Mutts

The verdict: There isn't a whole lot to see down here. Downtown has a comic book store, a whole bunch of hair salons and antique stores, and some off-the-wall stores like a ballroom dancing store. There are a few restaurants: An ethiopian place I went to once with Bill, a pub, a couple of smaller places, a mediocre coffee shop I went to once, and a Starbucks. There's also an Italian restaurant nearby. There are a few other things around, but overall it is just not a very jumping area. Indeed, there was extremely little pedestrian traffic as I was walking around, despite it being a lovely day out.

It was, overall, kind of depressing. A deserted downtown like that makes me think that the area is dying. And maybe it is, I dunno. (There's a moderate amount of vacant commercial space downtown.) At any rate, it drove home (even further) the fact that this particular part of the area will never be home to me. It's just very weird to me that when I step out of my apartment, I'm always going jogging or going to my car. I'm used to being able to walk to places. That's what I'd like to find in my next apartment: Something worth walking to.

On the plus side, this evening I drove up to meet Lucy and John to go to the Cartoon Art Museum in SF where Patrick McDonnell was signing autographs for the opening of the exhibit of his Mutts artwork.

When we got there, we were met by Sei Shonagon (isn't she dead?), another on-line journaller whom Lucy apparently knows quite well, who was quite pleasant and certainly one of the more energized, upbeat people I can recall meeting in a while! Lucy was a little embarrassed since she hadn't told me ahead of time that she'd invited Sei, but that was fine with me. I'm pretty easy-going about such things. (I will occasionally look forward to spending time with someone alone and would then be disappointed if a third person were invited, but I don't think Lucy and I know each other well enough yet for me to feel that way. Besides which, John was coming with us anyway.)

The line for McDonnell's signature was not very long, but it was very slow. I discovered quickly that this was because he was actually doing little drawings of the characters with each signature, and add that to people who brought multiple books (I always limit myself to two at a signing) and McDonnell also being friendly and chatty, and it did take a while. I was in line for about half an hour. But, it was worth it: I'm getting more used to getting autographs, and McDonnell was indeed quite nice, and was surprised that the Mercury News doesn't carry Mutts daily, but that the SF Chronicle does. ("Tell that to the Mercury News!" he said!)

The Mutts exhibit itself was interesting in that nearly every Sunday strip was presented in three copies: McDonnell's original ink rendering (with the white-out, paste-downs, and other corrections visible), a copy of the final strip from a newspaper, and - most interestingly - a copy of what I presume was the color guide to the strip, which was colored in, but had many (talking maybe 30-to-60 per Sunday strip) directions of how individual elements on the page are to be colored. Now, Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes did his own coloring; perhaps McDonnell does not, and since his work is slightly abstract, perhaps the colorists sometimes have trouble figuring out how to color something. Or, maybe all cartoonists do this. I dunno.

Also opening was an Edward Gorey exhibit, which I only had a chance to see briefly. Perhaps I will go back next year.

We went to dinner at the Metreon (the huge mall thing they've built in downtown SF right near the museum), and I'm going to be lazy and direct you to Lucy's entry to read about it. But overall it was a fine time.

I hung out with Lucy and John at their apartment afterwards for a while, petted their cats, petted their friendly dog, and chatted. Lucy gave me a nice Christmas card (one of these days I am going to start doing the Christmas card thing!) and loaned me their 33K modem, which should be slightly faster than my 28.8 modem, but is slower than their 56K modem. If I can scrounge up a patch cable for it (it has a big serial port on it rather than a standard Mac serial port), it should be a small improvement, which for free is fine by me.

Lucy and John are good folks. I hope to see more of them next year.