Immigration
I arrived back in San Francisco on 5th July, I got questioned by Immigration for about an hour before they let me in but once satisfied i was not here to enter the US workforce or to overstay; however I was told in no uncertain terms that in order to qualify for a visa waiver again I must stay out of the country for at least “3 or 4 or 5 months”, how clear is that? It is very frustrating and confusing when you think you are playing by the rules, doing exactly what the last immigration officer and the US embassy in London said to do, not abusing the visa waiver system, not working illegally, and then to be hauled over the coals like that, but i guess there is nothing I can do about it and they did believe me in the end.
Once in I went straight home to wash and catch up on some sleep, Amanda awoke me in the early evening in order to force me down to Pirate Cat Radio for, as it turned out, a surprise welcome home reception!
Dead Computer
Unfortunately my laptop did not survive the flight so i spent most of my second day back (first week day) searching for a cheap replacement, surprisingly difficult in SF. According t the Dell website the s a Dell store in downtown SF - when i got here i was told it closed down several years ago. Nice one Dell. I ended up buying the the smallest, cheapest Dell I could find anyway as there was no real chioce in Best Buy (who I can honestly tell you were appalling, thirty minutes to even speak to a sales assistant and then I knew a lot more about what the shop sold that he did, which is saying something because I know nothing about Laptops) but I could not find anywhere else to buy one in San Francisco……….
Pirate Cat
Amanda did yet another great Pirate Cat show that same day with Fossil Fool at Pirate Cat Radio
http://www.flickr.com/photos/morehumanthanhuman/sets/72157606086038257/
Rock The Bike:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rockthebike/
Rolling Sunlight
The last couple of weeks of July 2008 I am spending on board Greenpeace’s Rolling Sunlight for its The Global Warming Story Tour, I will be cruising up and down the West Coast with some folks from Greenpeace for twenty days while they collect personal video stories about how GW is affecting ordinary American’s and getting them to ask the Congress to legislate to stop GW by not investing in dirty or dangerous technologies and instead to use the money in clean, safe renewable energy!
Yosemite
Early August saw Amanda and I reunited after many weeks apart, she took a long weekend and we hired a car and went to Yosemite National Park which is only a few hour’s drive from San Francisco. Forest fires are apparently keeping visitors away but i saw little sign of it being quiet, we had trouble finding camping space even though we arrived on Friday. More than 4 million visitors come to Yosemite each year but the vast majority of them, something like 98%, visit only a tiny fraction of this enormous space so getting away from them, even at peak season, is easy. We took a day hike to Cathedral Lake and it was fabulous!
We also took the opportunity to visit Bodie, an amazingly unspoilt and un-Disney-fied ghost town which is held in a state of arrested decay - we also went seven miles off the paved roads to sit in Buckeye Hot Spring .
US Air Guitar Finals
We got given two tickets to the US Air Guitar Finals in SF the following weekend, a rare opportunity to see Americans actually being ironic. To air is human but to air-guitar is divine, it is all about air-supremacy,
Shhoting
Amanda and I have been talking about going shooting while in the US since 2004. Well we finally got round to booking a lesson the other day, 20 minutes in the classroom and were let loose in to shoot targets on the range with some 22 pistols. They were just not satisfying enough, se later we rented a Glock 9mm and had a go with that, a much more satisfying bang! Not that I’m going to make a habit of this, it was fun but I can’t see how anyone could get too excited about this, after an hour or two it is, quite frankly, a bit boring.
Andrea and BRC preparations
Andrea arrives in a few days from the UK, very exciting, and I have a tone of work to do in preperation for Burning Man, especally in desiging and making a shade structure for the camp.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3064/2750072393_0ecc8ae3a3_s.jpg
MagnoFuel
top of a hill), up Lombard Street and Haight Street (which I hate). Got visited By Chris and Tara on their way back from New Zealand, which was such fun too.
, so amazing (awesome, even), they did something like two hours, maybe more, of non-stop high-energy tunes, loved every moment of it, spent half the gig right at the front, it was like being eighteen again, came out at nearly midnight dripping wet from (other people’s) sweat and came home to some weird fog over downtown.
Insinuate
I have been trying a little experiment with the 
