Angelika Hanging laundry outside to let it dry is seen with suspicion in the United States. Americans prefer running electric dryers inside the house to airing clothes in the wind. Dryers are consuming energy, though, so airing it is the greener approach. But until recently, many appartment complexes prohibited hanging laundry outside. Powerful homeowners associations (HOAs) consider laundry an eyesore, fear sliding property values, and therefore until recently expicitly disallowed the practice in contracts signed by home owners and their renters.

Michael Some people in our household, and I'm not naming names here on purpose, are constantly misplacing their keys and wallet. You'd think that's an easy to solve problem, simply make it a habit to always put them in the same place, but with progressing age, it gets harder and harder to change bad habits.

Angelika It's fairly commaon that the city of San Francisco lets its residents decide on political matters with so-called propositions. In every local election, there's a whole slew of them on the ballot, and citizens need to make up their minds whether they endorse or reject a fair number of individual proposals to new legislation. For this reason, November 4th this year wasn't only the date for the mayoral election, but also for a decision on "Proposition F", commonly known as the "Airbnb proposition".

Angelika Although it's still quite some time until the next presidential elections in November 2016, we're already in the middle of fierce political campaigns this year. That's in part due to the long-winding process of the so-called primaries, in which the two major political parties, Republicans and Democrats determine their front-runners. Candidates need to mobilize their base during this time and pull out all the stops in order to distinguish themselves from the often unwieldy number of their competitors.

Angelika Just like in Germany, there's been an ongoing intense debate here in California during the last couple of years on the legality of assisted suicide. There have been numerous attempts to pass new regulations through the state senate to legalize assisted suicide for the terminally ill. Time and time again, however, new legislation failed to pass, but recently, supporters prevailed, when the California senate passed a new law, signed by governor Jerry Brown, which will take effect in January 2016.

Angelika We've been living here in San Francisco for what almost feels like an eternity, and over time, we've certainly found our favorite places and parks in the city. But the longer you stay in one place, the more it becomes routine to keep going to the same places over and over again.

Michael Recently, at Costco, I discovered that they had two-packs of the "Hawaiian Host" macademia nut chocolate truffles on sale, and couldn't help but buy one immediately. Sweet, sweet memories of one of our first Hawaii vacations dating almost twenty years back! I vividly remember how we arrived at our vacation rental back then from the airport, how we opened the the screen door and kept watching the ceiling fans rotating slowly. A nice breeze cooled the appartment, and while inspecting our new quarters, we opened the fridge and found a box of exactly these "Hawaiian Host" chocolate truffles.

Michael San Francisco has strict building codes making sure that the next earthquake won't wipe out its infrastructure. Contractors need to be licenced and are required build by the letter of the code or won't get their permits. Most houses around here are held together by wooden beams and plywood, it's quite rare to find brick and mortar residential buildings. That has the downside that you might fall out of your bed at night when your neighbor sneezes heavily in an appartment building, but in the event of an earthquake shaking the building, you're pretty safe. Unlike brick buildings, wooden structures won't crack and crumble and collapse, pancaking the downstairs neighbor right away, but swing left and right and then settle slowly.

Michael You're going to have a hard time believing this, but when we moved to California in 1996, we actually were on such a limited budget that for an entire year, we made due without a car of our own. Then, in 1997, I got a great deal from a colleague at AOL, where I worked at the time. He had a six year old Acura with 100.000 miles for sale and wanted $3,300 for it. Cosmetically, the car wasn't in great shape, as its clear coat that once had covered its black paint had been burned off by the relentless California sun, but I didn't care about looks. It only had a manual transmission, but that's what I was used to from driving in Europe anyway. And the previous owner, a Frenchman, had, apparently without thinking, bought the car with no air condition, but that didn't bother me, as I wasn't familiar with the murderous Southern California sun yet. I was young and mostly up and about in windy San Francisco, so this didn't seem like a show stopper. We shook hands on the deal on the AOL parking lot and from then on I was the prowd owner of a 1991 Acura Integra.