D's Notebook

Tag: San Francisco

Catching Up, Part One

April 6, 2004 /

Trying to organize my thoughts from recent trips while watching the national championship game. I think it’s safe so say I’m one million times less tense tonight than I was a year ago tonight (or April 7 I guess). I don’t recall a time when I was wound as tightly as I was leading up to the KU-Syracuse game. Even if we had won, I don’t know if I could have enjoyed it as tense as I was that night. Tonight, I can just sit back and watch. One of the benefits of your team losing when there are still games to play.

Good grief, are there really only two seniors starting in this game? Not to mention the fact Tech lost freshman Chris Bosh a year ago. I need to start looking for tickets to the Tech-KU rematch in Lawrence next year; there’s going to be a ton of talent on the court that night. I think Paul Hewitt is my favorite young coach in the college game. Obviously, he’s a heck of a recruiter, he’s proving his a very good coach, and I love his demeanor off the court. Seems like a very solid guy.

I’m working away this afternoon with MLB Gamecast or Gamecenter or whatever they call it pulled up, following the Royals – White Sox game (not realizing until tonight the game was on WGN and I could have been watching). It gets to be 7-2 White Sox and I shut it down to concentrate on some other projects. For grins I check the score around 5:00. Heavens to Betsy! What a comeback! I think the decibel record which had to have been set on opening day in 1999 when Mike Sweeney launched that absolute bomb off of Minnesota had to have been broken when Beltran went deep today. Nice little starts for Juan Gone and Benito Santiago.

First bad call of the game, Tech called for a foul on what looked like a clean block. Bang-bang, so by itself not a bad call. But the ref waited until the shot was missed to blow the whistle rather than calling it immediately. One of my officiating pet peeves. And now we have our first 12-30 reference. Thanks, Jim Nantz, thanks a lot for ruining my night. Four more free throws…

As you may recall, a week ago I spent the evening just a couple miles from the house we lived in during our year in the Bay Area. Being the reflective cat I am, I reminisced a little as we pulled into San Leandro that night. While it was very strange to fly over our home in Indianapolis last month, it was equally as strange to look down during our final descent into Oakland and see the golf course I worked at, the court I played basketball on almost every afternoon, and the street we lived on in ’86-87. When you leave someplace and return later in life, there’s always a time machine quality to your experience. During a trip to the Bay Area last spring, I actually drove over to our old neighborhood, cruised by the house, the golf course, and a couple other landmarks. Things seemed the same in some ways, like I hadn’t left in others, though I realized my memories were probably vague enough that things that simply seemed familiar were probably quite different. What really blew my mind was when I realized it had been 17 years since we lived there! I had been gone long enough to finish high school, go to college (for a long, long time), live through my 20s, get married, and move another 500 miles further east. The year we spent there was such a big part of my development that it always seems more recent than it really was. Was it really almost two decades ago that I spent my afternoons hooping on the eight foot goal at the elementary school, hoping I would get invited over to the real games by the older guys from Oakland who ran the big court? (Not that I ever became a great player, or even a consistently good one, but I swear, each time I got recruited to the A league games, I always, always knocked down a couple jumpers early so everyone thought I could play. I made sure I passed a lot after that so I didn’t ruin the image. Those of you who have played with me in my 20s probably wished I continued to stop shooting so much.) Was it that long ago that I spent my evenings bundled up, driving the cart that picked golf balls off the driving range, listening to LL Cool J and the LA Dream Team on my Walkman?

Make it two bad calls against Georgia Tech. I’m really torn. Billy Packer will obviously always side with the ACC teams. So do I agree with him in these situations, or call him an idiot?

With the gender of Little Girlfriend established, I’m noticing more and more songs that can be used as a soundtrack for raising a daughter. I mentioned Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” last week. On a recent flight, while shuffling through the MP3 player, I found another. Although written more as an ode to a woman who wears the pants in the family, Neil Finn’s “She Will Have Her Way” seems like an appropriate way of summing up how little girls wrap themselves around their daddy’s fingers (or is it the other way around?). Neil adds an excellent coda to the song on his Seven Worlds Collide live album. “There’s something about that face when you wake up that makes everything, everything alright. Yeah, she will have her way.” I’m already turning into a big softie.

More later (including now out of sequence thoughts on the Tech-UConn game)…

 

More Notes From The Bay

October 2, 2003 /

A few more notes to wrap up my Bay Area trip.

I want to go on record as being extremely thankful the good folks at the Starbucks at DFW gave me a fully leaded coffee last night, rather than the decaf I asked for. Thanks to them, I was still awake at 3:00 this morning. That’s the way you want to end a trip in which you’ve been sleep deprived to begin with. So I’ve been a little slow today, and unable to get much work done, or wrap up the pieces I started on the plane and hoped to publish today.

39 degrees when I pulled into the garage last night.

Does anyone age better than an attractive Asian woman?

I visited a client that’s right in the middle of Chinatown Wednesday. I’ve been to Chinatown several times, but it’s been around ten years since my last visit. Forget the regular culture shock going from a city the size of Kansas City or Indianapolis to San Francisco. Chinatown can completely throw the unassuming Midwesterner off his bearings. The air is thick with the smells of open-air markets and open windowed restaurants. The sidewalks are crammed with people, almost all Asian, who live, shop, and work in the same area, walking as suburbanites drive to the places they visit on a daily basis. There are special traffic signals that basically declare a pedestrian free-for-all for 30 seconds. All traffic stops and people flood every from every direction, clogging the intersection with foot traffic. For that half-minute, you feel like you’re in Hong Kong or Shanghai, not the US.

Streetlight banners seen in Berkeley: Protest Speeding: Drive 25. Talk about tailoring a public service announcement to your community!

On a sunny day, there’s no more beautiful city than San Francisco. I took a long drive Tuesday evening that was classic Bay Area. I left my hotel, where it was sunny and 70 and drove west, into the hills on the Peninsula. I climbed, the terrain changing from brown tidal lands to green, mountainous forest. The fog peeked ominously from the top of the hills. By the time I descended into Half Moon Bay, the sun was completely obscured, and the temperature had fallen into the 50s. I had gone from a metropolitan area of seven million to a rural area where pumpkin farms and signs for homegrown vegetables dominated the landscape. All in less than 30 minutes. Forget the ethnic and cultural diversity in the area; there may be no big city in this country where you can jump from urban to rural as quickly as in San Francisco-San Jose.
I drove to the ocean and braved the winds to walk out to the shore. I looked north, towards the city, and while I wouldn’t have seen anything on a clear day, I saw nothing but dark drapes of fog. Here I was, on the edge of one of the biggest metropolitan areas of the country, and I felt like the closest person was on the other side of the Pacific in Japan or Eastern Russia. 45 minutes later, I was back in the sun and urban traffic. It was eerie and amazing at the same time.

Total round-trip mileage to eat In ‘n Out Burger for lunch Tuesday: 41 miles.

Forget Iraq, the economy, and his administration possibly sharing highly confidential information with the press. The fact the Chicago Cubs are a in the playoffs and playing well is as sure a sign as any that America is headed down the wrong path with George W. Bush in the White House. Consider this: the last time the Cubs were in the playoffs, in 1998, President Clinton was impeached a year later. If I was George, I would do everything in my power to “remove” the Cubs from the playoffs, lest he be punished at the polls next year. Sammy Sosa might want to keep his bats under lock-and-key for a few days.

Am I surprised Rush Limbaugh got himself into hot water on ESPN? No. Am I surprised he’s blaming the rest of the media for blowing things out of proportion? Not at all. We all knew something like this would happen. I honestly thought it would come when Michael Irvin said something crazy and Rush couldn’t help but respond in his typical sanctimonious tone. Jim Rome summed it up well: Rush may not be a racist, and that may not have been his intention, but when you phrase something the way he did, you can’t help but think, “What else does he think/have to say?” To me the real point is he had a ridiculous argument to begin with. Donovan McNabb has been in three pro bowls, and finished second in the MVP balloting once. He may have been having a crappy season, but to say he’s an overrated player who’s never performed shows that Rush either had an agenda he’s been waiting to air (Shocking! I thought it was only liberals in the media who had agendas!) or he clearly doesn’t know much about football. Rush’s resignation has allowed him to retreat to his radio show, where he can continue to blame others without opposition and more importantly, avoid further tarnishing his image by spending more Sundays proving he knows little about the game.

 

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