California Internship – Week 3

It’s been another fun filled week in sunny California. Seriously sunny – we had a little heat wave where the temp was about 100 degrees Fahrenheit and that’s almost 40 degrees Celsius!

In the past week I’ve finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” which I did quite enjoy even though I found her to be a little judgy sometimes, and way too flowery often. However, she’s patient and observes little things that I never do and I enjoyed seeing gardening from her perspective. As someone who kills plants whenever they are near, it’s a form of escapism to go into her world – and it’s a beautiful, appealing world. Furthers my notions of packing up when school is done and finding somewhere I can be a computer geek and also raise chickens, goats, sheep and learn to make cheese.

Inspired by the book, and all the other food related literature I’ve been devouring as of late, I went to the Mountain View farmers market two Sundays ago, and this past Sunday I met Naomi at the Alemany Farmers Market to pick up some fresh produce to bring to Kim and Hillie’s house. I had this plan to make them some snacks entirely from what was available. As well as produce, there was a great one woman band:

Boy was I not disappointed! There were pink mushrooms, orange cauliflower, fresh organic fennel, blue potatoes (which I love), can you see that I’m going for colour?! Also I picked up some sage goat cheese, knowing that Kim was mostly on a goat/sheep diet right now. These items resulted in the dishes you see below…oh yeah, there was some asparagus too.

After our pretty simple fare, Kim and Hillie proceeded to ignore me and play with their iPhones…naw – not really – but they sure did make me jealous.

I really kinda want an iPhone…and no, it won’t make me any more likely to answer a phone. It will just make me more likely to Geocache.

The next day was “Bay to Breakers” – a regular event in the city that draws out the weirdness in a predominantly young, heterosexual population. It was a sight to behold. On top of snapping pictures of costumes that interest me, I also enjoyed taking in the scenery as we walked from one side of SF (the bay) to the end of Golden Gate Park (the breakers) a total of 12Km during which we walked for 3 hours and 15 mins. The slide show below contains some of my favourite pictures from the event including salmon who walked “upstream”, Elvis impersonators doing a mass pee break, and Spiderman. Something that I find both amazing and confusing is the “Yes on A” campaign. Maybe if I was living here I would pick up on what the intricacies of that proposition were, but since I don’t, I think it’s funny to be pushing such a simple phrase that suggests nothing of what it’s about. “Yes on A!” … sure, why not?

A few choice moments were seeing the sun break through the clouds at 7am by Embarcadero, meeting an adorable little beagle, and seeing the building with all the furniture stuck on the outside:

The icing on the cake, in Golden Gate park after walking for 3 hours – Surf Rabbanim and Thing 1 through 8 (from Dr. Seuss):

On Wednesday night I got to attend a birthday party for Kim who looked so healthy and happy, it doesn’t seem at all like she just got that kidney 2 weeks ago…

Finally, this week at work the Mozilla Store needed some new pictures in preparation for the release of Firefox 3 and so a few of the interns participated. Here you see my friend Armen showing his love to the Fox…and the Fox hanging around. That costume is getting around…recently the Firefox completed a Triathlon.

Okay, that’s this week’s update. It’s a long weekend and I’m going to spend much of it outside and in the city, so there will be plenty more photos next week.