Up and Down

Day 6
Neighborhoods Covered: Hayes Valley, Western Addition, Japantown, Pacific Heights, Fillmore, SoMa
Streets Completed: Hemlock

I took yesterday's lunch meeting with the interior designer who's just joined the networking group I belong to as an opportunity to tackle decent chunks of Laguna (up to Washington) and Fillmore (back down to Hayes). The resultant pink lines on my Map of Progress are satisfying, though one of these days I'm determined to knock out, say, Geary in one swoop, so I can start highlighting and keep on going until I hit the blue of the Pacific.

(Total aside: the cadence of that last phrase reminds me of Neko Case's "Set out Running," the song by which I took her on as my musical patron saint back in 2004. It makes me sigh that the song feels relevant again; I thought I had moved on to something like "That Teenage Feeling.")

Anyway, the early part of yesterday afternoon was lovely walking weather: sunny, blue, not too warm, not too chilly. By the time I left lunch and headed south, though, the sky had started to darken, and within a few hours the temperature had significantly dropped. No rain, luckily, but by the time I passed through Hayes Valley and briefly stopped home on my way to Josh's, it had ceased to be a pleasant strolling day. So I took a more or less direct route to his house, detouring only to cover the block of Minna between 9th and 8th.

A note here about Stevenson: City planners, why insist on attempting to keep it one street? It runs from well downtown all the way to 14th Street, but it's almost impossible to walk more than one block of it at a time. It repeatedly dead ends into buildings, parking lots, other streets, what have you. Was it once an unbroken stretch of road, or has it always been such a jumble? Was there a Stevenson in SF history who was promised a street spanning x-number of blocks, obstacles be damned? It makes precious little sense.