Random Thing #12 - Birthday Edition

Last week was my birthday week. I celebrated the 52nd year of "Blame Dawno" in style starting off the week with a great trip to Berkeley where I had a bead and books day with two friends I first met, if memory serves, at Worldcon in Denver, and have kept up with through various cons and online since.

We visited Baubles and Beads first then had a wonderful lunch and then wandered over to Another Change of Hobbit. One of the store cats there decided it needed a ride on my shoulder, the other one seemed to demonstrate an interesting trans-dimensional travel ability by folding itself through space to dissapear under a bookshelf via the gap between the bottom shelf and the floor, which we all thought was entirely too small for it to fit under.

Then my daughter drove up to spend the rest of the week here. On my birthday we (daughter, DH and I) saw Harry Potter and had a most wonderful dinner at Forbes Mill Steakhouse in Los Gatos (my daughter has a picture of me but hasn't sent it yet - will share soon as I get it). The next day daughter and I went to San Francisco for shopping at Union Square, another lovely dinner at Lark Creek Steak (the iced tea was amazing, the wedge salad and steak were divine and the butterscotch pudding, fabulous). After dinner we saw Wicked at the Orpheum.

Over the course of my daughter's visit we had some fun moments, including donning "I Threw Boring Overboard" paper pirate hats from Long John Silver's (again daughter has a picture I'm waiting for) and her creation of a short series of paper napkin drawings which I, as promised, scanned and saved, to my daughter's complete amusement. Here's one of them:

Money is Flying Out of the Windows of the Pickup in Front of You - What Would You Do?

My daughter called me a bit after 5pm tonight. "Mom, I can't believe people! I mean, they were putting themselves and others in such danger! They were even running out on to the freeway!" She was headed home on the northbound 805 in San Diego. Suddenly she noticed cars stopped on the median and the breakdown lane (possibly in the freeway too, but I can't remember exactly). It took her a moment to figure it out - they were crouching and sitting and stooping. Then she saw some paper fly by - they were stopping to pick up as much money as they could as it fluttered down the freeway.

Yep. The details aren't all in yet, but apparently just a little ways ahead of her there was a pickup being chased by the police with money being flung out the windows. The police recovered $18k. The news story said "It was unknown how much money was collected by passers-by or how much money may have been thrown out in the first place."

I'm proud of my daughter for driving straight home and avoiding the freeway later on her way to her evening class.