By now most of us have got over all those silly and ill-planned new year's resolutions and life has returned to normal, at least it has for me. Now that I think about it, I don't believe I've ever actually terminated a bad habit purely as an act of will. In most cases, events have conspired and the bad habit has left me pretty much of its own accord.

One lovely spring morning in 1984 I was standing crisply by my gleaming limousine at the curb on Post Street outside Gump's waiting for my client to emerge. (I was a minor partner in a small limousine company back then.)

I was buffed, I had just had a haircut, I was wearing a new Givenchy three-piece pin-stripe navy-blue suit, and I was feeling, frankly, pretty damn spiffy as I watched the traffic creep along. Then, as I scanned upstream I saw about to pull level with me a stunningly beautiful woman driving a Mercedes convertible. Like Cleopatra on her barge except Cleopatra wasn't driving. My gaze lingered as she pulled even with me.

And then she met my eyes as she rolled by and said, in a calm, conversational tone, "Stop biting your nails."

I was, as the Brits say, gobsmacked.

I wasn't biting them when she spoke, but obviously she had seen me biting them at some point before I turned and saw her.

Some of my earliest memories are of my parents telling me to stop biting my nails. In public school, teachers criticized this habit. When I was in the Army, sensing that it was conduct unbecoming, I went underground and indulged in clandestine nail-biting.

But I have not tasted another nail since she spoke. Not once have I found myself biting a nail and stopped. There was no exercise of will, there was no tapering off, there was no withdrawal. The habit was simply gone, lasered into nonexistence in an instant.

Then I discovered the negatives. You have to clean underneath them. You have to keep them trimmed or they get in your way. They're a constant hassle! But alas, keeping them trimmed short the natural way, the way our ancestors on the savanna did, is no longer an option.

How could that woman have had such power over me? What if she'd told me to rob a bank?

"Which bank, Ma'am?"

This morning I drove over to Oakland, picked up my friend Kobe, and hit the Jack London Square Farmers Market. Yeah, yeah, I had taken my neighbor and his visiting lovely lover to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market yesterday, but I had managed to limit my purchases. Besides, I just wanted to check out another Bay Area market. Good thing I did.

Right off, I spotted Oakdale Cheese. First time I've seen them in a year, as they have stopped coming to the Ferry Plaza and Justin Herman markets. They make an excellent moderately-aged gouda. They also make by far the best quark I've had in this country, and while I try not to allow the price of foods to influence my purchase decisions, I'm still enough the mean old Scot to notice that they charge half the price of their competitors like Cowgirl Creamery.

And then right beside them there was the Golden Sheaf Bread Company from Watsonville, from whom I used to buy their four-seed baguette at the San Mateo Farmers Market when I was working at Oracle. I would spark a feeding frenzy by putting it out on the refreshments table, which was rather like tossing a Jack Russell terrier into a knee-deep pool (his knees) of half-starved piranha, a pleasure which has never been mine but one which I have imagined repeatedly owing to my great love for piranha.

My German friend Chris is a honey connoisseur, eager to sample them from all over the world. When I discovered this, I leaped into seeking new sources locally, hoping to fan his interest into an obsession, a task I sense will be fairly easy. This autumn I discovered that there are urban bee keepers in San Francisco who market their honey in specialty shops, labeling it by neighborhood. These include: Golden Gate Park, The Castro, Pacific Heights, Lake Merced, Richmond, Sunset, Twin Peaks, Glen Park, Cole Valley, Cow Hollow, Dolores Park, Lone Mountain, McLaren Park, Mountain Lake Park, and Presidio Heights. Chris took a selection back to Germany last November.

Today, I was pleased to see at the market honey from a vendor I didn't recognize. Her name is Ann Wilson and she lives in Le Grand, but the honey was made in Madera County orange groves by a bunch of bees she has enslaved. Talk about a sweat shop! No retirement program; they work 'till they drop dead, and then are dragged out of the hive and cast unceremoniously on the heap.

Unlike Freddy, who they "dropped off the fire escape into the alley with military honors." I hadn't thought about Don Marquis in years, but as soon as I did, whole stanzas came back to me. It's all in lower case because archy types by climbing onto the typewriter carriage and jumping down onto a key and thus cannot do capital letters. To give you an idea of the time frame here, the dust jacket on my "new edition" of the lives and times of archy and mehitabel describes archy as "the gay little cockroach." As opposed, in modern language, to a little gay cockroach, which archy is not, although he is a cockroach and not particularly large.

Yes, I will do anything to set these up.

It all started when, realizing 1) I wanted to go the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market because of those astonishing clementines that Fairview has had and may not have past this week (these are the ones that I may have mentioned have pushed Page mandarins down to second place and have been eaten to the point of bowel intolerance in certain households) and 2) that I was going to have lunch at Palomino with some ex-colleagues, it struck me that I should just go to the market late and then drive the few blocks down the Embarcadero to Palomino. I don't have to worry about refrigerating stuff from the Ferry Plaza this time because yesterday I took Sue on her introductory trip to European Foods and went into a buying frenzy which resulted in my now having a refrigerator full of food that I must eat in order of imminent spoilage. So I knew I wasn't going to be buying much besides the clementines.

Anyhow, one of the ex-colleagues had expressed interest in the Segway, so I'd offered to toss it into the trunk and let her take a demo ride. I had written on several occasions about how the capability of just tossing it into the trunk was one of its most attractive features. I knew there'd be no problem because I'd lifted the first one I'd ever seen out of a Segway rep's trunk last November, and they weigh only 83 pounds.

Well, yes. They still weigh only 83 pounds, but it's a very cumbersome 83 pounds and singularly ill-provided with places where one who is losing his grip might grasp, especially when he is not being watched by a woman and is thus not focused on making this test of strength look easy. But with some grunting I got it up to the lip of the trunk only to discover that the Prius trunk is clearly not as large as the trunk of that woman's car. It wouldn't just plop right in. But we all know how if you approach these things at the right angle, you can get one wheel in and then adjust the angle and slip the other in. So I tried this from various approaches and with the Segway at various angles and can now state with some confidence that the Segway cannot be placed into the trunk of a Prius. I can also state with equal confidence that the Segway cannot be forced into the trunk of a Prius, and mine has a couple of minor scrapes to prove this...as does the Prius.

It can, however, be wrestled around to the passenger-side front door and allowed to rest there while the vehicle interior is examined and certain dimensions compared with those of the Segway. The fit looked iffy, so I went ahead and wrestled it into the back seat area after I had moved the front passenger seat as far forward as possible. Is the phrase "grunt work" current in American English?

I got a turnover place adjoining the market on my second pass and made one careful pass through the market, not a wasted step. I picked up twenty bucks worth of the clementines (they range from agate to golf-ball size), a couple of packages of dried tomatoes and a few Marsh grapefruit from the Hamadas, a half-dozen of Lee's fabulous and expensive eggs, and a bottle of Frog Hollow apple juice.

Back to the car, where I collapsed gratefully into the driver's seat and glided along the Embarcadero to Folsom, where I got a parking space and read the paper for thirty minutes (all bad news). Then I wrestled the Segway out, untelescoped the handle, and rolled down the bike lane to a cut just past Palomino, where there is, glory of glories, a wheelchair ramp. Palomino has a large outdoor seating area, and I rolled right up to the edge of it, parking the Segway out of the way beside a planter.

Lunch with the colleagues was as enjoyable as ever even though I have minor reservations about recommending Palomino. The interior is gorgeous, the terrace offers a spectacular view out over the bay, most of the staff are very pleasant, the menu is exciting, and the food was well presented. What more could one ask? Well, the others seemed quite happy with their food, Sharon going so far as to describe hers as having "bright bursts," a metaphor at which my heart leaped.

And yes, my strawberry lemonade was superb and my ability to appreciate the entree was perhaps dulled by eating way, way too much of a gargantuan appetizer of waffle-cut French fries with a gorgonzola sauce. My excuse was that I kept trying to find more gorgonzola in that rich, creamy sauce, and by the time I gave up I was pretty much full. Enough so that my "fettuccine Alfredo con seafood" sic perhaps was troughed in front of a sated appetite. Still, it was every bit as unexciting as my recent entree at Catch, the glitzy new seafood place on Market near 16th. (I read Meredith Brody's review of that place recently inSF Weekly. She mentioned that when she had told her father that she was eating at a gay fish place, her father had inquired, "Where do you think they find the gay fish?")

Rachel's introduction to the Segway was uneventful, once I noticed that her feet were too far back (and the manual had warned me to make sure they put their feet in the right place when I allowed others to test it). Women, I have noticed, tend not to have the control issues that make the first few moments on a Segway difficult for most men.

This evening I've been nibbling away at the stuff I got yesterday at European Foods. Just now, the fresh smoked sprats. The counterwoman and I enriched our vocabularies over the sprats, as I had failed to point at them when I asked for a half pound. She didn't know the English, which explains why the label was only in Russian, but when I pointed at them, she said something that sounded virtually identical to the German Sprotten, which I pounced on...and then carefully pronounced "sprats" for her.

At any rate, what I learned today is that I won't be tossing the Segway into the trunk. It'll have to be wrestled into the back seat and stay there in plain sight, which will reduce the number of dual-vehicle adventures.

I'm just loving the Segway, but there have been two problems. Well, three, if you include its not fitting into the Prius' trunk, which I certainly do, although I'm now thinking that if I took the Handlebar/Control Shaft Assembly off, which requires only a #4 hex wrench and disconnecting some wires......

More recently, after I graduated to the Intermediate and Advanced keys so as to attain higher speeds, I've been having a problem going down steep hills. Yes, down. One of the safety features is a governor. When this kicks in, the handlebar forces itself back, which slows me almost to a stop, after which it allows me to continue in another little burst downhill. I can't increase my speed even by leaning precariously forward against both common sense and the explicit warnings in the manual. Quite annoying, especially when rushing to an appointment.

So last night after Bob got here and he got his brief introductory lesson and rode the thing around the house a bit, we set out for the world-class cioppino at The Anchor. I suggested that I ride it down Noe to Liberty, turn left, and continue a third of the block to the point where Liberty becomes less steep before he got onto it. A glance down Noe at its steepest there in front of the house convinced him immediately of the wisdom of my plan. I think anyone contemplating stepping onto an unfamiliar wheeled vehicle with no brakes at the top of that hill would quite naturally flash on a vision of his freshly-skinned carcass twitching pitifully after it finally came to rest at the bottom.

So we set out, and Bob did splendidly on the gentle middle slope. As I had feared, though, I had to progress by fits and starts (OK, I exaggerate slightly) and could barely keep up with him (more slight exaggeration) on the steep downgrade. I really must try this one more time with the Advanced key and make sure it's not just me before I call the Segway hotline.

The other problem is that it attracts so much attention. I have yet to see another on the streets of San Francisco. Heads turn, which makes me cringe. Folks chat me up, which I rather enjoy in general, but a disconcertingly high percentage of them ask how much it cost.

Well, this is a sore point. I loathe ostentation. Displays of wealth sicken me. I'm so neurotic about this that I can't even bear to wear the Rolex I bought for my father when I was in the Army, so I gave it away. Yet, here I am riding around on what looks like (and for many people is) a 5K rich-guy toy. So I spin it as a wheelchair substitute, which in fact it is, albeit a bit early. What it's mostly doing now is allowing me to do my shopping and errands in Eureka and Noe Valleys without using my car. But still, it gives me the creeps to admit how much it cost.

Bob had the perfect solution. When someone asks what it cost, I'll simply reply: "It was a gift."

I just talked to Segway customer support. That problem with the over-eager governor? In a word, regenerative braking (OK, two words.)

According to company instructions, I keep the thing plugged in at all times because the manual says it's good for the battery.

But I live at the top of the hill. And if the battery is fully charged and the regenerative braking tries to kick in, the stupid little thing doesn't have the sense to just spew that generated electricity out into the ether. Ummmm, or better yet, turn it into a force field around me. So since there's no place for the electricity to go, the Segway solution is to slow down forward movement so that no electricity is generated. Since I must go uphill to return home, the battery is being depleted, so of course I can go as fast as I want. Well, up to 12 MPH, which frankly seems much faster when you're perched on a little platform eight inches off the ground instead of sitting inside a Hummer.

It is so strange to me that such a high-tech vehicle employs such a crude solution to a problem that would be experienced by every user who lives at the top of a hill. And let's face it, folks who buy 5K toys tend to live at the tops of things. This is actually a real flaw rather than the minor inconvenience caused by their location of the charge indicator light immediately below the cord input. So all you have to do to make sure that you've got it plugged in properly and it's charging is get down on your hands and knees and bring one of your eyes to a position about 5" off the floor to get a look at the light. It winks at ya.

Now I'm going out to ride around some to run the battery down a bit and then try to zip down a hill at breakneck speed.

Tell Becky I loved her.

How many times have you found yourself in a low battery situation, desperately trying to conserve that last little feeble trickle?

On the other hand, have you ever tried to run down a battery? They cling to life like Lillian Hellman's turtle. (See Pentimento.)

I took the damn thing out and rode all over the top of this hill, seeking the steepest upgrades at maximum speed and deliberately going very slowly on the downgrades so as not to accidentally commit any regeneration. I must have gone a full mile and still the indicator showed a full charge.

But then, figuring that I must have expended enough energy for my testing purposes, I went for it: Down Noe to Bell Market.

As is almost always the case, there was some ambiguity. No, it did not slow me to a virtual stop as before, but the governor did, to some degree, still hold me back more than I liked. And no, I have not become a speed-crazed maniac because I must admit that there were also a few occasions when my own terror reaction kicked in before the governor did.

So I feel somewhat better about this issue even though nagging doubt remains. At Bell, though, I picked up a really fine nagging doubt remedy, one of their excellent fried chicken breasts, a great bargain at $1.59 and one that can be rushed home in a separate bag for consumption while still hot. Separate from what? Well, from the half gallon of Kern's divine Peach Nectar out of the refrigerator case, a recent discovery that doesn't have quite as many calories as, say, a chocolate milk shake.

I am becoming a neighborhood feature on the Segway. In preparation for Chris' arrival tomorrow, I rushed out to Bi-Rite, that way expensive new grocery down 18th near Guerrero, to purchase some of their spectacular house-made chicken with smoked tomato sausages. What else do you get for a German? As usual, I spotted a few other delicacies that I had to have while I was in there, but I am pleased to report I managed to refrain from purchasing any of their Mexican wedding cookies, their version of which being made with pecans and so good that the entire bag gets eaten before sunset. Afterwards, I went over to Noe Valley to pick up some cheeses.

The round trip took nearly two hours because every time I slowed down, folks wanted to talk about the Segway. And people were swarming in the streets today because it was just gorgeous on this first day in a week without rain. The most interesting person I talked with was a woman who looked my age (and was thus twenty years older) walking with a cane in front of the cheese store. She broke into an ear-to-ear grin when she saw me and remarked excitedly, "I rode my sister's in the East Bay last week and put one on order!" I just love seeing old folks with ear-to-ear grins.

On the way back home I yelled, "Electricity rules!" to the driver of a Honda Insight that pulled alongside me at a corner, which got big grins from the nearby walkers, but they were decades younger. Maybe it's because a German visitor is coming, but somehow I'm feeling that I want to get back to the Germanic roots in my speech, and "walkers" sounds a lot more down-to-earth than the effete "pedestrians."

For all its wondrous qualities, the Prius has features that become flaws and vice versa.

One fine feature is that when you're down to a small amount of gasoline, a melodious chime sounds and the last bar on the gasoline gauge begins blinking discreetly. The flaw in this feature is that the warning occurs when you can still go forty or fifty miles, so it does not instill a sense of imminent peril. In fact, you get downright cavalier about it and begin thinking of it as merely a suggestion that you need to go through the hassle and expense of tanking up sometime during the next couple of weeks or so when you happen to be passing by a station and are not rushing someplace.

We know where this is leading, don't we?

Which introduces another feature: when you run out of gas in a Prius, you are not completely out of luck because while you are out of gas, you are not out of electricity. And so even though after those sickening little coughs the engine dies and the instrument panel lights up in an impressive display of warnings, the car still moves forward quite nicely with the motor alone when you press the accelerator although it doesn't seem to want to go more than 30 MPH or so.

And since being out of gas in a car is so disquieting that it inspires a compulsion to head for the nearest gas station, I can't tell you how far you can go on electricity alone. Yet. And won't push it because Toyota gets just hysterical at the idea of your doing this.

Today I ran out of gas at 21st and Valencia and being somewhat emboldened by having gone a good deal farther the previous time I ran out of gas, I elected not to go to that expensive station on Valencia at 23rd but rather to head straight on down across Mission to South Van Ness and then right four of blocks to a cheapo station on Army Street where I found regular for only $2.13 a gallon. And then relaxed.

As with beauty, an abundance of excitement is out there, waiting to be let into your life.

Last year about this time, to be exact it was 29 April, I wrote about planning to go to the Justin Herman Plaza farmers market because Juan at the Hamadas had alerted me that he'd have their first cherries and that he expected to scoop the other growers.

Well, I went, but on my way to the Hamadas' booth I couldn't help noticing that another vendor had a half-dozen boxes of cherries on display. I mentioned this to Juan as I was buying his cherries, and he remarked, with chilly disdain, "Yes, but did you taste them?" The ones I got from Juan were quite good, especially considering that they were, after all, the very first local cherries to hit the market that were actually ripe.

The following week their cherries were much better, of course, but, as is the case with any fruit, when you haven't had fresh local cherries in nearly a year, even the very first ones on the market are a great treat. You enjoy them thinking of them as a herald of joys to come.

Flash forward to this year.

Last Saturday was the last time for the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market to be held on the Embarcadero between Union and Green. This coming Saturday is the grand inauguration of the newly-restored Ferry Building with its six-hundred-foot skylight visible for the first time in decades and many other improvements, including outdoor space provided for a farmers market and some permanent indoor stalls. So last Saturday was a low-key farewell event and it was a wonderful day. Most of the vendors I talked to expressed cautious optimism regarding the new location, and I think everyone wants very strongly to make it work.

Perhaps because there were so many other issues being dealt with, when I was at the Hamadas' booth Juan didn't mention that the Hamadas would be having the first cherries of the season at the Justin Herman Plaza market on Tuesday. This is perhaps also because he doesn't work at the Tuesday market anymore since the tragic death of Mrs. Hamada last winter. She was so wonderful, radiating kindness, and every time I go to their booth I am saddened by the memory of her grace.

My friend Chris from Germany is visiting now, and having someone upon whom to inflict all this food is a great pleasure. I wanted to take him to the Slanted Door for lunch, and the place is so popular that you need to be there when it opens at 11:30. Since it's only six blocks from the Justin Herman Plaza market, we went down to the market first and discovered that yes, the Hamadas have scooped everybody two years in a row. And it's just as wonderful this year as it was last, to get the first local cherries of the season.

While we were there, we also picked up some green garlic, snow peas, and shelled English peas from the Mouas. Then we got a basket of strawberries from Yerena, to whom I expressed my fervent hope that some under-ripe Tayberries for jelly might somehow find their way to his stall in the Ferry Building on Saturday.

Finally, we got a comparison basket of strawberries from Ella Bella. Hitting Ella Bella was a special pleasure because of seeing the delightful Sharon (whose name I just nailed down at this meeting). She is very seasonal and very part time, but now I can give her the jar of jelly that I missed giving her last fall. Michelle and Brandon, the two regulars for Ella Bella are two of the most charming and delightful vendors at the market, and that's saying a lot. They're also beautiful, especially Michelle... not that I would have turned Brandon down twenty or thirty years ago had he been in my generation. No indeed. And as I already knew in my heart, they also have better strawberries than Yerena. A bit more attention to detail is what does it, I suspect. Unfortunately, they're aware that they have better berries, and they price them accordingly. I try not to look at the prices.

After the market we went to the Slanted Door and gorged on Spring Rolls, Imperial Rolls, Shaking Beef, and Caramelized Shrimp with a half bottle of a superb Spälese. What is it about those sweet wines with spicy food? A wonderful restaurant, delicious food in a beautiful, angular setting.

Sunday night was Ton Kiang. At night they have Hakka food and a modest selection of dim sum. The Hakka stuff was good, but we both felt that having a full selection of their fine dim sum at lunch is better.

This morning I went to an appointment with Dr. Janice Fong, my optometrist and dim sum advisor, who says that Ton Kiang has been replaced in her estimation by Harbor Village. (This seems like the name of that wonderful dim sum place on Ralston Avenue down by Oracle that Jim and I liked and Chris and I ate at on our way back from seeing Andy Goldsworthy's "Stone Serpent" on the Stanford campus in November. Chris liked it, too. Could this be a new SF branch?) Since we have two more lunches, one will be at the SF Harbor Village since I just love being one jump ahead of the reviewers. Besides, Dr. Fong says it's more authentic and has not suffered the portion shrinkage afflicting Ton Kiang.

The remaining lunch will be at Tu Lan, a nasty little Vietnamese dump in the Tenderloin/Sixth Street corridor that was Discovered by Patricia Unterman twenty-odd years ago and is still undoubtedly one of the best food bargains in the city if you don't mind your elbows sticking to the table while you are eating enormous portions of astonishingly good Vietnamese comfort food. (I don't think this hazard was what mother had in mind when she cautioned us against putting our elbows on the table.)

Tonight we went to Thep Phanom and ate their legendary Larb Ped appetizer while we studied the menu. Emboldened by the symphony of flavors and textures in the Larb Ped, we tried two new dishes: an excellent duck with honey and spinach dish and squid stuffed with pork swimming in a green curry sauce that was so good that we ate the dab remaining in the bowl with spoons. That place gets better and better.

I have decided that I shall start calling Chris "C.H.F." At least until I see whether I get away with it the first time. I mean, if it works for Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, it should certainly work for Christian Heinrich Friedrich Geibel. I told Chris that he ought to introduce himself as "Christian" over here for the little frisson it would evoke, but he demurred because he knew that "Christian" would get pronounced as it is in English (Kriss Chun), which grates on his ear. Oh, these fussy foreigners. A friend of Jürgen's who lived in San Francisco for many years always introduced himself as "Chuck." After I got to know him he confessed that his name was really Herbert, but he could not bear to hear folks using the English pronunciation (Hurr Burt) in reference to himself.

Did I mention I'm off my meds and feeling great?

Chris and I went to Tu Lan for lunch. They seem to have raised their eyes beyond the stoves since my last visit, as my table was not sticky...although the general ambiance, if I dare use such a refined word in reference to Tu Lan, remains unchanged. Chris had the Pho. I had the penultimate soup which was a "spicy beef with noodle" whose Vietnamese name I forget. We both tasted each other's, and both had a slight preference for the Pho, but both soups were very good...and enormous. We split an order of Imperial Rolls (2), which meant way too much food, but we both wanted something besides soup. Then too, I have to say that theirs, while not so refined and yes, a bit greasy, tasted nearly as good as the Slanted Door's...or at least close.

Speaking of the Slanted Door, a conversation with the waiter there last Tuesday occasioned a forty-eight-hour-delayed Treppenwitz. I had asked him the status of the expansion of the original location on Valencia, and he said that they had only recently broken ground but that he had seen the plans and it was going to be spectacular. He said they're now thinking about retaining the beautiful Embarcadero location as the upscale end and serving a bit more economical menu on Valencia. What I should have remarked is, "Oh, you mean a clean Tu Lan?"

At the end of the meal I suggested to Chris that we order iced coffee, never having had it at Tu Lan but somehow knowing that the Vietnamese make a drink almost identical to Thai Iced Coffee. I'm so glad I did because it just blew us away. In the first place, when I asked the waiter if they had iced coffee with sweet milk in it, he asked, "Iced coffee?" When I responded, "Yes, iced coffee with sweet milk in it like the Thais do," he declared firmly, "Iced coffee!" and walked away. Language skills are not a hiring criterion at Tu Lan.

He returned shortly carrying two tall glasses full of shaved ice with spoons standing in them. A couple of minutes later he arrived bearing a pair of assemblies consisting of a short glass with about 3/4" of a white substance at the bottom. Atop this glass was a stainless steel cylinder about 2" in diameter and 2" high merged with a disc about 4" in diameter beneath it. The cylinder was filled to the brim with a mixture of finely ground coffee and steaming water, and black droplets were falling from the center of the disc into the glass below. After five minutes or so, the water had all drained through, so we removed the brewing contraption, stirred the black and white layers in the glass together, and poured the mixture over the shaved ice. It was divine, the best Thai Iced Coffee I ever drank.

But there is more than food in my life. Chris has mentioned to me that our long dialogues about second person pronouns during his previous visits have made him acutely conscious of current German usage, and he now sometimes finds himself actively thinking about what had previously been an automatic, unconscious selection of the correct pronoun.

How easily we corrupt the young.

The Ferry Plaza opening was gala. The place is beautiful, and I cannot imagine what they were thinking when they covered over that magnificent, 600-foot skylight decades ago. My vendors were at their finest. All the folks visiting were at their finest. Chris was wonderful in his role as bearer, at midpoint making a run to the car to unload purchases made thus far. It was a bit coolish, but still a pretty day, all the more appreciated as it had rained on the previous days and more is expected in the following. Yerena came through, so this afternoon I made tayberry jelly from bespoke under-ripe tayberries. Modesty forbids my describing the taste, but I can note with complete objectivity that Chris and I made little grunting noises as we painstakingly licked the pot, the spoon, the spatula, and the measuring cup that I use as a ladle. I put them all in the dishwasher anyhow even though no visible trace of the jelly remained.

Jars will be distributed in order of niceness. You know who you are. Then again, ratings remain fluid and thus upwardly ratchetable.

There I was beside the road putting the key into the ignition and getting a weak little chime but nothing else, no little happy face on the indicator light. In fact, no indicator light. The crowd watched silently as I tried the intermediate key...and the measly beginner key. And then, mercifully, they began drifting away, not gonna be nothing to see here.

I was out eclipse chasing. I should, of course, have followed through on my original plan to drive over to Mt. Diablo in the early afternoon with a hamper of delicacies and a good book. But I'm back on my meds and sick and just didn't feel like doing that. Here in the City it was a bit too hazy for a really good show, and I saw in the late afternoon that driving up to Twin Peaks would be pointless.

Alas, I'm so damn gaga that I couldn't even get it together to set an alarm, so of course I lost track of time and didn't think about going out to the top of Dolores Heights until the best part of the show had already passed. But I went, anyhow. All I had to do was grab my field jacket and jump on the Segway to get up 21st Street.

At 21st and Sanchez a house was blocking the view, but as I balanced there speculatively, a passing woman volunteered, "There's a good view of it at the next corner," pointing south toward Hill Street. Sure enough, a pleasant little crowd of locals was watching the eclipse, and I glided up and casually performed my flying dismount to join them.

We stood there and talked of previous astronomical phenomena as the eclipse became more and more ordinary, and we all pretty much simultaneously began to leave. This was when I discovered that the Segway wouldn't start.

Good thing I was only a block and a half from home. Even better thing that after a very gentle upgrade during the first third of the return trip, it was all downhill.

So I dragged the dead Segway ignominiously behind me. It didn't deserve being pushed ahead of me. Got it inside and took the Handle Bar/Control Shaft assembly off so I could check whether the two wires in there were still connected. They were. Still wouldn't start. So I plugged it into the wall, thinking, why not? It shouldn't need a charge, but who knows?

I woke up in the middle of the night and had to pad in there and try the key. Still dead.

This morning, it was still dead, so I called Segway Technical Support and got this excessively cheerful young woman. When I told her the symptoms, she inquired whether I had by now had the Segway long enough to start messing around with flying dismounts, not that she called them "flying dismounts," but that's what she meant.

Good grief. The Ayatollah Ashcroft's measures are sure not necessary for this Subject. The most ordinary customer service rep off somewhere in New England can read me like a book and catch me trying to get away with things I didn't know I was trying to get away with. How was I to know that flying dismounts could involve dangers other than scraped knees and humiliation.

But now I'm clear that if I wish to perform flying dismounts, I must unobtrusively but scrupulously perform the Standard Shutdown Procedure described on page 43 of the User Guide. Otherwise, I will confuse the Segway and get some of that humiliation without even falling to the ground.

Unconfusing the Segway requires a #4 hex wrench.

I'm thinking a little chrome-plated model hanging on a chain around my neck. Ummm, naw, matte black. All the guys'll have 'em.

After a breakfast of toast with a whole stalk of young green garlic sautéed in duck fat with a couple of bites of leftover duck breast and three eggs, I Segwayed out to mail packages and stopped at Bi-Rite and picked up, among other things, a quart of Strauss Organic Low Fat Chocolate Milk since I had never tasted this brand. It was so tasty that I chugged half of it right out of the convenient glass bottle immediately upon returning home.

I hadn't thought about it, but a real selling feature of the glass containers is that they have a much better mouth feel than does the spout formed when you open a cardboard carton. Hard to get your mouth comfortably onto those pointy things, but with a glass jug I get a good seal that will prevent more of the spillage stains that have built up on the floor in front of the refrigerator. Actually, the seal was so good that I had to go back in there a few minutes later and test it again, finishing the jug off in the process.

I must say that I experienced a great deal of oral satisfaction, of a kind that I'd not really had previously since cardboard milk cartons came into prevalence before I got old enough to be so depraved as to drink directly from the milk jug.

But wait, I just remembered that night in the ninth grade when I had padded into the kitchen, removed the water jug from the refrigerator, and was about to pour myself a glass of water when I suddenly realized that a Great Labor-saving Shortcut was available when Mother was not in the kitchen. Tastes better that way, too, being one step closer to the source.

Mother never caught me guzzling from the jug. I was a pretty stealthy kid.

But back to the chocolate milk. After I finished it, I hardly had room for lunch except for a quarter of a smoked eel, three nectarines, and a double handful of Brooks cherries.

I just flashed on what's wrong with me. Why I'm so voracious now and go into binges of eating. It's because I'm not smoking. Hell, I keep forgetting that I stopped smoking sometime back in February! I would never have imagined being able to write that sentence, but it's true. It was on the 3rd that I got the test results confirming that the doctors were just kidding back in December when they told me that I had lymphoma, and I distinctly remember not having to go to all the trouble to go outside on cigarette breaks during the Siebel Open, which started on the 10th. So sometime during that week I admitted to myself that I no longer had an excuse to smoke, dammit, and stopped again.

(See, when they told me I had lymphoma, I was so delighted to finally see dark at the end of the tunnel that on the way home from the hospital I got the taxi to stop at a convenience store for a pack of cigarettes and joyfully resumed smoking.)

Yesterday afternoon I experienced a sudden rush of nicotine craving and it took me a couple of minutes to recognize the feeling for what it was since it happens now so infrequently. How strange it is.

People say that if they had their choice, they'd prefer to die suddenly of a massive heart attack or stroke. I just thought of a better way: If they still come with a last cigarette, I want a firing squad.

Have I talked about my late-winter toy? No, not the Segway. This was just before the Segway, sort of a warm-up. I had read with great enthusiasm Jeffrey Steingarten's It Must Have Been Something I Ate. Steingarten observes, regarding those folks who avoid the skin of chickens for fear of the fat it contains, "If you can't stand the skin, stay out of the chicken."

During his chapter on the development of the perfect pizza-cooking technique, Steingarten mentions acquiring a Raytek Minitemp non-contact thermometer, using as an excuse his need to closely monitor the temperature of his oven.

I somehow glossed over this instrument in my excitement in reading of Steingarten's gourmandizing. But then somewhere else I ran across a mention of it and did a little Internet shopping and in no time at all for a mere hundred bucks or so had one of my very own.

We all know it's just a guy-gadget thing, but it's so much better when you can spin the acquisition as a practical necessity. Like this morning when I gathered myself together and went on an adventure downtown to the Grand Restarting Ceremony for the recently-restored, original, turn-of-the-twentieth-century clockworks in the Ferry Building. I stuck my vehicular handicap placard in the exterior breast pocket of my field jacket, not wanting to get hassled for riding the Segway on the paved concourse area in front of the Ferry Building, since it might be construed as a sidewalk and the Supes have made it illegal on sidewalks even though I can legally take an electric wheelchair capable of the same speeds and weighing several times as much onto the sidewalk.

Well, nobody hassled me. And having that placard partially in sight attracted large numbers of folks my age and older who had disabilities or were developing them and were interested in the Segway as an aid to mobility. I told 'em all about the woman in front of the cheese store on 24th Street and dilated upon the practical aspects of zipping around the city darting in and out of traffic at 12 MPH balanced on a 13x16" platform eight inches above the asphalt.

But yes, the Raytek. The best use of the Raytek by far I've found is to aim it at the heart of a visitor and pull the trigger. He sees the red light of the laser pointer and knows that he's been somehow zapped. Then I tell 'im his temperature and say, "The next setting is Stun... don't make me use that." They know, of course, I'm just kidding...of course. But then, it does have a distinctly weapon-like look to it.

Everyone relaxes when I point out its practical uses. Like for example just aiming it at any window to take the temperature of the inside surface of the glass, which you can use to instantly estimate the exterior air temperature without bothering to go outside.

The clock, by the way, is big and loud, qualities we appreciate in clocks on towers.

What's that old line about how sometimes the fears of paranoids are real? Well, I know I'm a bit demented. Certainly there's ample evidence. But it may be jumping the gun to accuse me of delusions of grandeur. Here's the situation, you be the judge:

For the past couple of weeks, San Francisco has experienced summer with a vengeance, by which I mean a seemingly uninterrupted cold wind off the ocean bringing with it daily overcasts that barely burn off even in the middle of the day and make it unwise to venture from one's home without a coat.

Yesterday, I announced that I would be going out this morning and purchasing multiple flats of berries and conducting jelly testing all day today. Over a hot stove.

Consequently, dare I say, this morning dawned bright and clear and still. No fog. No wind. Shirt-sleeve weather. I went to the market for the first time this year without a coat, and just as I got there at 11:00 the Ferry Building clock performed a stirring rendition of the Westminster Chime and sounded the hour. What I really must do is memorize the words and sing them joyously and full-throatedly the next time I'm down there and the clock plays the chime.

Lord through this hour
Be thou our guide
So, by thy power
No foot shall slide.

Bong, bong, bong, bong.....

Then again, considering how my foot has slid....

As I swooped down upon Moua's beautiful young okra and Bruin's Brandywines I experienced perspiration. As I gathered nectarines from four vendors I wiped my brow. When I spotted the first haricots verts (painstakingly labeled "Haris Coverts"), I was gasping for breath although that may have been the signage.

By the time I got all this stuff plus some cherries, squash, onions, almond butter, and flats of tayberries and raspberries halfway back to my car on Drumm Street I was nearing heat stroke.

When I stopped at Safeway on the way home to pick up some canning jars and some dill for pickling the Coverts, the parking lot was broiling in the sun. In Safeway, I found the dill, $1.49 for a miserable sprig but not one of the vendors at the Ferry Plaza had any, so what could I do?

Well, I came home and napped all afternoon. It was too hot to work.

If you were nicer to my friend Robin, you'd get tales from her like the one she sent me the other day telling about how when her son was a youngster he got sick in the middle of the night and she groggily took his temperature and was trying to read the tiny little bar when he said, "I thought that was the cat's thermometer."

I went out yesterday afternoon on the Segway to Dr. Fong's, where we grossed out (in a fun-loving way, of course) her totally blonde and vegetarian assistant by discussing the Brain Masala at Shalimar, the new Pakistani/Indian restaurant on Polk at Pine. (The assistant was at first desperately trying to believe that a masala was perhaps related to a mandala and that a brain masala was thus some kind of Eastern study to improve one's mind.) On the way home I stopped in at Whole Foods to pick up some Bingham Hill Blue, an award-winning and ultimately somewhat disappointing Colorado cheese I'd read about, and while I was there delighted the garage attendant by giving him an intro lesson on the Segway.

I continued on my way home via Pacific Heights since the outbound trip competing with grumpy commuters on through streets had been a little too, well, competitive. Early on I got stopped by this alternative transportation nut for a too-long conversation about the politics of Segways in San Francisco, and shortly after that I hit a pothole on Steiner that threw me for my first significant spill. As I was picking myself and the Segway up and dragging us between parked cars to the curb to collect our wits, the woman driving the car behind me slowed and called out, "Are you hurt?" Since I could speak, I of course said no. Actually, I had forgot how much it hurts to scrape the skin off a six-inch patch of your forearm. But for the first few minutes that took my mind off my bruised butt, which seems to have absorbed most of the impact.

It's becoming clear that this thing is really quite dangerous to be running on heavily-trafficed streets, but it's opened my life up so much that I wouldn't give it up for anything.

And yes, I knew about potholes, but for a moment failed to watch for them. And my goodness, was the fall abrupt. The very first warning came as the Segway and I were doing an arabesque, during the first part of which our only contact with the ground was with one of its wheels. Then, I momentarily lost touch (in a couple of senses) with the Segway as I hit the ground. One advantage of a top speed of 12 MPH, though, is that you don't skid far.

And yes, I should drape myself with accessories like knee and elbow pads and a helmet and such, I really should. But they're so uncomfortable. I say that without ever had any of them on me except for a motorcycle helmet decades ago because they look so dorky that even donning them is unthinkable.

After I got home and scrubbed the street dirt out of my scraped arm, ow, ow, ow, I started discovering other minor contact points. The good thing about privately administering your own first aid at home is that you get to whimper as much as you want. I seem to have bounced a couple of times to get so many little minor contact points. Then, for a couple of hours, I was distracted from my discomfort by watching Andy Roddick prance around on center court at the ATP Masters tournament in Montreal.

But then bedtime came and I discovered that my scraped arm was not the really the problem. I seemed to have bruised my tailbone, as finding a comfortable position in bed was difficult. Luckily, I have my stash of leftover pain meds from various surgeries, so I sampled a 1995 vintage hydrocodone. It still worked, at least enough to let me sleep for several hours.

Hmmmm. It's several days later, and my butt still hurts when I lie down. Definitely may have to look into some kind of padding to wear when I'm riding the Segway...or better yet, when I'm trying to sleep.

Oh, I have whined.

I have whined about how swiftly my sins are often punished. Well now, I can unwhine, as a good deed got an incredibly fast reward. Here's how it went down:

Some weeks ago I had finished packing one of my friend Jim's inheritance items, but then I checked on the web and discovered that if I drove across town and took it to UPS instead of running down to the local post office, I could save lots and lots of money, easily ten dollars.

And then I realized that hey, I should just wait until I'd finished packing the remaining two items and take all three packages to UPS at once, thus saving several cents worth of gasoline and maybe an hour's worth total of my precious time.

A no-brainer, actually.

Well, until as the weeks went by with no further packing action, modest crumbs of guilt began accumulating at the edges of my consciousness...and continued to accumulate until they had reached feast proportions. So this morning, gorged on guilt, I actually sat down and filled out the address labels and the shipping form and placed the package conveniently beside the front door in anticipation of taking it to UPS on the way home from the Slanted Door after lunch.

And then I jumped in the shower to get ready ahead of time for lunch so that I could watch Andre play this Canadian upstart in the ATP Masters in Montreal until the last possible moment before I had to depart.

And God looked down upon me and thought, hey, why not now? And He caused a rain to fall upon Montreal, thus delaying Agassi's match this morning by fifteen minutes. And then He caused the producers at ESPN to think, hey, why don't we fill that fifteen minutes with coverage of the end of last night's match between Lleyton Hewitt and Max Miryni. So I got to see Lleyton llose, one of my favorite activities!

And to sweeten His gift, since I took that time to get the package ready, I did not get far enough in this morning's paper to discover that Lleyton had lost, so I got the agony of the drama, too.

Now I'll probably choke on a chicken bone at lunch, but that'll be alright.

I've been doing some thinking about Segway accessories.

Cup holder. Inspired by my journey this morning from Tully's (cafe) to Walgreen's holding a cup of hot coffee in my right hand. Yeah, yeah, Dubya fell while trying to Segway with a tennis racquet in his hand, but I got extensive practice at my summer retreat while holding a can of soda in my right hand, so I now have the knack. And it sure was a great crowd-pleaser when I rolled away from Tully's holding that coffee.

Cell phone. If the pedestrians and motorists can go down the street shouting into one, so can I. Unlike the motorists, though, I can't steer with my knees. So I need the cup holder to free up the left hand for steering.

Horn. One of those with the bulb that go, "Ah uuuuu gaaaaa." Either that or one of those Dutch bicycle bells that quickly wear out so all you hear is a faint "scritch, scritch, scritch" as the bicyclist vigorously thumbs it.

Radio aerial. Suitable for attachment of a small pennant. Radio optional, but in no case to be used without earphones in sophisticated neighborhoods.

And on a related concept: I find it somehow unfair that society deems it perfectly reasonable for children to have imaginary playmates, but yet at the same time declares it a symptom of encroaching senility when, without the aid of a cell phone, I carry on conversations with persons invisible.

I can't believe I've become such a vehicle technology nut, but I have. How many other people do you know who have two electric vehicles?

Here's the latest development. Sarah is the woman at USAA who manages all my affairs; Becky is my sister; today really is her birthday; but no, I didn't plan this ahead but just acted on inspiration.) Becky got back to me immediately, and since she enjoyed it so much, I thought I'd pass it along.

----- Original Message -----
From: Louis Bryan
To: Sarah Reinbach
Cc: Becky Kinzer
Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2003 11:26 AM
Subject: money

Sarah,

Please don't take this as an indicator of increased dementia, but I'm gonna buy a new car.

Yes, we all know that with significant guilt I went out last year and bought a Prius when my old car was only nine years old and had lots of life left.

Well, I've been looking at the web site for the 2004 Prius, and the technological advances are so enormous that I've just gotta upgrade.

Besides, I tell myself, the trade-in value for my 2002 ought to be high since the demand for the Prius is so great in the Bay Area. Furthermore, even though the 2002 is certainly the most entertaining automobile I've ever owned, it has three flaws.

First, it's a struggle to get the Segway into the thing. It won't fit into the trunk because the opening is too small, and getting it into the back seat is a serious hassle. The 2004 has a hatch back, which will simplify using the Segway when I'm out of the city.

Second, its high speed handling leaves a great deal to be desired. It feels quite unstable over 75 or so, not that I routinely go that fast, but even at legal highway speeds I don't feel like I have as much margin as I'd like. The 2004 specifically addresses this issue.

Third, and most importantly, it's the wrong color. At the dealer's I'd told the salesman, "I'll take that gray one there." Even though to persons who are not a little color blind the vehicle appears a lovely lavender, the salesman was clever enough to know that the customer is always right.

A last word about the new Prius: One of the hot new features is a little module thing that you can have in your pocket and when you get close, the car senses your presence and unlocks the driver's door for you and turns its ignition on so that you don't need anything so vulgar as a key and can just reach out and touch the Start button to activate the propulsion system. The gasoline engine would of course not start yet since it's now trained not to come on until after you've reached a certain speed and actually need it.

I'm thinking that that little module thing could be pried open and the teeny chip taken out and then, after a quick visit to my veterinarian, yipe!, I'd never have to worry about misplacing my car keys again.

The only problem with this plan is that I don't seem to have enough money on hand. So could you celebrate Becky's birthday by taking 20K out of her inheritance and putting it in my checking account?

Happy Birthday, Becky.

Many thanks, Sarah.

Louis

The day began badly.

I discovered that the order to fix my DSL had fallen through the cracks eleven days ago and that getting back up will take at least another week. I was just barely polite, being just furious...mainly at myself for being so stupid as to sit here for eleven damn days without bugging somebody.

But then, the forecast was for a gorgeous day and by ten or so the fog had retreated out of sight to the west, so I decided that instead of sitting here seething I'd hop on the Segway. I find that the wind blowing through my hair cools and relaxes my brain.

And then I realized that well, hey, this would be an excellent day to head out to Golden Gate Park and take a look at the newly-restored San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers, a spectacular pile of Victorian gingerbread that just re-opened a couple of weeks ago after being basically taken apart and reconstructed piece by reinforced piece after having been near-mortally wounded in the Great Storm of 1995.

I promised dear ones that if I didn't crest the hill and plunge into a bank of fog so thick that, owing to the wind-chill factor, I was transformed instantly into a rolling Popsicle, I'd write a report upon my return.

This is it.

The park was positively basking in the sun, and the conservatory is better than ever. Well, actually, it's practically the same except that at the extremes of the wings there are new refinements. The lily pad pond at the end of the right wing is now a hydrologist's delight and the pads are handsome and up to about four feet across with big purple blossoms arising from the water between them. Amazing. And hey, they don't have those signs up anymore asking you for God's sake please don't chunk stuff onto them to see whether they'll collapse.

Out on the left wing there is a kid-friendly learning area with rotating exhibits. The current exhibit is on butterflies, and I must say it's just delightful to be in a large room with dozens (hundreds?) of butterflies flitting all around you. You are cautioned not to grab them off blossoms or out of the air, and if one of them should choose to bless you by alighting upon you, you are enjoined to pretend that this delights you and assured that the butterfly will soon find you less delicious than you looked and depart.

Great fun, although afterwards I had a dark thought: they must have penned those butterflies up and half starved them. They sure were greedy for those blossoms.

Despite the fun, there were two downsides. First, except for the highland rain forest area, every room was oppressively hot and steamy. This is bearable because we know it's a necessity. The other negative is the incredibly tacky multicolored lights that someone chose to more or less randomly cast onto foliage and blossoms. It's like putting a neon frame around the Mona Lisa. Where's our taste gone?

Then I realized the colors were awfully pure and in very limited amounts and that oh hell, they're from natural prisms in the panes of glass! Aren't I happy I suffered in silence on that one?

And speaking of plants, we Californians sure do know how to make the most of self-inflicted adversity, even before he's inaugurated. Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle included an ad from a big discount builders' supply nursery for, and I quote this letter for letter, "hausplonts."

OK, time for some complaints.

October is finally here, so it's summertime in San Francisco and it's too hot.

I'm sitting here in my underwear with every window in the house open because it's too damn hot to even think about going to bed. I've got all the lights off except for the computer screen so as not to generate any unnecessary heat. I suppose this is the payback for the day being so gorgeous that I spent a good chunk of it just cruising around the adjacent neighborhoods on the Segway going from shop to shop invigorating the local economy. I did some serious invigorating in the bookstore, perhaps because I've been a bit down recently and done little but read and am thus depleting my pile of unread books.

Luckily I have learned not to leave the house on the Segway without wearing my backpack since without it I have no way to carry home impulse purchases. The good news is that the pack imposes a limit. When it's full, I must go home.

I just finished Simon Winchester's Krakatoa. Stupid me, I thought it was going to be a book about a volcano. You know, bright lights, explosions, gouts of lava, pyroclastic flows....that sort of thing. It was, of course, but it covered the volcano so thoroughly that it really should be right there beside McPhee's Annals of the Former World in the Plate Tectonics Department. That is, unless you're thinking about all the social implications he discusses and put it in the Social Studies Department.

As an aside here, Winchester finally tipped the scales on Max Havelaar. His was one too many mentions of this book the past couple of years, so I went ahead and put it on order while I was in the bookstore. No, the English translation.

I had received in yesterday's mail a long article Chris had clipped from that bastion of fluffy, light-hearted reading, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagzeitung, and I searched the envelope in vain for a translation. Unfortunately, since I do understand at a glance many of the words in the first few sentences, I know it's about a European version of the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market or perhaps Copia.

So I'm going to have to spend a day or two looking up the remaining words and untangling the Allgemeine's famously difficult syntax and will thus not be interested in taking on a Dutch novel in Dutch, even a short one that arguably altered the course of Dutch history. Now that I think about it, it was perhaps the Dutch Uncle Tom's Cabin.

But enough on that. The real reason I'm writing this note is to pass on a line from Molly Ivins' Bushwhacked, her best-selling exposé of Dubya's dirtier deeds which she leavens with wit occasionally lest you slit your wrists in despair. For example, she quotes William Brann: "The trouble with our Texas Baptists is that we do not hold them under water long enough."

Yes, William Cowper Brann, editor of the late-nineteenth-century Texas magazine, The Iconoclast. Brann realized the secret ambition of all journalists: he wrote columns so incisive, so scathing, so savagely satirical, that one afternoon on the streets of Waco a freshly-enraged reader paid him the ultimate compliment by shooting him...in the back.

Brann fell, mortally wounded, but as he fell he managed, like a true Texan, to get the last word by turning, drawing his pistol, and killing his assailant.

You may possibly see soon the first of the Satsuma mandarins in your markets. They are good enough until right at the end of their season, which is a long one. They are superb at the beginning of their season. Hint: select the ones that feel fullest and heaviest for their size. On Saturday as I was leaving the Hamada's stall, Gordon had the kindness to point out to me that I had missed the display of them.

And Bernard's had the very first of their old sour white Marsh grapefruit. One of world's great citrus fruits and now, in this country, in dwindling availability since every year fewer of the old trees remain and there are not enough of us connoisseurs to encourage farmers to replant this variety. One of the things wrong with the younger generation is that their taste buds have been dulled by all that junk food and they are incapable of tasting anything subtle. Not, of course, that most folks would describe the taste of a Marsh grapefruit as subtle, now that I think of it. Perhaps I meant "different."

And Lucero is still shoving out glorious strawberries. He is also teasing the season out with his heirloom tomatoes, but few are left and you need to hit him early to get the good ones. What I can't believe is that it took me so long to figure out that his strawberries were just simply better than everyone else's, and you don't have to hit him early to get the good strawberries. He also still has good raspberries. I've got some in there macerating in crystalline fructose while I write this. Well, strawberries this good deserve better treatment than being overwhelmed with table sugar....or even berry sugar since we now know about crystalline fructose. Oh, yes you do. Surely I've mentioned this before and besides, I cannot imagine Whole Foods not having it. It'll be right beside the dark agave nectar (not that tasteless light swill), just two aisles over from the aged piave and the hoch ybrig.

When the strawberries have sweated enough to completely dissolve the fructose (and yes, I do give them a little stir now and then), I plop a tablespoon or two of clotted cream on them to remove any healthiness factor remaining after the addition of all that fructose. Yes, my first jar of clotted cream. I'd been reading about it for years, and Chris grew fond of it as a Schmand substitute when he lived in England. I found it, priced by the molecule, at this new little gourmet store called "Yum" on Market at Valencia.

I fear the poor thing is not going to survive because their selection is simply too refined and too high end. For example, they have the original recipe Dr Pepper there. Still bottled in a special plant in Plano, Texas. Still using cane sugar instead of that high-fructose corn syrup. Still in 8 oz. glass bottles. Still available in returnable glass bottles at the plant but alas not over the internet. When you've found the right drummer, you keep marching to him. He's drumming away at Dublin Dr Pepper.

On Saturday at the Ferry Plaza I stopped at Marin Sun to pick up some of their free-range eggs and discovered that during the week there had been a performance review followed by executions of the underperformers, whose bodies were dressed, sealed in clear plastic, and displayed for sale to bring in a few extra dollars as well as to "encourage the others."

"Dressed," in the sense of plucked and drawn, is way up there on my list of favorite euphemisms. Actually, "drawn" is up there itself.

We have read all our lives that for maximum flavor, you want an old hen, but you don't see too many opportunities to buy them, so I snapped one up.

I chopped her up and threw her into a pot with some aromatic vegetables, and simmered away until she was tender, which took a full three hours! These are tough working girls, and the flavor is amazing. I don't think I've ever tasted anything quite so chickeny as this stock. Clearly, nothing would do but to fish the chicken out, shred it, return it to the pot, and float some dumplings on top.

I let Aunt Sara get senile before I had the wit to try to extract from her the recipe for her glorious, cloud-fluffy dumplings. Aunt Sara was by far the best cook on either side of the family, but by the time I got around to asking her, she responded, "Oh, now I just cut flour tortillas in strips and use them. You can't tell the difference."

Well, I can tell the difference. I knew it was insane, but I tried it. Actually, they weren't bad, but they were definitely not Aunt Sara's famed dumplings. Tonight I used a recipe that I've had for years and had never got up the nerve to try.

Unfortunately, they were so wonderfully light and fluffy that they disintegrated, but they served very well to thicken the stock with the torn-up chicken and remaining tattered vegetable bits into a thick, delicious stew. But not, alas, chicken and dumplings. I've found a couple of promising recipes in old East Texas church cookbooks, and if I can get one of them to work, I'll put it in the Recipes section.

And when I say "get it to work" I mean get it to work several times in a row successfully. I recently tried a biscuit recipe out of Lewis & Peacock's The Curse of Southern Cooking and was just entirely smug with my great success. Then I made them again for friends, and they were a near-total failure. Some of these damn things are, I swear, dependent on the phase of the moon. Ummm....I don't want to go in the kitchen and check, but it may be "Gift" rather than "Curse."

I just live for my little ah-ha experiences, but for sure this one is the first that involved a cat...my friend Kobe's cat. He's a nice cat, as cats go, and we all know how I do kind of like cats...especially friendly cats, and since Kobe's cat is Home Alone during Kobe's work week, there is some pent-up need for affection, or at least attention or whatever it is that cats are after when they signal they have noticed your presence by rubbing up against your leg.

So of course I reach down to pet him, which he facilitates by flopping down on his back to better present his eminently pettable belly.

Some months ago in the course of giving this cat his belly-rub, it came to my attention that he was fat. I called this medical problem to the attention of the house dietitian, wondering aloud whether he was in the process of killing the cat with kindness.

On subsequent visits, I observed that the cat did not seem to have lost girth and was, if anything, getting fatter. So I renewed my acid observations regarding its morbid obesity. The phrase "cat murderer" may have passed my lips...and fallen on deaf ears, as the cat grew fatter and fatter.

On a recent visit I noticed that, in addition to the premium canned cat food stacked in huge piles and clearly fed to the cat morning and evening, there was a bowl of dry cat food sitting there against the possibility that a single hunger pang might strike the cat at any moment during its waking hours. I was aghast. No wonder the cat is so fat!

But then as I was railing about encouraging the cat to eat itself to death it struck me that from the cat's standpoint this might be a damn fine way to go. Yes, there is more and more evidence that animals fed a nutritious diet but kept on the brink of starvation live longer, but it occurs to me that the animals might prefer a shorter life with plenty to eat.

And then I thought about my own situation. Ummmm yes. Back when there were certain advantages in sporting a six-pack, there was good reason to watch my diet.

But now that I don't care how I look, I am getting...well, not as fat as Kobe's cat, but I've made a start.

What a wonderful electric adventure I had today.

From home at 21st & Noe I took the Segway down to the Viking at 17th & Sanchez for a haircut.

From there I rode down to the BART station at 16th and Mission, where the absence of a "down" escalator immediately came to my attention. So I trundled the Segway down the stairs into this deep pit, remembering only about half way down that there were elevators for the disabled. (I had brought my handicap placard along just in case somebody wanted to hassle me by pointing out that the law specifically permitted only bicycles and wheelchairs, but the attendants were quite nice about explaining how I had to push the Segway through the handicap gate and then walk back around and use my ticket to get through the turnstile.) After a six minute wait, I boarded the Dublin/Pleasanton train as it pulled into the station exactly on time. www.bart.gov/stations/map/systemMap.asp

I had used BART routinely in the late 'seventies to get to work at Chabot College over in Hayward when I lived at 23rd and South Van Ness, so I was familiar with the first part of the route. And let's face it, since BART runs underground from 16th and Mission and then under the bay until it briefly surfaces in West Oakland and then dives back underground for three more stops, there's not really all that much to see for the first part of the journey. Although the stations themselves are all interesting architecturally, the insides of tunnels tend to be similar.

However, once my train reached a point just south of the Bayfair station in San Leandro, it veered off onto the new Dublin line that I'd never taken. The first part is relatively uninteresting, but once you're out in the country, the views are splendid. The BART tracks parallel I-580, but when you're driving you simply can't enjoy the panoramic views the way you can when your attention is not taken up with keeping the vehicle in one lane. We're into winter enough that the hills have greened up and the scattered trees are glossy, the wimpy winter sun lighting them up from the side. Just beautiful.

My friend David and a couple of his colleagues met me at the BART station and we tossed the Segway into the back of his van and went off to Little Home for a splendid Thai lunch. Then back to the PeopleSoft parking lot for a Segway introduction for the two friends and David, all thoroughly photographed and videotaped so as to drive their kids mad with envy.

And then, home again home again. The whole adventure was not 100% electric because of the few blocks in David's van from the station to the restaurant and back, but I could have just as easily taken the Segway for that part, too.

I took delivery of my 2004 Prius on Friday night. Oh, it is so wonderful in many ways. Now that we've made friends and I've scratched it in its special little places, I don't need a key anymore. When I approach, it allows me (and nobody else) to open its door. Then I simply sit in the driver's seat, push the Power button, use the little gear bar to tell it whether I wish to move forwards or backwards, and press the accelerator to glide smoothly away from the curb.

Yesterday, I drove it down to Moss Beach to place a package of get-well goodies and a plea for information on Robin's doorstep. Robin underwent a hysterectomy last week after failing to tell her husband to email me recovery updates...and me without their phone number. And so in the middle of the night last night I started imagining Something Going Wrong and by dawn, my imagination working overtime, I was, well, practically hysterical.

Then again, this may have been just an excuse to take the new Prius on the road, and take to the road it did. Oh, the handling, the handling. Vastly improved. Just clings to the road.

Moss Beach is right below Devil's Slide, that legendary section of US Highway 1 that keeps crumbling into the ocean hundreds of feet below. My nerves are no longer what they once were, and I touched the brakes once or twice along there, wasting momentum that could have been turned into electricity. But see, headed southbound you get a good look at the Slide itself as you approach it and you can tell it's well named: an unbroken stretch of scree about five hundred feet long and trembling at the angle of repose from the edge of the highway down to the water. Anything that gets on that is tumbled and abraded all the way until whatever is left spatters into the Pacific.

Robin called me not long after I got back home and let me know that everything went splendidly and she is recovering apace. When she gets a bit better, I'll go down to visit her, which will give me another chance to see whether I can make it down that hill without chickening out and using the brakes. At worst, the battery will be fully charged...at least until we hit the surf.

I went out Monday afternoon and bought a cheap boom box so I could participate fully in "Unsilent Night." My friend Bob came over from Marin, and we went out together, him trotting along beside the Segway, without which there is no way in hell I could possibly have done this.

I had combed the article in The San Francisco Chronicle Unsilent Night for clues as to the route, but it turned out that the route differed quite a lot from that described in the newspaper, I suspect at least partly because the described route would have involved climbing major hills.

We were given our cassettes at 18th and Dolores and pressed our Play buttons more or less simultaneously at the countdown. We were led up Dolores to 19th Street, down 19th Street across Guerrero to Dearborn and then over to 16th Street. Dearborn is a tiny little alley with Victorians and newer buildings rising two and three stories directly from the sidewalk...more or less sheer walls on either side, the ideal place for a lot of reverberation.

And reverberate we did. Imagine a thousand people carrying boom boxes playing the same tape in a narrow alley. It was just glorious, and improved by the sight of windows being flung open as the inhabitants became aware that they were being engulfed by what in the sixties would have been called a "happening."

The communal spirit was uplifting. San Francisco is, at least by eastern standards, a very open and friendly city, but we carried this friendliness to a yet higher level. Bob brought his video camera along and I am looking forward to his sending me some clips, which I will share.

In contrast to the happy scenes he reported filming (we kept separating and rejoining) was a motorist whose car was trapped by other vehicles when we were crossing Dolores and who was nearly apoplectic with rage at having his progress impeded for ten minutes by a thousand people radiating splendid music and great joy. His realization that Bob was filming him ratcheted his rage higher, and I sure do hope this part of the video is available online. (Thanks in advance, Bob.) The Grinch is alive and well, if a bit purple of face, in San Francisco.

The return was via 16th back across Dolores and then up another alley to Church, and then left back to the northwest corner of Dolores Park. From there the crowd went across the park to the center just in time for the final chords to sound.

Getting across the park, however, involved a flight of stairs at 19th Street, and after I had dismounted and was starting to drag the Segway up the stairs, a young local couple behind me and their visiting friend from Addis Ababa grabbed the bottom of the Segway and, over my protestations, practically threw me up the stairs. At the top we introduced ourselves, and I gave them a quick demo while we let the other folks travel without us the last thirty yards to the end point.

A wonderful evening. You might want to participate in this should it come to your city.

Here's what the music sounds like: Bang on a Can

As is probably obvious, I write this stuff as incidents happen and send it as email to a friend or two. If I get interested in them, I make little edits as I send them to more people. After a sufficient amount of banging on them has taken place, some of them get to the point that I think they're entertaining enough to post, a decision often reached rashly, as is also obvious.

What I'm trying to do right now is describe what it feels like when your dearest friend, at whose wedding you were Best Man 35 years ago and with whom you had had a rich and vibrant correspondence and meetings as often as possible, stopped answering your letters after you came out to him and his wife the last time you saw them. And now he has discovered your web site and breaks 33 years of stony silence with a short but chatty email saying how happy he is to have found you, says he loves reading your stuff, gives you two email addresses and a telephone number at which he might be reached, and salutes you as "your old friend."

Yeah. The laughter, the tears, the running around the house screaming. Still, the bottom line is that I'm old, sick, half-crippled, and depressed, but yet, yet I have not lost my curiosity.

I really must know whether, if I yield to my desire to respond, he will ever hint that it might have been even slightly better had he broken his silence a year, a decade, a generation earlier.

Note: I celebrated the new year by writing back. I discovered that my coming out to them occurred by purest happenstance just at that point in time that he simply got too busy to write or call me.

Oh.

I thought about this a lot.

And finally it struck me that I, too, had walked away from relationships...and, unlike my friend, for no good reason. Remember, in those days folks who were discovered to be gay were routinely shunned by their churches, expelled by their schools, fired from their jobs, disinherited by their families, and/or just killed. I got off easy.

I must share with you a recent outrage I experienced right here in San Francisco.

You will perhaps recall my rhapsodies over the brain masala at Shalimar on Polk. Well, all this news coverage over mad cow disease got me to thinking about that masala and so yesterday I made a special trip, in the rain, yet, to have some.

Well, the sissies have stricken it from the menu! Until now I had not appreciated the etymology of the "cow" in cowardice.

I explained patiently (at least at first) that when one is old and sick he gets to eat anything he wants, particularly when his brain is already somewhat spongy, but they were unmoved.

Thank God I still have five veal brains individually wrapped in my freezer. I can't decide whether to cook them all at once in a great banquet for my friends or to stingily eat them one at a time by myself.

Finally, an observation from my outpost on the Slippery Slope: The transition from humming a happy little tune while one works to just uttering continual grunts is subtle, so I'm not sure when I made it.