It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in the neighborhood adjacent to Lafayette Park in San Francisco. That house on the left has wreaths with red bows in the windows.

The FedEx truck has stopped at Octavia Street, and, if you look very closely, you can see the driver returning from a visit to Danielle Steele's house on the right.

Hers is the one with the hedge that envelopes the first floor. It looks like the setting for a novel by Jane Austen, or rather it would if it had rolling green lawns around it.

Instead, it is perched at the top of a hill overlooking San Francisco Bay. I should say almost at the top. Lafayette Park sits a bit higher, which is how I was able to take in the view and snap this photo. 

I sometimes tell myself I am walking by a fellow writer's house. Then I remember her books have sold 800 million copies. I have some catching up to do.
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Ms. Steele has turned up before in my blog. The proprietor of the Argonaut Book Shop has an amusing story about her, as I mentioned in my blog post on the shop.

On a recent visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I saw an announcement for this exhibit in the lobby, thought, "That looks like fun," and trotted up to the fifth floor. 

Yes, I took the stairs all the way up. I do this instead of working out.

And it was fun. As you can see, people stroll through a room full of giant spiders as if they were in a theme park. Some even like to get close:

Of course these people are a self-selecting group. Not everyone feels this way. One friend opted out, saying simply, "No. I'll skip that." Since there's more at SFMOMA than one can possible see in a single visit, I took this to mean, "rather do something else."

But perhaps my friend doesn't like spiders. In "An Arachnophobe Faces Louise Bourgeois's Iconic Spiders," Tess Thackara confesses she projected her own fears when she interpreted one of these sculptures as an image of horror.

To the contrary she quotes the artist's interpretation: “Because my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and as useful as a spider.” The usefulness is a reference to her mother's craft, repairing tapestries. She compares this to spiders spinning webs from threads.

Each of us brings something different to a work of art. Perhaps we should't ask, "What does this piece mean?" Instead, we should ask, "What meaning blooms when you encounter this piece?"

Why is there a life-size sculpture of a blue whale at Crissy Field? 

Why not? Given the choice between having something this cool and not having it, I think most people would go for it.

But there's a little more to it than that. This lovely sculpture is made entirely from plastic trash collected in California. 

Why make a blue whale out of plastic trash? Because, Every nine minutes, 300,000 pounds (the approximate weight of a full-grown blue whale) of plastic and trash end up in the ocean.* 

*According to National Geographic.
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Come on, people, we can do better than this! 

​By the way, Crissy Field was formerly a military airstrip. It's part of The Presidio. The whale sculpture is a joint project with the Monterey Bay Aquarium and some other great organizations. You can read all about it here.