Category: Travel

Why I Blog

I  received an email the other day from  HD Honscheid, an old friend with whom I used to work at Spectra Medical Systems,. HD also worked at Sun while I was there and his wife, Una was my pediatrician’s nurse when the girls were young. HD and Una are retired now and just took a wonderful trip to Japan. The pictures on their web site are fantastic. Looking at them really gives you a feel for the cultural experience they had. Getting to know people on a trip is so much more rewarding than  just a site seeing.

His email really made me remember one of the main reasons I blog. I blog to keep in touch with friends and family. Every once and a while my mind strays from my purpose in blogging and I wish for a bigger readership. His email snapped me back on track. Blogging has not only helped me stay in contact with old friends who I cherish but it has also enabled me to make several new friends. In my mind that is what blogging is all about.

I’m in Atlanta

I’m in Atlanta (actually Marietta) on business. The flight was smooth and on time, direct from Oakland to Atlanta. This is my first visit to Georgia outside of the Atlanta airport. I’m going to be pretty busy with meetings so I don’t imagine I’ll get to see much but it is still nice to be some place new. I ordered sweet tea with dinner, something I only do when I am in the south.

Stanford Theater

If you are ever in the San Francisco bay area and want to do something fun and different I recommend going to see a movie at the Stanford Theater in downtown Palo Alto. The theater was first opened in 1935 and was purchased in 1987 by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation. They have totally renovated it. It is a beautiful theater complete with a pipe organ that rises in front of the screen and is played  between shows.

The theater only plays classic movies. On Sunday we  saw To be or Not to Be with Jack Benny and Carole Lombard and Midnight with Claudette Colbert and  Don Ameche. What fun. Both are entertaining, funny movies. The Stanford Theater is a wonderful place to see a movie.  The building and decorating alone make it worthwhile. It is a great experience.

Traveling

I haven’t been posting much lately but I’m going to turn that around starting now. I’ve been doing some traveling lately. As I mentioned a few weeks ago I made my first business trip to Tucson where Quicken Solutions Group  Customer Support is headquartered. I finally got to meet all my co-workers there. Intuit’s fiscal year starts in August so we were doing planning for the new fiscal year.

We also did a great video scavenger hunt as a team building exercise. I usually hate these kinds of things and I went in with a bit of a ‘let’s get this over with’ attitude. But it turned out to be a lot of fun and definitely was a team builder. The goal was to earn points by completing tasks off a list and video taping us completing our tasks. One task was to have a stranger do a celebrity impersonation. One of the women in our group has horses so we went out to  see her horses and one of them impersonated Seabiscuit and the other did a great  Mr Ed impersonation complete with "oh Wilburrrr!" Another requirement was to make a three minute movie using only lines from this list . I think our movie was definitely the best. We ended up at a great restaurant in Tucson, had dinner and watched all the  movies. I was totally impressed with what a wonderful group I work with, all they have accomplished this past year and what fun the scavenger hunt turned out to be.

My second trip was this past weekend. Duke left Wednesday to  take his twin daughters to college in LA.  I flew down to join him Thursday night.  I got to see my daughter Shannon and see Duke’s girls dorm and campus. Then Duke and I took the rest of the weekend to drive back up the coast. On the way home we visited the Reagan Presidential library, strolled through downtown Santa Barbara, played a little blackjack and poker at the Chumash casino, and tasted wine at San Marcos Creek Vineyard.

One of my goals is to visit all of the presidential libraries. I’ve been to the Kennedy library,  the Johnson library, and now the Reagan library. I’d like to do research at each library but so far have not even started that. If you could research one thing in Reagan’s papers what would it be?

So now we are empty nesters!