| December 17, 2003 | Sunrises over Sunnyvale and the Painted Desert |
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It's still in the forties here in the Bay Area. Maybe the low fifties, and I'm using a space heater to try to warm my room. (Like most old Victorian houses in San Francisco, ours doesn't really have central heating.) And to all the people who are telling me I'm such a wussy complaining about the cold weather -- I'm sorry, but I just think it's my god-given right to wear open-toed shoes year-round OK? That's why I live in California. I have delicate kitten heel shoes and pretty pedicures I'd like to show-off, thank you very much. Yesterday evening Allyson and Jacqueline and I were watching an incredible sunset out the window of their shared cube over the drab gray windowless Lockheed Martin compound next door. It started dark pink and and red as if the Santa Cruz mountains were leaking blood into the sky. It was completely post-apocalyptic. (For visual assistance, here is a photo I took of the sunset over the Lockheed Martin building last year one night after it rained. I took the photo out the same window, and you can see the florescent lights and our office's paneled ceiling reflected in the glass.) "The poor Lockheed Martin workers don't have any windows so they can't even look outside at all," I said, before quickly following up with, "I suppose that's what they get for building bombs." Yeah, I guess we can feel smugly satisfied because we're building virtually harmless internet products. "Do they have sunsets like this anywhere else in the country?" Jacqueline (a Bay Area native) asked. Before Allyson could respond, I said, "No, definitely not. I can't remember sunsets like this in Massachusetts or New York." Jeff called on my cell this morning as I was driving into the office. He flew from New York to Los Angeles yesterday to spend his 30th birthday in the promised land. He's staying at Chris and Hillary's new place, which I was overjoyed to learn is in our old neighborhood near the big-ass Mormon temple on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Los Angeles. "It's beautiful, Jess!" Jeff practically gushed. Jeff can be a rather stoic guy (we were raised in New England, after all), so I love it whenever he gets excitement in his voice. "It's 75 degrees, and I was watching the sunset from their deck last night. It was really amazing!" "We were watching the sunset in Sunnyvale last night at work too, and one of my co-workers asked me if the sunset is as pretty in other parts of the country. I told her I was pretty sure it wasn't, but is that true, and if so, why?" "I do remember some decent sunsets in Brooklyn, but I think the sky is just always clearer here, so you can see it more," Jeff said. I'm driving down to Los Angeles on Saturday morning so I can help Jeff celebrate his 30th birthday properly. We've been friends since we were 15-years-old, and now we're both about to turn 30. Crazy, huh? Weirder still is the fact that we've both felt like we were 30, as far back ago as when we were 25. (Budding blog archeologist Esther dug up this 1999 blog-post and forwarded it in an email to Jeff and me a few weeks ago, asking, "Do you both *still* feel like you're 30 every day when you get up?" My answer: "No, now I feel like I'm about 22." Jeff and I actually hated each other when we first met first semester of our freshman year in high school. We ran against each other in a student council election. Jeff won (he's a much better politician than I am), and I'm a bad loser. But sophomore year we were two of the only brave students who signed up to take Latin class, so we bonded while translating Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Here is a photo I took of Jeff in front of one of the parabolic dishes at the Very Large Array in Socorro, New Mexico during our incredible "South by South by Southwest" road-trip in March 2002. During that trip we saw one of the most incredible sunsets over the painted desert driving West from New Mexico into Arizona. Labels: allyson, jeff, sanfrancisco, siliconvalley, sunrise, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 7:00 PM 
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