Weird Dream Channel

This was from Friday night, I did not have time to enter it what with the trip to San Diego and not having a computer with me there.

I am in bed, and next to the pillow is what looks like a pirate treasure box, but a no-frills one. It is made from wood slats kept together with simple cast iron bands. The wood has a solid look to it, it appears to be stained but not varnished, not new but not weathered either. There are cast iron hinges at the top corners. I don't see a lock.

I have no clue what is inside, but I am being told over and over again that I will not be able to sleep until  Pam Dawber takes the box away. If I roll over to another side, the box follows, always up against the pillow on the side furthest from my head. After a while the name  Pam Dawber becomes an earworm.

Sandy Eggo Day 1 (Saturday)

Packed too light at first, the folding day pack was too flimsy, so I grabbed the Interop day pack which has a built-in laptop section. By reflex I put the netbook in there, but that made it heavy so I took it out again. I only needed the phone for the internets this trip. Took Central to the park & ride lot I've been using for the past 15 years, and it was locked up. There were plenty of cars in there, but not nearly as many as usual, and it seems the new landlord Enterprise (Budget used to own it) is using it to store in-transit rental cars.

So I went onto the airport grounds but could not figure out how to get to the parking garage, so I parked in the too-expensive daily lot, which is very close to the Southwest terminal. That worked out well.

As usual I was there way early, thought about upgrading but they wanted $166, so I was in section B 52, which landed me a seat by the window in the second to last row. The last row was occupied by a WASP man, his foreign wife, and two little girls who were competing to see which one of them could kick a hole in the back of my seat quickest. They also had the "whine till Daddy says yes" thing down to a science, and it took the WASP middle-age male flight attendant three minutes to get them to put the tray back up, after which they cried as lot.

They were endlessly entertaining, too bad the flight is only an hour and a half.

I had no plan for how to get from the airport to the park to collect my theater ticket, so I asked at Information. She said to take the airport bus downtown (senior rate is $1.10 and I'm old enough there), then catch the #3 or #7 and get off at Laurel and walk into the park, the theater would be right near the entrance.

I didn't have any change, so I bought something at Starbucks which gave me a couple of quarters, I figured 15 cents was not a huge sacrifice. I got the #7 (no transfers on this system so it cost another $1.25), and when we passed the zoo and still had not gotten to Laurel I knew something was wrong, so I got off, walked three blocks to the zoo asked how to get to the theater from there. There is supposed to be a free tram, but there are no stops marked anywhere, and the info person said they don't come to the zoo. WTF? But he gave me a map, and pointed to a path. The theater is all the way on the other side of the park from the zoo, directly across.

That turned out to be more than a mile.

Signage in the park sucks. They have maps lost of places, and some of them have "you are here" markers, but as soon as you leave the map you are on your own. I was going to The Old Globe Theater so I thought I'd hit pay dirt when I started following Old Globe Road, but it dead-ended behind the botanical gardens.

Finally found it near the art museum, there was a sign which you pretty much had to trip over to see. Got my ticket, and headed for the park exit, the plan being to catch a bus to the hotel. Google maps told me the #3 bus, at Juniper and 4th. That was about a mile from the museum. No tram, no buses run into the park from that direction. When I sat down at the bus stop I looked up the hotel again, saw it was only 5 minutes' walk away, so I walked (the bus passed me just as I left the stop). 

The hotel did not have my reservation, but they had rooms at the rate I'd seen online (I had not prepaid) which was $69 plus the trimmings, on the AAA discount. Nice enough room, queen bed, small balcony overlooking the street, microwave and fridge in the bathroom. Air control unit cleverly hidden behind the very nice long desk. Flat screen TV connected directly to cable (no cable box), inside a lovely wood cabinet. Huge walk-in closet. Pretty nice for the price. America's Best Value Inn, I'd recommend them except then they would always be booked and I'd never get a chance to stay there again.

Vegged for a couple of hours, then walked a few blocks to a restaurant called Hob Nob Hill, which was very nice, had the lamb shank which was excellent and reasonably priced, which included delicious mint sauce.

They called a cab for me, which I took to the park, about two blocks from the theater is as close as cars can get. $6 was well worth it.

I was half an hour early, so I people watched and took some photos of the buildings until the doors opened. Lovely fairly new theater, comfortable seats but could use more leg room. I was dead center in the Orchestra section, and at curtain time it looked like there would be no one in front of me. But just as 8 a ton of people poured in, and after 10 minutes the house was full. And here I thought Bay Area people were bad about showing up at the last minute.

The show was Allegiance, a musical set in a Japanese interment camp in Wyoming during WWII. I'll have a separate review in a day or three, but for now, let me just say George Takei has much better acting (and singing) chops than they ever let Sulu display, Philippina Lea Salonga and Chinese-American Telly Leung gave tour-de-force performances as Japanese-American siblings, and the show has changed a lot since I saw an investor's preview in May 2010, some for the better, some not so much. It is a powerful, emotional story, my eyes were not dry from the second minute till the end. SOme of that was not from the show itself, but from the fact that when I lived in Seattle some of my high school friends' parents had lived through that, and I had no idea how horrible it had been. It made me truly ashamed to be American. The Kubotas were neighbors, their grandchildren were friends of my sisters. My oldest sister was on Seattle's first sister city committee - the city was Kobe, Japan. The there was my high school crush, Mary Tahara and her mother Rose.  And so on. Anyway, the show was Worth Full Price™, which includes the $100 ticket, the flight from SAN, bus fare, taxi fare, the hotel, the dinner and all that walking.

After the show there were no taxis anywhere, so I walked all the way back to the hotel in an intermittent light drizzle, which was not so bad, it was still about 67°, the streets are well lighted and there were a lot of Our Nation's Youth in various states of punk-ish dress heading into the park for some nefarious Saturday night purpose or other.

Back to the room, took me a while to get to sleep, ­ but it was a comfortable bed,  so I was asleep before midnight.

Scumday

Woke up at about 7:30 this morning in the hotel in San Diego, looked out the window at the drab cloudy day and the evidence of showers overnight. Did my morning stuff then went downstairs and next door to the continental breakfast, and was rained on for that short trip. Had a toasted bagel (margarine, there was no cream cheese), a couple of boxes of fruit drinks, and an apple "pastry". There were a few pretty women in and out, and a litle girl whose daddy thought she was amazingly cute when all she was was an annoying attention whore.

It was still raining when I was done, so I parked myself on the comfortable sofa in the lobby and watched the rain, and the occasional passer-by, and the occasional checker-outer which included a couple in their late 20s where the woman trailed behind the man carrying a comforter and two pillows. And I played on the smartphone. Downloaded the SW Airlines app, and changed my reservation from 8 pm to 1pm. And took the upgrade, which was only $7. This moved my boarding to 4th in line.

Back to the room, packed up, back to the other building and checked out. Got change for a quarter from the front desk for the bus and at about 10 was at a bus stop waiting for the #3, which had just passed by when I walked out the hotel door. One lovely thing about SAN buses, each stop has a number, and if you text the number to the bus service, immediately it replies with the next 5 buses due at that stop. There were two 120 buses due before the next 3, and those went right where I wanted to go too. So in about 15 minutes I was on a 120, this time "only" paid $1.10, then waited about 10 minutes for the bus to the airport (another $1.10). I should have had lunch downtown first, I suppose, but wasn't very hungry.

At the Southwest terminal, the line for security check-in was a block and a half long. It was moving, but it was long - and kept getting longer after I joined it. When I got to the front 20 minutes later it seems my upgrade meant I did not have to get in that line after all, but there were no signs about that until you got around the corner and saw the second line. So it only saved me about 5 people's worth of a wait, which was all negated when the woman in front of me tripped the alarm, and they had to send for a manager to un-trip it.

The reason for the delay is the isiots at TSA had set up shop at the very narrow hallway at the bottom of the escalators, a natural bottleneck only wide enough for two walk-through machines. There are four conveyor belts, but the lack of scanners slowed everything down.

Up the escalator to the gates, most of the seats were taken. The gates are in a circle, I finally found a seat in the second to last gate. The next plane was going to Baltimore, which was funny because it was facing the bar which had the Ravens game on TV, and the Ravens were getting clobbered.

Turns out SAN is an excellent place to see eye candy, so I got a mocha from Starbucks, and mostly sat enjoying the view.

They told me at the gate when I checked to confirm my upgrade that they would start boarding at 1, but when I got there at 12:45 they were already lined up. I was 3rd on the plane (#2 did not show up early) and grabbed the first seat by the window. #1 and #3 for some strange reason went to the middle of the plane. I was all set at 1:05 with a very tall man in the aisle seat and no one in the middle, for them to shut the door and get us in the air on time, but latecomers kept showing up. A young woman (high school age) with her dad grabbed the middle seat while Dad went to the back where Mom was already seated. We did not get out of there till 1:19. About 20 people boarded late. I'm blaming the TSA backlog.

Very easy flight, no annoying children nearby, no turbulance, and this time I was on the ocean side, and the cloud cover was broken enough to see the islands, Moro Bay, Monterey and Half Moon Bay. I got some nice shots.

First row meant almost first off the plane, which was very nice. Especially after being almost last off on the way down. Still had the camera out, so was able to grab this shot as a couple of blackbirds decided to take advantage of the water fountains near the restrooms:


Waited 10 minutes for the parking lot shuttle, grumbling all the time about the a-holes who decided to put the smoking section right by the shuttle stop. Drove home on Central, dropped off my pack, picked up my mail, which had three things for previous tenants and the refund check from my last apartment. Looked it over at home, and will have to call them, they charged me instead of credited me for the amount of time I vacated early. Otherwise it was a more than fair sert of charges for cleaning and painting.

Sat in the recliner and watched football, with Domino sometimes on the arm, or walking across my lap, or parked on the sheepskin rug. Fired up the PC and took care of some things on FB which their phone app/mobile browser pages couldn't handle. Started up the VCR and the USB adapter, and set up to record my 2000 Sunnyvale Man of La Mancha. My all-time favorite theater experience. Uploaded the photos to the PC, processed them and uploaded them to Flickr. Wrote a short review of Allegiance on their web site. Watched more football. Dinner was dolmathes, followed by a small Turkey frozen dinner, then a bag of sweet corn, dessert was a Klondike bar and some chocolate booze-filled confections. Started a load of laundry which I entirely forgot about until now. Will run the dryer in the morning, and start another load too.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work. Team meeting at 10
Maybe BASFA, maybe MNF