It's still raining. My house remains attached to the hillside. There's water in the garage/basement soaking a major structural beam. Every contractor in the City is overbooked right now fixing leaking roofs and sliding foundations. The area where I'm living hasn't had any damage. I don't think this hill is going to slide...unlike one hill along 280. The hillside has slid, exposing the foundations of several houses which are now hanging over the edge of what used to be a hill & is now open air. I wonder how many of the houses will follow the mud.

This weekend has been pretty busy. Rabeca came down from Portland for a weekend-of-basketball. This is the 2nd year we've done this. And the rule is if Rabeca is in town, we can't sleep all weekend so now it's Monday AM & I'm very very tired.

Rabeca came in on Friday evening & I met her at the airport. I had the flight time and knew she was arriving from Portland...and forgot the airline. I didn't think this would be that much of a problem because there couldn't be all that many flights coming in from Portland, right? Traffic was bad with it being the Friday night of a 3 day weekend so I took the first parking space I could find, figuring that I could make better time on foot than in gridlock. My first guess was Alaska. It turns out that I'd parked near American. I found the airport map inside the terminal and discovered that Alaska was on the other side of the International terminal from where I was. Rabeca's flight was supposed to arrive any moment so I started running through the airport to get to the Alaska terminal.

When I found Alaska, I found chaos. Something went wrong with their computers & the information on the display screens didn't have any relationship to what planes were arriving when at what gates. I asked two Alaska employees where the flight from Portland was and they gave me conflicting information. One of them had a hand written list of incoming flights. While there was one from Portland, it had supposedly arrived 1.5 hours earlier. Maybe she wasn't flying Alaska. I went back to find another airline. I checked screens for America West, Southwest, Continental, everyone in that terminal. I'd glanced at American on my way in & hadn't seen a Portland flight but maybe I'd missed it. United was at the other end of the airport from my current location.

I started running again. If Rabeca's flight was on time, she had already arrived. I checked American. No Portland flights listed. I checked United. There were Portland flights...but none that matched the time. I decided to try baggage claim. Because I still had no idea what airline, I'd start at one end and go to the other. Meanwhile, I was hoping that Rabeca had my cell phone number with me and that she would call soon before my battery died. (I'd spent most of my live-battery minutes on the phone trying to arrange a carpool for Saturday's rugby game. There wasn't much talk-time left). At the far baggage claim, I found Rabeca, patiently waiting for her suitcase to come out of the baggage dispenser or whatever those machines are called. She said she heard this loud noise & that was me running up to her & she had no idea why I was running or out of breath. I'd certainly gotten my exercise for the day doing laps around SFO.

We went back to my house, parked the car & headed for the Castro. It was Friday night. We had to go out. We didn't stay out all that late - only until about 1am. After all, I had a rugby game on Saturday AM. I got up at 6:30 Saturday morning and started gathering my gear for the rugby game in Santa Cruz. The plan was to leave the house at 7:45, stop for bagels/coffee, drive to Palo Alto, pick up Ginny & Ginny's car, drive to Santa Cruz, play rugby, stop by Santa Cruz yarn store for baby bootie wool, drive to Saratoga to get the rest of the wool for my sweater & then head back to Ginny's house so I could shower before we met Ann to go to the Stanford basketball game at USC. Did I mention that it hadn't rained in 12 hours?

At 8am, Rabeca & I were on schedule. I called Deb to check on the status of the field. Santa Cruz said the field had 3 inches of standing water but they thought it might drain. They would move game time to 2pm & give the water some time to run off. I called Ginny to cancel our carpool plans. Rabeca & I went to breakfast. Around 12N, the skies opened up. The standing water on the field probably now had waves on it. There wasn't going to be a rugby game that day.

Rabeca & I went to Office Depot where I looked at electronic organizers. I'm leaning towards getting a Psion System 5. Next week, I'll go to the PDA Expo trade show & do some more checking before making a final decision. Well, with no rugby game we had some extra time. Rabeca tolerated me dragging her through 2 yarn stores while I picked up sweater yarn & needles. Then we went to the Stanford-USC game which Stanford won easily with most of the bench playing.

Then it was back to San Francisco to go out dancing. We ran into several would-be rugby players at the dance club. Everyone was very frustrated at not being able to play. With El Nino, there may not be much of a rugby season this year.

(aside: there's someone in the Bay Area who's name is Al Nino. He's been getting a lot of crank phone calls).

Sunday, we slept in & went to breakfast & a nice walk around San Francisco's Glen Park & then headed down to see the San Jose Lasers/Portland Power game. Portland beat San Jose by a couple of points in a very close end game. This was the first time I'd seen Natalie Williams play since discovering our 'relationship.' She had a great game. Then we went back to San Francisco for more Thai food & out dancing again. It was a late night. I dropped Rabeca at the airport this morning, went to the gym & came home to go back to bed. I'm tired! Fortunately, Etak observes President's Day so I have the day off. Tonight, Bill, Ron & maybe some other folks are going out to a comedy club...assuming we don't float away first. It's still raining.

Stacey