California driveby

Long time, no update. December was silly season for sure, as Lise worked through to Dec 23 at the Elementary School she's training in. She was very happy to turn in her last assignment too! Many of the kids gave her xmas presents. It's easy to be judgemental about how commercial the 'Holiday Season' is in the US, but when it comes to kids and parents making and buying personalized gifts for student teacher in their class, you can see how the opportunity to manufacture that commercialism: it really is nice to give and receive those kinds of gifts!

I had a conference in San Francisco mid-December, and was crazy-busy before and during that. I firstd flew into LA and spent a weekend in LA visiting my good friends from Cornell, Alex, Steve and Etienne who are now at CalTech and JPL in Pasadena. Alex was a great host, from picking me up at LAX with a thermos of coffee to talking the talk (and greasing the palm of) the bouncer at the Red Buddha bar in Hollywood so Steve could get in with no ID. Whistletop tour included Santa Monica boardwalk (including punters in open-air poser gym and street rappers hawking their CD's), Saturday night out at a couple of bars in Hollywood (actually more low-key and Wellyington-like that I anticipated) and checking out the Norton Simon fine art Gallery in Pasadena (thousand-year-old buddhas to Van Gogh originals).

The conference was very busy but successful and beneficial. It was a great chance to catch up on friends at other institutes and enjoy some of SF's nice restaurants and late-night shopping. (Photo on left is looking down Powell St, one of the cable-car routes.) One conference highlight was being one of about 700 who attended an hour-long address by Al Gore. I haven't seen his movie or read his book, but know of them. He was certainly a very polished but relaxed presenter with a great sense of humour, and is clearly passionate and seeks to be well-informed about the environment. The obvious thing to wonder is how the state of the world would have been different if he'd bean elected President ahead of inglorious-George in 2000...

Otherwise, back in Squarebanks, the snow was still playing hard to get and we'd been limited to a few sessions only on the ski trails at school.