What are you going to do in San Francisco anyhow?

I like San Francisco. I always have. For my first job I was a driver for a water lab. Every morning I had to drive from Redwood City to Marin (through San Francisco, of course). I had all morning to do the drive plus my lunch hour. I would often spend my lunch hour picking a new route through the city. Way too much fun to be paid for, but i took the money anyway. Now I had the opportunity to spend all day every day in the city.

Here I am. I have a smart phone that has a 12mp camera. Why do I need a camera like that? I have an aversion to selfies and some pretty nice real cameras. So I really didn't know why I got one but it's good to get caught up with phone technology now and then. San Francisco is a walking town. I'm staying about halfway across town on Sacramento Street. Everything is within walking distance. No, really... pretty much any place in town is within a 5 mile walk and anything I need is within about 7 blocks.

So I have been walking a lot, right? December has some beautiful days in San Francisco and the air can be so clear. Having the change to spend the time in town without a specific agenda is great... I have been able to pick up some projects that I haven't had the chance to work on for a long time...

One of these projects is public stairways. San Francisco has so many of them. Of course it is a rather arduous task because I can't just see a staircase, take its picture and move on. I must either ascend or descend the staircase. In some parts of town you can be methodical; ascend a staircase, move a block over descend the next. But in other parts of town it is a bizarre chase at the end of one staircase you discover another leading into a different direction... or two divergent ones you end up three hills over and know that there are still two sides of the first hill you haven't hit yet. And there is still so much of the city to cover. I will do a series of posts on those at some point.

So getting back to three paragraphs ago. The cell camera is coming in useful. All of the pictures have GPS coordinates so I can go back and reshoot the location with a real camera if I have the hankering. And I don't have to haul 15 lbs of gear around. Part of this post is a celebration of the cell phone camera. All of the pictures here were taken with it.

Say Cheese! it seemed like this group spent about 5 minutes getting the group selfie right.... but the looked like they were haveing fun doing it.

Broken Granite chunks on the breakwater by the San Francisco Marina. While it is easy to imagine that these pieces were broken during and cast here after one of San Francisco's earthquakes I couldn't say for certain