DanRochman.com

Who’s fault is it?  It’s San Andreas fault!!  Ha ha ha ha.  Okay, that’s not even remotely funny.  But Tuesday (April 18th) was the 100th anniversary of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and the local media’s been fairly saturated with quake-related items.  There were also a host of quake-related events going on in the Bay Area, none of which we ended up going out for.  Well, the closest we came was going kayaking on Tomales Bay (thanks to Janna for organizing the trip!) last Saturday with a group of friends.  Tomales Bay sits right on top of the infamous San Andreas fault.  In fact, it was *created* by the fault spreading at that point, and creating a depression in the landscape that happens to be open to the Pacific at one end.  The Exploratorium has a great web page (with a really cool webcast!) on the geology of Tomales Bay.  It’s part of their excellent “Faultline: Seismic Science at the Epicenter” project, which I wholeheartedly recommend as a starting point for the curious.  And by “the curious” I mostly mean Em’s brother Nelson.  He’s coming down from Toronto (and by “Toronto” I mean Brampton) to visit us at the end of June, and I guess he must have caught a whiff of the hype surrounding the big quake’s centennial.  He told Em he’s all excited about the potential for the next “big one” to happen while he’s out here.  Of course, if it *does* happen while he’s out here, and assuming he were to survive it and all, well then I guess it *would* probably make for a pretty cool story. 

True Story.  Within a day or so of moving to San Francisco, back in February of 1999, I went to the offices of a company called “Rent Tech”.  [Back then, with the dot-com boom in full swing, and before all such services were obliterated by the inexorable rise of craigslist, two or three private firms (including Rent Tech) shared total control of the *frenzied* rental housing market in San Francisco.]  While meeting with one of their reps, I was distracted by a huge (6′ x 4′, maybe?) framed poster on the wall behind him.  It was obviously a map of San Francisco, but covered in splotches of different colors.  I couldn’t make out the legend from where I was sitting, and had to ask the rep what the colors represented.  He walked me over to it, and explained that it was a “Seismic Hazard” map.  The different colors represented the underlying geology - one color for bedrock, another for fill, and so on.  I can’t remember it exactly, but it looked a lot like this map I just generated [warning: link is to a 1.2 MB PDF that I'm self-hosting] using the extremely cool ABAG Interactive (GIS) Liquefaction Susceptibility Map.  It turns out that fill (aka landfill) is stable enough under ordinary circumstances, but when shaken it tends to “liquify” (a process known as liquefaction), which makes living on fill particularly risky in earthquake zones.  Coming from Toronto (and Montreal before that), I was completely fascinated - it had NEVER occurred to me that people who weren’t geologists would ever be interested in a map like that.  But of course, in places like San Francisco, the makeup of the ground beneath you is a HUGE deal.  In the last big quake out here, back in 1989 (known as the “Loma Prieta” earthquake - 7.1 on the Richter scale), parts of the Marina district of San Francisco (which is mostly fill) suffered disproportiate amounts of damage, most of it due to liquefaction.  So maps like these can really be a major factor when people out here decide where to buy a home - or even where to rent.  Speaking of which, I’m writing this post from our apartment, which *is* located on bedrock (in your FACE, Marina district!).  And yes, I’m having a yabba-dabba-doo time.

On a completely unrelated note, Michelle Parise (thanks, meep!) sent me this very sweet (sorry) link today: Top 10 Creatively Decorated Nerdy Cakes.  Those cakes are cool, but I’d certainly never try to make any of ‘em myself.  Not like I’m the one who makes the cakes in this family, anyhow.  But I don’t even think Em would try to make any of these.  Now photo cupcakes, on the other hand… Well, I just cannot WAIT to make me some photo cupcakes. First of all, I like to think that even I can make cupcakes.  Second of all, the mind literally REELS at the possibilities. And yes, I know that photo cakes have been around for some time, but these are photo CUPcakes. I mean, this is a whole new ballgame. Okay, I can’t explain why it’s a new ballgame - it just is.  Humor me!  Or not.  But if you don’t humor me, then no cupcakes for you…  And if you aren’t craving a cupcake by now, it can only mean that you still (how??) have not yet seen this awesome video (watch it quick, before the jerks at NBC shut it down - they had it pulled from YouTube ages ago, so this mirror’s days are surely numbered).

I just want to say for the record (this *is* The Record, right?) that poker night with the boys is great, even when you lose.  And man, did I lose.  But hey, at least when you play with friends, your loss is a friend’s gain - as opposed to a blip on some casino’s “Gross Gaming Revenues from Suckers” radar.  And you get to hang out all night, drink, smoke, and tell dirty jokes.  It doesn’t get much better than that.  Well, actually it does.  When my friend Stuart is the host, he throws down some feastage like most people never see.  Smoked duck, anyone?  Giant tiger shrimp poached in butter?  Gougère?  Cheese board with four types of cheese?  Two home-made pizzas (one carmelized onion with olives, and one margherita)?  Great beer and wine?  A home-made chocolate-chocolate-chocolate-chocolate cake, with chocolate ganache, and raspberry something-or-other?  And that’s just the stuff I can remember.  And never mind that the rest of us (we car-pooled to Stuart’s) picked up two dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts (for five guys??) on the way there…

Ah, but that was Friday night.  Back to the present.  It’s raining, as usual.  It seems that last month was the rainiest March on record here in the Bay Area.  Twenty-four days of rain, breaking a record set in 1904.  Hurray.  It’s almost two weeks into April now, and the rain hasn’t let up much.  The ground is so rain-soaked that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (yes, it’s as strange to write that as it is to read it) declared a state of emergency yesterday in seven northern and central California counties.  Aside from the mudslides and such, it seems that California has its own levee system that’s severely strained in a number of places, which in turn is putting a lot of people at extreme risk of severe flooding.  At least San Francisco isn’t one of the seven counties - we’re soggy here, but at no real risk of being flooded that I know of.  And I’m out of here tonight, for a three-day trip to Everett, WA - where the forecast (duh) calls for rain every day over the next three days.  Sigh.  And the San Francisco forecast says it’ll still be raining here when I get back Friday night.  In fact, it’s not supposed to be sunny here for at least another week.  Sigh.  At least it’s not snowing. 
I haven’t posted much lately, because work’s been fairly busy, AND it’s tax season.  I’ve been a US resident for the last seven years, which means I haven’t filed a Canadian return since 1999.  But last year I sold some shares in a Canadian business, and that’s making my tax return life incredibly complicated this year.  I had to pay taxes on the sale in Canada, which means I have to file a Canadian non-resident return (with a TON of ensuing additional paperwork), and I also have to record that income on my US (federal and state) returns, and claim a foreign tax credit, and…  Words just can’t describe the fun I’ve been having.  To cheer myself up, I’ve been looking at this photo of three baby hedgehogs (warning:  link is work-safe, but the cuteness factor is off the charts, and is likely to sicken people who aren’t coming off of doing their tax returns).

Oh, and thanks to Arnon and Carlos for the wedding reception music tips.  I’m slowly building a playlist of 30’s music that ought to do - it’s just for background music during dinner.  And when I mentioned “the band”, I should have mentioned that the live music will be provided by Alex Pangman & Her Alley Cats.  We’ve never seen her live, but we’ve got one of her CDs, and we’re thinking it should be great.  You can even check out a video of her on her site, which is an excerpt from the made-for-TV period movie Torso: The Evelyn Dick Story.  Not a great film (yes, we rented it), but not bad, and it covers an interesting episode in Canadian history that I’d never heard about before.

Side note to Ronen:  Yup, it’s the same Daniel’s Broiler.  They have three locations - I was at the Bellevue location, and it sounds like you were at the Lake Union location. I’m sure the food is equally good at all the sites, but the views from the Bellevue location can’t be beat.