Greetings from Sunny(vale) CA

I've been awake since 4 and up since 5 for a meeting that doesn't start til 9. Time zones are not my friend this morning. Anyhow.... It's hot out here. Isn't California supposed to be nice and cool? (Aside from Sacramento, that is. I learned that lesson.) It feels just like what I left behind in Houston, except earlier.

I ended up sitting next to an off-duty pilot on the flight out here, and I got the window for the first time in ages, so I got some running commentary on landmarks. He said he'd starting flying when he was 13, and the lady on the other side of him and I looked at each other and raised our eyebrows and laughed. I know I was wondering if Continental hires pilots who aren't old enough to drink yet, and she just shook her head and said, "Everybody looks so young to me these days."

Appropriately enough, I'm reading an old (1943) history book about the westward expansion to California, and I laughed out loud when I read this passage:

"The Californians were of two factions, a revolution having occurred just a few months before. (California revolution: by proclamation. No unthrifty waste of gunpowder, no indecorous blood-letting, just some heroic marching and a fierce barrage of rhetoric....)"

The whole book is salted with such commentary, and while a lot of it goes over my head because I'm not familiar with all the political ins-and-outs of the time, some of it is very funny. It's more like reading a (really long) newspaper than what I think of as a "history book."

And with that, I'm off to find breakfast and meet some Californians....