So I'm here at some hotel by the airport at a Microsoft .NET conference on Windows Workflow Foundation. Already, I'm ticked off. I've been sitting here for 10 minutes and the presenters are all 'let's wait a few minutes for the stragglers." There are 150 people in this room who responsible enough to show up on time and early and you're going to punish ALL of us for the sake of 10 stragglers! People should be outraged. There should be riots up in here.

It's not like the first 15 minutes of your presentation is going to be packed with such integral information about the "only way to ever get this technology to work is (...). Nooooo, It's usually packed with info such as "hi, I'm Karl...let me do some bad stand-up about my background and talk about how I prayed my way out of my STAGE FOUR cancer for my "captive" audience that I'm holding hostage against the real information that they're here to learn.

Ugh. He actually started his presentation with the phrase. "Me and my partner are just normal people." Really! I thought you were some bad-ass holy person with special magic cancer curing god powers. Good thing you're just a normal Microsoft person with normal smart person intellect with a better than average opinion of yourself and a worse than average actual reason to have that opinion.

You and your stupid Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts make me sick.

Today, I got up and went hiking. First, I realized I had no flimsy backpack. I have a computer backpack, and a really expensive brand-new shmancy backpacking backpack for all you people out there who are dying to take me on a backpacking trip... BUT I had no flimsy backpack. The kind that you need to carry granola bars, water, and your car keys. So I went and bought a pinkish vinyl one on sale at Ross for like 10 bucks. And it carried my granola bars just dandy. I had to of course go buy granola bars from trader joes, cause all I have at my house is strawberries and beef and some runners GU. 

I hiked the Beaudry North Motorway. It's a fire road. I almost got to the peak and then freaked out about mountain lions about a half mile from the top.  I had been at a fork and had used the iphone to see which path I should take and I accidentally read about some mountain lion spottings earlier this month on the trail I was on. So of course I was all, 'I've already decided to die a slow death-by-smog so this choose-your-own-adventure life is going back down the mountain'  So my hike was all panic and no conquest. (i still got maybe 4.5 miles  in total, half with a decent climb) I then came home and researched bear and mountain lion attacks for 4 hours. List of all reported attacks in CA. So it turns out you are more MUCH more likely to be killed by a deer than a mountain lion. Like only 13 puddy tat attacks have been fatal in the last 100 years and the vast majority were on children and solo-hiker women under 5'6''...wait a minute....the puddy tat does want to eat me. If only I had three inches more of terrifying humanness . Maybe if I had a bouffant and a batman cape I'd feel safe like a normal person. Regardless, though, kitty critter attacks are extremely rare in anyplace excepting my sister's apartment which BTWay, I left from last week with a punctured and torn nose from when that stupid gray cat landed on my face in the middle of a fight with that stupid orange cat.

So a cool thing happened too!. I didn't see a single hiker on the way up the mountain. But on the way down I see a Doberman trying to dragging a tall mountain biker up the trail. And I was all 'that looks like the dog at my house...wait! it is!! So it was really strange that the only other person I saw on the trail for the duration was the people i live in the same house with. are you ready for it..."small world isn't it." You thought I would spare you from cliches but no. hahahahaha. sucker.

I had a fantastic trip to Point Reyes National Seashore with some buddies of mine.  We did a 12 -13 mile hike with an itsy bitsy bit of rock climbing on Saturday where we saw birds, mussels, a slug, deer, hobbits, sky hobbits, poison oak, and a naked man! Then we did some urban hiking in San Francisco and saw some Sea Lions some Asians and some Italians.

Now I'm in Reno, and I'm hiding in the Library. The Library at UNR is so big that it has its own blessed ecosystem.  Free from the predator outside that has been forcing my eyes to water and my nose to be stuffed and my shirt sleeves to be covered in sneeze for the last 4 days.  I need to get back to LA where smoggy air conditions are killing me much slower then the air here in Reno.