After one month in Los Angeles, I have fled to northern California. I am in San Francisco visiting my cousin before I go to Tahoe for a friend's wedding, and I have a small suspicion that I may have up and moved to the wrong city.

San Francisco, as any Full House fan can attest, is beautiful. We spent the morning across the Bay in a neighborhood called Rockridge. While my cousin ran errands, I was tempted by the offerings in a toy store that rivaled Duncan's Toy Chest of Home Alone II fame (sans bad guys), talked to a little girl who was keeping charge of a fluffy black dog the size of a horse, and tried to figure out how I could adopt one of the kittens being showcased on the corner by the animal rescue league and get it back to LA. I think the perfection of the morning had gone to my head by that point--I don't even like cats.

Back in the city, we went to a going-away picnic in the Mission District. In a park at the foot of a steep hill covered in huge fallen stumps and dense, green trees, a group of young thirty-somethings and their toddlers gathered to say goodbye to three of their brood who were moving back East. The parents sipped beer and wine and the children nibbled on french bread slices and watermelon while they wandered around the park, jumping in the wildflower patch, wearing out the slide, chasing the birds. It was a wonderful, chill group of people with beautiful children and kind hearts. I claimed a square of blanket and stared at the sky as the fog was pulled in to the area just above the treeline and dissipated as the sun hit it. I had a small urge to talk about life and the sky as a metaphor for change, but I snapped out of it and opted to explain to my cousin the intricacies of today's slang.