Author: Eric Kauschen

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The Lazy Gardener

Spring has sprung and if you aren’t living in an apartment it’s time to take a look at your garden if you have one. Gardening was my Dad’s pastime and he used to love it spending most of his weekends out in our backyard picking weeds and planting flowers. For me, I’ve discovered that while I’m good at landscaping I pretty much suck at gardening.

Before we lived here the wife and I lived in a house we rented near the beach. We didn’t really have a garden there because our landlord lived in a cottage house in the back so we focused on houseplants. We bought several and they did quite well because they were easy to take care of. We had this one that we bought called an aeonium that was a small succulent that I think we paid $1.99 for that sat on our windowsill and was basically forgotten for several years. When it came time to move we were pulling all our stuff together and found it sitting on the windowsill. It was still alive, barely. It hadn’t grown at all sitting in a small dry clump of dirt, but we decided to bring it with us.

Oddly enough for some strange reason, probably that we didn’t have as much room in the house my wife got the idea of sticking it outside. Within a a month it had become twice the size it was when we got it [about 3″] within 6 months it was over 3′ tall and had to be transplanted several times. We had it in such a large pot that on windy nights we would find that it had blown over and a piece had broken off. We have a terraced backyard with brick bulkheads filled with dirt so for the hell of it I stuck the broken off piece in the dirt. It grew. The bulkhead planters my Dad used to plant annual flowers in and that wasn’t something I wanted to get into dropping money into every year.

We bought a few more of the small aeoniums and planted them in the bulkheads and watched them grow. When they flower they keep their flowers for a month or two. The best part about them is they are truly a plant for the lazy gardner. If you water them, they grow. If you don’t water them, they grow. They can take direct sun or shade. They don’t have any pests or plant diseases like my roses out in front are constantly attacked by. They just sit there and make your yard look nice without any hassle. If you want to take a vacation somewhere for a month or two, go ahead they’ll be fine when you come back. If they start getting too big, lop off the big pieces and stick them in the ground.

Very few people around me have gardens anymore. The lawns in front are dried up and the backyards are usually dirt overgrown with weeds. A backyard like that isn’t a place you want to bring your friends out to when you have a nice day and want to have a barbecue. You can have a home that looks like a million dollars on the inside, but if the outside looks like a garbage dump it’s just wasted space. We used to have lawn on one of the terraces in the back, but it was too much of pain for my Dad to mow so he let it go and it became just dirt. I bought some landscape fabric and covered everything up and covered it with small blue river rock and made a pathway with red lava rock to the stairs down to the next terrace. We still get weeds every once in awhile, but they’re just easier to get rid of. We took what used to be the flower beds on either side and added in aeoniums and jade plants which also don’t have a care about San Francisco weather. I can’t even remember the last time I bothered to water outside. We do have two camellia bushes that were planted long before I was born so they probably have roots tapping into some underground lake at this point in time.

If you have a garden, put it to use. Drop some landscape fabric and toss some river rock and plant some aeoniums or jade plants and you’ll definitely bring up the value of your house. Please don’t use it to run your clotheslines to hang your nasty old granny panties out to dry like our neighbors do.

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Garlic Fries…HOME RUN!

Dan Gordon of Gordon-Biersch invented garlic fries when he was studying in Germany. Sadly though when he came back to the US and opened up the first Gordon-Biersch restaurant with Dean Biersch it wasn’t in San Francisco, but in Palo Alto. Garlic fries though didn’t get much attention until they opened up their San Francisco restaurant and started selling them at AT&T Park and that was the day that baseball and garlic fries got married together.

Everyone has garlic fries now and it’s no wonder because they’re so easy to make. It’s a 3-2-1 recipe that even an idiot can make. Take 3 tablespoons of olive oil, 2 tablespoons of chopped garlic and 1 tablespoon of chopped parsley whip it all together and toss it on some freshly deep fried potato bits. Gilroy who hosts it’s own garlic festival sells them as well, but they from what I’ve heard bake, not deep fry the potatoes.

Nothing is as good in it’s greasy goodness as a deep fried strip of potato. Crispy and crunchy on the outside and moist and tender on the inside. When you add the oil, garlic and parsley to it, it just becomes even better. It wasn’t until the late 90’s that garlic fries made an introduction onto the San Francisco food scene and they made an instant hit. I don’t get to eat them too often because when I do I tend to eat too many and my wife banishes me to the other room for a three days because I tend to reek of garlic. It is a fate that is understandably worth it for me since I happen to love garlic and will add it to just about anything. The secret to adding the garlic to the fries is a wide bowl with the fries in it then you toss in the mixture then you have to learn that special one hand flick of the wrist that tosses them up and over, like you see a professional chef flip an omelette. It takes a bit of practice, but you don’t want to stir them around because then you break up the fries. The flick/flip does the job much better.

I do remember in the 80’s there was a shop at Ghiradelli Square called Pomme Frites that sold french fries with a variety of dipping sauces, many of them based off the Belgian tradition of mayonnaise on fries [don’t knock it until you’ve tried it], but there was no garlic in any of their sauce blends. It seems odd to me since now it just seems like such an obvious addition to add to the fries.

I have a small deep fryer that I’ll probably use to test my own riff on this dish. The trick supposedly in making the best fries to fry them twice and starting with russet potatoes that you’ve skinned and soaked in cold water for one to eight hours before cutting them into 1/4″ strips. First at a low temperature of 325° to oil cook them, then drain and flash fry them at a higher temperature of 375° to sear the outsides while keeping the insides moist and crispy. The sizzle when they hit the oil is actually the water inside the potatoes coming out of the fries so if you’ve cooked them to the point they stopped sizzling the water is out and the oil gets sucked in through reverse osmosis and those are some bad greasy fries.

I’m glad to see that San Francisco isn’t resting on it’s laurels with rice-a-roni, sourdough bread and dungeness crab. I’m glad that we can come up with a few new traditions in food that we can claim as ours and that change the world around us. Hell, even Trader Joe’s sells them now, but they’re still no comparison to the original.

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How I Miss The Elephant Train

You have to have lived in San Francisco for awhile to remember the elephant train that ran at the San Francisco Zoo. Later becoming the zebra train for some odd reason, I still miss the original zebra train tours around the zoo.

I think they cost about 75¢ at the time which tells you about how old I am. You would hop on by the Children’s Zoo and ride around the entire zoo getting a little lesson on all the animals that you’d see. It was a good way to start your trip to the zoo, then you could walk around and take your time. For elderly people who had trouble walking around the zoo it made it much more accessible. While to many the zoo seems large today, it was even larger back then when they were using more of their space.

I have heard, but can’t confirm that it original ran from Playland at the beach to the zoo back in the day when it didn’t cost anything to get in. It was also said to have been used at one time to help students get around at SF State University, which if people thought of the place as a zoo that would give them proof.

I do remember going on field trips to the zoo and that was always the best way to move the kids around the zoo quickly and then get them back to the school. Field trips like that made going to school fun back then. It’s hard to find pictures of the trains now and I couldn’t even find one of the zebra train that replaced it. It’s even harder to find any information about them, but I believe the zoo stopped them in the early 80’s. I can’t even find out when they started using them there. There’s actually more information out there about the Little Puffer train, but doesn’t mention that it runs on a shorter track today than it used to. There’s a lot of stuff out there about the old zoo like Storyland which every kid had to see back then. Sure it was a little beat up and run down when I was a kid, but it was still fun to see all your nursery rhymes and storybook characters in 3D.

I’m a bit out of shape and when we got back from taking our daughter to the zoo today I was out of breath and sweating. I think that’s part of the reason I really miss the elephant train.

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Skype Etiquette: A Few Suggestions

I love Skype. It’s helped me out a lot and given me the cheapest phone line to use for my business and keep me connected with friends around the world, but there are a few things that I think people need to understand so that they make it a more polite experience for all involved.

1. Skype is not a phone. Yes, it’s kind of a phone, but it in most cases is locked down to your computer [I’m ignoring the mobile market for the moment]. When you are at your computer you might be doing work or playing a game or in a meeting or otherwise occupied. If you get a phone call during this time on your cell you can just send it to voice mail, but if you’re working on something on your computer you suddenly get an unexpected pop up window. Sure you can decline it, but sometimes that just cuts the person off and doesn’t send them to voice mail [yes, even if you don’t pay for it Skype will give you voicemail, you just can’t customize it.

If you really want to have a voice chat with someone I feel it’s best to check their status first then send them a text chat message asking if they have time to talk. Some people still need to get their headphones ready or find them and plug them in. Not all of us can use the camera and built in mic on their computer. I find this to be especially useful if you have a friend overseas who might leave Skype running all day and night, but isn’t around the computer.

2. Don’t be a lurker. There are people who like to stay in invisible mode so they aren’t bothered by other people. If you’re going to do that then do others a favor and don’t bother them. People don’t like receiving text chats or calls from people who don’t want to show that they’re online. Besides, if you call someone and you’re in invisible mode then they won’t know if you’re there to call back.

3. If you call someone and they don’t answer, follow through and leave a message. I get calls on Skype and my cell where people don’t leave a message. If you don’t leave a message the person you’re calling won’t have any idea why you’re calling them.

4. When adding a contact use more than the standard supplied text. People don’t have to use their real names on Skype so that means I won’t really know who you are when you request to add me. I’ve received requests from people like Matt81265 and I’ll have no idea who they are so thinking they are a possible troll or spammer I will block them and report them as abuse. The only time it’s OK in my book to use the standard text is when you’re in the same room with somebody and you want to do a quick add.

5. Don’t expect a response to your chat message right away. I’ve gotten up and gone to the bathroom and come back a minute later to see that not only did someone send me a message, but there are 4-5 Are you there? added in after it. Maybe I got it on my cell phone and I can’t type quickly on that tiny iPhone keyboard or maybe I went to the bathroom or I was called into another room. I’ll get back to you when I have time available.

6. Respect the status. If I have do not disturb as my status that doesn’t mean I’m sitting there waiting for your call. That means I have work to do and don’t want to be disturbed. I actually think, but am not sure that if you use do not disturb that you can’t receive text or voice calls. If that’s true then thumbs up to Skype.

7. Video eats up bandwidth. If you want to talk and don’t really need to see the person keeping the video off is a good idea. They’ll sound clearer and you’ll get less packet loss. If both of you have super high speed bandwidth and you know it then go at it, but also remember to be oh, wearing clothes before you start the chat. I had a FaceTime chat with a friend who didn’t realize he had switched to the back camera and sitting in his underwear giving me a macro shot of his crotch. [side note: I don’t apply these rules to FaceTime because there’s not text chat function there.]

Skype is an awesome tool. Facebook has integrated it now, but I turn off Facebook contacts because I’d never get anything done with my 650+ friends on Facebook along with my 200+ friends on Skype. I use it to set up conferences with friends around the world, done business overseas, hell I’ve even had friends give me a tour of their new homes using Skype on their mobile phone. I have a couple of friends who rent out a lovely house they own in Barbados that gave me a tour of the place while I was putting their website together and even got to meet their personal chef while taking the virtual tour over Skype.

If you stick to these seven simple rules you’ll find that you will be considered a better person especially if you’re using it for business. It’ll also make you less annoying to people you want to communicate with and you’ll find it opens doors for you. I’m sure someone from Skype will read this and I hope they do. I’d like to ask them to shrink the real estate on screen of their UI. It’s way too big and forces me back to using an older version that doesn’t work as well all of the time.

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The Manly Art of Shaving

I have decided for a number of reasons to go back to old school shaving. Part is the cost of the modern day cartridges and foaming gels and the other is because there’s just something about pulling out that old mug of soap and lathering it up with a brush that I want to get back into. There are many upscale stores in San Francisco that will charge you a pretty penny to go old school, but it doesn’t have to be that expensive.

I moved up from double blades, to triple blades, quadruple blades and finally five bladed cartridges. These cost me close to $5 each. Now I only shave every other day so I can get a lot of life  out of a blade. I take good care of my blades and after I’m done shaving rinse them off in water then dip them in 90% isopropyl alcohol to completely dry them. I can get close to a month out of one of these blades. It starts to show at the end of the month when it makes it harder to get a close shave, but I never get any cuts.

I did for awhile use shaving soap and found out that a single bar lasted me about a year. I actually used the cheap Williams soap that I think including the mug cost me about $2.99. That’s a good price for a year’s worth of shaving cream. When you add hot water to the soap and then soak the brush in hot water for a few seconds and start building up the lather the first thing you’ll notice when it goes on your face is that it’s warm, not cold. This including the liquid helps soften your beard to make it easier to remove. I’ve even heard now of men who use a pre-shave oil on their face to help relax the beard stubble. Many of these are expensive, but you can use Cornhuskers lotion that you can get for about $3 and save your money.

I’ve never tried a double edged safety razor before, but Dad swore by them. I’ve found them online ranging in price between $15-$150 and while price does matter to some extent you don’t have to go top shelf at the start. You’ll have to find the blades as well which so far I’ve only seen online. I’ll start with five blades at first, but if it all goes well I’ll get 100 which will drop the price down to around 20¢ each. I’ve heard you can get about 5 shaves out of each side so with me shaving every other day that means it’ll cost me about $3.80/year for razor blades. Far less than for the cartridges. Merkur blades seem to be the standard of excellence people are recommending. There are many suggestions for how to use a safety razor and youtube has tons of videos. Some of them are quite good like the one posted at the bottom.

You’ll have to consider the brush as well. There are three types, boar, badger and synthetic. Boar is the most common, but comes in three grades the cheapest and worst usually what you find in stores. Synthetics have varying results, so I’ll suggest a badger brush since from what I’ve read they seem to be the most consistent and best overall quality. It’s also what I’ve had in the past after trying a boar brush. Badger brushes hold water better and you can find them in a few stores in San Francisco at a relatively cheap price. Oh, and by the way skip the after shave lotion and just use a squirt of witch hazel afterwards followed by a few splashes of water on your face followed by any decent after shave balm or moisturizer.

Overall, it looks like from my research that I can get into this for about $30 investment and that should hold me at least a year with only having to buy a bar of soap and some new blades for the next year. Which would add only another $5 each year. Sure the disposables and cartridges are convenient and I’ll probably take one along when I travel, but I think for the overall cost savings I’m going to give it a shot.

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Park Cafe: My Kind of Dive

I like going out for breakfast when I can. I love me some bacon & eggs with a side of toast and hash browns. I don’t really need an upscale kind of place to eat, just one that’s clean, quick and cheap. That’s where the Park Cafe comes in because you’d never know it was there. It’s small, hidden in the Stonestown Medical building and you’d never think about it and probably miss it when you’re walking by.

My wife and I decided to try it one day after I had a dentist appointment. It was close to noon and I hated going to the dentist because he always treated me like a five year old tell me how awful my teeth were and how they were all going to fall out if I didn’t brush them 3-6 times a day with fluoride rinses afterwards. Needless to say, I changed dentists and found one who was nicer and cheaper. I digress a bit. We decided to try the Park Cafe, at the time bacon and eggs with toast was just $2.99 each and you got coffee with it. This of course was prior to the dot com bomb, but today they prices are now $4.99. That’s still a deal in my book. The nice part is they can scramble your eggs well so their fluffy and hard and overcooked and you get three slices of bacon, not the skimpy two most places offer. You can also swap out the toast for a bagel at no extra charge.

Hardly anyone goes there, except probably the doctors in the building during their lunch who are too lazy to walk across the mall. There’s no windows inside the place so the best view you’re going to get is of beverage container. I was always a kind of odd duck there as I used to get Martinelli’s apple cider to go with my breakfast there. I can’t stand orange juice unless you add in some vodka [which I don’t recommend for the mornings] and apple juice for some reason made me want to drink more water. I think we were one of the only houses prior to having kids that stocked apple juice.

To find the place you walk in the front door of the building and walk straight toward the elevators then turn left. They have no website and you’ll hardly find anything on them if you search google. My apologies for the shaky picture, but it was a quick shot on the way out of the building this morning. We would have stopped in to eat, but our daughter doesn’t like doctors too much yet because she’s been getting vaccines every time she’s gone, so I could understand her wanting to get the hell out of there, but if you’re ever out that way check them out and tell them I sent you.

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The Saddest Playground In San Francisco

I’ve seen lots of changes to the playgrounds in San Francisco and a lot of them have been really good. Being a parent and having to take your kid out to a place where they can run around and work off some energy so they don’t destroy your house is always a good thing, but there are some places that still need help. This one is on 24th Avenue and Quintara Street.

This playground, really a mini playground has looked like this for close to 50 years. They did put in some of that spongy stuff down and have replaced the benches, but it’s still the same. For some reason it even warranted a plaque. I’m not sure why because other than a few swings, small slide and sandbox there’s really nothing else left.

It’s also not fenced in and a quick run into the streets. It is also used as a staging point for Abraham Lincoln High School’s PE teachers before making the kids run around the reservoir so when PE is happening the teachers and students don’t really care much if you’re a parent with a child there to actually use the playground. We were lucky in that we only visited this playground when our daughter was very young and she was just learning to walk. Now that she knows how to walk and can run around by herself there are plenty of other places to go to that offer much more energy releasing activities as well a mentally stimulating forms of play.

While there have been great improvements to other Sunset neighborhood parks so as Frank McCopping playground and West Sunset playground, this one has pretty much been forgotten. My suggestion to our local Supervisor Carmen Chu is to either upgrade this mini-playground or just remove it and add in a few of those concrete chessboards and leave it as a meeting place for people who often use it already as a place to meet up and have a chat. It’s a small area so you wouldn’t need much there, but leaving it in it’s current state of looking like it was built during Russian industrial era times just isn’t San Franciscan. Email Supervisor Chu or tweet her about this and maybe we’ll see something get done.

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John Dobson: The Hippy That Made Astronomy Hip

The Dobsonian telescope named after it’s inventor, John Dobson brought the heavens to a great number of people. It was fairly cheap to make, but gave you the ability to see things in the sky that most store bought telescopes would never let you see. The first time I got to see Saturn for myself was through a Dobsonian telescope and Jupiter looked huge and I could even make out more than the four moons you normally can see.

I’m not sure why, but John popped into my head over the weekend. I haven’t seen him in years and figured he had probably died. I think I was 10 when I last saw him and my parents and I took a class from him to make our own Dobsonian telescope. We met him one night outside the California Academy of Sciences with the group the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers. They had brought telescopes out and had them set up and were inviting people to have a look. They were really quite simple reflector type telescopes. They had a mirror at the end of a big long tube which focused the sky’s image on to what he referred to in the class as the spider which had a mirror that reflected what it saw into the viewing aperture.

My Dad had always been into astronomy and when he asked John were he bought the telescope [this one was called the Zebra and painted with psychedelic zebra stripes] John told my Dad that he made it and offered classes on how to do it and you’d end up with one when you finished. You had to do all the work yourself, but I think it only cost around $50 at the time and my Dad was sold. The first couple of classes were just discussion and then we were given two round portholes and grit and told to get to work.

The process of making the big mirror for the telescope consisted of mixing some grit with water and putting it between the two portholes and rotating them in small circles. I think most of our neighbors thought we were crazy as my Dad on weekends would take the portholes out in the driveway and he and I would sit there for hours grinding away at the glass. Since my Dad only had weekends to work on the mirror and John always focused on perfection in the grinding we never finished the mirror, but we did get it as far as the pitch lap which I’m still not sure what part that plays in the mirror, but I remember it was the last step before your porthole became a mirror for your telescope. That and the tube for our 12″ telescope sat in our house for years until my astronomical friend Patty took them off our hands a few years ago.

One of the interesting things about John was that he wasn’t a child of the 60’s although he totally fit the bill when you saw him. He was actually born in 1915 [turns out he’s a Virgo like me] in Bejing, China which made him the same age as my Dad. He had a ponytail and probably still does. I don’t know how old the picture I found of him is, but that’s how I remember him. He, unlike my Dad is still alive today and still talking about Astronomy at the ripe old age of 96. I bet he still gets on his knees and grinds portholes into mirrors to this day. The San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers [which John helped found] and their urban guerrilla astronomy are still thriving today. You can find them showing up around the city on clear nights holding star parties to entertain and teach the people passing by.

Because of John, I took up a big interest in science and still have a love for it today. I actually even worked at the Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences for a while as a teenager because I though the planetarium projector was just so cool and the fact that it was built out of spare parts during WWII gave it a kind of Dobsonian feel to it. John doesn’t have his own website, but he’s got a Wikipedia page and he’s mentioned frequently on the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers website. They have a calendar, but I didn’t see any upcoming star parties listed. You can also follow them on Twitter where you’ll probably here about their next star party. Check them out and you’ll be able to check out the stars for yourself one day.

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Today’s Post is Dedicated to my Mom


Two years ago today I had to unpleasant surprise to find my Mom had died. I can finally say after two years I have been able to move on. We had great times and bad times together. She didn’t like to have her picture taken very often so I had to go back to her High School graduation picture [1946], one of the few pictures i have of her that does her any justice. Yeah, I miss her, but there’s lots of things that I’d want to tell her today that she wouldn’t want to hear, like the price of gas or that two boys she knew from the neighborhood that I grew up with are now women.

Wherever you are, just know that I’m doing fine and I’ll continue to do so. Oh yeah, your grand-daughter says hi.

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Paybyphone.com For Parking Meters

When I’m out driving around I’ve found that I’ve started to take every quarter in change I have and put it in my jacket pocket, that way if I have to use a parking meter I know I’m covered. Sometimes though I might need to be there for a couple of hours and don’t have enough quarters on me. This happened to me today and I tried out paybyphone.com to pay for the parking.

I had to have an allergy test done which for some reason I’ve never had done in my life. The hospital I go to has parking garages, but that would have cost me around $12 for the 2 hours I was there. I found a meter and saw that you could pay by phone. I had no idea how long I would be there, but I guessed an hour and a half would be a good amount to start with. I called the number entered my credit card number and created a PIN number and then entered the code on the parking meter. I was all set. I did have to pay a 45¢ convenience fee which I didn’t like, but the company that runs this has to of course make some kind of money.

As I’m going through the allergy test which was carried out in a Pediatrician’s office [and I didn’t get a lollypop afterwards for not screaming and crying during the test!] I noticed that my time was running out so I opened up the web browser on my iPhone and found that the page was still available and had an extend button so judging from what the doctor said I figured adding another 30 minutes would work. I was then charged another 45¢ convenience fee on top of the last one. In the end I don’t have any allergies and it turned out I had to pay only $4.90 vs. the $12 it would have cost me in one of the lots. Not too shabby, but it would have only been $4 if I had the quarters on me.

When I got home I went to their website and saw that they have a mobile app for iPhones and Androids which is free. It’s much easier to use and doesn’t require a phone and is much more secure. Most meters around the city have the paybyphone.com stickers on them so if you’re going to be somewhere for a couple of hours it makes sense, or you can just keep $4 in quarters handy at all times. I did that once and frankly I didn’t like the jangling all those quarters made as I was walking around, so now I keep $2 in quarters as my maximum all of the time. Oh and if you really want to know, I don’t have any allergies.