Today my job was to operate a jet engine.  Then I went home and took a nap.

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The response to my call for kid-drawn monsters has been outstanding.  Why did it take me so long to come up with this idea?  The only thing better than free labor is free child labor.

So far, so good:

Since the beginning of the fall I’ve been bringing food to work.  I have never been able to do this before and I have no explanation as to why the O.C.D. is taking hold so late in life.  But five days a week this has been my lunch:

So it was that last week was a special treat.  I am not gonna gloat, but I’m coming off an unbelievable five days of eating with my friends. The undeniable highlight was Brothers restaurant, in the Korean BBQ district of San Francisco.  We got the meal for four, which yielded 38 plates, 3 pounds of meat and 1 hot-coal grill and the recommended Korean daily serving of approximately twenty thousand grams of sodium.

Look who’s here!

That’s right: it is noted bachelor and baseball blogger Ben Hill, asleep at 10 AM on my very own couch even though he’s still ahead on east coast time.  The sleeping part is expected.  What is not expected is receiving a Ben call on a Sunday night and, through a heroic act of sponetnaiety, drinking with Ben on a Monday night.  There truly are no downsides to divorce.

For reasons too boring to get in to, I ended up arranging a weekend field trip with a handful of my students. They drove from Vallejo, I biked from the Mission and we rendezvoused on a unusually wet and gray Saturday morning. The destination in question: Candlestick Park, ex-home of the San Francisco Giants, current home of a stray cat colony. As we poked around behind the scenes I was struck by how decrepit the place was. For example, the entire lot under section 25 is filled with junky old wooden tables. According to Wikipedia, “Candlestick is currently the only NFL stadium in which upper-deck supports obstruct sight lines from the first-deck seating.” And apparently, it’s currently the only NFL stadium with it’s own self-sustaining ecosystem.  The cats are tolerated because they eat the mice. I asked our tour guide Dave what eats the cats.

“The barn owls,” he answered un-sarcastically. “They’re like this big” (chopping at his neck).
Anyway, I’m making fun of Candlestick, but it was pretty cool. Plus, the tour gave me pause to appreciate my job, which is essentially to always amuse 19-22 year olds one way or the other. That is pretty good as far as jobs go. If I were a research technician, I might not be holding a fake press conference in the 49ers home locker room.