Mini Family Vacation

On Monday I left for the AGU conference in San Francisco. I was presenting a poster at the CLARREO session and attending lots of scholarly sounding talks. Some of the talks were cool, some were confusing and most were kind of like some sort of plumage display that you might see on the nature channel. Monday through Friday were the conference days that I was scheduled to attend. A particularly negative reacation to some Pakistani food prevented me from attending the Tuesday sessions, but other than that the conference was productive as far as I was concerned.

On a typical conference trip, Joanna tries reasonably hard to stifle looks of either disappointment or contempt for the few days before I leave because I am allowed to get the hell out of Logan as she remains behind. Ah, but not this time! Thursday afternoon the girls showed up so we could spend the weekend together in the city! I met Joanna and Vi at the airport and we all rode BART from SFO to downtown. No pictures of Vi on the train but Vi really likes the subway.

Random BART station pic.

Our one day on the town has been a good time so far. We went shopping (for all three of us, in fact), we ate lots of different food, we walked around, and we saw lots of people who are black, or Asian (if you stay in Utah long enough and you begin to forget that people come in other configurations than "pasty white"), or homeless, or standing on the corner shrieking about some kind of perceived injustice. Sometimes one person can embody all of these things at the same time. We saw lots of seemingly normal people too, but those aren't as fun to write about.

The good thing about Vi is that she makes friends wherever she goes. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has smiled and waved to her - even the people in restaurants will put down their mobile phones and interact with her for tens of minutes. As we walk down the street the traffic stops, the throngs of people part, jaws drop and people simply wave and throw flower petals in our path.* Vi has magical powers, I tell you. At least we get good service from the waitresses we have had.

Here are Joanna and Violet enjoying some morning sun while we drank
our coffee and Vi played with gingko leaves.

Joanna and Vi in front of the Martin Luther King monument in Yerba Buena Park.

Two more of Joanna and Vi walking around Yerba Buena Park and picking flowers. :-)

* - Reports may be somewhat exaggerated.