All day the San Francisco sky stayed heavy and low and dark, never changing from the way it looked when I took this picture on Dolores near 17th Street shortly after sunrise.
I wanted to get the laundry done early and leave the rest of the day free. One other fanatical laundry-doer had arrived ahead of me. The proprietress and her helper were already busy also, doing wash-by-the-pound for absent customers. They had loud sad Tex-Mex ballads on the sound system, and were singing along.
Across the street is a former convent, now converted into housing for low-income seniors. I heard that when it opened here in the Mission several years ago there was a lottery for the sixty-some available units and thousands of people applied.
Printed warning above the change machine just inside the front door of Star Wash Laundromat (for a bipolar reading experience, you cannot do better than the customer-written Yelp reviews about Star Wash).
The synthetic fabric flowers used to live in a plastic pot on the windowsill. Sometime recently the plastic pot disappeared and the flowers found a new spot to ornament on their own. Bits of artificial soil still cling to their round green plastic support-base.