back from visiting the fruit company
Well I got back from San Francisco last night having spent three days out there. It was a really good trip, all in all.
Wednesday I flew out, and we had an all day EMI showcase at a venue just outside of downtown. Got to see Tristan Prettyman perform which was fun – have always liked her. Thursday was spent all day in meetings, which all went well.
Can I just say… the drive from Cupertino, CA to Pleasanton is one of the prettiest I have ever been on… 40 miles of rolling hills and green meadows and red roofed houses. It looks like Tuscany, or what I imagine Tuscany would look like, having never been there.
I got to take some time to stroll around downtown San Francisco on Thursday night… walked all around the port area, saw some really cool architecture. Met a couple seagulls.
San Franciscan’s are officially the gutsiest drivers on earth. First of all, it’s an old city, so the streets are really narrow. Second, the whole thing is build on the side of a cliff, so it’s 60 degree hills everywhere you go. Third, 80% of the roads are one way streets, so you really have to know what you’re doing to get where you’re going. I finally came to the conclusion that in order to accomplish anything in terms of driving in the city, you basically just have to forget every rule and law you’ve ever learned about driving, and just commit yourself to a giant free-for-all. Otherwise, you just get stuck trapped between a trolley car, 5 taxi cabs, and 700 pedestrians. It’s definitely winner take all out there.
So, a good trip – glad to be home though.
To set the scene, here is a picture of my parent’s house all snowy-ish. For some reason, the past two years the snow has come late to Minnesota (January), which meant no white Christmas… very sad. We had a very white Christmas this year… in fact, I think this was taken on Christmas Day.
It always humors me listening to people in the South talk about snow. If wintry-precipitation is ‘predicted’ sometime within the next week in Nashville, all out chaos breaks loose. There’s a rush on the local grocery store to stock up on all necessary items like milk, eggs, and canned goods that would get anyone through a nuclear disaster. After that, the roads all but shut down out of sheer fear – no one dares to venture out. The News programs go into 24-hour coverage updating you on every degree change in temperature, interrupting your television show and generally annoying the heck out of you.
Here we have the Official Pace Car of Minnesota roads, our friendly orange snowplow. The plows in Minnesota are really quite impressive… they’re out immediately when a storm moves through and clear the major roads quite quickly, and work through the night to keep them clean. Frankly, we laugh a little inside everytime a Southerner complains about driving in the snow because we think you’re a pansy.
This picture is for Steph… she works with horse-people in Nashville who baby their animals every time the temperature dips below 55 degrees, giving them blankets, barns, and heat lamps. Animals can adapt to their surroundings… look how these cows get all fuzzy in the winter to keep them warm.
Minnesota has a lot of limestone, which is a rock very susceptible to cracking due to various acidic elements in the ground. As a result, this picture to the left is a common sight around our hometown… giant icefalls where water has been seeping through the cracks of limestone, and freezing on it’s way to the ground.
