Seriously?

It's a double case of "the more things change, the more they stay the same."

Saturday Olivia and I went to the St. Patrick's Day parade, which was literally up the block and had woken us with bagpipes. In a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" bleary-eyed spirit we toddled through the spitting rain to Market Street to watch the festivities.

We were greeted by a motley assortment of end-of-parade marchers -- a number of whom had Sinn Fein banners. (I nearly typed "bastards" instead of "banners", oops.) I was bummed to see, in light of the recent IRA bombings in Northern Ireland, that local folks would care to export that nonsense here.

Yesterday we all (Sadie included)went to look at an apartment to rent that actually met all our criteria: reasonable rent, month-to-month, clean, quiet, furnished, takes dogs, has laundry, an elevator -- oh and reasonable rent. It just happened to be the very same apartment building where Aaron crashed when he first moved to San Francisco in 2005. He slept on our friend's couch there for a few months and was staying there when I first met him.

The landlady was trying to get us to be flexible about which of several units we might take, but I was only interested in one of them. Then Olivia reached up to the landlady and gave her a hug, which seemed to seal the deal. So we will see if we end up as T.S. Eliot wrote and: "the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."