- I am not making deliberate and frequent changes to the typeface in this blog. The software the blog publisher uses seems to be doing that unbidden by me. If I figure out how to stop doing it, I will stop, even though I didn’t start.
- We’re returning home from vacation in the morning. The weather in San Francisco and Sacramento wasn’t too nice this time, or last time either. Next time, I think we’ll make a point to travel to sunny California, instead of the California we’ve been visiting.
- During our vacation, both my wife and I were under the weather. It seems strange to me that when we’re fully recovered, we won’t be over the weather.
- If you are renting a car in San Francisco, please be advised that gasoline at the stations nearest San Francisco International Airport costs almost fifty cents a gallon more than gasoline a mile or two away. My mama told me, “you’d better shop around.”
- To me, the worst thing about California is that I can’t stay here long enough to get used to the three hour time difference between here and where I live. I hate waking up at 3:00 AM and there aren’t many places open for breakfast in Sacramento at that hour. I know one place on 16th Street that’s open all night, but I tried it for breakfast once and didn’t care much for it.
- Note to TV news directors in Sacramento: when I’m watching the local weather forecast, I’d also like to know what the outdoor temperature is now. Even if the forecast is recorded, you could display it as a graphic on the screen.
- On this trip, I learned that there’s no proof Mark Twain ever said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was one summer in San Francisco.” It’s funny and it’s true, so that’s probably why people think Twain said it, but he didn’t publish it, so there’s no proof that he did.
- This week, that bogus quote is also true in Sacramento, which is particularly startling to me since I was here three years ago at this time of year and it was over 100 degrees.
- Traffic in Sacramento is weird because streets switch from one way to two way or the other way around. I could drive to where my son lives by heading west on H Street, until H Street becomes one way headed east. A lot of streets in Sacramento are like that.
- Toddlers never try to avoid tripping you; they depend on you to avoid stepping on them. It seems a dubious survival strategy to me, but you have to admit it has been largely successful for millions of years so far.
- The power seat in the Lincoln I’m renting slides as far back as it will go when I shut the car off. I suppose the people who designed that feature did so to make it easier to enter and exit the vehicle, but I don’t like it and wish I could disable it.
- The original platform on which the Lincoln Town Car is based has been updated, but it started 32 years ago. I’ve only rented one twice and each time, I did it because I needed a sedan with a cavernous trunk. It seems to me the interior hasn’t been updated very much since the last time I rented one which was probably more than 20 years ago. On this one, some of the buttons on the dash board are concealed by the steering wheel and the bottom of the dash is way too close to my knees. Those are two things I think they could have fixed in all that time.
- Our son is considering relocating from Sacramento. I like the area, but I’ve seen all the local tourist attractions because we’ve visited him here several times, so maybe that’s a good thing.
- From the “stating-what-should-be-obvious department” comes the sign on the wall next to the hot tub at the hotel where we’re staying: it says, “Danger. No diving.” There’s another sign too. It warns that there are, “No lifeguards on duty.” I said it’s a hot tub, not a pool, didn’t I?
- We had a cute and EXTREMELY PERKY waitress at the restaurant Saturday night. As an aside, hello Kayla. But because of my bad head cold, I was really in no mood for EXTREMELY PERKY.
- The hotel I’m using near San Francisco International Airport overlooks a marina on San Francisco Bay. It’s very nice, but with a little more attention to detail, it could easily replace Rice-A-Roni as the San Francisco treat.
- The desk clerk at one hotel told me the newspaper in the lobby was complementary. I read the entire thing and it didn’t say anything nice about me or my wife. I’d say that’s one problem with homonyms, but one definition of homonym I read said that they sound the same AND ARE SPELLED THE SAME, but mean different things (I thought they just had to sound the same). By that definition, complimentary and complementary aren’t homonyms, are they? I wish they were, because any time I want to use either one, I have to look it up to remember which spelling carries which definition.
