Under the Baobab Tree

I have selected La Jolla as home base for my business trip. Why not? I wanted to select Del Mar -- my favorite place in the world -- but it was booked. Instead I'm at La Valencia in La Jolla, across the street from the beach, in a room with a balcony looking over the water. The hotel is one of those vintage art deco Hollywood getaway places....pink with huge palm trees and elephant ears and madrone trees and wood and cast iron everywhere. The window panes are cut glass and metal (iron?). There is a great room with wooden beams and a fireplace and windows covered in salt. The rickety elevator has an elevator operator in it. The place is built down a cliff so you kind of walk in on an upper floor and then the rooms cascade down to the beach. There are not really levels -- there are lots of half levels and three quarters levels and reappearing disappearing staircases. It's kind of like a pirate ship only fancy. I got lost on my first venture out of my room and had to go to the desk and say "I just came down a staircase a minute ago and now I can't find it anywhere!" They said that happens a lot.

I did a little work on the flight out -- I came across three funny things in the documents I was reading.

• A read a series of multi-page memos. The first page said, "page 1 of 1." The second page said "page 2 of 2." The third page said "page 3 of 3." No wonder these people have legal problems.
• Another document reflected someone's desire that something "be started yesterday," presumably because something was urgent, maybe. The dead-pan response was "The arrow of time is unidrectional, so we cannot start this yesterday." These people are all scientists, I should add.
• The last funny thing I read was someone saying in an email, "We have the same misunderstanding you do." What do you suppose that means?

posted by Anonymous @ 7:44 PM