The San Francisco Chronicle’s Tom Stienstra shares his favorite view spots around San Francisco.
My personal favorite spot to take in the Golden Gate is Hawk Hill at the Marin Headlands. This may be the No. 1 urban lookout in the world. The panorama features the entrance to San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, with San Francisco as an Oz-like Emerald City backdrop.
Over at Sharon Park, our early fall rains have brought out the first new growth in the woodland grassy area just beyond the park – slowly replacing the golden grass of California summer.
As the day’s shadows lengthen toward December, California’s fall moisture kicks in and re-boots the growing season all over again – following months of no rain at all – making it a very pretty time for an afternoon stroll through the woods. Soon the new grass will be too tall. In the spring of the new year, the goats will descend upon it to nibble it bare.
Elsewhere in the park, the mulch is arriving as the park caretakers grind up the fruits of this year’s growth elsewhere. The aromas in this new fall mulch are a special treat for our dog’s nose! And, the ducks are back — having arrived in quantity a few weeks ago.
San Jose’s KSJO (now owned by Clear Channel) has recently changed formats after 36 years from hard rock to a Spanish language format of Mexican favorites.
The switch at KSJO is part of a broader initiative by Clear Channel — the nation’s largest radio station owner, with more than 1,200 stations nationwide and 10 in the Bay Area — to bring Spanish-language programming to its stations in more than 20 markets.
More on Clear Channel’s programming strategies in a recent edition of Ben Fong-Torres’ Radio Waves column.
The San Francisco Chronicle’s Datebook has an article by Tom Graham titled City of Hills describing some of the hills of San Francisco.
Included as a sidebar is a a listing of the City’s Top 20 Hills.
This weekend was Fleet Week in San Francisco — but, alas, the US Navy Blue Angels for the first time in many years were elsewhere. Canada’s Snowbirds were the star attraction for this year’s airshow — and, having seen them perform for the first time last year, they are pretty amazing. The Snowbirds’ formation flying — with so many aircraft — is very beautiful. But we still miss the sound and speed of our Blue’s F-18’s!
Fall is slowly making itself known here in northern California.
My favorite jaunt in the late afternoon is a walk or two around Sharon Park here in Menlo Park. On those lazy summer Sunday afternoons, the grassy lawns in the park are the perfect place for reading the Sunday papers – lying out in the fresh air on that blanket in our own little private space.
Over the last few weeks – with the daylight steadily diminishing and the late afternoon sun angle decreasing in lock step – there’s a whole new feel to the place. Over the last week or two, the ducks (who were gone all summer) have been day-by-day steadily increasing their presence on the pond — multiple males circling females out on the water in what looks like the circle of life playing out in realtime.
The late afternoon air has taken on a just noticeable bit of that fall crispness — although nothing like that fall shift in the air that Midwesterners know so well. None of those burning leaves here in California either, those leaves that I used to build forts in this time of year as a kid growing up in Ohio before my Dad raked them out to the curb and lit the match.
Some folks say we don’t enjoy the seasons here in California – but in Sharon Park I see the seasonal cycle play out day by day.
I was up in Seattle for a couple of meetings yesterday and took a bunch of pictures as we flew back into the San Francisco Bay Area on the return leg of the tip. It was a spectacular afternoon — and I had a superb seat for the show!
While on the road earlier this week, I finally finished reading Bethany McLean’s book The Smartest Guys in the Room. It’s a story of the Enron debacle, told in all of its gory detail.
The book begins with ex-Enron exec Cliff Baxter’s suicide a few weeks following Enron’s bankruptcy filing and then peels back to the early days of Ken Lay before following the story through to the end. An amazing story of arrogant egos gone wild. In particular, the chapter on Enron’s manipulation (along with others) of the California electricity and natural gas markets is downright sickening. it’s one of those books that has you washing your hands after reading.
Update: Tomorrow’s Sunday New York Times has a long article based upon interviews with Ken Lay in which Lay claims he’s innocent of any crimes — but, as CEO, admits he is accountable for what happened at Enron. What a guy!
Don Park’s got a great idea — a monthly ad hoc get together for folks to show and tell their latest stuff.
Reminds me of the old Homebrew Computer Club meetings or, more recently, the events during the Internet boom times that Garage.com used to hold for its members every month at Quadrus — they did quality control and limited the presentations to three companies having 15 minutes maximum to strut their stuff.
Sue McAllister reports in the San Jose Mercury News that median home prices in the San Francisco Bay Area were $520,000 in April.
The new half-million-plus median price for resale single-family homes in the Bay Area was up 17 percent from April 2003, according to a report Thursday from DataQuick Information Systems.
With mortgage rates on the rise and the Fed about to increase interest rates, this has to be close to the real estate market peak for this cycle.