Oakland - nicer than Cairo!

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Which is not to imply that Cairo is not nice. I liked Cairo quite a lot. It was a lot comfier home for me than New York or Boston ever could be... but at least so far, Oakland is nicer than Cairo :) For one thing, it's bikable! Yay bikes! And public transit takes me into (and back out of) San Francisco for under $2, with my bike!

I'm living with Molly and Ransom these days, which is marvelous. A couple days ago, I dug up the bathroom floor at their new house in West Oakland. Hypothetically tomorrow I will replace some pipes? Maybe the plumber will do it. We'll see how confident I feel in the morning.

Right now I'm listening to Call of Ktulu by Metallica. How and why, you ask? Let's trace this tangent...

- I started by looking for a Mad Max-esque aviator cap with a gas mask thingy (for Burning Man)
- Found Steam Punk Tribune who mentions some weird Seattle band called Abney Park has one
- Abney Park rocks steampunk-style and have silly lyrics about dirigibles ("We're a crew of Drunken Pilots, we're the only airship pirates!")
- Abney Park also has awesomely fantastic instruments of steampunk-ness (click "Tools" on their main page)
- Their next gig is Friday in San Francisco! In the name of immediacy, of course, I'm going.
- Hmm, the gig seems cool, too. It's a "Swing Goth" event called "Ball of C'thulhu"
- I've heard of Cthulhu... Wikipedia... (side-track to look up pronunciation and International Phonetic Alphabet symbols I've forgotten since college)
- Looking for a copy of the 1920s short story, "Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft, I found instead Metallica's "Call of Ktulu" which I rather like and realize I didn't used to listen to metal music because it was so counter-cultural and I was so square-world, but Dragonforce fixed that for me...

So now I'm listening to metal music and thinking about a steampunk/goth swing-dance I'm hoping to go to on Friday.

And now you see why I say Oakland is nicer than Cairo :)

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