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Well, the rains have returned, so a quiet evening at home in front of the fire is in order. We made great progress on our painting today…and hopefully, I’ll have some FINAL shots to post tomorrow. The new room color is quite a striking difference from the previous blah. Of course, what I’m REALLY ready to be done with is spotting–cloudy days make for poor lighting, which makes it very very tough to find all of the spots where the roller missed. AAARGH. Time to move the furniture back in!

In the meantime, I’m having fun playing with my new iPod, which Jeff gave me for Christmas. I uploaded my first CD from my collection–a Pink Floyd CD, which happens to be the first band I bought when I got my very first CD player in college. Many thanks to my friend Keith for enlightening me 🙂

I also bought my first music video on iTunes. Now THIS is a kick ass feature. I bought U2’s City of Blinding Lights. I also downloaded my first podcast from my all-time favorite radio show, The Don and Mike Show. I’ve listened to these guys for 15 years…and now they can entertain me on long flights.

The bottom line is that I’m happy to have joined everyone in the 21st century.

Of course, I’m having to work around Buster, who has decided that I make the best bed on a rainy day. He doesn’t see to care about my iPod.

Well, as promised, here are a few pictures from this past week. I started the week with a crack-of-dawn flight to Colorado Springs. On top of traveling with and working with some of my closest coworkers, a nice perk was a top-floor view of the Rockies including Pikes Peak. This particular photo was taken at dawn.

When our plane took off on Tuesday afternoon, it did a hard bank for 30-60 seconds. The late day lighting was really quite dramatic. One odd feature I noticed is what appears to be the Colorado version of the Great Pyramids going up (second picture below).

Later in the week, I flew to Orange County for a client meeting. I won’t even go into my frustrations with LA traffic, because I’m determined to keep this blog happy 🙂 But I did end up at the Hilton directly across from Disneyland, and my Hilton Honors status got me a fine room overlooking the park. So, what a surprise when in the morning I looked out over the California Adventure portion of the park to see a replica of the Palace of Fine Arts, a San Francisco landmark. You can see it below–the domed terra cotta building.

I’m in between business trips and should have some pictures posted from both Colorado Springs and LA later this week. In the meantime, I found two snippets in the paper today that I just HAD to share.

It would seem that our San Francisco supervisors really do have too much time on their hands. In the past, they have passed all sorts of measures that cannot legally be enforced, but seem to make someone happy.

The latest attempted “resolution” is from the supervisor representing District 11, an odd little area on the southern edge of the City. The resolution recommended that the City adopt the Seattle Seahawks as its official team for the duration of the NFL playoffs. Rather than kill the resolution, the Supervisors referred it to committee.

Pause.

Breathe.

Moving on, I also learned that a naked man was killed Tuesday morning at 2am while running down I-280 in the City.

What a town.

Jeff and I worked on our painting today. The previous owners inexplicable peach-ish color and mysterious stains along the baseboards are FINALLY GONE! Tomorrow, the color goes up…Carrington Beige to make all of our blue accents pop.

But in the spirit of being Mr. Helper, I thought I would throw out an inspiration picture from our visit to the Vatican Museum. I thought Jeff might appreciate that I’m participating in the design process. 🙂 One change I might recommend–perhaps swap out the Virgin Mary with a statue of David. Otherwise, this understated room is sooooo us!

This morning, San Francisco was enveloped in one of our fog/low cloud blankets. Perfect weather to light the fireplace. The skies cleared up in the afternoon, and we had a beautiful afternoon for painting (more on that in a bit).

Now, as I glance back over my last few postings, I noted that my blog has become The Weather Channel. So, to break myself of that habit and add some visual interest, I worked on a few images from Venice that I have not shown before.

The first image is just a random, typical Venetian alley. The second was taken inside Santa Maria della Salute. The third is of the Grand Canal.

By the way, just a curious note…as I was spell checking this entry, Blogger failed to recognize the word “blog” (above) in its dictionary. It recommended “blows” as one of the replacements. Oh, and Blogger didn’t recognize “Blogger” in this addendum. How bizarre.