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CHEAP EATS One by one I am finding my old friends and hugging them. Last night at the Giants game, for example, I found El Centro, who — by the time you read this — will have sailed to Alcatraz and swum back to San Francisco. I'm so proud and impressed, and excited because, assuming she doesn't drown and/or get eaten by sharks on her way home, there's going to be a barbecue after at her house.

El Centro will be my second friend to have attempted this feat; not the barbecue, the swim.

How cool is that? To swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco — are you kidding me? It's so cool, I'd need to wear a wet suit just to write one more sentence about it.

My own adventures have been more pedestrian, of late.

Hedgehog and me needed to get a neighborhood sticker for Angelo Joe, our gigantic and hard-to-park Honda Fit cargo van, and this required a long walk down to Market and South Van Ness. Along the way, we held hands and argued about geometry.

Hedgehog thinks that just because she remembers more words (in particular: hypotenuse) than I do, she is always right about math. I argue that, vocabulary-be-damned, the shortest distance between two points is always a straight line and never turning right on 14th St. and then left on Mission. (Except maybe in rare instances like Market St. has a parade or protest on it.)

BTW, I won that argument — as anyone save the staunchest surrealist and possibly airline pilots will plainly see. Even so, we were late for breakfast.

You know me. I can't stand in line on an empty stomach, so I had asked Hedgehog to find us something good down there to bite into. She did that magic little thing she does with her thumbs and a cell phone and came back with my new favorite restaurant.

Little Griddle, of course. It's just one block away from MTA, and they have those donut burgers like at Straw, with bacon and everything. Only their donuts are square. The Lucifer, they call it. They also have a giant double-pattied burger (the Evil Knievel), and one called the Hot Mess, featuring pepper jack cheese and jalapenos, and chipotle sauce. Plus cilantro and onions.

Thankfully it was a very breakfasty hour, or I would have been tempted. Instead, it was the Morning Star omelet that caught my eye — in particular the words "maple smoked bacon chicken sausage," every single one of which is in my vocabulary.

This omelet comes with green pepper, yellow onion, tomato, and substitute spinach for mushrooms if you're me. (Pssst. You're not!) All that, plus cheese, and maple smoked bacon chicken sausage. Which is just one thing, mind you. With five words. Working backwards, it's a kind of sausage, a chicken sausage. With bacon in it. Maple smoked bacon, to be precise.

Now is a very good time to be alive.

I'm serious. When a kind of sausage can have five words in the name of it, and every single one of those words is your all-time favorite word ...

Those are the days. These.

I mean, it wasn't as good as it sounds; but how could it possibly be?

Hedgehog ordered the Bits & Pieces scramble, which is basically the same ingredients minus cheese, scrambled. And you can get salad instead of hash browns so we got one with each and shared. Very good. Good, crispy hash browns. Good, crispy salad.

The coffee was good.

Coach came down on her bike and met us there, for support, and brought me a box of my favorite welcome home maple cream sandwich cookies from Trader Joe's, and a black Champion skirt to play football in this season. She takes care of her players like that. Speaking of which ...

Giants 3, Padres 2 — but I gotta tell you, even though the Giants are in first place and yeah yeah yeah, something even more exciting, baseballwise, is happening in Oakland these days. And it's still easier to get to the Coliseum. And cheaper. Just saying.