silicon valley and adulthood

I spent monday through thursday of last week at a customer site in California for the delivery of 2 of our systems. While I was there I noticed some interesting things about California. First, there are too darn many people there. However, being that there are so many people out there, it is unbelievably diverse. It's great to walk down the street and not be surrounded by only whites and just see different people.

Second, forest fires are real man, Smokey isn't lying. Of course they are real, but in Ohio you hear about them on the news and they are always in some far off place burning x number of acres and y number of homes are in danger and the information just passes in 1 ear and out the other (for me anyway). Well, when we landed at SJC there was a forest fire just down the road about 10 miles. It seemed huge to me and we went up the road a couple of exits (away from the fire) to our hotel and I could see it from my window (along with Yahoo! and McAfee buildings--right there!). There was just this huge column of smoke that went up into the air. My first forest fire. Unbelievable.

Third, Silicon Valley. Here I am in the hotel lobby getting my breakfast in my doc martens that severely need shining, faded out Levi's, a button up shirt from Kohl's and my jheri curl still wet from the shower flopping whichever way it wants to flop surrounded by all these Silicon Valley hot shots with their shiny shoes, dockers, crisply ironed shirts, business suits and ties. I pointed this out to my co-worker and he said 'hey, we're silicon valley hot shots too!'. Who knows. It is what it is.

Sorry for the lack of an appropriate segue here, but one downside to having an adult vehicle that young adults in their late teens and early 20's don't have is that there is a lack of helpful information to be found on the internet on that vehicle. We've got a little brake light issue and I thought I would try and find a forum for our car, post my problem and some gear head who could type would tell me all I needed to know. That's what I do for my truck and what I used to do for Amanda's old car. So I find a forum that seems decent, register and post my question friday night. Well, in 24 hours there has been no reply. There hasn't even been another post since then and the most recent post before me was on wednesday! Good grief Charlie Brown.