Snow Day
Friday, March 24th, 2006I’m a little late getting this in, but it *snowed* here (where “here” = “San Francisco Bay Area”) a couple of weeks ago. The link has some really cute video clips of local kids sledding down steep side streets not a mile from where we live, and of other kids amazed at the really cold white stuff all over the place, and how picking it up makes your fingers go numb. Turns out the last time it (officially) snowed here was thirty years ago, so most local kids had never touched snow before in their lives. It stuck overnight, but was all gone by the middle of the next day. Good thing, too, because steep roads and inexperienced drivers don’t mix very well with snow and ice…
In other news, I ate the world’s two most expensive tacos last week. I was asked to attend a luncheon near Seattle on Friday - even though I had to work in San Francisco the rest of the week. So on Friday morning I got up at 04:00, got into a cab at 04:30, got to SFO at 05:00, boarded my flight at 05:30, took off at 06:00, and landed at SEA at 08:00. I got to the site around 10:00 (after picking up the rental car and driving over an hour), and headed to the luncheon itself around 11:00. Lunch consisted of two “make-your-own” hard-shell tacos from the buffet table, and a plastic bottle of diet soda, consumed while some nice people said some nice things about all the hard work many of us there had done on a recently completed project. Then, because I was booked on the 16:07 flight back, I got back into the rental car and headed straight back to SEA. Unfortunately, after boarding my flight, the co-pilot reported a mechanical problem (right engine fuel pump failure) resulting in a 3-4 hour delay, so we all had to go back into the terminal and wait it out. I ended up taking off around 20:00, getting back to SFO around 22:00, and getting home around 22:45. LONG day, that. Oh, and I then submitted an expense report (round-trip airfare, rental car and fuel, food, and taxi rides to/from SFO) totalling almost USD$600 for the trip. Which works out, of course, to roughly $300/taco. Devoting an entire day of your life to eating two $300 tacos? Priceless.
Trivia Time: On another recent trip to that neck of the woods, I had lunch at a hotel right beside Paine Field Airport. The chef came by our table, and we chatted a bit. He pointed at a very large transport plan we could see parked on the tarmac, and mentioned that it took a crew of SEVENTEEN - the result being that they were putting up a party of seventeen Russians at the hotel. The interesting trivia bit is that it turns out Russians (well, these Russians) just LOVE sausage. So much so that at breakfast on their first day there, they cleaned out the hotel’s entire supply. The kitchen staff notified the head chef, who placed some rush orders with their suppliers to try to keep up with the demand. Apparently, the total Russkie breakfast sausage consumption was three *cases* of sausage, EACH DAY. “Three five-pound cases of sausage?” I asked, somewhat aghast. “Nope. Three TEN-pound cases of sausage. Almost two pounds of sausage per person. And that on top of all the eggs, bacon, bread, cheese and fruit they ate.” It’s a wonder the transport plane was able to lift off…
Finally, in wedding-planning news, Em has tasked me with making up a playlist to fill the time between when people first start to arrive at the venue and when the band takes the stage. She’s doing absolutely everything else related to planning and preparing for the wedding, so I figure I should at least be able to throw some mp3s together. The playlist duration should be four hours, tops, so maybe 80 to 100 (2- or 3-minute) songs or so. In keeping with the look and history of the venue, we want “period” music, ideally from the 1930’s. Since I’m lazy a populist at heart, I figured I’d ask you folks to do my homework for me solicit input from the readership. Anyone have any recommendations for songs from the 1930’s that would make good wedding reception music?
