Going to California

This journal entry was written on the plane.

I was lucky enough to get rearranged into exit row seating on the flight from Chicago to San Francisco. Yay legroom. Yay ample room to open up the laptop without bumping into the seat ahead of me.

On the other hand: I finished the reading I had brought for Apple before I landed in Chicago. I could reread the Cocoa book—but instead, I will use this 'can open the laptop' time to work on D&D preparation.

I'm excited about this D&D prep--this could be one of the major events of the second arc of the campaign, if I manage to make it neither too obvious nor too cryptic. Maybe I can find the time to distress it a bit, to make it look good too. I wonder if I can find a better way to integrate the expository and the ghoulish bits...

Rental Car; Dining

The rental car I've received is an SUV (a Mitsubishi Outlander). It is cherry red. It looks quite the pimpmobile.
I find it difficult not to play bass-heavy dance music and drive too fast--and I worry that it may be a magnet for speeding tickets.
Another misfeature: it has a button on the console that is a bright glowing red. It's almost impossible not to feel compelled to push this button, even though I expect it to declare, "INITIATING SELF-DESTRUCT SEQUENCE". The actual function: it engages the hazard lights. Does the hazard light button really need to glow that brightly?

The strip mall near the hotel seems to be a colony of Asian stores--all of the stores seem to use English only as a second language. There are several restaurants, but the menus I've seen have tended to things more exotic than I'm used to seeing on menus of Chinese or Japanese restaurants.

And with this amazing opportunity to try genuinely exotic foods, I--well, I wussed out. Instead, I went to an English restaurant called the Duke of Edinburgh, where I had prime rib and hard cider.