From the 49er management press conference - head coach Steve Mariucci expressed a desire to become vice president of operations for the 49ers, and management said no and then they parted ways. 49er General manager Terry Donahue mentions that owner Dr. John York said there were philosophical differences in the way he and Mariucci wanted the operation run. Interesting. Hey they let George Sieffert go, and he had most winning percentage of any head football coach at the time.

Someone on ESPN once said of the SF Bay Area, "the pressure cooker that is San Francisco Bay Area sports". I guess ESPN was right.

Rumors, rumors, rumors ... ESPN is reporting that 49ers release Mariucci from final year of contract. On the radio, they're reporting that the 49ers management team is having a press conference at noon. God ... shocking ... was Skip Bayless right?

I made it to gym tonight. I'd forgotten how the gym is full of beefy, hunky, beautiful yummy boys. Men with lovely muscled backs, arms, torsos and legs who make me think about what it would be like to run my tongue all over them or at least their well muscled body part. Mouth watering bickie boys, bickielicious sweaty beings, who sometimes smile at me. Do they think I'm cute? Or are they marveling at my fat rolls? Does it matter? Aren't we all just eye candy for each other at the gym?

Yeah! Joe Millionaire rocks and won # 1 ratings for the second week in a row. I skipped my workout because I was afraid I would miss this fantastic show. What's actually more fun than watching the show, although that's a blast too, is listening to people criticize the show and bemoaning the demise of american culture. The reality shows like Joe Millionaire came from the BBC, or says the SF Chron's TV columnist, BBC honcho smirks at U.S. copycat shows.

It's the Brit's fault!!! They started it, and the american TV networks are just copying. Get it right people, and blame the Brits.

I suppose I should comment on President Bush's latest tax cut proposal. I'm against it for the following reasons:

1) a lowered tax revenue due to a faltering stock market and ecomony. Those so called budget surpluses were estimates based on a continuing strong economy.
2) it doesn't address the Alternative Minimum Tax, which affects more and more people every year.
3) if the US is fighting a war on terrorism, doesn't it take money to fight this war? What about increasing spending for the new Homeland Security Department?
4) I read somewhere that the proposed war on Iraq is estimated at costing $4 billion. I know the Iraq war plan includes seizing the Iraqi oil fields to help pay for the war, but the logistics of the seizure don't make sense. Even if we could seize the oil fields, how do we pay for the war till then?
5) don't we need money to pay for a possible war with North Korea?
6) The UK Telegraph is reporting that America is veering towards the biggest hole ever in its government finances as the cost of tax cuts and increased military spending threaten to unsettle the world's largest economy.

Need I say more? It's just like budgeting at home. More money going out than coming in makes for a bad financial situation at home and for our federal government.

I love making my own croutons for salads. They taste so much better than the stuff you can buy in the store. I feel so Martha Stewartie when I do this.

I take my favorite bread, Grace Baking Pugliese (italian country bread), and let it sit around till it's hard. Then I cut bread up into cubes, pour two tablespoons of light olive oil and lots of this seasoning called Garlic & Herbs. The seasoning is so tasty, you don't even need salt. Then I toss the bread cubes in the oil and seasoning, and then roast them till they're crunchy. YUMMY!

I got the gist of the recipe from this woman I used to work with, when I first moved here, who eventually started her own catering business. She gave me such a great recipe!

I'm taking advantage of San Francisco's Dining About Town 2003, and have reservations at Hawthorne Lane, Bacar and the Pacific Restaurant at the Pan Pacific Hotel. I've always wanted to check out the Pan Pacific Hotel, so this is my excuse.

On Saturday I had lunch at Postrio, which was great. The menu lunch prices weren't that bad, and I'll probably eat there again when I'm downtown shopping.

I'm trying to decide if I want to spend more money and try Boulevard, and go back to Farralon. Farralon is a great restaurant; beautifully decorated and heavenly food. I want to try restaurants I've never been to, and although I've been to Farralon before, I just love this restaurant.

The money that's spent goes to Meals on Wheels, a service that delivers meals to homebound elderly people. It's a fun way to donate money to charity as well as try new restaurants for budget prices.

On Saturday, there was an event at Union Square Park to kick off Dine About Town 2003. I heard something about it on the radio, but forgot and made reservations to eat at Postrio. For $10, you could go into a tent and sample food from all the participating restaurants as well as meet the chefs. I was bummed out, but the lines were really long to get in so that made me feel better about not going.

For entertainment, they had a band made up of restaurant people including Joey Altman from the Food Network. Altman isn't a bad guitar player! He's also much better looking in person, than he is on TV. Too bad that accent of his annoys me to no end.

A scary article from the New York Times via Yahoo on the catholic priest sex abuse problem, Trail of Pain in Church Crisis Leads to Nearly Every Diocese.

Points I found interesting and horrifying at the same time:

¶The data show that priests secretly violated vulnerable youth long before the first victims sued the church and went public in 1984 in Louisiana. Some incidents date from the 1930's and 1940's.

"This has been going on for decades, probably centuries," said Richard K. O'Connor, a former Dominican priest who says he was one of 10 boys sexually assaulted by three priests in a South Bronx parish in 1940, when he was 10. "It's just that all of a sudden, they got caught."

¶Half of the priests in the database were accused of molesting more than one minor, and 16 percent are suspected of having had five or more victims.

¶Eighty percent of the priests were accused of molesting boys. The percentage is nearly the opposite for laypeople accused of abuse; their victims are mostly girls.

¶While the majority of the priests were accused of molesting teenagers only, 43 percent were accused of molesting children 12 and younger. Experts in sexual disorders say the likeliest repeat offenders are those who abuse prepubescent children and boys.

¶The survey also shows how pervasive the abuse has been. Using information from court records, news reports, church documents and interviews, the survey found accusations of abuses in all but 16 of the 177 Latin Rite dioceses in the United States.

¶The church is still covering up cases. Despite the pressure on bishops over the last year to reveal the extent of the abuse, some refused to release the number of accusations or the names of the accused priests.

One question keeps echoing through my head - what if they didn't get caught ... how long would the catholic church have allowed this go on if no one had said anything?

Power is back on, and now I'm watching this interesting movie called "Enemy of the State". I'm going to have to rent it to see the beginning.

Power Outage

There's a power outage in my neighbourhood. It happened just as I watching the Eagles/Falcons game. I'm sure hardcore football enthusiasts not to mention bars are upset by the lack of power.

I'm listening to the news, and surfing the net on my baby laptop. The phone lines are still working, and I just put some batteries in my portable cd player in case I want to listen to music. The radio news is reporting that PG&E has no idea how long the outage will last or why it happened.

I'm very well prepared for emergencies, so I'm okay. This is a good test of my preps, but what an inconvenience. I've been thinking of buying a battery operated TV for emergencies, and now I think I will.

So on a wild whim, I went back to Sears to try on a Lands' End size pants. And they FIT!!! The waist is snug, but that's okay because on the Lands' End website you can buy pants with stretchy waist. I like buying pants from Lands' End because they have stretchy waist pants, and they'll hem your pants to any length. I can buy pants to fit my bum, but then the waist doesn't fit or it's too long and usually both. You can now even order jeans and chinos fit to measure your body exactly on the Lands' End website, if you have serious problems with finding pants that fit.

So I'm my fantasy size 8, which I've always wanted to be for such a long time and I'm not even at my goal weight yet. I think Lands' End sizes run big so I'm probably still a size 10 in other brands, but who cares. I'm my fantasy size 8. What a trip! There was a woman on Craig's List who wrote a post about how much easier it is to navigate the world of men and dating in a size 8 butt, as oppposed to a size 16 butt which is what I used to be. I think I copied it, so If I find I'll post it. It was a good writeup.

The whole thing new size thing is blowing my mind because at my thinnest in college, I was a size 4/6. My butt measurement is one inch away from my butt measurement in high school, which is really cool.

I was sitting at the mall eating my veggie delite subway sandwhich, my heavenly baked Frito Lay Dorito nacho cheese chips (one bag is 170 calories), and drinking diet pepsi and thinking to myself, is working out and eating low calorie for the rest of my life worth a fantasy size 8 butt and miraculous maybe size 4/6 butt. And my answer was "HELL YEAH!".

Now if I could only just get that washboard abs look I've always wanted, but have never had.

Movies watched since June 2002 when I started keeping track:
13 Conversations about one thing
61*
A walk to remember
Amelie
Blade
Blue Crush
Changing lanes
Clerks
Die Another Day - James Bond 007
Dogtown & Zboys
Donnie Darko
Dragonfly
For the love of the game
From Hell
Gone with the wind
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Hedwig & the angry inch
High Fidelity
Hollywood ending
Kpax
Lagaan
Lantana
Life is Beautiful
Merci pour le chocalat
Minority Report
Monsters inc
Mulholland Drive
Oceans 11
Panic Room
Pay it forward
Pollock
Reign of Fire
Rivers & Tides- andrew goldsworthy
Serendipity
Signs
Stars Wars: Attack of the clones
The Big Lebowski
The Cat's Meow
The fast & the furious
The legend of bagger vance
The Man who wasn't there
The mothman prophecy
The Red Violin
The Ring
The Rookie
The Royal Tenenbaums
The Spanish Prisoner
The Tailor of Panama
The time machine
The virgin suicides
Triple X
What women want
Wonderboys

Books Read in 2002:
A room with a view - EM Forester
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Confederates in the attic - Tony Horwitz
Disappearing Acts - Terry McMillan
Five quarters of the orange - Joanne Harris
God and the evolving universe - James Redfield et al
How to study the bible for yourself - Tim LaHaye
Harry Potter & the prisoner of azbakan - JK Rowling
John Henry Days - Colson Whitehead
Jurasic Park - Michael Crichton
Killing time - Caleb Carr
Making a literary life - Carolyn See
Movies in the mind, how to write a short story - Colleen Mariah Rae
Screenwriting - Richard Walter
Sin and Syntax - Constance Hale
The age of innocence - Edith Wharton
The dynamic laws of prosperity - Catherine Ponder
The Four Agreements - Don Miguel Ruiz
The house of the sleeping beauties & other stories - Yasunari Kawabata
The house on mango street - Sandra Cisneros
The jungle book - Rudyard Kiplinq
The right to write - Julia Cameron
Things fall apart - Chinua Achebe
Watermark - Joseph Brodsky
When god writes your love story - Eric & Leslie Ludy
Who moved my cheese - Spencer Johnson
Woe is I, a book on grammar - Patricia T O'Connor
Year of Wonders - Geraldine Brooks
Your Infinite Power to be Rich - Joseph Murphy

Check this this link out, Top SF Restaurants offering $29.95 dinners & $19.95 lunch. Such a deal! Eleven of the restaurants are on The SF Chronicle's top 100 restaurants for 2002. It's a froggie price fixed 3-course menu, but $30 for a dinner at a fancy and usually very expensive restaurant in San Francisco is quite a bargain.

Those Ariana Huffington SUV and terrorism ads are very funny. I almost bought a hybrid car in 2000 when I needed to buy a new car, but I was wary. The Honda Insight I was told, needs to be plugged into a socket to get power and I don't have a garage so the car didn't make any sense for me. The Toyota Prius looked okay, but you can't get it with a sunroof, and I have to have a sunroof on my car. A sunroof is so essential to my driving life, since I don't like wind blowing on my face.

My Golf is an automatic and it has 2.0 litre engine (a big engine), so the gas mileage is so-so. I get 22-24 mpg for city driving, which is what I mostly drive, and about 30+ for freeway driving. I went down to San Luis Obispo from San Francisco one weekend, and made it there driving on 101 on half a tank of gas one way. The mileage when I drive long distances in my car is amazing! It's city driving that sucks. If a drove a stick, I'd probably have better gas mileage.

Ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing; / Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; / So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, / Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet (1807-1882)

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The ratings for "Joe Millionaire" are out, and it was an incredible success. The beginning was boring, but I loved it. I totally loved it! I love the catiness of the women; I love the insecurity of the I think incredibly unattractive cro-magnon bachelor man, and I love the corny as all heck butler. This is so much interesting than that frothy and idiotic Sex and the City. Real life is so much more interesting than fiction.

I heard an interview with Katy, one of the women who was rejected on the first night, and she said that all the women received an all expenses paid vacation in Paris for a month, and it was totally worth it for the free trip. I mean, I think I'd get on the show for a free one month trip to Paris, but I've also been fantasizing on going on "Love Connection" for years. Remember that old TV dating show?

I'm writing a novel on women's power games, and this show is like a bonanza of research material for me for how competitive women really are and how they behave. I got a big taste of bitchy, nasty competitiveness women at my last job, but that was on the career business level. I think how women play high stakes power games in corporations is similar to how they play power games with men, and it will be interesting to see if I'm right. People say men are nasty power game players, and they're right, but women aren't that far behind. Men at least don't seem to take the business stuff personally, whereas the women I've had to deal with were totally scary vicioius people. I never felt fear going up against a man in a business meeting, but I've learned to become very wary of women, especially women VPs or women who would kill to be VPs. And believe me, they would literally kill to be VPs.

Stats for 2002 from my Palm, which I bought in June 2002.

I read 29 books in 2002. I decided not to count all the movie scripts I read in 2002, even though they're like books and I had to analyze them for people. I definitely need to read more books in 2003. I'm such a bad bunny girl!

I saw 52 movies, rented or in the theatre and not counting TV, since June 2002. That seems like a lot of movies to me, but I know there are people out there who see way more movies than me.

I didn't keep track of theatre plays, but I probably saw at least a 12-15 productions in 2002. This is normal for me.

I saw one ballet, two operas, one dance festival, and one symphony performance in 2002. I definitely need to see more opera and ballet productions, more dance festivals and go to symphony more. I saw a music concert while in West Virginia, but I didn't count it.

I took five seminars and one class in 2002. It was a good year for personal education.

I flew to LA to see the Andy Warhol exhibit, which was tres cool!

You know you're a big city dweller when part of your New Year's chores includes printing out and posting where you can see it 1) the Parking Meter Holiday Enforcement Schedule and 2) the Street Cleaning Holiday Enforcement Schedule.