I’m here in beautiful San Francisco for a company meeting, set up in a posh hotel on Nob Hill. You forget how great this place is when you’ve been away: perfect weather, beautiful architecture, terrific restaurants,… sigh.

I flew in last night from Boston and boy are my arms tired! Ba-dum-bum!

But seriously folks…

I woke up this morning at the crack of dawn as my body’s still on east coast time, and since the sessions I’m supposed to attend don’t start till noon I got up and went for a run (boy those SF hills are rough!), came back, checked email and then walked up to Grace Episcopal Cathedral, which is just about a block up the hill from where I’m staying. I got there just in time for Morning Prayer. There were five of us, including the officiant, a layman by all appearances; it was straight Rite II, no liberal funny business. ;). I lingered around the cathedral for a while and got to see the Keiskamma Altarpiece, a huge triptych created by women in a poverty and AIDS-stricken village in South Africa. Obviously this resonates tremendously with the Cathedral community which has its own (much smaller) triptych created by Keith Haring which is housed in their AIDS memorial chapel which commemorates the ravages of the disease here. It was a very moving piece of work and a testament to the faith and resilience of those folks who’ve suffered so much.

After that I took a stroll around the area in the perfect Bay Area weather (currently sunny, upper 70s and breezy), sauntering through North Beach, got a cup of coffee from an Italian bakery and did a little browsing at City Lights books. It’s days like this that make you wonder why you left…