From the 15th to the 17th, I was in San Francisco for a work-related conference. At the conference, I was lucky enough to attend a keynote speech given by Story Musgrave. Musgrave must be one of the most accomplished human beings alive, reminiscent of fictional heroes like Doc Savage or Buckaroo Banzai. How do you match a fellow who has advanced degrees ranging from medicine to literary criticism, and yet never finished high school? How about an astronaut who is the only man to have flown on all five space shuttles; an engineer who designed key aspects of shuttle equipment and the Hubble Telescope; a mechanic who actually changed the mirror in Hubble, in orbit; a poet and a professional landscaper? A meeting with him is guaranteed to make you feel somewhat inadequate about your own accomplishments.
I also participated in a fun "ghost hunt" tour of Pacific Heights, which started from the amazing Queen Anne Hotel. The hotel is decked out in Victorian decor (though not completely authentic; I don't think they had animated holiday statues of children in that era). Led by a chatty tour guide who wore a leather Van Helsing type duster and a top hat (and who also practiced a little sleight of hand along the way), the tour was a fun way to see a city that I lived in for three years. (I must say that the Mark Hopkins Hotel, where I stayed during the conference, offered a far nicer view of the city than my three years in the Tenderloin.)
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