a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Paul, Thomas and I went for dinner at the Old Bamboo Vietnamese Restaurant in Seattle’s International District. It’s the new incarnation of the Spring Garden Restaurant, but in our estimation not quite as good. Afterwards we went to a bakery-cafe to pick up some dessert. I picked the red bean mousse cake. It reminded me of the red bean-filled buns I used to buy at the 7-11 in Hong Kong.
I ran some errands Friday morning, but then had I to go home and answer a dozen e-mails that came in from the Denver project. Technology brings the work e-mails to my smart phone, but I cannot pull up full screen work sheets and applications on a tiny phone screen!
Yesterday was Election Day in South Africa (the national elections is held every 5 years), so I had to check in on the results. The election is the first one after Nelson Mandela’s death, and marks the 20th anniversary since he was elected South Africa’s first post-apartheid president. As for the 2014 elections, seems to me there are no major surprises so far : the African National Congress (ANC) is on the way to win in all the provinces except the Western Cape. The Democratic Alliance holds sway there. The support for any party after these two falls off precipitously, but hey – they keep trying. There is the Economic Freedom Fighters with some support, and way, way down the list with 3,000 votes nationally, the Keep It Straight and Simple Party (KISS). The KISS party’s logo is a kiss imprint of two lips. Yes.
My body clock is still shifted toward going to bed early and getting up early, so I went for a walk early in the morning. (Normally I go to bed late and sleep until I have to get up!). Here are some pictures I took along 14th Street here in downtown Denver.
For the first time this year while I had been in Denver, I left my jacket in the hotel. The day-time temperatures reached into the 80s (26 °C+) here in Denver on Monday and Tuesday. I’m still a little bleary-eyed from jet lag, but today was already a lot better than Monday!
It’s Monday and I was off to Denver early this morning. No rest for the wicked, as the saying goes!
I read about ‘The Silicon Valley Conspiracy’ in Bloomberg Business Week on the airplane. Only thing is, it was for real. Over the past several years, Google, Apple, Adobe and Intel conspired to use their vast wealth and warped sense of entitlement, says Businessweek, to suppress the salaries of their programmers and engineers. They basically agreed not to hire away each other’s employees. The $324 million that the companies agreed to pay to settle a class-action law suit, amounts to 0.4% of their combined total revenue for the most recent quarter. That ‘Don’t Be Evil’ slogan attributed to the Google of yore is starting to look awfully tarnished.
I had the removal of one of the three big trees in my back yard scheduled for this past Friday, and it went ahead even though I was traveling. The arborist that took the tree out stopped by today (just to say he planted a sign out on the sidewalk to advertise his business). Seattle City Light had to take the power line coming into the house by the corner down for the day, and it took them until 12 noon on Friday to get here – but after that everything went well. (Yes, I don’t like to take out trees, but this one has been making trouble for me for a number of years by giving squirrels access to the roof, dumping pine needles into the gutter, and it’s in the way of a new fence that has to go in right about where it stands).
I made it in to my Seattle home at around 2 pm this afternoon. The flight went well; Lufthansa took good care of us and I managed to sleep a little bit. It’s just all those time zones we crossed to get here : my body clock has a lot of adjustment to do.
It’s 7 am here in Frankfurt. We arrived an hour ago from Johannesburg, at 6 am. The Germans run a sharp operation here (of course), with everyone at the airport at their posts this early in the morning, and most of the duty-free stores and others open as well.
I’m at Cape Town airport. I will go back the same way I came, with a stop in Johannesburg, then up north to Frankfurt, and then across the Atlantic to Seattle for an arrival on Saturday.
My time in Stellenbosch is running out, so here are some pictures I took as I ran errands with my brother and sister-in-law.
