I left everyone at Thursday of last week - I had just finished my email from Tahoe and off to the Bay Area I went.


I drove out of the Sierras and past Sacramento.
I drove through Napa to get a feel for it, and then spend about 2 hrs to travel approximately 50 miles into the heart of TRUE San Francisco - the bridges are a HUGE bottle neck to enter the city.
I met up with Rey Lukito, a classmate from Dublin, who lives right below the Golden Gate Park on 3rd ave. We grabbed some dinner and went out for drinks on Haights St, historically a popular place for hippies - and there were remnants of them even that night. About six folks on the corner were involved in a variety of things while 2 officers hung around. One was playing guitar, another "wowing out", another telling the cop that "it's not right man" and just for good measure two were in a dispute over $1.35. I have to say that I liked it. My hitchhiker Daniel would have fit riiiight in.

The bar was a typical pub ( notable deal: Chamays for $10!!!), so I started talking to some guy who is a game developer for Sony to grab some tips. The conclusion is that the new PS3 is a HUGE gamble - they are a year behind 360, the tech inside is very expensive and apparently very advanced, yet the graphics will not look impressive. It will have the proposed 'new' DVD format and to round off....it will cost $600! Parents will clearly make the right decision to buy the PS3, instead of the next generation Nintedo that will cost $200. Watch that Sony ticker tape in the Fall for fun changes.

This was Rey's first week on the new job (and yes I do love his gusto to go drinking hard on a Thursday when first impressions are important) and he made sure to wake up a little buzzed on Friday morning. I don't think there was too much of an issue since his firm openly drinks on Friday afternoons - love that West Coast ethic.

I met with Calvin Huang on Friday and stayed with him through Sunday morning. This guy had started work that week just like Rey, but with AT Kearney, so he was off to NYC for more training and had to catch a 9:00 am flight to get to the east coast. My IBM guys get to fly out Monday mornings and still manage to grunt about it, can you imagine not having a Sunday???

The next paragraph, I realize, is rambling and observation of the weather and the heat wave, so you can skip over it.

Since I am so used to moisture rich environments and the way temperatures feel because of it I am fascinated with other geographies' climates. First as background, the bay provides very nice 70-80F temps year around, the wine country is about 15F higher and even further inland (Sacramento) is another 10F higher. [Today Napa had 108, I can't imagine whats West of here.] The Bay provides SF a nice temp year around, and a cooling-off for the evenings, so many houses do not have AC. Well, this heat wave forced many to buy portable AC units (that run from $300 to $550) including Cal, but ALL appliance stores were out (yes, more were ordered for this week, but the weekend cleaned the stores out). Now...the heat is on, AC's are running, the city is asking to control energy use (mind you, everyone is turning extra light bulbs off and making efforts to carpool) but public places are ICE cold AND here is a whole new section of the population that went out to buy portable AC units and is plugging them into the grid! We know now that the original California black outs were from purposeful Enron spikes, but Cali, have fun with black-outs for which you'll be responsible.



I spent Sunday night near the coast and in the morning drove through fog that was actually climbing (!) the mountains. State Route 1 is very mountainous, winds around a lot, and slow as hell - so traveling down that thing to look at the coast is not as scenic as one can think.

So, I secured a job with a vineyard and will be starting with them tomorrow. Its exactly what I wanted - I am working in the tasting room, pouring samples and talking about the wine. This is a smaller winery, therefore I have access to learn about the entire process from soil, grapes, crush, oak, aging, palette, marketing and distribution.

The three famous areas for wine here are: Napa, Sonoma, Russian River Valley, and Dry Creek Valley being the most newly developed. It would have been way too appropriate to find a place in the Russian River (especially since I think that for middle range, those are the best California wines), but my vineyard is in Napa.

Housing was another fiasco - living off of friends and camps was starting to wear thin, so figuring it out was a relief. Nothing in Napa or Sonoma is affordable or really available for a month at a time (unless it's a house for $2,000), so i had to comb everything online and all the local newspapers, but in the end it was trusty Craigslist to the rescue.

I called yesterday to check out a place, came around 8:00PM to see it; we chatted for a  couple hours and by 10:45 I was in because we ended the conversation with -
"ok, I'm off yo bed, Yuri this is your room".

I am living in suburban development of Santa Rosa, the largest town around the wine country, with a 32 year old hippie lady who has 5 year old twins. Her housemate had to move out a month early so she needed to rent out two rooms to hold August over. She rented the one room to a 22 year old girl, Marissa, from LA, who is, I suppose, just treading water and doing a variety of things. For example, she is waiting to go to Australia in a month to work on organic farms. Of the two gals, Erica the host, is most certainly the wackier one, so having Marissa and her hopefully cute friends in the area will be most advantageous. Marissa speaks fluent Spanish so I have had her promise that we will practice speaking to one another. " Como se dice en Espanol 'where do you keep your condoms'?"

Erica is what I can call a faux spiritual being combined with 20th Century Granola. She has a bunch of Hindu items around the house, a Jesus picture on the fridge, she knows nothing about Eastern philosophies ( I took a course on them) she is in love with change,and changing ways of thinking, she overuses the word energy, has bad world music that sounds like Yani and Bolton taking a sax and a keyboard to Ravi Shankar compositions; and she manages to spend $900 per month on food because she believes in only organic products.

Now I haven't seen Birkenstocks in the house, even if the solo US distributor is in Novato, 5 minutes from here - but you can still feel the strong Granola vibe throughout!

Work starts tomorrow, ahhh at 9:30, so I am soaking in the opportunity to sit in front of the 'net and get my fix of Wikipedia and much needed reading.

Ciao,

Y