{"id":685,"date":"2004-10-14T17:40:56","date_gmt":"2004-10-14T22:40:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xorph.com\/creator\/2004\/10\/14\/685\/"},"modified":"2004-10-14T17:40:56","modified_gmt":"2004-10-14T22:40:56","slug":"685","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/2004\/10\/14\/685\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Maria and I went to San Francisco last weekend, and it was pretty great. We left very early Saturday morning and got back very late Monday night, and although we unfortunately missed hanging out with Kris, we did get to play games and bum around with Leonard and Sumana a lot.<\/p>\n

It was like every few hours we gained a new and spectacular privilege: aside from Leonard’s food, to which I’ll get in a moment, we discovered the mafia geese of Fairyland<\/a>; we gained admittance to the residence of Kevin<\/a> (more on this soon too); we got a quick-but-personal tour of Berkeley; we spent big wads of money at Games of Berkeley<\/a>; and we played arcade games both vintage and new. Hell, Maria attended the national American Academy of Pediatrics conference practically by accident, and I got to have one of the first looks at Leonard’s newest awesome secret project (so awesome, he got banned from the API of at least one site!). It was that kind of weekend.<\/p>\n

Now, Leonard’s food. It should be sufficient to say that Leonard’s fondue made me–the guy who hates cheese–like fondue, but I’m going to say more. We also got to eat his first-ever attempt at home fries, which were unfairly perfect, and his first-ever attempt at pie ice cream<\/a>, which was also pretty freaking great. Leonard’s food is world peace. Leonard’s food is the answer.<\/p>\n

As for Kevin’s house: when Ian and I were younger, we had on our 386 Magnavox computer a program called Floorplan Plus. Because we were dorks–huge dorks, the budding dorks of legend–we spent hours on that thing, designing about a million floor plans so that both of us could completely fail to go into architecture.<\/p>\n

My houses were silly, but I always tried to make them sensible. Ian, on the other hand, was constantly reinventing a place he called Jamhouse. You can pretty much imagine what it was like: the perfect residence, as envisioned by a ten-year-old boy. And Kevin’s house is that house,<\/i> but with a better sound system and more art. It is my future house’s role model.<\/p>\n

I need to say something about Sumana too, because she was a major part of the weekend and I’ve barely mentioned her. We stopped for lunch in Berkeley at De La Paz<\/a>; it was warm and we’d already walked a lot, and Maria (who is hypoglycemic) was getting kind of dizzy. Sumana got up, ostensibly to go to the bathroom, but first snuck over to the bar to have the lone waiter express-deliver a Coke to replenish her blood sugar. That is the kind of friend Sumana is.<\/p>\n

Before February of this year I’d never been west of Minnesota, and now I’ve been to California three times in eight months. Two-thirds of that is due entirely to Leonard and Sumana, whose hospitality and thoughtfulness are boundless and unfailing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maria and I went to San Francisco last weekend, and it was pretty great. We left very early Saturday morning and got back very late Monday night, and although we unfortunately missed hanging out with Kris, we did get to play games and bum around with Leonard and Sumana a lot. It was like every […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,83,31,27,29,28,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-kristofer-straub","category-landmarks","category-leonard-richardson","category-maria","category-sumana-harihareswara","category-travel-and-acronyms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}