October 07, 2004

Leigh Visits San Francisco

In the beginning of October, Little Miss Leigh Lezark (know to me as the Tinny, but known to many of you as THE TASTEMAKER. Hahaha) got on a plane and flew her tiny self out to visit little old me in San Francisco.

Thursday, October 7th

leigh — On Thursday night I hopped in my (hot Nissan Sentra) rental and headed over to the Oakland airport to pick Leigh up. Awwww! Who's that who's happy to see me? Ummm, it's the Tinny!

leigh — From the airport we immediately went over to the The Baghdad Cafe so I could get some dinner. Leigh said she wasn't hungry and didn't order any food (see what oversnacking on JetBlue will do to you?). But when my food showed up, she started pick, pick, picking away at my grub. Here's the pic I took of her helping herself right before I STABBED HER IN THE ARM with my fork. After dinner, we decided to go out for a quick nightcap drink at Amber, a bar right around the corner from my house and we ran into...

the ass — ...Stevie aka "THE ASS!" Holy shit, remember this guy? (If you don't, go read the story right now). Stevie was out visiting SF for only two days and had just landed when we ran into him. Small world!

leigh, me, the ass — Stevie in all his bun-o-licious glory, Leigh and me (still in total shock about running into him).

leigh, me — Tinny giving me the shark eye before...

leigh, me — ...ATTACKING!

leigh, me — After finishing our drinks (and wishing "The Ass" a wonderful visit in SF) we headed back to my apartment where we stopped in the lobby to take a picture of the huge mirror that's framed with an awesomely 80s splatter-paint "artsy" frame. We love art.

leigh — And then upstairs, Leigh (wearing a skull broche, ha!) put on a sexy tooth brushing show.

Yeah. Fuck, yeah. Ungh. Like that. Unnnnngh! Yeah. Brush it like that.

Friday, October 8th

Little know facts about Tinny: She sleeps face-down with her little Tyrannosaurus arms tucked underneath her little Tinny body. Also...

leigh — ...she keeps her photo negatives in a TrapperKeeper (that has her name handwritten on it in White Out!). The best part is, whenever I laugh at her TrapperKeeper™, her only defense is to insist "It's not a TrapperKeeper, it's a binder!"

leigh — After I was finished laughing at her TrapperKeeper, we headed over to the Golden Gate bridge to do some sight-seeing. But it was super-foggy so we decided to save it for another day.

leigh — Tinny hating the fog.

I can't see shit!

leigh — After giving up on being able to see anything good out in the bay, we decided to head into the gift shop. Here's Leigh getting ready to slam a shot with hoodie-bear.

leigh — Later that afternoon, we went exploring (and mountain climbing!) in Buena Vista park. Where we ran into...

...this little dog named Molly!

She enjoyed looking cute...

...and having her belly scratched.

leigh, me — Later on Friday night we headed down to Rickshaw Stop to meet up with Mike and Michael for a party called "Loaded."

leigh, michael s — They have an empty school bus parked out front that you can sit in and we used it as an opportunity to get our BYOB on. Here's Michael and the Tins warming up with a Sparks.

liza, mike doyle — And then ten minutes later who should stroll by? Liza! Another person I know from NYC who moved out to San Francisco about a year before I got there.

leela, mary — Leela and Mary (who was the first female San Franciscan to go out of her way to befriend my homesick ass).

Saturday, October 9th

I don't know what's funnier in this picture; my shampoo horns or the fact that Leigh looks like one of the Happy Little Elves from The Simpsons. Hahahahah.

There she is! The blonde one!

Acting all pouty because we were starving and where having trouble finding reviews for good veggie places to get brunch.

We met up with Mary and had some brunch down in the Mission. But Tinny was still being all pouty. So we decided to pop into the McSweeney's store where she got to...

leigh — ...dress up like a pirate! ARRRRRRGH! No more pouting or it's the plank, me matey!

Hahaha. And then afterwards we went over to Amoeba records and then over to...

...Golden Gate park. We hung out and read and took pictures of funny Californians like SpandexMan! And his crazy brother...

...Mr. Invents-a-Sport! (What the fuck is he doing? Roller-skiing?)

leigh — After Golden Gate Park, we drove up to the top of Twin Peaks to check out the reeee-diculous view of the city.

So gorgeous. (And if you look in the foreground of the pic you can see the road that leads down the mountain and the first of many hair-pin turns that you to navigate).

mike doyle — Windy Mike Doyle.

Then after dinner and a lil' nappy nap, we headed down to Arrow Bar in the Mission for a party called Frisco Disco (which we were told was the "SF equivalent of Misshapes").

And it sorta was! The venue is tiny and the whole back area has all this foam stuff everywhere that makes the walls look like rock so it feels like you're in a cave.

leigh — Tinny (wearing a different broach) drinking like a hummingbird again.

Me and Andre! Turns out he reads the site so we shot the shit for a bit!

mary, me — Mary and me (with two drinks in one hand. Ye olde scotch & PBR combo can only lead to trouble).

leigh — Speaking of trouble, look who's six drinks on her way to Drunksville? So somewhere around this point Leigh was like "I'm feeling feisty! What kind of trouble can we get into in San Francisco? I know! How about we try to score some hippy weed?" I was like "Uh, neither of us really smoke weed, though. Remember?" She didn't seem phased: "I know. But isn't that what you're supposed to do here."

Me, "So you want to try to buy some weed?"
Tinny: "No, I don't want to buy some weed. I want to see if we can get someone to give us some for free! It'll be like a scavenger hunt!"

We started off by asking around FriscoDisco - but all we managed to find were people who wanted to sell us cocaine. When we got outside, Leigh ran across the street to check out a huge mob of people that were standing outside of some other bar and ask them for free weed. Less than a minute later, she suddenly starts running away from the crowd all fast and re-crossing the street heading towards me. I immediately thought that she'd accidentally asked a cop or something and got freaked out. But it turns out that she...

...scored a ginormous nugget of Hippy WEEEEEEEEEEEED! Hahahah. She was so excited by her free weed that she...

leigh — ...stole this stuffed squirrel that was tied to a homeless man's abandoned shopping cart on my block that we'd passed earlier in the day and laughed at. Weed and a Squirrel down the street!

leigh — Weed and a Squirrel up the stairs!

leigh — Hahahahahaha. Holy funniest photo ever.

Sunday, October 10th

On Sunday I headed over the Golden Gate bridge again! This time to do some explore the Marin County side of the Golden Gate National Recreation Areas.

leigh — Tinny with her camera. (Uh-oh! Who got a squinty eye and a smooshed nose? Hahah).

On the road heading down towards Rodeo Lagoon.

leigh — Off the road exploring the coastline near Ft. Barry.

leigh — Check out the bridge and the city way in the background!

After walking around the cliff's edge for awhile, we wandered over to check out the remains of the bunkers and gun embattlements built into the hills.

leigh — Me taking a sneaky (and artsy!) photo of Tinny from inside one of the cannon embattlements.

leigh — Until she spotted me and started firing back!

leigh — Leigh inside standing on the machine-gun platform.

leigh — And finally, Leigh touching some sexy-ass nudie-rabbit graffiti. YES! After driving around some more, we decided to head back into San Francisco and check out...

...The Exploratorium! Which is this totally huge hands-on science museum where you get to play and experiment with stuff.

leigh — Check out Lil' Ms. FrogApron getting ready to splash around with one of the water-related science experiment type thingies.

leigh — And now here's Nerdo again this time trying out this cool device that tracks your eye movements as it shows you all sorts of pictures. When the slide show is done, it analyzes what you tend to notice first in given situations (Apparently, we all look at human faces before anything else). I know there are hardly any pics of me here but that's simply because...

leigh — ...I didn't look nearly as cute in the nerdo glasses.

leigh — After three hours at The Exploratorium (and we didn't even make it through the whole place!) we'd worked up an appetite and decided to head over Love N Haight (which is on Haight Street! Get it?) so that Leigh could experience their delicious veggie duck sandwich! (PS - Hey Tinny, Freddy Krueger's gonna be pissed when he finds out you swiped his EASTER SWEATER! Hahahaha!)

leigh, mary — Then late night we met up with Mary to do some bar hopping.

leigh, mary — And to drink the non-drinkable water.

leigh — And to steal the bartender's drink-mixing spoon. Hahahah. Who got themselves a free San Franciscan souvenir?

leigh, mary — And um, to think about stealing another filthy stuffed animal, this one tied to a tree - but then thinking better of it and leaving the filthy thing alone.

Monday, October 11th

On Monday we headed to the northeast part of town and hopped a ferry...

...and left the city behind in order to head on over to....drumroll...

...ALCA-motherfucking-TRAZ!

leigh, me — ...Oh, snap!

Leigh's most favorite movie in the world is THE ROCK and she insisted that we visit here.

leigh — Ok, not really. The real story is this: Like when Meredith visited, I suggested that before coming out Leigh should put together a list of stuff that she wanted to do and see when in San Francisco. So when Leigh showed up sans list, I was like "Now what are we going to do!" She was like "What did Meredith's list look like?" When I busted out Meredith's super-detailed crazy printed out itinerary, Leigh was in awe. "Did you guys really get to do all this?" "Not even half of it," I replied. "Good," Leigh said tapping the sheet. "Here's our itinerary." First up - Alcatraz!

Do I really need to write captions for all of these? Crap.

The inside of Alcatraz.

This are probably redundant. I'm guessing you'll all seen Leigh's favorite movie and already know what the inside looks like.

I kept trying to listen to my fancy little personal audio tour walkman thingy but the entire time Leigh kept interrupting me being like "Hey, remember that time in The Rock when Nicholas Cage was all trying to disarm the rockets with the VX gas and then that one dude totally found him and was all shooting at him like AH-AH-AH-AH-AH? (That's Leigh making loud machine gun noises with her mouth) Yeah, that's basically my favorite part in the movie."

"Seriously Leigh, I know you love the movie, and yes, Sean Connery is pretty awesome in it, I will give you that. But c'mon, no more talk about The Rock, okay?"

leigh — "THE ROCK!"

The kitchen in Alcatraz (check out the painted outlines of the cutlery so they could easily check to see if any were ever missing. Sooo badass).

The view of the bay from "the yard."

The path that surrounds the yard.

leigh — Me kicking Leigh in her ass on the way back to the ferry. Once back on the mainland, we headed over to the Fisherman's Wharf to check out...

...the seals and sea lions (which was another activity ganked from Meredith's itinerary! Thanks, Mer!). The sea lions and seals were SO FUCKING FUNNY to watch and we stayed there watching them for hours - or at least we would have if they didn't stink like a giant, hot, fishy asshole. Seriously, I know that they're really cute and you don't want to believe me, but the smell was unbearable. You can literally smell if from hundreds of yards away. I kept telling myself "Relax, you'll get used to it." But when after 15 minutes I could still taste the smell in my mouth, we decided it was time to flee in terror.

candy, leigh — We quickly retreated to a nearby candy store to buy delicious treats in hopes that they'd cleanse our palettes.

leigh — We back to my place to discover that we'd been locked out! (One of my roommates had engaged the bolt and I hadn't brought the key for it). So I had to hoist Tinny up six feet in the air so she could shimmy into the window.

leigh — With her last day on the west coast nearing an end, we hopped in the car and drove south to check out the beach at Half Moon Bay.

leigh — Yay, beach!

leigh — Hahahaha.

We got there just in time...

leigh — ...to sit down on a log and watch the sun set.

I took this picture of me because Leigh was laughing at my hair and I wanted to see what it looked like.

leigh, me — Turns out it looked like THIS!

Sunset. (Despite all the sunsets I watched out there, I never once got to see the "green flash" that apparently sometimes happens on the west coast.)

Afterwards we hopped into my rental...

leigh — ...and I dropped the Tinster off at the airport! Thanks for coming out to visit me, sugar! When I got home, I sent Leigh a note teasing her about how I snuck the dirty homeless man's stuffed squirrel into her suitcase! She wrote me back teasing me that she'd hidden drawings in my room illustrating what she was going to do to me next time she saw me. Cursing her craftiness, I immediately set out to explore my apartment.

Sure enough, I soon found this. Hahahah. That's Leigh pushing me down the stairs. (You can tell it's her because of the little Tyrannosaurus arms).

leigh — And a few weeks later, I found this one hidden in a drawer in my bathroom. Hahahah. That's Leigh chasing me with a bulldozer. Check out her smiling while I'm all frowning. OMG, I hate it. I hate being chased by a bulldozer so bad.