I'm done with my first week at Xoom & I like it. This was a very good move in a lot of ways. Not having to drive every day is wonderful. I listen to radio in the mornings. They do a traffic report about every 10 minutes during drive time. It usually says something like: "3 car wreck on 101S before Belmont with left lane blocked, over turned big rig on 280N at Hickey, mattress in middle lane of east bound Bay Bridge....All BART trains on time." The next day has a similar pattern with lane closures & accidents and "all BART trains on time." I like that part.

Driving in the City is a dangerous thing, anyway. As I was stopped at a crosswalk near my office, I started counting the number of cars that passed with drivers who were talking on the phone. I think the percentage of cell-phone-distracted drivers is in the double digits.

Still, I'd put Muni bus drivers as the most dangerous of drivers. The Examiner put out a story this week about how they did the math on Muni safety. There's a 1 in 9 chance that a bus driver (driving a bus, not on administrative duty or in training, someone who's behind the wheel of one of those huge vehicles) has had two serious accidents since 1997. 1997 isn't that long ago. I take a Muni bus to get to BART. Well, no accidents yet.

There was some more excitement in my neighborhood this week. About 2am on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, two men walked into the Wild Side West, a small neighbor bar up the hill on Cortland. It's more of a community center than a bar. They sponsor the Bernal Babes softball team & provide space for various groups to meet & have pot luck dinners. It's a very friendly, casual place. Well, these two men walked into the bar & tried to rob it. The bartender saw them come in & moved away from the bar so they couldn't tell she was the bartender. One tried to open the register and the other started gathering wallets from the patrons. One of the patrons was a bus boy from the Hungarian restaurant across the street. He resisted giving up his ring so they shot him in the chest. Last I heard, he was alive - stable but critical. The newspaper story talked about what happened and then went to interview people about what they thought about the events. Bernal Heights (my neighborhood) has a very small town feel to it. Most people have been here for 30 years. I'm part of the new gentrification trend.

The newspaper article talked about how something like an attempted armed robbery at the Wild Side West wouldn't have happened 10 years ago because it really was the wild side. If someone had tried it, someone else would have pulled out their own gun and shot the would-be-robbers. Maybe yuppies make easier targets. Despite this shooting (and the mugging outside my house about a month ago), I do believe this is a neighborhood on the upswing. I've been watching the open house listings in the paper recently. It's rare that there are any houses listed for under $300k. The older families who've been here for 30 years couldn't afford to buy their own houses today.

Stacey