I spent June 25-28 with Diana and her husband Sean in Santa Clara, California. As you could see from my map on yesterday's schedule, Santa Clara is part of the Bay Area. I didn't know much about California's geography until I drove around the state, so I'll lay out for you what I learned: The Bay Area refers to a—surprise!—bay, and around the bay are different cities. San Francisco is the most famous, but San Jose and Santa Clara and Oakland and lots of others are around there.
So basically, I spent the last few days in the San Francisco area. And now, to give you another new brand of sum-reporting on a shadow spot, we'll tour my time with Diana through pictures!
I know I talked about donuts earlier this week (and hopefully established that I don't actually eat them all that often); the Portland donut scene came up at dinner with Sean and Diana Sunday night when I got there, and they decided to take me to their local fav for Monday breakfast: Stan's Donut Shop.
Diana works for a company that supplies educators with online courses. She's an implementation manager, so she resolves technical and organizational issues for the users of these classes. She was working with some users in Napa on Monday, so we drove an hour north, grabbed lunch, and went to the meeting.
We went on lots of walks around the neighborhood by their apartment complex. Here's a tree that's huge and cool.
And from another walk, here's another tree, casually growing lemons.
Diana and Sean cooked dinner each night. My fav was brussel sprouts on Monday night, what's new, but here's another good one from Tuesday—stuffed sweet potatoes.
On Tuesday we both worked—she on her job stuff, me on Summer Shadow stuff (did you see the new archive at the top for different locations' posts! & do ya follow @thesummershadow on Insta?)—went on more walks, washed the dog, went to Costco—a classic American day!
I liked hearing about Diana's different places she'd worked. She worked after undergrad, then went to grad school, and has held three or four different professional jobs since then. It was cool to, after living with her for a few days, learn her thoughts and her personality—and then think about how her strengths and attributes related to different jobs she'd told me about having.
And—so generally that it's almost unhelpful—I really just liked hearing what Diana thought about things. Her tattoos, the way she met her husband, life in California, anything. I learned so much, and I've already started writing about it for the ??? (=short story, book, articles, you tell me).
So ya. Yay, Diana! Report on my days in LA comin soon!
