Slowly getting the hang of things...

I swear, the Bay Area must have a greater number of highways crammed into a smaller surface area than anywhere else in America. Adding to the confusion, almost all of them have the number 80 in their name. Thus, highways 280, 380, 580, 680, 780, 880, and 980 (as well as random others, like routes 1, 101, 92, and many more) weave their overlapping ways around the hills and over the bridges of the bay, like a tangle of giant spaghetti that someone dumped onto the city, then covered with cars that aren’t moving.



Happily, we’re starting to get the hang of this craziness, aided by extensive use of Google maps on the iPhone. And somehow, this feeling of gradually-developing mastery (for example, learning how to dodge traffic by hopping from one highway to another) has really helped us start to feel more at home here. Add to this the fact that we’ve essentially worked out our supermarket shopping rotation (Safeway for most things; Trader Joe’s for frozen food; Whole Foods for meats, fish, and vegetables that didn’t look good at Safeway), and it’s starting to feel like we've got the basics down cold!

Also, here's a picture of a white Christmas in San Francisco.