pondering – Page 51 – Oh Fair New Mexico

Obessed by Floors

Posted on November 9, 2011November 9, 2011
by Karen Fayeth
2 Comments

There’s this hotel in San Francisco that’s technically in the Financial district but really is so close to the Embarcadero you can taste it (not that you’d actually want to taste the Embarcadero. That’s just ew.).

The hotel is the Hyatt Recency and it’s not only a hotel, it’s also a movie star. The Hyatt featured prominently in the Mel Brooks movie High Anxiety and also served as the lobby for the The Towering Inferno.

I am utterly fascinated by this hotel. It’s a quirky place and definitely has this 1970’s vibe. It was opened in 1973 and I’m guessing it was pretty cha-cha for the time.

It’s odd shaped. The huge atrium is profound. The open hallways looking into the atrium do give a bit of vertigo.

But while that’s all fascinating…it’s the floors that get me. I’m literally obsessed with these floors.

Here’s a couple photos. The patterns just kill me! (in a good way)

I can’t even begin to imagine how long it took to lay all of those tiles in patterns across not only the huge hotel atrium but also on all four buildings of the shopping center next door.

The floors have a seventies vibe, to be sure, but there is something engaging about them too.

I can catch a glimpse of these floors in a movie or old photo and I know exactly where they are.

It’s just another one of those oh-so-uniquely San Francisco things.

Yes, I wrote a whole blog post about floors.

Photographs by Karen Fayeth, Copyright 2011, and subject to the Creative Commons license in the far right corner of this blog. Photos takes with an iPhone4 (I haven’t set up the new phone yet) and using the Camera+ and Hipstamatic apps.

Quality Control

Posted on November 7, 2011November 9, 2011
by Karen Fayeth
4 Comments

You might recall a few months back (July, actually) I posted a story about San Francisco’s celebration for a glass.

A perfect, petite glass, just ripe to be filled to the rim with Irish coffee.

This past weekend, The Good Man and I had much to celebrate, so we spent the weekend rabble rousing from one end of the beautiful City of San Francisco to the other.

It was a magical weekend.

After consuming an insane amount of food at Tadich Grill, a venerable old place dating back to 1849, we set out on the quite stormy Saturday night and ultimately found ourselves at the Buena Vista down on the Wharf.

The Buena Vista is one of my most favorite places in the City. Especially on a cold, rainy night.

I was there in an official capacity, of course. It was necessary to investigate this whole glass issue for myself.

You know, in the interest of quality control and all that.

After the first Irish Coffee, I was intrigued.

After the second Irish Coffee, I was quite contemplative.

After the third Irish Coffee, I was…wait…what were we talking about…..?

*hic* Yes, I found the glasses at the BV to be of fine quality and most upstanding in their capacity to serve a nice warm beverage.

Or something.

I slept rather well that night, too……

All photographs Copyright Karen Fayeth, 2011, and subject to the Creative Commons license found in the right column of this page.

Photos taken with my iPhone4 and the Hipstamatic app.

Feliz Dia de los Muertos

Posted on November 1, 2011October 31, 2011
by Karen Fayeth
4 Comments

Today, I offer this beautiful virtual ofrenda so that we all may take a minute and remember those who have passed on into the next world.

On this day of both sorrow and celebration, the veil is just a little bit thinner.

Today I remember my four grandparents, my father, my best friend from high school, my dear college friend, and yes, even Steve Jobs.

May we all take a moment today to remember those whom we have loved and lost.

Feliz Dia de los Muertos to us all.

Virtual pink pastries and sugar skulls for everyone who passes this way on their journey.

Photo from kalavinka‘s Flickr Photostream and used under the Creative Commons license, as granted on the applicable Flickr page.

Nightmares

Posted on October 31, 2011
by Karen Fayeth
No Comments

In honor of Halloween, the scariest day of the year, I figured I’d do a little mental deep dive and reveal some of my most scary nightmares.

Perhaps in the light of day they won’t seem so scary, right? Maybe I can take some of the fear out of them.

I had one of these dreams last night and found it hard to shake off. So let’s start with that one.

I’m in my car, driving too fast, and suddenly, my brakes don’t work. The pedal feels right, I’m pressing on it and it gives resistance, but the car isn’t slowing down. I grab frantically for the handbrake but that does no good. I try to take the car out of gear, but that doesn’t work….often I’m rolling down a hill. Sometimes it’s in San Francisco.

Only once in my life did I had something similar happen. I was in college and driving my dad’s old ’72 full size Blazer, and the master cylinder was going out. I rolled to an intersection, hit the brakes, and it went all the way to the floor. Yipes! I was able to get my toe under the pedal, lift it, and kept pumping the brakes until I finally stopped. I was scared, but thankfully got through that safely.

I have no idea what this inability to stop is about but it *freaks* me out. I was all jittery driving to work this morning.

I’m in danger, I turn to run, but my legs are heavy and I can’t run. I’m making a running motion but moving slower than molasses in January. I bend over and use my arms to help me run/crawl, scratching at the ground trying to get away.

I think this one is a fairly common dream. A lot of people have it. I’m not much of a runner in real life and I think this dream plays on my own insecurities about that fact. Like, if I was ever really in trouble, could I run away?

Yeeeks!

I’m in college. It’s finals week. Trouble is, there is a class that I haven’t bothered to attend all semester. I’m freaking out! What am I going to do? There is no way I can pass this class! I’m going to fail!

The class I forgot to attend is usually a math class (my absolute worst subject). Sometimes it’s accounting. Lately it’s morphed into that god awful advanced Economics night class I had in grad school.

This is such a weenie nightmare. I can’t believe how much it totally freaks me out. Oh dear, I might fail a class. Big deal!

But I wake from this dream *frantic* and freaking out.

The monsters of the mind are far worse than any creepy Halloween story, I guess.

I’m staying in a really nice hotel. I go to my room and check in. Then I leave my room for some reason, I need ice, I need to find something to eat, whatever. And then I can’t find my way back to my room. I go up and down stairs. I wander through hallways of the hotel. I keep taking the elevator and it puts me on floors I don’t recognize. The more I try to find my way back, the more lost I become. I start getting more and more frantic.

This dream often takes place in a huge Las Vegas casino (ever felt hopelessly lost inside of a huge casino in real life? I sure have.). Sometimes it takes place on a college campus or a high school building. It’s a dream of chasing my tail ’round and ’round.

Whenever I check into a hotel in my real life, I inevitably try to find landmarks so I can find my way back, owing to my whackadelic brain and this dream that recurs month after month, year after year.

Tornados. Enough said.

I’ve chronicled my own Really Bad Day dancing with a tornado in Carlsbad. I think that one afternoon left me irrevocably scarred.

Ok, of all of my frightful dreams, at least this on and the brakes going out are dreams that I can go “well yeah, that’s actually scary!”

I think the rest of my nightmares listed are pretty much crazy machinations of an over emotional brain.

To misquote Emerson, simply hobgoblins of my little mind.

Happy Halloween everyone!

Devil graphic by Viktors Kozers and used royalty free from stock.xchng.

The Marketing Department Needs a Hard Slap Across the Chops

Posted on October 27, 2011October 28, 2011
by Karen Fayeth
26 Comments

Several years ago I did quite a riff on stupid car names. It’s good stuff, go back and read it if you get a chance.

In that same vein comes today’s post.

Stupid cell phone names. Yup, the mobile phone manufacturers have gone well past idiot car names and have slipped into ridiculous.

Since I work way, way too much with mobile phones, I have to not only see these dumb names, but utter them aloud.

Here’s my personal top eleven list of “Someone Should Get Slapped for that Brand Name”

HTC Salsa: Seriously? Salsa? Because I’m going to dip a chip into the device? Bleah. Just Bleah!

Palm Pre: The suffix pre means before. So this is the phone that’s what? Before the actual phone? Before the demise of Palm? Before HP killed it?

Samsung :): Oh how I wish I was making that up. The actual name of the phone is :) How do you even go to the store and ask for that? “Um, yes, I’d like a sideways smiley please?” Lame. Lame. Lame.

HTC Rhyme : Rhymes with stupid.

Casio G’zOne Commando: First of all I can’t get over Casio, maker of tacky Dad-watches is also making phones. This is a kind of cool looking device, but godDAMN it’s a bad name. First of all, what the eff is G’zOne? And second of all, commando makes me think of going without chones. I don’t think my mobile device should evoke that.

Motorola Citrus : Mmmmm! Lemony!

Motorola Photon : I tested this device and I actually liked it a lot. But neither The Good Man nor I could stop pointing the device at each other and going “pew pew!” It is, after all, a photon. Pew!

LG Remarq : One, you misspelled it. Two, my remarks are “WHAT THE SEVENTEEN KINDS OF SAM HELL ARE YOU THINKING with this name?!?!” That concludes my remarqs.