Parking woes

One of the inconveniences of living in Midtown is that we have restricted parking.  On one hand this is good because if you do not have a permit you can't park on the street for more than two hours at a time. This basically means that if you do have a permit when you come home there will be a place to park because there won't be a lot of other people who are using it as a commuter stop parked in front of your house.

And this is important because none of us have garages or even driveways.

The other side of the coin, however is that every two years we have to go through a bureaucratic nightmare to get the damn parking pass.

To get a parking pass you must submit to the City a copy of the car registration, a copy of a bill which has been sent to your home with your name and the address where you want the parking permit to be issued, and a properly filled out form.  

This doesn't sound particularly difficult, unless you get your bills online.

When you get your bill online it generally comes in the form of an email and does not look like a regular bill. They will also accept as proof the copy of your bank statement. Oh yeah, like I would like the City to have a nice copy of my bank statement.

This requirement is all the more ridiculous when you consider that the City also bills us for the utilities, so we shouldn't have to give more than an account number for them to be able to click one button and see our bill.  

Six weeks ago, I sent in my properly filled out form, a copy of my car registration, and the closest thing I could find on the Internet to a bill.  I mailed it off, and we left for Canada.  

When we got home, There was a letter stating it wasn't the right thing.  

After a lot of grief, I finally found a page where I could get an actual copy of the bill, bullied and cajoled my ancient computer to print out one miserable copy, and mailed it in.  

And waited.  And waited.  As of today, it has been a month since I sent it in, and the old permit expired at the end of August.

So I walked over to City Hall to see what the problem was, because god knows you can never get anybody on the phone.  

But I got there at 11:30, and they don't open til 12:30.  I went off on another little walk --gotta get those miles in-- and came back at 1pm.  

Here's what the line looked like when I got there.  

After about 20 minutes I mad it up to the desk where I was given a number and allowed to go into the Kafka memorial waiting room.  In this room people have numbers like a bakery, except they are somehow computer generated and don't come up in any particular order.  

In another 15 minutes, I finally got up to the window.  At this point the clerk asked if I had brought the information with me.  (Why should I?  I mailed it in.) I gave her the long explanation about the difficulty of finding the website with the bill on it, the difficulty of making the damn printer print it, the long wait, everything else, and she was nice enough to go back and look for my paperwork.  

And surprise, it was there.  After a month, nobody had even started to process it.  This clerk was nice enough to process it and give me my permits.  

After an hour total, I finally walked out with a parking permit.  

COW TOWN

Sacramento has a reputation of being a cow town, pretty much meaning it's a place where nothing ever happens.  I actually don't think that cat ever played much of a part in Sacramento's history.

Agriculture certainly did. Now our illustrious mayor, who mostly cares only about getting a basketball team in Sacramento to stay, has declared us the farm to fork capital, of the world? California? The central valley?

Since for most people eating local, farm to fork, fresh this and that, usually suggests agricultural produce --fruits, vegetables, etc., the meat folks wanted to get in on it. So today they herded some cattle up Capitol Mall.

It makes me feel old and like somebody who was raised in the country, which I wasn't, because I remember what a pain in the neck cattle drives were when I lived in Yerington.  You'd be on your way somewhere, drive around a corner, and there would be a big herd of cattle being moved across the road.  And then you had to drive through the part of the road they just lumbered across.  

And now here are all these state workers coming out in their suits and ties to watch them being herded down towards the Capitol. Actually it was fun.

I think at the max there were probably 30 cattle,  maybe only 20, and about twice that many herders on horseback. Meaning you could never get a good picture of the cattle because there was always a horse In the way of the picture. And it was way too close to the horses for me as well.

The cattle drive started in West Sacramento, came across the bridge, and ended at the Capitol. It was fitting to bring the cattle to the Capitol, since the Legislature is not in session and therefore cannot produce what it usually does so well.

FUN WITH PIC COLLAGE

One of the fun things we are doing this year in the iPad Projects class is playing with an app called pic collage. I have never been able to do anything with photoshop except clone, and this is so much more fun.  

So I thought I'd put up a few things I had fun with this week.  

This is a combination of rocks I've painted and a vintage photo.  

This is the barracuda I think I'm going to start using on my Barracuda Bait cards.

These are a bunch of rocks I've painted.   When I get done with them, after I've admired my work for awhile, I surreptitiously put them in other people's front yards. The one on the left is the biggest, it's about a four pound rock.  The piano --the black flowered triangular thing on the right is really only about as big as my hand.  

I thought Michael might want to be represented on a roman coin.  Looks like he belongs there.  

I could have spent this time making jewelry, but obviously that wouldn't have been as much fun.  I have three more rocks ready to paint.  Since I just essentially throw them away after they're done, I guess it's not much of a business model, though. 

YARD SALE

Right before we left on our trip, our neighborhood association decided to have a yard sale on September 8.  The day after we got home from Canada.  I think that for someone like me, a lot of lead time is necessary to have a yard sale, if for no other reason than to locate all the stuff hiding in various nooks and crannies, and especially THE BASEMENT (scary music here).  

As it turned out 24 hours really wasn't long enough for such a project, though I did manage to scrounge around and drag out a few miserable pieces of dross and schreck which I hoped to entice unsuspecting antique seekers with.  

On the second Sunday of every month, there is an antique market under the freeway four blocks away.  (www.sacantiquefaire.com). It's very popular and we thought putting out signs that would attract that crowd into the neighborhood was a pretty good idea.  One of our members, and the originator of the idea, is a realtor, and he has signs, which was a good start.  We put out flyers all through the neighborhood about three weeks before hoping people would have their own sales that day.  I think there were about ten.  

      I did at least sell these fake Adirondack chairs.  

The Friends of the McClatchy Library asked us to put out some of their books for sale.  We didn't sell many, and they were probably surprised that they had delivered ten books and got about 20 back.  But then, that's the risk you take when you ask someone to sell stuff for you.  

http://www.saclibrary.org/Locations/Ella-K-McClatchy/

Lynda from next door had a bunch of stuff, and Kim brought some of her handmade stepping stones over later in the day.  We had a pretty good time, but I only made $45.  I tithed $5 to the association, but I ate and drank that much at the after party, 

A ONE MUSEUM DAY

Here I am looking out the window of our hotel this morning.  We're on the fourth floor. 

Who would think that we would have spent basically a whole day in a little museum that we didn't go to yesterday because we might not have made it there until an hour before it closed.

This museum is built on the site of an old giant insurance building.  The original building was built near the water on wooden pilings copied from those in Venice, which then had stonework on top of them.  As the years passed and the water ebbed and flowed around them, the pilings rotted, so that in 1949 the building was torn down because it was in danger of collapsing.  

Most of the exhibit is underground, in the remnants of the old building.  There are lots of interactive exhibits, including holograms of people who talk with you about their lives in the 1700s.

There are other places where videos are projected onto walls (ruins) and many other interesting things.  

These are birds projected.

When we left the underground area, we went up onto the tower.  I like the picture of Notre Dame with the big insurance building in the background.  It sort of looks like it grows out of it.  

They also had a Beatles exhibit of when the Beatles visited Montreal in the 60s.  I didn't think it would be that interesting, but it was really kind of a Iife story of the Beatles, and it was interesting.  The only picture I took was of their car.  

By the time we left the museum it was 3:30. I think we went in at about 11:30 or so.  Too early for dinner, but John was starving.  He remembered that treat we said we were going to have before we left, which is a sort of a sweet piece of hot bread, maybe fried? where you choose a topping or two.  My half was apple, John's was Nutella.  

I'm posting a few generic pictures of the Old City.  

Our hotel is the one with the open window.  This is the front. Our room is on the back. 

We had a fabulous dinner tonight at an Italian restaurant called L'Usine

We have to leave tomorrow at 5 am for the airport.  Ugh.  

DOWNTOWN MONTREAL

Our charming hotel is big on visual charm but the bed was too soft AND it's only a queen so we didn't sleep very well.   And this hotel, Auberge de Vieux Ville is on Conde Nast's best of 2012 list.  In their defense, I think we got a not so good room because we had booked two nights and they didn't have a third, so when they found us a room for the third night, we got it for the others.  And really, it's only the fact that the bed is too soft.  And like all hotels anymore, your only choice is to have a down comforter or nothing.  And the down comforter is too hot, but you get cold with nothing.  It isn't so bad when you have a bed to yourself but when you're sharing a small bed, one person is getting stuck with the comforter the other one threw off.    They had a wonderful breakfast.  

This morning we took a long walk --not on purpose, we overshot our destination --and visited the contemporary art museum here in Montreal.   It's quite a big museum, but I wasn't all that impressed with the collection.   

However, they have built a beautiful complex where this museum is.  The kind of thing Sacramento might have if we didn't have to waste all our money on a basketball arena.  

Our plan was to then go to the Pointe-a-Calliere museum, which is an archeological museum in the old town.  It has an underground tour of old buildings that were here from the 1700s.  

After visiting the contemporary art museum, we decided to stop for lunch.  Did I mention it was cold?

We had lunch  in a food court at an underground shopping center in Montreal. There are lots of these because the weather is so bad. We are cold today, the temperature is in the low sixties, and they have the heat on already which is the main reason we came in here

We bought a sandwich combo at Panini du Monde, which had 2 big salads (your choice from about 8) and a coke for $9.99. Of course there's a tax of $1.50 on that. It's always astounding when they tell you the tax. 

Anyway, by the time we finished lunch it was after 3, and we realized that if we walked back to the other museum we probably wouldn't have time to take the tour.  

So we hung around downtown, went back to the anglican church we visited on our city tour last week, and tried to get some pictures of the stained glass.

 We weren't too good at it.  We also checked out a couple of underground shopping centers (nothing very interesting except the winter coats that are out already and the fact that they have the heat on and it's September 4).  

So by about 5 o'clock we thought maybe we could find someplace to have dinner, in spite of the fact that we finished lunch at 3 pm and i wonder why I have a weight problem.  So  we just ambled around some more.  Eventually we ended up at St. Denis street, which is not only an interesting shopping street, it's also  the start of the Latin quarter.   And it's an area where there's a college, and we saw a continuation of the initiations we saw yesterday in Quebec.  These seemed to be more about running around drinking and less about beng told what to do, but I could be wrong about that.  We had a hamburger and frites for dinner, then went up the street to have a version of an ice cream sandwich that uses macarons, my favorite French pastry, as the "cookie" and has ice cream in the middle.  They were really good.  

We made it back to our hotel by 9 pm.  My pedometer says we walked 13500 steps.  Finally!  

AU REVOIR QUEBEC CITY

This morning, just after I woke up, or rather John woke me up at 8:30 for no good reason, I heard a lot of cheering outside and looked out the window to see a stream of young people, maybe older teenagers, maybe in their twenties, running down the street in small groups all wearing similar colors and many with cardboard boxes around their middles meant to look like cars.  

I threw my clothes on and rushed out into the street and tried to catch up to them.  I found one group about three blocks away, and as I continued searching, I found other groups of them.  

The groups all seemed to have 8 to 12 members, and all seemed to be accompanied by four or so people in military garb who often gave orders -- like lie down in the street, or shout agreement like a military group.  I asked someone in one of the groups what they were doing, and they said it was an initiation.  Of course, today would have been the first day of school.  

As it turned our, we saw them all around town for the rest of the day.  Sometimes they would stop passers by and ask them to buy candy (we did), once they asked somebody to marry one of them - a particularly charming specimen who had something that looked like spaghetti on his head.  

Our morning wandering took us back to the lower old town, through just a few tourist shops -- depending on whether you want to believe me or John -- a coffee stop for croissants and cappuccino, another visit to the giant mural for special photo ops, and finally dropping in at Paillard to buy ham and butter sandwiches on baguettes to take on the train.  

The person who made me the happiest today was the bellman who arrived our bags down the 30 steps from the lobby to the street.  

 We decided today at the last minute to take the train, rather than the bus, back to Montreal.  

As I was sitting I the train station reading my email, I noticed an email from Citibank about our credit card, but am waiting til we get to Montreal to call about it.  The email looks legit, and I made a bit of a mistake when I was trying to book the train tickets on line this morning, so I'm hoping that's all there is to it .  We've paid ahead for just about everything we have left on this trip, so if there's a problem, it won't be that bad.  

We've arrived in Montreal and are in our very cute hotel room.   It's in a very old building and our room has exposed brick and stone and windows that actually open, a first on this trip.  

Credit card issue was resolved.  

A VISIT TO STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRE

Today most of the rest of our group left because the Road Scholar part of the trip is over.  We spent the day with Nancy and Joe from !aryland and George and Grace from Texas.  We rented a big cab this morning to take us out to Ste. Anne de Beaupre to visit the basilica.  

This was a difficult thing to arrange,because its quite far from Quebec.  The taxi driver of a private taxi agreed to take us out there for $60,  but said if we wanted him to wait, it would be 65cents a minute.  However, he liked us, and when we got there he said he'd wait for about an hour.  All we wanted to see was the church, so we figured that was a good deal.  I think it was for him, as well, because he said that because today was a holiday there wasn't much work.  And of course he got two $60 fares out of this.  At the end, he took us on  a little free tour of the lower part of the city.   I think all of us thought this was a good deal.  Did I mention it was POURING down rain?

I'm just going to post a bunch of pictures of the basilica.  It is the most beautiful church we've seen on this trip,  in my opinion.  

When we came back we went to lunch in a cute little place right across the street from our hotel that had wonderful sandwiches, delicious mushroom soup and to die for chocolate mousse.  So much for not eating so much after our eating extravaganza yesterday.  

Our friends George and Grace and Nancy and Joe.  

And we also had time for a little shopping.  

Dinner tonight was with the same group.  We leave tomorrow for Montreal, and they all leave for home.  

WE'LL EAT AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN

I think today is the biggest eating day of the trip.  We started out at the breakfast buffet which was the most extensive of any we've had  on this trip, and they've all been wonderful.  

Then we visited the folk art museum in Baie du Malo.  It's a really interesting, though very small museum.  A little of everything-- primitive paintings, old festival costumes. Wood carvings, and many other things.  They were also having a little fair outside where you could learn to make jewelry with silver or copper, how to color yarns with natural dyes, and some interesting marbling techniques for paper.  

From there we proceeded to Maison Forget (Forget is the name of the man who donated the land) and which is a music school that does things like master classes and short workshops.  

They have a beautiful concert hall, and since they had a piano on the stage for an upcoming recording session, I got to play it so we could appreciate the acoustics of the hall. And the hall is really magnificent.  

Then we went to brunch!  You know, like two hours after the breakfast buffet. And this brunch was terrific.  Lots of interesting pates, breads, salads, all made from local products.  

This was a musical brunch, so we got to hear a nice pick-up trio, violin, bass and guitar.  

After that, a two hour eating extravaganza, we went back to the hotel for free time and then at 4 got back on the train to Quebec.  Did I mention the train is a dinner train?  

When we got back to Quebec and checked into our hotel, we had a room right next door to the one we had before we left.  Here's a picture.

 It's much differently decorated , and did I mention there's a post In the middle of the room?  They aren't even charging us extra for the post.   There is a Celtic festival going on and they're having a fun band and dancing in the street right under our window. I actually love it. 

THE TRAIN TO CHARLEVOIX

What a fun day we had today.  The only bad part was that we had to be up and put of our hotel room by 8:20 so we could get on the train for Charlevoix .

The train is a private train, the rights to the track bought by the owner of Cirque du Soliei.  This is just a tourist train, but it's really nice.  The train celebrates its second birthday in a week, and everything is still new and nice.  On a side note, the waitress told us that last year the train ran 10 months, this year only from  June to October. Our tour guide Andree told us that they don't get enough customers in the winter to pay the $100,000 it costs to clear the tracks for one trip.  

The train goes along the St.  Lawrence river to the Charlevoix region which ends at baie de malo.  

The train starts about 10 miles out of Quebec at a scenic place with a waterfall and a cable aerial tram that goes up to the top of the waterfall.

 Once you get on the train, they start giving you food.  It began with an assortment of bread, bran muffins, croissants, and chocolate bread.  And of course orange juice and coffee.  From there, they goon to a little frittata, yogurt with berries and crunchies, cooked tomato, and bread pudding.  Then they come and agai with the fancy bread tray and more coffee.

On every table is an ipad which is pre loaded with interesting videos abut all the places we are passing and accessed by an interactive map.  About the time we finally finished all the food we came to the little artisan town called Baie St. Paul.   The train stops there for about 2 hours, you can walk into town and visit all the little shops and art galleries.  They were cute, but didn't find anything I really had to bring home.  I did buy a gourmet chocolate bar (having been so deprived of food) but we ate that long before we headed back to the train.  

The first half of the,trip was pretty, the second half even better.  You can see New Brunswick across the water, but it's a long ways away.  And we saw Beluga whales in the water.  They were out of camera range, however.  

Then we arrived at La Malbaie and were taken to our hotel, the Fairmont Manor Richelieu, which is every bit as elegant as it sounds.  In fact I didn't mention it before, but our hotel in Quebec, another Fairmont, is also quite elegant.  

We arrived here at about 4:30 which barely gave us time to go to the scenic outdoor bar and have a drink before we went to a very cute restaurant in the village to have dinner.  I think they aren't really going to let us go home after the trip, but are going to sell us for foie gras, which means we'll never see California again.  

I'm writing this blog tonight in the hotel, but for all the luxury, they want $14 for Internet, so I won't get to upload until I get on the train tomorrow.  

Tomorrow is also the end of the Road Scholar part of our trip.  We take the dinner train back to Quebec, stay at the Manoir Victoria overnight and then most people leave for home.  We are staying another night in Quebec, then going back to Montreal for three days.