2000-09-07 - 4:49pm

On the internal soundtrack: "Do-Re-Mi", from "The Sound of Music". "Edelweiss" gets stuck in there a lot too.

Last night, suddenly, Bach's Prelude VII for the Well-Tempered Clavier (E major, I believe) suddenly turned up in my head. I had forgotten the song existed. It lead me to go tearing through the house looking for the music, so I could (try to) play it. I forgot how much I love Bach, how mathematical but beautiful his music is. I also forgot how difficult he is to play. This might inspire me, though, to get back into practicing. Just a little bit every day. We shall see. To-do list be damned.

Note to self: Do not go up the outside stairs two at a time while carrying a half-full watering can. You'll trip, and rip up your toes and fingers.

Christ, I'm getting old. The other night I went on a walk with the local power walking club. Unfortunately, trying to keep up the pace was painful on my legs. I decided to stick it out, though, because I was not out of breath. Apparently my lungs are fit enough, from all the skating and my hoppin'-and-bobbin' video (low impact aerobics), but not the right muscle groups for power walking.

Well, now I'm paying for it. Yesterday and today I've been a mess of sore muscles. Jeez. Even my arms hurt, which makes no sense. Next thing you know it'll be joint pain. I'm getting old.

Otherwise, the walk was fun. Lots of chitchatting with the ladies. One of them invited us in to see her Murphy bed, which I could not resist. She lives in a $400,000 townhome and she's got a Murphy bed in the office for guests. Really. It's beautiful, too. It looks like a cherry entertainment center, with bookshelves on each side, but instead of a TV inside there's a bed.

Someday, if we are living in a little bitty place in the city, we'll probably want one of these.

So, to make myself happy, I will list what I like about the city and why a yuppie suburban development doesn't cut it:

- Grid streets. GRID STREETS! None of this curving cul-de-sac dead-end crap. In DC, you can run over to 12th Street if 14th is jammed. Not so in the 'burbs. There are no alternate routes because all the nearby streets are curvy dead-end residential "pods" with stupid names like "Morning Wind Court".

- Mixed-use zoning. Very important. This is the only way to have shops and restaurants and residences on the same block. Also, they're more likely to be independently owned shops and restaurants, not chains.

- Much easier to rent a flat in an cool old house than a cookie-cutter apartment in a big building.

- Old architecture, new architecture, big and small buildings. All on the same block.

- People actually walk as transportation, not just to burn fat.

- The city is designed to be walked in. The streets are narrow, and parallel parking provides a buffer zone between you and traffic. On your other side, you have houses and stores coming right up to the edge of the sidewalk. Conversely, walking along Duke Street gives you parking lots on one side and whizzing 50-mph traffic on the other.

- In the city it's likely that there will be people of multiple income levels and ethnicities within a 1/4 mile radius. Where we lived in San Jose, if you went one block south, there were rich white people. Our block was mostly Mexican immigrants with their native-born children. It was a better balance. It's harder to have weird misconceptions about any particular group of people when you buy Kool-Aid at their kid's roadside stand in the summertime.

- You're close to major public transportation, such as the airport or (especially) the train station. In San Jose we were so close to the airport we could watch the planes landing. The light rail stop was 2 blocks away and took you straight to CalTrain.

I wonder if, ten years from now when I re-read this diary, I'll be living in the suburbs with two rugrats. That would be a switch.

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