Went out with another friend of mine for a post birthday lunch at The Beach Chalet. I forgot how great the view of the beach is there. It's the only place in San Francisco where you can eat a good meal and get a great view of the Pacific Ocean.

There were so many people at the beach, and The Beach Chalet was packed! I even ran into a friend from writing group there. San Francisco is such a small world!

It was such a beautiful day out at the beach. If you didn't know it, you'd think that living out on the coast of San Francisco was really nice and sunny all the time. It's not.

The second apartment I moved into in San Francisco was on the Great Highway. We were on the second floor, and we could see the ocean from our living room and kitchen. Oh my god, the weather down there was foggy all the time and freezing. At night, the wind would whip right off the ocean and into our apartment.

There were maybe 10-20 days out of year where it was a sunny and the weather was nice. The rest of the time, it was miserable. One week out of the year, the sun would set directly in front of our living room. That was cool.

And when you live out at the beach, public transportation sucks. It would take 45 minutes to an hour to get downtown. If you lived outside the city, you could get to downtown faster than I did living down there.

When I lived out there I never felt like I really lived in the city, even though my address said San Francisco. I was so far away from everything. It's like you're living in a foggy beach town.

We shopped at the Safeway at the end of Fulton, and it reminded me of grocery stores in San Diego, LA and Hawaii. I started calling it "the LA beach Safeway". There were always surfer types in there, beach bums, and the kinds of people I remembered seeing in beach town groceries.

Even the food they carried catered to the beach crowd. They had alot of vegetarian types of foods, stuff you'd never see in other Safeways in the city. The "LA beach Safeway" is still my favorite Safeway to shop at in San Francisco.

I think it's still one of the few Safeways in San Francisco that has a perpetual supply of Red Stripe Beer. Talk about the king of beach beers. Red Stripe is one of my favourite beers!

Best Red Stripe beer memories ... walking along South Beach in Miami with friends, watching the sunset and drinking Red Stripe beer ... dancing and drinking Red Stripe beer at the reggae festival in Washington DC at Malcom X park.