Author: Glen

This is almost the last bit of news on my mom’s vis­it: she’s leav­ing Tues­day morn­ing…

Today we went to church at Penin­su­la Chris­t­ian Cen­ter, the church Paula and I have been attend­ing since mov­ing here.

After­wards, we came home, had some PBJ sand­wich­es, and passed the after­noon lis­ten­ing to the Penin­su­la Sym­pho­ny play a free con­cert at our apart­ment com­plex! Evi­dent­ly Oak Creek apart­ments are a big spon­sor of the sym­pho­ny, so once a year they come do a free con­cert for us. Pret­ty cool.

That made me start think­ing, how­ev­er. How can an apart­ment com­plex afford to spon­sor a sym­pho­ny? The answer: pret­ty eas­i­ly. Oak Creek Apart­ments has 759 units. Rent­ing those at Bay Area prices means they’re tak­ing in around 1.5 mil­lion dol­lars each month. Even if they had 50 employ­ees and paid them $100,000 a year they still would clear around a mil­lion each month. Pret­ty neat busi­ness, that.

We wrapped up the day by grilling some steaks. Fun stuff.

Today we took my moth­er to vis­it Mon­terey Bay Aquar­i­um and San­ta Cruz Wharf.

As far as I’m con­cerned, Mon­terey Bay Aquar­i­um is the best aquar­i­um in the uni­verse. It’s amaz­ing! If you ever get a chance to vis­it it, you have to go. If they ever put the sev­en won­ders of the world to vote, I’ll serous­ly con­sid­er cast­ing my bal­lot for this attrac­tion. It is sim­ply breath­tak­ing.

After spend­ing four hours in the aquar­i­um, we were quite ready for sup­per at the Bub­ba Gump Shrimp Com­pa­ny (yes, like in For­rest Gump). It was pret­ty neat, and the food was good. We even got our pic­ture tak­en with a For­rest Gump imper­son­ator!

Final­ly, we vis­it­ed the San­ta Cruz Wharf at the north end of Mon­terey Bay. It was pret­ty neat, although the sea lions weren’t too frisky.

Over­all, it was a pleas­ant day spent roam­ing North­ern Cal­i­for­nia.

I found out I’m not alone in my opin­ions about San Fran­cis­co’s san­i­ty. No less an author­i­ty than Rud­yard Kipling is square­ly in my cor­ner: “San Fran­cis­co is a mad city, inhab­it­ed for the most part by per­fect­ly insane peo­ple…”

Ken­ny Worth­ley (a friend from Spring­field) wrote in with a mar­velous obser­va­tion: San Fran­cis­co seems to be con­fused about pot and pots. I quote:

“My ques­tions is: what if you were on pot, med­ical­ly nec­es­sary of course, and need to use the pot, but were not in a spot with a pot because you were grow­ing pot on a pub­lic lot? You would have to put down your pot, run to anoth­er pot spot, and pri­vate­ly poop.

So here is the scoop on poop — I think you should be able to claim med­i­c­i­nal pot poop­ing — so you could pub­li­cal­ly poop on the spot in a pot lot.”

Well said, Ken­ny: that would make an excel­lent let­ter to the edi­tor!

We took my mom to do the tourist thing in SF today: we took the Cal Train from Palo Alto into SF, and then the Muni bus­es (which take for­ev­er) to Fish­er­man’s Wharf (over­rat­ed), the Explorato­ri­um (San Fran’s best-rat­ed muse­um), and a Blue and Gold Bay Cruise (there were so many peo­ple we could bare­ly see any­thing, and the noise from the engine drowned out the audio pre­sen­ta­tion for a good por­tion of the tour). We ate lunch at the Expo Fam­i­ly Restau­rant (no web­site), and at the Rain For­est Cafe (which was quite an adven­ture: the food was decent, but the atmos­phere was excel­lent)!

We also had a chance to drop by Ghi­rardel­li Square (yes, like the choco­late com­pa­ny). It’s a mall area, but they do promi­nent­ly fea­ture choco­late! Very tasty.

Also, my mom will be vis­it­ing with us from today through next Tues­day. We get to be tourists and see all the cool stuff that we’d nev­er see oth­er­wise. I’ll be sure to post some trav­el­ogue info!

On a non-Stan­ford relat­ed note, this area is a mad­house. San Fran­cis­co is plan­ning to vote on whether to grow pot (mar­i­jua­na) on pub­lic lands. This is because Propo­si­tion 215 legal­iz­ing med­i­c­i­nal mar­i­jua­na has­n’t flown at all with the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. I sup­pose the city fig­ures that if they grow the pot on pub­lic lands the DEA is less like­ly to come in and arrest gov­ern­ment employ­ees.

Advo­cates say that this leg­is­la­tion has the addi­tion­al ben­e­fit of pro­vid­ing job train­ing for the unem­ployed. Train­ing unem­ployed peo­ple to grow and dis­trib­ute drugs just does­n’t seem like a help­ful social strat­e­gy to me…

This, of course, is the same city that just now made it ille­gal to poop in pub­lic, and the deci­sion was hot­ly con­test­ed. No joke.

In my mind, not poop­ing in pub­lic is just basic cour­tesy (not to men­tion good pub­lic health pol­i­cy).