MORE INSULATED

Late lunch yesterday was decent, not mediocre, but strictly "decent", and I'll probably go there again in a few weeks. They're struggling, it's not the kind of place that caters to tourists but just another one of the many places run by local Chinese around C'town which did better before the pandemic. So I'm glad to see that they are maintaining.

Returned home after my post lunch pipe smoke, and spent a few hours drawing a farmhouse, in a bleak Autumnal landscape, rural North Brabant. I don't think I could really hack the weather in Autumn there anymore, I've become fussy about temperatures.

I lived in that region from my toddler years to late teenagehood.
Returned to the States for college.

Seeing as you cannot smoke indoors anymore, I need a climate wich is bearable all year around. Preferably nowhere near freezing. And anything above mid-seventies is too hot.

San Francisco, most of the time, is perfect.

I love foggy evenings. And rain, when we have it.
The fire season not so much.

All the necessities of civilized life can be found here. Yorkshire tea. Oxford marmelade. Sriracha hot chili sauce (是拉差香甜辣椒醬). Bookstores, libraries, Fernet Branca. We're comfortable, and very happy to read about nasty stuff elsewhere in the world, horrible places like Texas or Florida. Or the low vaccine rates in Mississippi and North Carolina.
Plus wars, pestilence, Trump, and Jeppson's Malört.


I'm already mapping out the inoperative storefronts in C'town that have good awnings for the rainy season, as that is where I'll seek shelter when smoking a pipe after lunch. By a happy coincidence, there's a good stretch of metal awning very close to the clinic where my doctor and pharmacy are. Plus another nearly two blocks over down the street from my favourite grocery store, AND one across the street. The tourists won't be around then, so no one will bellyache about the horrible smell of TOBACCO traumatizing them and upsetting their gluten allergy, sugar intolerance, MSG sensitivity, and inability to wear anything but the purest native fibres no chemicals dammit and is it green.

As you can tell from the portrait above, I don't need no stinking pure native fibres.
Rabies shot perhaps, and probably a raincoat.
And a cup of tea if you're offering.



By the way: while tobacco is severly frowned upon in California, marijuana is perfectly okay, because it's grown by little green men in the Amazon. Who hug dolphins. It's natural.



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