Swirly

I was pretty adamantly anti-compact florescent lightbulb until I started working with Josh Weinberg on the International LED summit PR campaign, and it was my job to write up releases and fact sheets about the progress that's been made in the solid state lighting world. The LED world sets itself up not so much against incandescent bulbs, which everyone in the city planning, architecture and design world already knows are wasteful and high-maintenance, but more against CF bulbs. LED lighting is even more efficient and takes even less maintenance than CF.

Anyway, in the course of researching solid state lighting, I came to discover that apparently CF lighting has come a long way as well, and I decided to take a leap of faith and try out one of these new-fangled swirl bulbs. The deal-breaker always for me was that florescent light is a really unattractive color, and that I can see the flicker, and it gives me headaches.

I'm so happy with the new "soft light" CF swirl bulbs that I'm totally switching, at least everywhere that the bulb itself is hidden from sight. (They look terrible in sconces.)

Anyway, California is pretty excited about enforcing this on the rest of you, so maybe you won't so much choose to move over, you'll be forced to. Bear with the middling humor of the Chron and read up on the proposed legislation.

"How many legislators does it take to change a light bulb?

In California, the answer is a majority — plus Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Decrying the inefficiency of the common light bulb, a Democratic Assemblyman
from Los Angeles wants California to become the first state to ban it — by
2012."

Light bulb moment in California: Should it ban the common bulb?

If only I liked hunters

I found this on my local Craigslist. "World of Warcraft account 60 hunter, mage, priest - $400"

Tempting. If I sold my level 49 for $400 that would work out to about 30 cents an hour. Sweatshop rates.

World of Warcraft account 60 hunter, mage, priest:

On the subject of nothing

Hey, if you wanna see my photos from Puerto Vallarta, hit my flickr page or click on the shots over in the badge on the right. They're mostly of palm trees, food and the fantastic art on the beach.

I haven't been incredibly moved as yet to write up anything about the trip - although a tale of the vomitous drama of the last 24 hours is probably worth working on - but there are some mini-stories on the photo captions.

Tea Time for Sarah

"'The Bay Area is the center of the current tea renaissance. No other city has
this range and depth."

I love seeing stories like this in the Chronicle. This is a huge piece about serious tea shops in the Bay Area, where you can do and sample one of hundreds of carefuly picked, shipped and stored varieties. I love doing this, especially at the original Chinatown Imperial Tea Palace. It was a revelation to me that the proprietor actually is aging his own puer collection in a 40,000 sq foot warehouse. I love making puer tea - the stuff smells like musty hay in the most pleasant way possible. And the effect of drinking it is unlike any other caffeine effect - it actually makes my head feel like a gentle balloon is being inflated inside.

I have to thank Stanley, the proprietor of the erstwhile cafe in my Embarcadero office building, for first introducing me to puer. He leaned across the counter like a drug dealer and said, psst, wanna try something different? That always gets me going. He showed me a little bell-shaped pellet about the size of a thumbtack, wrapped in thin white tissue paper - a tuocha, or compressed nugget of tea. The resulting brew was thick and dark and refreshing in a way tea had never been for me before. I was hooked. I paid a premium to get this stuff over the internet for a while, and to my delight you can now buy it in the regular tea section at Andronico's. I love this town.

Tea's time / Bay Area artisan teahouses offer tastes to rival the complexity of fine wine

Superiority Complex

Ha ha, I told you I was right about Berkeley...

"For Ann Rothman, a Manhattan real estate agent, her difficult person is a
know-it-all friend who simply cannot be pleased.

“She’s a superior human being, and she comes from a superior area —
Berkeley, Calif.,” Ms. Rothman said. “She has told me many times that there are
only two places to get good food. One of them is Berkeley, and one of them is
France. And France is only second to Berkeley.” "

Help, I’m Surrounded by Jerks - New York Times

getting older

This weekend, I bought cloth napkins. Just now, I was putting things away and I thought, hmm, where do the cloth napkins go? If I were really a grown-up, I'd have a drawer for napkins, and napkin rings. (Come to think of it, I think I actually do own some napkin rings that I bought years ago simply because they were gorgeous and I thought I'd probably have napkins someday to put them around.)

This growing up thing is just one problem after another. You think you're mature because you have some cloth napkins, but you still are too disorganized to have a napkin drawer. And hell, maybe someday I'll be lucky enough to have space to designate a napkin drawer, but something else will elude me.

For now I'm excited to have cloth napkins, and a new laundry quandry - how do you keep them clean? I have never understood the bleach thing, really. Must be part of getting older - learning how to bleach things. I'm open to advice.