Hello the internets!

I have been up to all kinds of boring things recently. Boring boring boring. John Baby's apartment is nearing completion. All the standard furniture things are in it now. Getting it to this stage involved a truly traumatic encounter with a creepy mattress salesman, though. Salesmen in general skeeve us out. It's much more fun buying stuff on Clement Street. Clement Street is a primarily Asian neighboorhood in San Francisco, the awesomeness of which is as 1/x where x approaches 0 (that is to say, very awesome). Certainly, the shopkeeps make the attempt to sell you things. But there is a certain charm in statements like "No full extra long! You buy queen! I tell many people you buy queen! Works great!" (this was in reference to John Baby's attempt at purchasing some sheets)

Great things about Clement Street:

The super cheap, super tasty Vietnamese restaurant, Minh's Garden. Sure, they have a large sign up to the effect that the health department found numerous code violations there on their last inspection, which have since been rectified. But the food is superb! And full of crunchy vegetables! And cheap! Further, the interior decoration consists of several Vietnamese beer ads, and several more pictures of women breastfeeding babies. We took my mom to eat there, and she thought that aspect of it was just fantastic.

The giant Asian supermarkets full of fascinating variants of dried mushrooms and bins of fresh produce, and wizened old people who will mow you down in their attempts to get to the fresh produce.

Super Tokyo, which will sell you twelve packs of Sapporo or Tsing Tao for 8.99. In addition, they will sell you tasty candy with amusing Engrish monikers.

And, of course, there are the small bargain shops which line the street and are filled with articles too strange to imagine anyone having authorized their mass production. See this flickr set for examples.