Better even than expected

Two weekends ago, S. and I finished moving everything we own into our new apartment, which is situated up on the side of Twin Peaks, one of the larger but less populated hills in the heart of San Francisco. This past weekend we were able to start building our environment from all the raw material we moved, and sacrificed our extra second bedroom to the clutter gods so that our actual bedroom and our living room could take on a semblance of organization and polish. We could -- and did -- finally, in good conscience, have guests over. We also discovered, to our delight, that S.'s projector can handle high definition cable channels, and we have been completely infatuated with the Discovery-HD channel's Planet Earth series ever since. (Watch it, watch it, watch it. Beautiful, astonishing footage! There was a scene with Birds of Paradise in which the display of a male bird was so surprisingly transforming that everyone watching literally exclaimed out loud "WOW - WHAT WAS THAT??")

Our biggest triumph, however, was our back roof-patio. We are situated in the building thusly:

So as you can see, we have nothing but roof stretching out before us, giving us a spectactular view of the bay. We are asked not to walk out on the roof past our little fenced-in portion of it (as indicated by the rectangle drawn above) as it supposedly weakens it and causes leaks for our neighbors below, but we loooooooove our little fenced-in portion of it so much anyway that it's no big deal. Our major project this past weekend was to find and put up some kind of pleasant barrier to give us more privacy from our neighbors to the left and right (we have a building's light well to the right of our little patio which has windows with a direct view of us, and the building to our left has the same set up as ours so that they can walk out on their patio and look directly on ours) without seeming to be completely unneighborly (to spin on the saying -- pleasant fences make pleasant neighbors). We found some great 6 foot high woven straw matting at Lowe's which we put up that gives the patio a bit of a tiki-feel while still being mildly transparent. We also chose to cut it into a triangle by our neighbors on the left, so we can still poke our heads around it and say hello. (I'll try to take pictures.)

Having this all done by Saturday meant we could bask in the glory of our patio on Sunday, and bask we did. San Francisco was kind and gave us a glorious, mostly-sunny day where we could stretch out on the patio chairs and enjoy that famously mild San Francisco weather. Even then, I got more than I bargained for: the neighbors who live on the top floor of the building to our left have a hummingbird feeder complete with black-chinned hummingbird client who pops by to feed (we ran right out and bought a feeder too!); a mourning dove is nesting in one of our gutters (which, oddly, is one long horizontal piece without a drain in it, (?!?!?) so we cut a small hole in it to drain it of accumulated rain and spare the dove a soggy nest!); two raucous scrub jays came by scouring for food (we bought a feeder and some seed for them too, althought if it attracts pigeons, we'll take it right back down -- fingers crossed); and either a merlin or a prairie hawk flew by (judging purely by the shape of its all-black silhouette against a pale blue sky) being heralded by alarmed smaller birds. And on top of that -- it is so quiet, so away from the city roar of street-cars, large thoroughfares, crowds, taxis, etc., that we can hear all kinds of bird calls, out of which the only ones I can identify so far are mourning doves and crows.

Can you guess? I was in heaven. Home sweet home!