Exactly 1 month ago yesterday as part of the celebration of Leanne’s birth, and because there wasn’t enough time to take a faraway trip, we took a weekend vacation in San Francisco (we live in San Francisco in case that doesn’t make sense). It’s an interesting thing to stay in a nice hotel in the city where you live, in a part of town you usually don’t visit for more than about 2 hours.

I decided that it would be fun if we could make our hotel bar bill for the weekend come out to the same amount or more as the room. Before you read into that too much realize that the hotel bar is one of the swankiest/trendiest in the city, the drinks are like $17 as are the small appetizer things. For that weekend we had the complete freedom of telling the people in the swanky bar to just add it to 919 (the room number you see). To be clear: I really enjoyed being able to do that and took every opportunity during those 2 and a half days to visit the downstairs. We didn’t quite reach my goal, not for lack of trying, but a larger than normal room during tourist season may have contributed to that near miss.

Staying in downtown San Francisco is a lot different than living in San Francisco. For one thing, you don’t have to clean the litter boxes at the hotel, and if you want to go out to eat at night you have to make reservations or they make you wait until just before they close. It was a great time though, and best of all when it was over we were home in about 15 minutes. I opted for a cab ride home while leanne went to return something she’d bought the day before and rode the subway home. As the cab pulled up to our busted front-steps I tried to get the cab driver to add it to 919 but he looked at me like I had 3 arms. About a minute later i was tripping up the stairs to clean the litter.