![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Synchronicity strikes again!
Feb. 27th, 2005 12:22 amThis has certainly been the vacation of surprising coincidences.
1) At story reading a week ago I read a chapter from Robert Sapolsky's A Primate's Memoirs. Two days later, while getting a tour of Stanford from Eric Roberts (a CS professor, player of games, and generally wonderful person), he told me that Sapolsky was a friend of his and offered to introduce me to him, since he was also a Stanford prof. Unfortunately, he wasn't in, since it was the Presidents' Day holiday.
2) On Thursday I was at Amoeba Records in Berkeley, one of the largest CD stores in North America, where I wound up buying about 88 discs. Checkout took a while, as you can imagine.
From there I headed north to where Evan (with whom I was staying at that point) had gamelan rehearsal, which he'd invited me to watch. It was intricate, simple-and-complex in that minimalist way, and a little too loud for sitting right next to. During the break, one of the ten musicians saw my bag of CDs and said, "hey, weren't you the guy who was in front of me in the checkout line at Amoeba?"
3) But the big story was Friday, when I went to Muir Woods (utterly beautiful; totally peaceful despite having hundreds of visitors; amazingly close to San Francisco for all its remote-feeling-ness; photos on request). I paid the $3 admission to a cashier, and a woman next to her said, "Jim??" The last time I saw Alison Campbell '87 was probably her graduation, almost eighteen years ago. She's worked for the Park Service pretty much since then, and is currently in charge of the Muir Visitors' Center. We talked for a while, some about what we've been doing and more about the woods (typical me, I had lots of ask-the-naturalist questions. Why do the trees on opposite banks seem to have bark grooves that spiral in opposite directions? She didn't have an answer for that one.)
So with one more day of vacation to go I find myself wondering whether I'll run into Eric Hurliman in a secret chamber in the Winchester Mystery House (one of tomorrow's features. Along with a rare west-coast roundsing. Hey, we should have one on the east coast this week, to show our support!)
1) At story reading a week ago I read a chapter from Robert Sapolsky's A Primate's Memoirs. Two days later, while getting a tour of Stanford from Eric Roberts (a CS professor, player of games, and generally wonderful person), he told me that Sapolsky was a friend of his and offered to introduce me to him, since he was also a Stanford prof. Unfortunately, he wasn't in, since it was the Presidents' Day holiday.
2) On Thursday I was at Amoeba Records in Berkeley, one of the largest CD stores in North America, where I wound up buying about 88 discs. Checkout took a while, as you can imagine.
From there I headed north to where Evan (with whom I was staying at that point) had gamelan rehearsal, which he'd invited me to watch. It was intricate, simple-and-complex in that minimalist way, and a little too loud for sitting right next to. During the break, one of the ten musicians saw my bag of CDs and said, "hey, weren't you the guy who was in front of me in the checkout line at Amoeba?"
3) But the big story was Friday, when I went to Muir Woods (utterly beautiful; totally peaceful despite having hundreds of visitors; amazingly close to San Francisco for all its remote-feeling-ness; photos on request). I paid the $3 admission to a cashier, and a woman next to her said, "Jim??" The last time I saw Alison Campbell '87 was probably her graduation, almost eighteen years ago. She's worked for the Park Service pretty much since then, and is currently in charge of the Muir Visitors' Center. We talked for a while, some about what we've been doing and more about the woods (typical me, I had lots of ask-the-naturalist questions. Why do the trees on opposite banks seem to have bark grooves that spiral in opposite directions? She didn't have an answer for that one.)
So with one more day of vacation to go I find myself wondering whether I'll run into Eric Hurliman in a secret chamber in the Winchester Mystery House (one of tomorrow's features. Along with a rare west-coast roundsing. Hey, we should have one on the east coast this week, to show our support!)
