Fascination Place

This is pretty neat: Palo Alto Online has historical notes on many neighborhoods on the southern SF peninsula. For example, Castro City in Mountain View, or Loyola Corners in Los Altos, or Fair Oaks in Menlo Park.

Of course, my own house isn’t in a historical neighborhood. We’re newfangled sorts around hereabouts, I guess.

It’s strange that the former town of Mayfield hardly rates a mention. Mayfield used lie between Mountain View and Palo Alto, and it eventually was absorbed by the two other cities when it was outgrown by them. The southern half of Palo Alto was mostly Mayfield, and I believe California Avenue was Mayfield’s downtown, which is why Palo Alto effectively has two downtown districts. The now-defunct Mayfield Mall at the north end of Mountain View was named for it, and is the only location I know of which still bears the Mayfield name (though there may be others I just don’t know about).

This morning we got up and were joined by Mark and Yvette for a bike ride. We headed into Shoreline Park and had lunch there, and then headed down the Stevens Creek Trail to check out the new reach that opened yesterday, including a tunnel under El Camino Real!

For those not familiar with the area, El Camino Real is a major artery down the San Francisco peninsula and through Silicon Valley. In Mountain View, it’s a 6-lane road with plenty of traffic. I have to cross it somehow whenever I bike to work, and I usually cross at a traffic light at one of three intersections. But this underpass will help make it easy to avoid all that, especially once they build the next reach (hopefully by the end of the year) which could make my bike commute a lot easier. They built the underpass with surprisingly light impact on the road and it looks great, nice and clean and wide and with a skylight at the median of the street to let some natural light into the tunnel.

A few shots of the tunnel and trail’s end:

Additionally, we’re in the middle of a heat wave here, with highs in the mid-80s. Zoinks! It was breezy and it wasn’t too bad in the shade, but a lot of our ride was in the sun. At least it was dry out, too, so it was still fun. After three days of heat, it sounds like it will be back to normal tomorrow (highs in the high 60s). And now that frisbee is winding down I should consider starting to bike to work regularly.

For dinner I made my recently-mentioned “ex-girlfriend tacos” and we watched the Red Sox/Yankees game on ESPN, and the god damned games between these two teams go on forever, this one running about 4 hours. Fricking Yankees. Fortunately, the good guys won.

Many weeks Debbi and I go to the Mountain View Farmer’s Market for fruit and cinnamon bread and flowers (it might surprise you to learn that I enjoy arranging flowers at home; we even have two hang-on-the-wall vases to keep them away from our flower-eating cats).

We learned recently about Thursday Night Live, a new weeknight fair they’re doing in downtown Mountain View four times this summer, so last night we walked down to check it out.

Although my impression is that advertising for the event has been poor (having not heard about it until earlier this week), apparently everyone else knows about it, because traffic and parking downtown were both pretty well slammed. (No wonder they keep wanting to build new parking garages!) I happened to notice an on-street spot as we were in the queue to get into a garage, and I moved quickly and grabbed it.

The fair itself was pretty small: Four or five performers, a small slice of the farmer’s market, a few craft vendors, and several events for children. On the other hand, the performers were all good, and they closed way more of Castro Street than they had to, so there was plenty of space for all the people to walk around. And the restaurants and local businesses were staying open and apparently doing great business. In other circumstances I would have judged this to be an event having a hard time getting off the ground, but the attendance suggests otherwise.

The performers who stood out most for me were a band called Circumsax, who when we arrived had just started playing a Herbie Hancock song, “Chameleon” I think it was, which works really well for a large sax group. (They ought to consider some of the tracks from J.J. Johnson’s J.J. Inc., too; I think “Mohawk” or “Fatback” would work well with their style.)

So we had dinner, looked around, stopped into BookBuyers (where I found a hardcover copy of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere), and enjoyed the lovely evening. Can’t beat that. We’ll probably go back next time - assuming we can find parking!

Some useful links (well for those of us in the area):

What’s Open in Cupertino Right Now?

Also, What’s Open in Downtown Mountain View Right Now?