s so hard to tell, I mean, that’s a great deal of pain and time, putting that yellow through your hair. But what IS she if it’s halloween costume?”
“Toxic waste? Or a bee”
“Toxic bee”
“Should we ask her?”
“Hell, no”

Because that’s the problem. It would be one of the best internet games ever. Look at the picture, click on the button saying whether it’s a halloween costume or just every day wear… But the problem is that the person setting up the quiz has to know, in advance, which one it’s supposed to be.

And you know the problem with that: that the only way of knowing for sure is to ask the person.
Can you imagine actually doing this?

“Hello, I was just admiring your costume”
“What costume?”
“Erk.”

“Hello, are you on your way out to a costume party?”
“No, I am just a common-or-garden nutter, please hold still while I stab you with this sharpened spoon”
“Erk.”

“What a great normal everyday outfit one might wear to work, do you know where I can get one just like it?”
“Are you stupid? I am clearly dressed as the ghost of Sarah Palin’s political career, do you think I would wear this by choice, what’s wrong with you?”
“erk.”

“That’s a particularly outrageous slutty nurse outfit, you basically look like a medical prostitute! Did you hire that from the costume shop down the road?”
“No, I’m just a nurse, I’m on my way home from work. Wait here while I get my actually-a-firefighter boyfriend to come and beat you up”
“Erk.”

Etc.

Never mind. It was a good idea in theory.

And things like this.
My jaw, as you can imagine, was almost constantly scraping the pavement. Insanely beautiful. Insane.

The chilly scenery is good. The writing would be going better if I didn’t have the whole of the internet to distract me (note to self: next time, I need a B&B with a nice view and no sodding wifi), and the leaves are unexpectedly brilliant. I was expecting to be a bit jaded and cityish and unimpressed, but they’re just too amazingly colourful for that.

Literally, and without exaggeration, for once, I have to admit that the trees of New England are pretty insanely beautiful. So there.

And - and I know I haven’t told you about my great state-collecting plan yet, but I will do soon - I’ve now collected all of the New England states. Vermont was slightly further out of our way than we had imagined, but a quick 9-hour round-trip sorted that out.

I have also done some hiking, although because My Beloved has mainly been conferencing, I have been hiking alone. Hiking alone isn’t as fun. There is a disappointing lack of anyone to shout “I thought YOU knew which way we were supposed to be fucking going.” when you get lost, and then no one to high five when you get unlost again. You endup having to self-high-five, which isn’t very dignified and just looks a bit like clapping gone wrong.

Weirdly, however, I have been here three days already and have not had a Clam Chowder. Or Lobster. Or,a s they would say here, Chowdah. And Lobstah.

That’s what they say. And they’d probably say Annah too, if anyone could remember to call me that.

But no. In our Bed and Breakfast I am, apparently, Anne. Bed & Breakfasts are done differently here, much more like staying with someone than just staying somewhere, and we all have to have communal breakfasts and make polite chit chat, which I am never very good at, and far worse at first thing in the morning.

So far, most breakfasts have gone like this:
Propriatress: “Morning, Bobbie. Morning Anne”
Me: “Anna.”
Propriatress: “Can I get you some juice, Anne?”
Me: “It’s Anna”
Propriatress: “Right, I’ll just be out with that. Lesley, have you met Bobbie and Anne?”
Me: “Anna”
Lesley: “No”
Propriatress: “Lesley, this is Bobbie, Bobbie, Lesley. And this is Anne”
Me: “Anna”
Lesley: “Hello Bobbie. Hello Anne”
Me: “Anna”

Up until this morning at breakfast, when the crazy B&B propriatress called me Anna by mistake, then said “Oh I’m sorry, it’s Anne, of course”, and then walked out of the room while I was trying to correct her.

She came back, I got my courage up, and next time she said the Anne word, I told her that no, she’d been right the first time, it WAS Anna after all - and she looked at me like I was making things up.

“Oh…” She said, looking at me like someone who might go around sneakily changing their name when a person wasn’t looking “…are you sure?”

Reader: I was somewhat lost for words.

Anyway, I was on the way to the airport to pick up soem lovely visitors, and I was distracted at the airport by this:

Which is just brilliant.

Because it takes a familiar warning phrase, and somehow manages to change it into something that is not only useless as a piece of advice, it also looks like it makes something dangerous, which is surely the opposite of what a piece of signage should do.

So in London we’re used to the London Underground person intoning ‘Mind the gap’ in polite tones that carry some sense of gravitas (as well as good schooling, obvs) and make us aware that we should be mindful of this thing. We should mind it.

I can see why they would change that in America - watching out for something is probably a lot more familiar a phrase than being mindful of it, and I’m not sure, but think the phrase ‘Mind the gap!’ spoken to an American would tend to provoke the response “Mind it? No, I don’t mind it at all” (and, depending on the American, they might go on to express the gap’s constitutional right to be as gappy as it so chose to be. OR presume you meant the clothing chain and say that they didn’t mind them, but rarely shopped there).

So watch out for the gap would be fine … but it’s probably too long. Shortening it to ‘Watch the Gap’ would, then, seem to make sense… Except when it’s then interpreted like this sign.

The person on the sign would seem to be watching the gap. Watching it doing what it does: watching it with great focus and intent. Just watching it. Like one would watch a television. Not watching OUT for it. Not being watchful of it. Just watching it. Just having a bit of a watch. Watchy watchy watchy.

Now, call me crazy, but I’m not sure this is the most effective way of getting on a train.
Particularly when they seem to be advocating that the optimum was to get the best view of the aforementioned gap is by sticking your head as far into the Yellow (or “Danger”) Zone as possible.

The more I look at this picture, the more I’m convinced it must be guerrilla art of some kind, because it sure as hell isn’t travel advice.

Whatever it is, I love it very much.

There are two approaches to insects in this household. No, wait, there are four.

1) Fear (Him: Spiders, me: flying things like moths)
2) Release (if one can be arsed, it is the loving way, after all)
3) Play
4) Eat

The difference between the cats is the best thing to watch,

Squirrel, a powerful, muscled and big cat, spots any intruding bug. She will chase it, and bat it, with a sharp, heavy claw; leave it; watch it crawl, or fly, off … then start again.

Ten minutes later, Widget - runt of the litter and still small, ungraceful and special - will notice what Squirrel is doing. When Squirrel is not looking, she will walk up to Squigg’s amazing live hunting toy, open her mouth, and eat it. Whole.

Done! Game over.

I love them both. So much.

Dear Mrs Reverse Charge Lady,

Sorry for being grumpy. I know it is your job to phone people, ask if they’ll accept charges, take payment and patch the call through. I realise you must have to speak to grumpy people loads: people are in stressful situations when they speak to you - like, say, having family who have missed a connecting flight and are stuck on a payphone in Atlanta.

So I’m sorry to snap. But while you must constantly have to deal with stupid names, have you ever, EVER met someone called “Ponald” before? Or was it “Punald”, you thought he said, and then threatened to hang up when I didn’t know what who you meant?

Ponald!? Really? Like Ponald Puck, right? That popular hockey mascot? Tut.

Anyway, I’m sorry. Not much, but I am.
Ponald, indeed.

Kisses,
Anna.

And I know that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, because you would probably imagine that quite a lot of the time it isn’t raining in quite a lot of places, and seeing as I live in California, it generally isn’t raining here quite a lot, and it isn’t raining quite a lot practically all the time.

Fog, we do. In my new ‘hood half way up the mountain on the sunny side of the city, the fog sometimes rolls over the top of the hill and sits heavily on my house - other times you see it rolling over the tops and dispersing over the bay. This is a weird, weird city for weather. Don’t worry, I’ll do some kind of visual explanation sometime using napkins and peppergrinders and cats and such.

Anyway. Tonight, I have reason to believe it will rain.

Mainly because there have been doomladen news reports in the breaks of every big show saying “RAIN! RAIN! There’s going to be a STORM!” (’But how bad will it be? And will YOUR house get washed out to sea? Join us at 10, because we’re not going to tell you anything before then!’)

And, while I am of course worried about anyone’s house getting washed out to sea (not mine, as we all know it is made of cardboard so it will just go a bit wet and floppy, which is possibly worse) I am quite excited, because I haven’t seen any rain in a while.

Yes, yes, I know, there are much worse problems to have, and trust me, I’m not complaining. But it’s weird the things you miss. I miss occasionally having a big old rainstorm. Last month there was a thunderstorm but, predictably, San Francisco had to do it all weird and special, and it while it thundered so much we all thought the sky was falling, the sky fell not very much. I think there was what at home I would politely call a bit of drizzle, and a single small puddle appeared outside my house.

But tonight, we should be getting rain.
Any moment now.
Or, you know, two hours ago or something. They promised me rain, and damnit, I WANT my rain.

Because the clouds gathered and everyone got very grumpy, and you know what you need, when all these things happen, is to have some rain. Rain will break the tension. Rain makes everyone feel better. Rain makes everyone feel like sitting inside and watching the rain fall and knowing nothing bad happens when it rains.
Or not much, anyway.

Rain always makes me feel like I can curl up and not worry about anything bad happening around my house. I sleep well when it rains, better than any of the rest of the time. There are reasons this happens, and maybe another time … all I want right now is for it to rain.

Meanwhile, the cats are curled up in a little furry white, brown and grey yin yang, grooming each other in the cutest way possible and … no … wait, it’s just turned into a tooth and clawball. It’s so hard to tell the difference sometimes when they do everything silently, be it loving or fighting.

I’ll finish the cat update post I’ve been adding things to. That’s what I should do first this week.
Sorry, this was going to be a post that went somewhere, and now I’m just writing a public to-do list.

There is, however a lot to do. But, as ever when it’s things I can’t talk about on here, the very fact that there are things too up in the air to talk about mean that I don’t feel like I can say anything at all.
All I can do is sit here and mither and blather and babble and just wait for the rain to fall.

It isn’t falling yet.
I keep checking the radars and the local news sites - the ones who have been all “OH MY GOD OH MY GOD IT’S COMING, LIVE IN FEAR!!!” all day, and still. Nothing.

A little water falling from the sky, is that too much to ask? I don’t want it to rain all winter; I don’t even want it to rain all week, I’ve got family coming (in can rain all next week when I’m out of town, though. Is that uncharitable?).

Half past midnight. Still not raining. Said there was 90% chance of precipitation at 10pm, and look at us here, now, dry as a nun’s chuff.

Sooner or later it will rain. And yet here I am, determined to sit up for it, wanting to actually see it happen, like it’s going to arrive with flags and streamers and fireworks. And not just be some water falling from the sky.

I shouldn’t even publish this, I shouldn’t think. It’s terrible for anyone else, this ‘diary of a place where it is not raining’. Yes, and next week, we will have a six-hour liveblog of no tornado, how would that be?

Never mind. I have to stick something up here. If I keep being quiet because I’m trying not to jinx the universe by saying the wrong thing, I will never get anything done at all.

Not that anything’s getting done at all.
It is all the same.
Nothing is new.
There is no rain.

I’d like some rain.
And I’d like some British sausages, while we’re about it. Lancashire preferably, but Cumberland would also do.

I’m not homesick, honest.
I’d just like some rain every now and again.
Or, as I was promised some: every now.

1.30am update
Still not bloody raining.

8am
Oh holy hell, someone’s upended the ocean on my house.
Um… Can it stop raining now?