I set myself up for a stressful Thursday (a Thursday on which I had to be at JFK for a 3.45 p.m. flight) by not packing the night before, and getting up late on the morning. To make matters worse, I had a couple of conference calls, and a rather difficult phone conversation with my project manager. To make matters far, far worse, I switched on my home laptop that morning (the laptop on which I'm writing now) to be presented with the ominous message: "No operating system present." I've been having a lot of scary problems with my laptop; first the network card died as soon as I arrived in New York, then I couldn't connect the external peripherals - the CD drive (it's one of those light laptops with no internal CD drive), and the backup hard drive. Now it looked like a hard-disk failure, and I hadn't been able to backup my machine since I arrived in New York.

When I rebooted, the O/S loaded correctly however, so I decided right there to go by a backup device at CompUSA, which is just across the street from my block. Problem. Without a working CD drive, I had no way of installing the software for the backup device. I looked online and downloaded the software, fired it up, connected my new backup device, and ... nothing. No awareness from the laptop that anything was connected. By then I was just out of time, so here I am, still working on a dodgy laptop, hoping it will last long enough for me to get back to New York tomorrow and somehow figure out a way to backup this thing. I once had a hard-disk crash years ago, before I kept regular backups, and I lost a lot of stuff - early emails, and letters. I never want to have to go through that again.

I made it to the airport on time, early Thursday afternoon, and found I'd been upgraded to business class. The first piece of good news. The second piece of good news came when I arrived at SFO, and took the spanking new airtrain to the rental car station. National Rent-a-Car had lost my reservation, and the only rate they could offer me was $89 per day. So I called up Thrifty, and made a reservation for a compact car at $20/day. When I walked up to the counter to complete the reservation, I was told, "I'm very sorry, sir, we're out of compacts. Would a Jeep Wrangler at the same rate do?" That will do fine, I said, laughing inside.

This turns out not to have been a good weekend to visit San Francisco, because half my friends are out-of-town. I was staying at D&S's apartment, because I sublet my own, and even D&S were away for the weekend. They have a huge, new, stylish loft with enormous picture windows that look out on the urban-industrial SOMA neighborhood. It's a gorgeous, comfortable apartment, in a rather horrible neighborhood where you here screaming motorbikes almost all night long.

Maybe it was just because I'd been away for a few weeks, but the next day seemed preternaturally beautiful. Sparkling skies, perfect temperatures, and a cool breeze. Everything stood out in utmost clarity, bringing colorful beauty to even the ugliest backlots in SOMA.

I worked out with Cecilia, and it was nice to be back in a gym where people make eye contact. Of course, I've been working out there for seven years, which helps. For the rest of the day, I bummed around town in my rental Jeep, doing some shopping, having coffee with an acquaintance, feeling, in truth, a little melancholy to be so relatively alone in my home town. In the evening, I had dinner with Sh, a sexy nurse I've been getting to know for a few months. But he was coming off a twelve-hour shift, and really should have been in bed, so we called it a night at 9.30. I came back to my borrowed apartment, watched a bit of television, and went to bed early.

Today, the fog hs come in, and the wind howls about the apartment. Welcome to Summer, in San Francisco.