1-16-09 Friday (Free Is Not Always Good)

It's morning once again. We set the alarm clock for 7am. We got up at 7:15, a good start. It's now 8:30 and Jim has to take a shower but naturally, Blue Cross/Blue Shield just called him. We're trying to get health insurance. Jim filled out a long online questionnaire but now we've had to give it all over verbally to a monotoned nurse. Oh sure, a lot of new questions were asked as well. Sigh.



9am and we've finally finished the phone call with BC/BS. I have to get my Apnea information along with my last cholesterol readings to BC/BS for them to finish the request.


We made it to Pier 39 at about 11am. Our first stop was for donuts. They were "fresh" mini donuts and I thought they were good. Jim says they weren't hot n fresh enough. Why do we keep getting fat?


We stopped at Musee Mecanique which was full of very old arcade games. No, older than Pacman. Even older than pong. More like Fortune Tellers, player pianos, etc. It was fun. Most all of it are antiques and usable.


That arcade was right around the corner from the National Liberty Ship, S.S. Jeremiah O'Brien. Liberty ships were built to be the workhorses of WWII. They carried cargoes of mail, grain, ammunition, troops and more. We toured through this ship which was pretty amazing. I've been on one in NY, I think it was the Intrepid. I thought of our sailor friend Mike.


For lunch, we went to In N Out Burger. This place was packed at 1pm. They only sell burgers, fries, drinks and milkshakes. Period. A single burger, single cheeseburger or a double cheeseburger. Period. The fries were hand cut with a press of sorts. The burgers were pretty good. We've seen several In N Out Burger places around California.


A few blocks away we stood in a long stupid line for the original cable cars. I say stupid because they hardly had any running and it seemed to have taken longer than it should have to catch one. I'm also over the anti-climatic attitude of the MUNI, BART and other city/state/county transportation employees. They are all dry, monotoned, and slightly rude.


We got off the cable cars at Lombard Street. Lombard Street is famous for being one-way, steep and amazingly crooked with a speed limit of 5mph. The side walk is partially staired and/or graded. We walked to the bottom along with 4 women visiting from Pensacola, Florida. We had a nice chat, and a few blocks later, we reboarded the cable car again to continue the ride. They eventually got off again, as we continued to the end of the line in SOMA (South of Market).


Sometimes.... we find out that just because it's included doesn't mean it will be good for us. I'm talking about the Cartoon Art Museum. This was more comic art to us. It was drawings and boards from comic books, Sunday comics, etc. They had one piece of machinery, I think it was a cartoon camera. We were expecting more. We walked through this pretty fast.


Right next door was the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Historical Society exhibit and museum. Interesting but not pay a price interesting. Ya know?


Next up we had a lot of fun at Yerba Buena Gardens, Zeum. This is the techie side of San Francisco and is all about creativity. We enjoyed the claymation studio where we were able to build a clay character and animate it with photo shots. I filmed the film the best I could. We then messed around with some other interactive art stuff, and finally exited to a carousel built in 1906. Zeum had tons to do for children and fun going adults. Unfortunately they were closing soon so we didn't have enough time to do all of the stuff there. We did enough to have a great time.

It's taken a long time to put the video together. I haven't really watched it all the way through. I hope it came out OK. I skipped music since there's so much video. As a side note, we didn't do the Rice-A-Roni thing. I suppose we still can perhaps, BUT we did put flowers in our hair when we 1st went to San Francisco. That should count for something.