Wednesday was the first day of Flash work. Flash is a very difficult program to try to build a seminar around, but our speaker was much more agreeable than the Dreamweaver guy was. Not that the Dreamweaver guy wasn't pleasant or knowledgable enough, but the Flash guy had a much more approachable demeanor to him. All in all I didn't learn much from the first day of Flash.
I did however have a really wonderful night. I left the Flash session early, at 5, so I could be picked up by Enterprise car rental to procure a car. I rented a black Chevy Cobalt -- not my first choice, but I preferred that over the Kia Optima they wanted to give me (yuck). So I drive back to the hotel, Kathleen arrives, and we're off.
We drove all over the city, with Kathleen navigating (I drove, natch). We drove past Fisherman's Wharf, stopped on a pier under the Golden Gate bridge and took pictures, drove over the bridge to Sausalito, took more pictures, drove around to find a restaurant .. finally found a spectacular 5-star restaurant called McCormick & Kuletos where they didn't have crab (sadly) but the filet mignon was one of the best I can remember having. I also had a glass of KJ Grand Reserve Merlot which was excellent. Dinner was over a hundred bucks, but it was worth it to be able to spend the evening with this lovely young woman whose company I enjoyed. (Liberal, but that did make our conversations more lively.)
While we were at the restaurant, I remember one guy stood up, clinking his glass with is fork, and commanded the attention of the restaurant by saying he and his girlfriend were on their way to Maui, that he had just then proposed, and she had said yes. We all heaped a tremendous avalanche of applause on the happy couple. It was a wonderful highlight of the night.
Leaving there, we realized how shallow the gas tank was getting, so we drove back across the bridge to find a gas station .. but we did a quick loop around the Transamerican pyramid, and when I stopped the car and looked up, I found the moon was perfectly positioned in the sky right over the tower, so we both took a lot of fantastic pictures from there. We also drove through Chinatown and took pictures there too. My pics turned out very dark, but I am still hoping to be able to photoshop them up to the point where they're more interesting.
From Chinatown we drove into the Mission district, where we found a gas station (in the nick of time), and Kathleen pointed me down this alley called Balmy alley, which was a treasure trove of artwork up and down the backs of the buildings. I photographed a lot of this. Then we drove through Castro, the heart of the gay community .. interestingly, there wasn't a lot of weirdness there, because by this time it was 11:30 at night and the streets were eerily empty of people and traffic. Then she took me down "the Haite" to the Haite Ashbury, apparently a site of such blinding historic significance I was shamed to admit I'd never heard of it, the birthplace of the hippy "revolution" in America. She made sure I was shamed, much the same way I made sure she was shamed to admit she didn't know where Missouri was.
From there, she took me to Twin Peaks, which was the most spectacular scenic view she'd shown me all night. Absolutely breathtaking. I could see the Golden Gate, the bay bridge, the pyramid, the church on the UCSF campus, Market street, city hall, just freakin everything. I took pictures and video, but very little of it turned out. But that was not as important as getting to be there, enjoying the sight and the feeling of being up there.
After that, it was very late, and she needed to go home so I dropped her off and returned to my hotel at about 1:30 or so .. if I remember right, I was seriously tired. Fortunately the morning session Thursday didn't start until 11 so I was able to sleep in.
Last night I was looking forward to a nice pleasant evening having dinner and visiting with my aunt and uncle Groff, but idiot me got on the wrong BART train, and because I didn't have my NFT guide with me, I didn't realize I was on the wrong train until I was way the heck out in the totally wrong direction. Fortunately my cell phone had enough life in it to call Paul and coordinate him picking me up and taking me back to his home. I didn't get to see Joe or Mike or any of my cousins, and I lost several hours of time visiting with Paul and Mary Lou because of my getting lost, but we did have a wonderful meal and 3-4 hours or catch-up time.
As I type this, I'm sitting in one of the last sessions on Friday afternoon, listening to a debate/discussion on QuarkXPress versus InDesign, and I've been coming up with all kinds of ideas on how to redesign the Choreomedia site, and what I want to do with my own site, and I'm really excited to begin using some of the techniques I've learned here at work and freelancing. Tonight I have to go back to my room and work on client stuff, and pack, because in the morning I have to get to the airport and get on my plane. It's not a long flight, but I lose two hours in the time change, so my day Saturday is pretty much shot. Sunday I have to get back to Columbia fast so I can get a bunch more work done.
But as I said before, what I really got from this week is a sense of inspiration that has been missing from my life for a long time.
This is from CNN Money's The Top 100 Stupidest Moments in Business in 2005. A truly hilarious read, to be sure, but my jaw didn't hit the desk until I came to this one:
