Yippee! My Canon SD500 is hone again! I took it with me when we flew up to Oakland Thursday for an Infopeople workshop in San Francisco. I had forgotten what a fab little camera it is, and what great pictures it takes!
Cheryl picked us up at the airport and we drove over to the city and had dinner at Max’s. We stayed at the Ramada Plaza which was a block from San Francisco Public Library (where I was teaching), and BART (which we took to get back to Oakland Airport Friday afternoon). We walked around the area a bit after dinner and I took some pics with the newly repaired SD500 and fell in love with it all over again. The Casio is great, don’t get me wrong – the quality of its pics is amazing for the size of the camera, and it fits in my running shorts so will be my running camera. But when it comes to taking super quality shots with great flash capability you can’t beat Canon.
Back to the Ramada: when we checked in Cheryl was with us, and when I gave our name to the desk guy, he gave us all the strangest look and asked, “Are you all staying in the room? It only has the one queen bed…” at which we all burst out at the same time saying “no, no just us” and vaguely pointing at each other, making it very unclear who was, in fact, staying. The desk guy clearly thought some kinky menage a trois thing was happening. Chuck was mildly pleased at this and didn’t try very hard to disabuse the guy. Men and their fantasies! When we went up to the room, I immediately saw why the guy was surprised to hear that three people might be staying in the room. It was VERY small – a corner room that had a bed and two nightstands and not a lot of room to maneuver in. It WAS very affordable, especially for San Francisco – I think it was $89/night before taxes, so I can’t complain. But I had to immortalize the bathroom. It had the smallest sink I have ever seen outside of a train. As we were only there one night, it wasn’t a bad deal, and there was free wireless Internet access so that was nice.
The workshop was great, and we left SFPL about 4:30 heading back to Oakland. Everything went fine until we got to the Coliseum station and had to take the shuttle bus to Oakland Airport. I have rarely experienced such stupid inefficiency. For starters, the buses seem to run on a vaguely half hour-ish schedule. Then you have to pay two dollars to take the shuttle – and you have to have exact change or an airport shuttle BART ticket. This is information that only becomes obvious when you try to board the bus, or you catch the obscure signage while you stand in line. We finally made it to the airport around 6:30pm, and swore we’d never do that again – next time we will take a cab from BART to the airport – WAY less aggravating.
Anyway, we made it home in one piece (well, two pieces strictly speaking), and now Chuck is happily occupied in the backyard laying the new sprinkler system’s lines.