sweet freedom

After almost three weeks and enough head-scratching to cause major bleeding and trauma... I finally got the iMac to communicate with the great, wide Internet... and incidentally, that's where I'm typing from.

Major kudos go to Paul for answering pretty much all my questions and providing a number of brilliant solutions to what were previously unsolvable problems. His firm grip on the technical outreached my grasp of the concepts, and the whole adventure would never have even gotten off the ground without his technical support. thanks, bro.

So, back to the story.

Wednesday afternoon was cool and rainy. Our first stop was a pizza joint somewhere in SF (this was before I developed any familiarity with my surroundings). I have said to anyone who will listen, and will probably say for many weeks from now, that I had the best food ever while I was gone, and this was just the beginning of a wondrous culinary journey.

There is a whole industry that remains dedicated to manufacturing very expensive watches. Not digital watches with built-in PDAs or that tell you the weather or anything like that, but real mechanical watches that perform bizarre, unlikely tasks simply by way of interlocking gears. Each function that is not part of time-telling is called a "complication." A good example of a really complicated complication: Some watches, if you flip over the face, have a season-dependent astronomical chart on the underside. If you turn over your watch, it will provide a guide of the constellations to you, depending on the time of year. (I wish I had a link: anyone?) My favorite, though, is the perpetual calendar. A calendar that will be correct in perpetuity... inside a watch, manifested in little bits of metal teeth.

Norm has an affinity for watches with complications. Norm is the sales manager of the car dealership where Kevin works, and he would be our host for an evening on the town. Kevin was critiquing my appearance as though I were his wife and we were out trying to wine and dine a client that would close the deal of the century, if only my hair were perfect enough; I was a bit apprehensive that I would let it slip that I'm a total country bumpkin in the presence of this amazing salesman.

Norm turned out to be a very friendly, likable fellow. We sat down at a Chinese restaurant near downtown SF (the name of which I don't remember, sorry), shook hands all around, and made small talk about the nature of work, business, and keeping employees happy... all the while being served sake bombs (like a jager-bomb, but with sake instead of jagermeister and beer instead of red bull - you're right, it doesn't taste very good) and crab soup. I generally disapprove of seafood and soup, but I figured that this was my first and possibly only chance to enjoy some local delicacies that would be unlikely to appear in my local grocery store. Norm was happy to oblige, summoning a server and ordering dish after dish in Chinese, leaving me mystified as to what would arrive at our table to replace the growing stack of Heineken bottles.