the rough winds did shake the houses and hovels of oaklandia the other night. they reached into the 24Th street collective and threw back our skylight like the top of a pez dispenser leaving us with a three foot wide hole in the ceiling. you can be sure it was far less baffling than the first time this happened to us. you see, i get up to start my day. i shuffle out, sleepy-eyed and puffy faced to a solar glare and birds in my living room singing “o what a beautiful morning.” in my sleep soaked haze, i just blinked and stared from the gaping hole in the ceiling to the sunlight on the floor. then i went back to bed.
but this time we were prepared. unfortunately, our ladder is of a diminutive stature, which is a poor quality to have in a ladder, but it has personalty so what are ya gunna do? so actually closing the skylight was out of the question. but last night, with staple gun and cardboard in hand we (eventually) set about in a pathetic attempt to keep out the cold (yes, sixty-whatever degrees of a california winter is cold! cold is relative. besides i’m little. shut-up.)
so lil’ ladder teetering on the teetering table, and elowsky teetering on top of that, he manages to complete the mission

and descends the back down the ladder. and were standing by the table, staring up and admiring the work. when we hear the popping of staples. oh, i think, maybe that one just didn’t take. but then there is a series of deliberate crinkles and the sound of cardboard buckling and it became apparent that someone or something has now decided it wants to break through the roof. now, people crashing through the skylights and going commando is one of elowsky’s long held irrational fears. (while mine are mostly just i think people are secretly watching me and every time i brush past something i think spiders are crawling on me.) and so he instantly thinks that THIS is zero hour; this is the moment he’s been waiting for. but instead of home invaders, our ceiling opens up like a trap door and,

from the sky, with legs flaying, drops a highly freaked-out gray house cat.

the resident tomcat that rules this roost, Bella Gato, soon realizes that this is the moment he’s. been waiting for and streaks across the house, a howling, scrolling ball of fur, nipping at the heels of the intruder.
with the help of a slightly drunken, super-helpful neighbor and her superior ladder we were able to resolve this problem by roaming around the roof, randomly knocking on skylights until we found someone, about as confused as the cat, to take him back home. so all’s well that ends well; we even got our skylight closed.
i tell you, with all the hubbub and the mini-block party there, you would think we would be smart enough to ditch our plan to sneak in to to vacant apartment next door with the washer and dryer to do our laundry.
but we did it anyway.

any proper adventure begins with breakfast. occasionally, an
adventure will begin with hash browns and syrup, if you are
sucrose-ly inclined. add biologically unsafe amounts of coffee and
buttered popcorn jelly beans to the mix, and you have a recipe for
the collapse of human social structure and the very fabric of time
itself. or perhaps just one helluva sugar catastrophe.

this particular adventure began in just such a way.

and just what kind of adventure, you may ask, would these wild
swashbucklers be embarking on? well, only a whirlwind tour of
the san Francisco bay area’s finest beaches with one mission in mind:
midnight kite flying.
as armed as i was with one diamond, doubled tailed lift-demon
emblazoned with — get this — a monkey holding a giant pencil with “i
love school” written at the top: how could i go wrong?!

balancing our overgrown tires on precarious ledges, through dangerously winding roads, over the highlands and into the
valleys, with sleepy eyes and spinning heads. i nearly lost my huevos. (or was it my rancheros?) black sabbath and other cures generously administered by Sonju — our
resident medicine man. in our travels, we encountered dark creatures, detention centers and rampant dental hygiene.

(incidentally: in a pinch you can substitute waxed or un-waxed floss for kite string. of course the counter lady will act a little funny when she encounters a gang of hooligans who seem to dangerously obsessed with proper enamel care.)

and, lord knows, i talk a lot of shit about mother nature, but every once in a while — and in her place — she ain’t such a bad dame.

and then the battery on my camera ran out.
we did a little beach hopping and some mocha swillin’ then on to cocktails at the Attic. (or is it “in the attic?”) where i had a melodramatic bloody mary. but it was nothing that the tamale lady and her traveling cooler of magic couldn’t fix. and elowsky found this tv that looks like it belonged to astronauts.
then things got kind of strange when i was told i was going to have to pretend that i was “Olga from Greenland: daughter of field geologists” in order to get into this art show for free, but that’s another story. i don’t know: its almost believable.