Walk: Presidio Pickleball Courts Distance: 3 miles, 1 hr pickleball, yoga stretch
Walk: Presidio Pickleball Distance: 2 miles, yoga stretch, 2 hrs pickleball
So, many San Franciscans' favorite holiday is rapidly approaching along with Ciwt's Best Halloween Decorations Contest. It's still early, but she may already have a winner.
Walk: Presidio Pickleball Courts Distance: 3.5 miles, Pickle, yoga stretch
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| The Grand Canal Canaletto, Guardi, JMW Turner, Monet, Renoir, and many more artists. Seems to Ciwt she had seen thousands of up close paintings of the Grand Canal but never seen such a full sweep of the splendid waterway. |
Walk: No (Zooming) Distance: 0, Yoga
So, being a certain age Ciwt is mindful of not becoming a "remember when" person. But today she zoomed a presentation on grand old department stores that brought back memories she hasn't quite shaken. Good ones, yes, there was nothing like cruising the aisles of Bendels or Bonwits or Lord and Taylor and maybe even making a purchase. So splendid and pampered; it felt like hobnobbing with royalty.
But then there is Ciwt's memory of her first 'big city' job which isn't so great. She wanted to spend a summer in San Francisco during one of her college break, and her father helped by arranging a job for her there. The first morning after she arrived, she put on a nice suit and took the cable car to I. Magnin which turned out to be San Francisco's poshest department store. All excited, she gave the guard the name of the woman she was to check in with, her boss, and he escorted her to the elevator.
See the wreaths in this picture of Magnin's? That's the top floor which is where Ciwt was headed. And where she stayed all day long except for a half hour lunch break. In other words, she was not to be hobnobbing.
The job her father had arranged - or maybe he just told his contact there "put her wherever she's needed" - was as a 'tube girl.' Like these women (a generation older than Ciwt!) are doing 
- except they are seated whereas the I. Magnin tube girls stood all day. No chairs anywhere. All the faster to race over to a tube
that had been filled with cash, or receipts or messages and whisked up via compressed air from a glamorous floor to Ciwt's workroom. (By the way those wreath windows don't let in any light). The general noise level was like those hand blowers you find in rest rooms these days, and you knew a tube had arrived because it make a Thunk even louder than the blowers. Also because Ciwt's boss spent all day watching her tube girls, yelling at us and scolding us if we didn't move instantly. (Ciwt is pretty sure that she was being watched extra closely because her boss probably resented having to give a job to 'spoiled' college kid from back east).
At the end of the day, it was down the 'Employees Only' elevator and out a side door. She can't remember if, as an employee, she was allowed into the 'royal' chambers on her days off.
Ah, first jobs, real life begins. With recollections like these, CIWT readers can probably rest assured they won't be walked down (m)any more 'remember when' lanes.
Walk: UPS shredder, Japantown Distance: 3 miles, Yoga
Walk:1. Hood 2. Goodwill Distance: 1. 3 miles, small yoga 2. A few blocks, easy stretch' pretty relaxed day (feels kind of nice)
Walk: 1. Presidio 2. No Distance: 1. 5 miles, Pickle 2. 0, 1 hr. pedal, Yoga
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| 2020 photo of California poppies and lupine |
| Granville Redmond, California Poppies and Lupine, ca. 1920, oil on canvas |
Walk: Presidio Distance: 5 miles, yoga stretches
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| Part of a neo-Assyrian clay tablet at Library of Ashurbanipal Gold again! Not intentional and Ciwt doubts that this ancient cuniaform tablet is gold in person. But it's in the collection of the world's oldest known library so might be at least as valuable as gold. The tablet is one of several 'collected' (ie, plundered from Babylonia and other conquered territories ) by the 7th century B.C. Assyrian ruler Ashurbanipal and kept in Nineveh (modern day Iraq). The library site, which included a trove of around 30,000 cuneiform tablets organized according to subject matter, wasn't discovered until the mid-19th century. Mercifully, given activities in the mideast, the majority of its contents, including the 4,000 year old Epic of Gilgamesh, are now kept in the British Museum. Why is Ciwt writing about this today? Well a friend sent her a picture of the beyond sumptuous and stunning Waldsassen Abbey Library in Bavaria  A supporter and lover of libraries who knows little of their history, Ciwt started researching and found herself at ancient Ninevah and the 'gold' tablet. After Ninevah it was on to ca. 300 B.C. Alexandria where that Egyptian city's library became the intellectual jewel of the ancient world. Numerous learned scholars came to live and study on site, among whom were the likes of Strabo (first major geographer), Euclid ('father of geometry')) and Archimedes (mathematician, inventor, astronometer among other fields). Sadly the Alexandria Library has been lost to destructive battles in ancient (probably Roman) wars. A rival to Alexandria's Library was also constructed in the Third Century B.C. at Pergamum (now Turkey). And quite the rival it was:  . Apparently Egypt's Ptolemaic dynasty became so competitive with the Library of Pergamum that it halted shipments of papyrus there to slow its growth. The members of Turkey's Attalid dynasty responded, it is said, by becoming the leading production center for parchment paper.From these very early beginnings, Ciwt was off through Greece, Rome, various ports in Asia, innumberable wars, countless book burnings, plunders galore, lavish displays of floor to ceiling scrolls by Roman tycoons who were illiterate, the invention of paper and moveable type, the insistence during the Industrial Revolution that the lower classes be educated to read, Benjamin Franklin, Madison and the Library of Congress, Andrew Carnegie, Bill and Melinda Gates, the audio-visual-digital (and many more!) services todays libraries provide. And to CIWT for today's offering after which she will walk and read a book from her personal library piled (decorously) beside her bed. |
