San Francisco

We had a wonderful trip to San Francisco in April. We'd love to go again!

It was sunny and rainy, and surprisingly, it was colder when it was sunny. I was thankful there were no earthquakes while we were there... at least none that we could feel.

We had fun with our good friends John and Dana, saw some new sights, and walked all over. We took BART instead of renting a car, but we also enjoyed Dana driving us around on Friday; otherwise, we'd never have been able to drive over the Golden Gate Bridge.

I have discovered that I am enamored by blooming flowers. Yes, I have always loved different plants, but I guess I was more fascinated than I thought. I realized this after taking numerous photos of blooms and then seeing a picture of me taking pictures of flowers. Ha!

What should be our next little diversion trip?

The famous Golden Gate Bridge

Cherry Tree Blossoms

These guys were over by the Ferry Building along the Embarcadero.

My friend Dana is with me. We've known each other for almost 25 years.

The orchids at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park were spectacular!

Funny story about this Chinese woman: she and her counterpart toward the back are said to make 20,000 fortune cookies per day. See the rejects in the bin in front of her? They sell those too! The cookies come around on the little conveyor belt and she grabs one, puts in a fortune, then folds it over the metal pipe in front of her. They were pretty good despite the fact that there were pigeons walking around in the store when we first arrived! We had to pay 50 cents to take her picture.

Alcatraz Island. Welcome to the Rock!

Hackers!!!

Last night Amy told me to check my e-mail, and behold, my AOL account had been broken into, and yucky e-mails sent out from it.

They don't appear to be malicious; however, they are bothersome. The time from the first e-mail to the last one sent out was less than 2 minutes, so this was done digitally by computer. No human could copy the addresses into that many e-mails and send them out in less than 2 minutes.

Seriously, if people that spend their time and talent hacking into other people's e-mail, identity, etc., would simply devote their time and talent to worthy pursuits, I am certain we would have world peace and a cure for cancer.

The wasted potential!

In my case, I believe they used computer algorithms to determine my password and then get into my account or my address book. All my software definitions are up to date; my computer had just been scanned for threats and was then scanned again and all is clean.



So, the question remains - if they can write the complicated algorithms that allow them to do these things, why don't they use it for more worthy pursuits? (No, that is not a rhetorical question.)

I'm sure the answer is money, laziness, and the thrill of seeing if they can do it. I just think it is a waste of time, talent, potential, and probably the lack of a concerned adult in their young life that would have taught them right from wrong.

I'm glad that these didn't appear to be malicious, and perhaps it is a good wake-up call to double my password security.



I apologize if you received one of the e-mails and I hope you'll take time to check your security settings too.

Friends and Fowl

For our anniversary, we spent the day together and took a drive to SE Arizona, visiting Chiracahua National Monument and into Wilcox trying to find sandhill cranes on their annual migration. The cranes were illusive - eventually they made themselves known by flying overhead at dusk. Below are a few photographs from the day.


Looking west toward the Dragoon Mountains from Masai Point in Chiricahua Nat'l Mon.



The old homestead



Ducks really can walk on water...



The sandhill cranes



More sandhill cranes


We had a fun day together celebrating our 29 years.