Nice place, wouldn't want to live here

San Francisco is a nice place, but I wouldn't want to live here. Maybe nearby in Oakland or Berkley, but not in the city. First of all, the houses all look like this:
And there are homeless people everywhere. Good things about it are the weather, diverse neighborhoods (chinatown! little italy!), and decent public transportation.

I had a good time at our family reunion. We stayed in Pacifica, which is a small city about 20-30 minutes south of San Francisco. We rented a nice house for the 14 of us. We had to get a little creative with the sleeping arrangements, but we managed. There were only 4 actual beds, the rest being air mattresses and pull out couches. The first night there, I was still a bit jet lagged, so I was up at 5:30. Rest of the week I was up between 7:30 and 8:30.

My sister, her boyfriend, and I decided to go to a 24 hour gym. A nearby one was doing a special free week trial, so we decided to check that out. It turned out to be for local residents only, so we only got 1 day free and the other days were $10 a day.

The weather was pretty good for our stay. It was generally between 50 and 60 the entire time. We generally lounged around a lot and occasionally took day trips to San Francisco and to Point Reyes, where we did an 8 mile hike. Dinners were always big affairs with something nice that my dad cooked up. My sister even did some baking, though her last batch of cookies was a bit of a failure in the presentation department...they turned out flat, like pancakes. Still tasty, though.

On the last full day at the house, we went to our cousins' rock climbing gym and did some climbing there. It was pretty fun and exhausting. My forearms were quite sore and I couldn't really make a tight fist for several hours after we finished.

At the beginning of our trip my laptop decided it didn't want to turn on anymore, so yesterday I decided I wanted to replace it with a new laptop. So I did some searching online and found a Sony store in downtown San Francisco and went there to check out some laptops. I ended up buying one for $1049, marked down from $1249 along with a $20 two year protection plan and a free digital picture frame. It's a pretty decent laptop, much better than my previous one and probably better than my work computer as well. It even has a Blue Ray player, so I can get some sweet movies from Net Flix.

Tomorrow morning I leave for the airport a 6:00 AM to fly back to DC and then the following day I fly back to Pittsburgh. I took a 2 week vacation from work while only having about 35 hours of actual vacation time accrued, so I'll be working some Saturdays to get those hours back. Ah well.