Favorite San Francisco stuff.

Met yeloson IRL and was introduced to many exciting new manga and anime.

The Muir Woods, yeees. I will move into one of those trees like in My Side of the Mountain.

Stinson Beach was also very pretty, except that there was a lot of garbage on it the day we were there.

starlady and I met at the Samovar Tea Lounge, which was awesome both because of getting to meet her IRL and because that was some seriously good tea and food there.

Almost immediately afterwards I met thegeekgene and Mom at Lovejoy's Tea Room, where we had an entirely different tea service. If there had been a formal garden involved at some juncture, this would basically have been my perfect day.

The Asian Art Museum had a lot of really gorgeous stuff, some of it the property of an evil billionaire who does dumb things with yachts and other people's money. I'm hoping for the appearance of a Japanese teenaged girl calling herself Something Something Magical Thief Something.

The Exploratorium would have been a lot more fun had we not gone there for an American Trial Lawyers' reception, and had there not been an open bar. Can a science museum even survive such a dense concentration of cynicism and incuriosity? I haven't checked the news to see if it sunk into the earth after we left. I don't want to know.

My second cousin was there and told me stories about my great-great-grandparents. He said that one of them was a hit man, and my great-grandparents had some kind of yakuza manga-ish arranged marriage contingent upon my great-great-grandfather eliminating some business rivals of my great-grandmother's family. In evaluating how seriously this information is to be taken, it is important to remember that my cousin is a trial lawyer, and I heard this story at the trial lawyers' drinking party.

Annnd I wanted to try stinky tofu but never got the chance. That may have been a good thing, I don't know.

Roger Zelazny is so good.

His books are just so snarky and dry and mean and outrageous. It's too bad he was kind of a misogynist and racist, though? Yeah.

Last night's dream.

Four monsters were conspiring to rebel against the Queen of Monsters, who was obviously Meenah Peixes. One was a talking bear cub, one was my Orcish hunter from Warcraft, I don't remember the third, and the fourth was the Condesce's gentle, easily-distracted personal assistant, whose name was PSBR, pronounced like "Posbur."

PSBR looked a little like Snufkin, but with black skin, a black cape, long black hair, and huge, heavy-lidded purple eyes. Sie wasn't gendered; members of hir particular subspecies of monster were born when two creatures of any sort were touched in a certain way by a large, faceless forest creature with soft yellow fur, who combined their genetic material with hir own to form several offspring.

PSBR's name was, sie told hir co-conspirators, an acronym of the creatures used to create hir: Piranha, Snake, Bear, Rattlesnake.

The orc pointed out that there were four things in that name, not two. PSBR nodded sheepishly. Also, said the orc, two of them were snakes. Was there one rattlesnake, and you put it in there twice to have more letters? PSBR wasn't sure; sie was nearing hir thousandth birthday, and when you get that old, you forget things. And why, asked the orc, was there a piranha near a rattlesnake and a bear, anyway? What sort of forest does this yellow furry thing live in, exactly?

PSBR said, "Okay. So maybe I don't really know what my name means."

The bear cub said happily, "But there was definitely a bear! That means we're cousins!" PSBR agreed, and they excitedly went on a bear family picnic together. The orc and the fourth conspirator grumpily went back to planning sedition.