no words

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Craziest weekend.  Getting ready for out of town guests, Z’s birthday festivities and coloring outside the lines.  I haven’t had much to say lately or maybe my brain has been too full to be creative-I’m not really sure.  The weekend seems noteworthy though.  Z turned thirty four on Saturday so I struck out from the house at 7:30 for one of his favorites that we never buy, doughnuts.   That is only the beginning of the madness.  A timeline maybe seems in order.

7:30 left the house – strangely felt a kiss of …is that cool air?  Fall starts tomorrow.

7:45 hit Charlies Gourmet Bakery for a few cookies for this week’s lunch. (I don’t bake as a rule and felt like giving Z a prolonged birthday treat)

7:47 ran into a training race?  What?  drove alongside people running.  Ignored GPS turn left every block for about 50.

7:57 what the heck.  Now what.  Turned right.

8:07 This is obscene.  Am now downtown and there are tourists taking pictures.  What time did they get up?

8:17 finally hit Bakery Plus for my $5 worth of doughnuts.  Ate one in the car out of frustration.

8:27 decided I should sit and wait for Freshfields Farm to open at 9 so I can counteract the cookies and doughnuts with fruits and vegetables.

8:57 they open three minutes early.  Thank goodness.IMG_20130921_112626

9:07 check out and head home with 5 bags of produce that will speak to a major mess tomorrow.

9:27  Home again with Z’s birthday doughnut.

Did this really all just happen?  Did I really buy all this produce?   Fresh eggs, Raspberries, Thai chillies, Jalapenos, Kirby Cukes, Lemons, Limes, green beans, snap peas, Onions, fresh herbs.  I have just set my day tomorrow in motion because no one in their right mind could eat all this.  We’ll see…

life long learning

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embarcadero so, I’m coming to the end of the San Francisco posts and this one isn’t devoted …necessarily, to the usual.    It’s an ‘I love learning post’.  I have a friend in Denver who loves learning -passionately.  And really, we all should.  Once you stop learning you may as well throw in the towel because in essence, your life is over.  Learning and exploring and extending your boundaries make the difference between life and life well lived.  We stayed a day after the conference ended just to do a little extra sight seeing and some reconnaissance for the Discovery Center and that included roughly a four mile walk and a trip to the Exploratorium.  We started out fairly early in the morning and made it down to the waterfront by the time Boccalone opened so Z could get a meat cone I had the most incredible steamed bun with a splash of chile sauce.  We hung a left and walked up to the giant public art that is a bow and arrow and then turned ourselves around and began to make our way up the Embarcadero.  Our first long stop, the Exploratorium, where we went to both research and have fun.  It is billed as a learning laboratory, an eye-opening, always-changing, playful place to explore and tinker with exhibits, tools, programs, and experiences that ignite curiosity, encourage exploration, and lead to profound learning.  Now to be clear, I lifted that text from their website but it is exactly what it says it is.  A place to explore and learn by doing, seeing, trying, failing and embedding.  I’ve been researching and considering ways people learn for the last six months or so and let me tell you something-the pathway to learning isn’t found through someone talking at you until you pull out your phone and browse the internet. It is found through digging in and finding answers to your questions. Questions that lead to other questions which lead to exploration, embedding and engagement in those things in your mind and heart as you take it all in.  The fact that you do it yourself is part of the key.  As we made our way through the exhibits with very likely 2000 of our closest friends we were able to try things, to be amazed and to get excited about things that might not always be exciting.  It reinforced for me that we don’t need to spoonfeed people.  If you give people tools they will often build something amazing.

 

when the cabbie isn’t sure if he should drop you off…

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badgirlI only had one dinner pre-set before our trip so most of the dinners were kind of – see how we feel, where and if we want to walk, how hungry or hangry we were.  Someplace between Orlando and San Francisco as I caught up on my magazine reading I ran across an article about Trick Dog, a mostly speakeasy styled bar serving a small menu.  I thought, well, that sounds good.  So, on our last night we jumped into a cab and gave the address.  The cabbie said something to the effect that it would be hard to get a cab back and that put a bit of drama into my mind but not enough to stop us.  Then, Trick Dog has no sign and no real clues as to what is inside and I could tell that he wasn’t at all sure that he should drop us off having passed some rather intense gathering of locals out for the evening.  But he did and we walked in.  It doesn’t really have a restaurant vibe.  We went upstairs and were seated on the balcony where we could watch all the cool kids drinking complicated cocktails.  There were only maybe eight or nine tables and it was industrially rustic.  From what I had read the bar menu was printed on Pantone color-chip books-this to me, is the height of cool.  But, I missed the Pantone books as the bar menu had recently been changed to 1950’s books of 45s with each drink printed on it’s own 45.  I ordered a ‘Bad Girl’ which was a St George Botanivore Gin with sherry, plum, lime & sencha soda.  It had a sage leaf floating in it and was ridiculously delicious.  So lightly sweet and fluffy.  I loved it.  We ordered a starter to share of something I will not claim to have ever eaten before, peaches & cottage cheese.  Now, I actually like cottage cheese as a rule, but this was over the top good.  I previously really only ever sprinkled it with pepper.  This had grilled peached, honey, ras al hanout and pistachios.  I loved the creamy dense cottage cheese with the char on the fruit and honey on the plate.   Actually, I need to try that at home.  Soon.    I wasn’t sure I needed to eat a full dinner and as a result went totally off the rails and ordered thrice cooked fries manimal style.  Super crunchy fries topped with this goo that they riffed from In and Out burger which is piled with some random american cheesy thousand island dressingy mess.  Honestly.  Z ordered a rice plate which was essentially deconstructed fried rice in a way that no take-out restaurant can compete with.  A fried cake of sticky rice with chewy shiitakes, pickled carrot and daikons, and ginger chicken.  Who thinks of this stuff.  The shiitakes were amazing and the chicken had the best flavor.  We ordered a scoop of burnt popcorn ice cream to finish just because it was billed as burnt popcorn.  Really it tasted of roasted caramel and some kind of a corn finish.  I am guessing they steep caramel corn in the ice cream base and then strain before they churn it.  Just a hint of burned caramel and salty finish.  Lovely. A food experience I would like to have more often.tinyreddoor

We got the name of a cab company from our server, paid our check and went down to wait on the sidewalk. This was a bit of magic in itself as Z spied a teeny tiny red door into the building where I am sure the Littles or a mouse with a motorcycle reside.  The cab whisked us breathlessly off towards home.

side note …or why we were there

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we went to San Francisco primarily because Z is a software engineer.  That is to say, he writes code that make internet web sites, and more recently, apps, work.  He has quite a talent and is filled with brain waves quite different from my own.  A result of this is that he sometimes works on a big project that is a WordPress multi-site of roughly 2500 (?) web pages for Campus Crusade called GCX (are you tracking with me…knowing I could be slightly wrong and/or off?)  GCX runs on WordPress so he went to WordCamp San Francisco.  All that said, I tagged along because this blog is also run on WordPress.  I am not the genius that he is but I can tag along and hold my own blog wise and never ever have written more than one word at a time of code and that only for making margins bigger or something like that.  WordCamp has two tracks though, the smart young people upstairs (ie developers) and the rest of us downstairs (users.)  Does this start to feel like Tron?  No wonder he likes that movie.  Anyhow, I went to the conference and went to the user track (except one developer one which was both over my head and super dull) and I learned a few things along the way.  Some about blogging, some about a few big marketing ideas in general.  I really related to some of the speakers for my own day to day job.  But, we used the opportunity for being there to see the city and eat our way around.  Here are some things I really enjoyed about the conference.

1.  Pretty much every presenter at the conference referenced He Who Shall Not Be Named.  (That would be Voldemort.  I’m not scared.)  And, a photo I’ll add to this blog reminds me of the statues in the Ministry of Magic was in the general meeting area at the conference.wordcamp

2.  If they didn’t reference He Who Shall Not Be Named they had a slide show with either

  • Lego
  • Fuzzy things like bunnies and/or kittens
  • both of those

I cannot explain this at all.  During the state of the word address by the younger than I founder of WordPress who has worked to revolutionize the interweb there was a comment made which was Usage is oxygen for ideas.  I totally resonate with this.  If you don’t use something you can’t know how to make it better, or more fun, or actually useful or whatever.  Be a user.  The other things I learned were these.  They reference web sites of course, but I say, for marketing and ‘sales’ in general these are the markers of good content.

Why?  Be clear about the why of the existence of the website.
What is a successful visitor going to get, see, do from your space.
Who?  Is the audience
who are they, what do they like, do, how to help them.  Make the space work for them.
What?  Formats are you going to use to share content
As opposed to just text,  info graph, white paper, audio, video, webinars, etc.
Where? Are people going to find the website.
of course don’t have a url that MAKES NO SENSE or people can’t remember.
When?  Update a minimum of one a month
How often do you update content.  An editorial calendar when it comes to blogs but also holds true for stores, museums, etc.  Clearly you can’t update some things that are spendy as often as others but keep it on the radar.
How? Will you know if site is meeting audience needs.  Analytics.  Benchmarks, likes, reservations, etc. how to know if business is coming , coupons, stc.  Unless your space is ‘just for fun’ then you have to have a way to decide if it is working.
Have a plan.

All this makes me want to be better at every aspect of what I do.  Working, blogging, whatever.    I love strategy.

There was also food at this thing, just to be clear.  Lunch everyday where you could mingle and ‘horrors’ …network.  Some of our lunchmates were interesting and chatty, some I decided should have saved the airfare and some just sat there in introverted terror.  The best thing they served were these glazed lemon poppyseed cookies.  I pretty much want one right now.