Progress Is Our Most Important...Product?!

Maybe not, having time off to think about what we are trying to do or accomplish is important too. We have lots more work to be done at the Morgan Street house, more painting, more tiling, more details AND we have work to do in The Swamphouse too! The carpet in the office downstairs and in the upstairs bedroom (mine now as I'm in exile from The Marriage Bed by mutual agreement) too. Then tow new floors get put in place, a wood one like the other upstairs bedroom and here in The Office a continuation of the terracotta tile that is everywhere else downstairs. These are NOT small projects and will take at least another month to complete AFTER we are done with the Morgan Street house. France this year? I really don't think so, it wouldn't make much sense (financial or otherwise) to go and stay only a short time as we refuse to spend the winter there at all anymore...to !#$#$#@! cold, brrrrrr.
So we will just continue onward and upward on the two houses and rent this one when we are done and enjoy that one afterwards.

My son Michael, my grandson Jordan and I went to see the King Tut exhibit at the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park yesterday afternoon. We had a great time gawking at all the treasures, reading all the liner notes and being jostled by the madding crowd. We spent a bit of time looking thru the souvenir shop for something for Jordan to remember this good day by. Satisfied by a hieroglyphic chart after looking through the wide array of gizmos and goo-gahs we ambled off towards the car and our dinner at Gino's Pizzeria on California Street. It was crowded and noisy with diners at this dinner hour as is typical of most restaurants in SF on a Friday evening. We orderred 2 beers and a Sprite and were seated at the counter in anticipation of the repast to come. A delicious and very fresh salad came first which we all shared eagerly, then the beautiful individual pizzas, a sausage and mushroom for Michael, a pepperoni for Jordan and a pepperoni, olives and anchovy one for yours truely, they were wonderful! A nice thin crust, blistered throughout with just the right amount of sauce and mozzerella, they were excellent! We wandered back to the car and drove north through the city to the Golden Gate Bridge, tony Marin County and to Petaluma where they dropped me off at the truck which was loaded with a three panel door purchased earlier in the day. I drove home feeling satisfied that we'd had a great time and shared time with each other, it's a too rare event that I'd like to do far more often. We aren't getting any younger!

A Site For Sore Eyes

Try this site for a bit of non-family style entertainment, a Real Time Side Show!
http://www.adamsblock.com/

What is THIS? Well friends it is LIVE video with sound from a certain neighborhood in SF. To say "seedy side of town" is not to cover how actually terrible a location it is. Avoid at all costs...even in your car! Carjackings, robberies and mayhem of all sorts emanate from this place. It has been this way as long as I have had an affiliation with the wonderful city of San Francisco, California and I don't see any change these days worthy of mention. The denizens of this section of the SF forest are in dire straits and thier various needs can cause great personal calamity to the general public. BEWARE! And be wary at the same time. To view this from afar is a GOOD thing. Up close it is tragic, frightening and otherworldly all at once. I used to venture into this "hood" now and again because of my line of work at the time, it is very near City Hall and there was a large computer center therein. Parking was always a hasstle, especially at night and it forced people off onto certain streets in that all so familiar hunt. I've had bottles, 1/2 filled, empty and full thrown at me, my truck and can hear the echos of the tinkling glass shards as it bounces off the sidewalk. A hell of a place. Whores of all sorts, some with fancy business cards with rates on the other side of the card frequent the stop lights and corners. Pimps ride around with the ever loud Thumpa, thumpa, thump from their over speakered back seats. Bums ly idle on the sidewalks day and night, some with tins out to collect thier hard won alms, others just sleep it off. Broken glass, old newspapers, 1/2 drank beer bottles...a real San Francisco Post Card that you will never see in the shops in Union Square or Pier 39. This is The Underbelly.
See any police cars? Wait...and watch.

Computer Chatter

I dunno if anyone cares but my whole working life was a curious mix of the computer industry, IBM (yes), a small company in Long Island, NY called Potter Instrument Company and my last one Control Data Corporation. I worked in an IBM plant in San Jose, CA right out of the USAF and during this time wound up getting trained as a field engineer working in San Francisco and environs. Not just a job believe me, thoroughly entertaining and at times impossible. The City (As SF is known locally and elsewhere) was a bustling place full of people, cars, buses, noise, dirt and panhandlers. I was a young man with a starter family who lived in Stinson Beach about 25 miles away along the northern coast. I loved it there. We moved there shortly after my son Michael was born, from Campbell near San Jose in the fall of 1968. It was a small (660 sq. ft!) ex-tent house from early in the 20th century. Built on a platform flat on the sand. It became a house at some time in the past with 4 tiny rooms and thin walls coverred with lath and plaster. The outside was lap siding which we painted grey with white trim, our elephant look. It remained cool and wet most every day and suited both my mood and need for refuge from the chaos of the Streets of San Francisco sans Karl Malden from the TV show of the same name.
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The computers that challenged my patience and intellect at that time were room-fillers to be sure, huge 7 foot tall black boxes that roared with the sound of fans and gears. Complex beyond belief and prone to both errors and outright failure at any time. One spent a goodly portion of each working day in study of the modes of failure and in acts called Preventative Maintenance aka PM designed to stem the flow of Incident Reports aka IRs to the main office. My friend SC worked at the same location that I did in downtown SF, Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company aka PT&T and we grew to be best friends and co-workers. Days were spent cleaning filters, vacuuming the frames and checking voltages of the 360/50 and 360/65 processors and thier related periferals. Huge racks of reference books in dark blue matching covers lined the edges of the equally huge main room. It was always cold therein, these things needed airconditioning just to stay powered up as they had extensive heat sensors to detect overtemperature conditions in each section of the machine.
Humans came in second in this multi-million dollar computer facility thus we froze except when we roasted.
More to come...