A few weeks ago, we hosted wine tasting at our house.
50 bottles of wine were consumed.
This is the only picture I took:

Filed under: food, san francisco | 1 Comment
Tagged: bernal , BernalingMan , wine

We’ve been subscribing to KenFlix for 23 days and loving it! Here’s what we watched:

• Juno - better than I expected.
• Saawariya - the first ten minutes were so bad we turned it off.
• Once - we saw it in the theater and liked it. still good, but this movie is best watched once.
• Sopranos - Season 5 disc 4. They all blur together. I can’t watch any more of these for a while.
• No Country For Old Men - Good, but far too violent to watch with Jess and the parents.
• Someone to Eat Cheese With - Much better than I was expecting.
• Planet Earth on Bluray - We got this to test Bob’s sweet new home theater system. The encoding quality was disappointing. The places where you can usually hide quantization noise (foliage, high-freq areas) were encoded very poorly. It was sad to see panning shots across the forest exhibit so many compression artifacts. These guys need to use an encoder tuned to such scenes. Note: don’t ask a video codec engineer to review encoding quality of Bluray discs unless you want to get an earful..
• Be Kind Rewind - Slowish, neat plot but could have been much better.
• Congorama - Whoa. Unexpectedly, my favorite KenFlix so far!
• War - dunno. Only Bob watched it.
• Wave Twisters - Great, but Bob hadn’t seen it, and the DVD wouldn’t play. Oh well.
• Futurama: Beast with a Billion Backs - Disappointing. We had such high hopes!
• Eastern Promises - Very intense. Good, but good thing Jess didn’t see this one.
• Stray Dog - Japanese noir. Kurosawa is always good.
  

Bob & Jess, anything to add? Did I forget any?

Filed under: video, why are we here? | 2 Comments
Tagged: 4star , bernal , kenflix

We are on the second day of our KenFlix subscription, and loving it! I was wondering if KenFlix was limited to just one movie per day, or if you could get a movie, watch it, and then immediately walk back to Four Star Video and get a new one. I told the folks at 4star we were going to have a KenFlix weekend where we would see how many movies we could watch in two days, and all three people working behind the counter said that was a perfectly great idea. Ridiculous!

So anyway:
(11 hours open per day) * (30 days per month) / (2 hours per movie) = 165 movies a month!

Filed under: all talk, san francisco, video | 0 Comments
Tagged: 4star , bernal , kenflix

Four Star Video has launched a subscription plan called KenFlix, and it appears NetFlix is about to lose the important Bernal Heights demographic.

The deal: $20/month for unlimited rentals, one out at a time.
Advantages of KenFlix: No waiting for DVDs to arrive in the mail. Video nerds can get 30 rentals a month if they go to 4star every day..
Disadvantages of KenFlix: 4star DVDs usually play in my player, unlike Netflix discs, which usually start to skip about half way through. This means whenever we pick a bad movie, we’ll actually have to watch the whole thing.

Filed under: san francisco, video | 5 Comments
Tagged: 4star , bernal , kenflix

May, Jess, and I went to hear Alice Waters speak at Red Hill Books. It was packed! Here is the view from the very back:

Here is a strange thing with feathers, in a window display next door to Red Hill:

It was cold night! Even Zara needed a scarf!

Filed under: books, san francisco, zara | 0 Comments
Tagged: AliceWaters , bernal , RedHillBooks

SoCha is a cozy cafe in Bernal that just opened up 2 weeks ago. The food and coffee seem to be standard cafe fare but some nice things about this place are:

1. live music almost every night! Here’s the schedule. I’m sitting in the cafe right now and a couple guys are playing the cello and piano.
2. free wifi…and magazines to peruse
3. a large back room with cozy bench seats.
4. a small beer and wine list.
5. movie night on wednesdays
6. unlike Ritual further up the street, it’s not totally packed. There are lots of tables!

I think there’s also a brunch menu on the weekends so we should come here for brunch one day!

Filed under: san francisco | 3 Comments
Tagged: bernal , cafe

I’ve been teaching Zara how to catch the Ultimate disc.. she’s getting really good, even though the disc is three times larger than her head! Here are some videos of Zara playing catch on top of Bernal hill:

(click play to start) (link to other sizes)

Here is an earlier video of Zara learning how to catch a floppy puppy disc.

Filed under: san francisco, video, zara | 1 Comment
Tagged: bernal , frisbee , kindred , ultimate

Todd Lappin from Telestar Logistics posted this pic of the Sock Exchange at Bernal Bubbles:

via b0ingb0ing

Filed under: san francisco | 1 Comment
Tagged: bernal

Art says:

yesterday, I got the sad news that our remaining Bernal Hill great horned owl was found dead under a pine tree near where this picture was taken on June 16th, concluding the story of the beautiful pair of birds that chose to live by the top of the Esmeralda steps this winter.
Bronwyn and Aaron have taken the body up to Wildcare in San Rafael for testing.

These beautiful wild birds were embraced by the community. They made the hilltop a better place as people gathered to see and talk about them.

Filed under: san francisco, why are we here? | 0 Comments
Tagged: bernal

Trying to concentrate on anything yesterday was impossible. There were two different construction crews working right under my window. The construction equipment was setting off car alarms, and the workers were really close to the house, causing Zara to bark. Then a bucket of tar spilled on the roof of Thurgood Marshall High, starting a fire. This was the scene out our front window yesterday:

Filed under: san francisco, video | 0 Comments
Tagged: bernal

This morning a utility pole on our street caught on fire, and then it cracked in two. The fire department came and hosed down the pole after first turning off the power. The top part of the pole was just left dangling from the power lines until PG&E showed up about eight hours later and lashed the two parts together.

We have underground electric at our house, so we didn’t lose power when they cut power to the overhead lines. But when PG&E switched to underground power, they left these live power lines dangling in front of our window, which is a bit scary.

Filed under: san francisco, support | 0 Comments
Tagged: bernal

We had dinner at one of our favorite Bernal Heights restaurants a couple weeks ago… can you guess where?

Filed under: food, san francisco | 2 Comments
Tagged: bernal

Our neighbors dug a hole in their back yard, and um… roasted a pig in it. I didn’t realize “pig in a blanket” meant acutally wrapping a dead pig in a blanket and then throwing it in a hole in the ground along with some coals and rocks! I brought over a couple pitchers of mai tais, which didn’t last too long!

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.

photo linky!

Filed under: food, san francisco, tiki lifestyle | 0 Comments
Tagged: bernal

I stepped out into the backyard early one morning and found this:

I don’t think it was for me!

Filed under: san francisco | 1 Comment
Tagged: bernal

Filed under: inspiration, san francisco | 1 Comment
Tagged: bernal

The 42-inch water main that carries water from the reservoirs into downtown San Francisco runs underneath our house. SFPUC is replacing it with a new one that doesn’t go underneath our house, and they are drilling a tunnel through Bernal Hill for the new pipe. A couple months ago they started digging a giant hole at the top of the street, which now goes down three or four stories. They call this the tunnelhead.

Recently, this weird equipment appeared next to the giant hole:

On the other side of this thing is an opening with a chair that you can sit in:

Here is a close up of the knobby bits:

Does anyone know what this thing is? Is it the world’s largest drill bit???

There isn’t a lot of information about the “Bernal Heights Water Pipeline Tunneling Project” on sfwater.org, but there is this map of the reservoirs and pipelines.

Filed under: san francisco | 3 Comments
Tagged: bernal

Art has posted an update.

Filed under: san francisco | 1 Comment
Tagged: bernal

Very sad news… Zara and I were just on Bernal Hill and saw a note that said one of the Bernal owls was found dead…

:(

Art, our resident owlographer, has been documenting them and found the body. The note said that the Hungry Owl Project might be able to determine how the owl died..

Filed under: san francisco | 4 Comments
Tagged: bernal

A pair of Great Horned owls relocated to Bernal hill a couple months ago. Bernal resident Art has been taking beautiful pics of The Neighborhood Owls!

(via)

Filed under: bobslobster, san francisco | 4 Comments
Tagged: bernal

I love Wild Side West. It’s my favorite bar in Bernal, and maybe my favorite bar in the world. When San Francisco gets cold and misty, I love their fireplace. When it’s hot and sunny I love the fabulous garden in the back. Whenever the evening plan seems a little lackluster (like on Friday), re-routing to the Wild Side is a good way to ensure a fun night!

Filed under: photos, san francisco | 0 Comments
Tagged: bernal

About a month ago an artist installed this pretty piece on Bernal hill. It fades from blue to green and sparkles in the sunlight, and the dogs on the hill love to play in it. It has stood up really well against the rain and the doggies.. Does anyone know who made it? It’s really well done!

Filed under: san francisco | 1 Comment
Tagged: bernal