Home Again, A Few Last Notes from My California Trip

1.  On my flight from Boston to San Francisco (and then back again), everyone around me was ordering diet soda when the attendants came with the drinks cart.  On looking around--according to their laptops--I'd already discovered that these were people doing work on brain function, politics in the Philippines, etc.  I figured, as the BOS-SFO crowd, they represented a pretty well-educated group--MIT, Harvard, Tufts, Stanford, Berkeley, etc. So why was it they were so blithe (shall we call it) about the ingredients in diet soft drinks and how those chemicals affect the body.  (Badly.)

2.  I also found myself deluged with background music in the form of what my father called Noise.  Xylophones, horns, tinkly pianos all in an indistinguishable soup.  No let up.  That or background TV's.  Including four going at once during breakfast at the Marriott ... as if I wanted to hear more awful news over toast and coffee.  The hotel lobby was jangling as well.  The airport shuttle driver had his radio on.  More dithering played in the airport. Later:  department stores, book stores, restaurants, coffee shops.  So what is this!  Do we need constant distraction?

3.  Cra-zee in Santa Barbara.

• Rather than pants, women now wore tights.  As if they've just come from yoga class.
• The homeless sprawled on library and church lawns, slept on sidewalks, spent the day on the art museum steps, made use of bus-stop benches--one even hanging her laundry there.  900 homeless in Santa Barbara alone.  As one local told me, with its ideal climate, "You don't die here if you sleep outside at night."  
• Baby buggies now seemed the size of small European cars.
• In one major department store where I went to take in the SoCal scene, I found myself in such overload, I had to leave again.   I decided there was more choice there than in all the stores in my state of Vermont.  "Here I am; look at me," every item called out.
• Outside, scruffy buskers played guitars and sang with one objective--volume.  One fellow beat a drum and shouted the single word, "AGAIN ... AGAIN ..." 
• Skate-boarders feeling invincible, whizzed down the main street, daring stop lights and traffic.
• Passersby gestured to no one as they carried on phone conversations.
• As for the real estate market, it STARTED at a half a million and that most likely for a mobile home now called a "manufactured home."
• And as for Cra-zee Great, how's THIS for a fabulous bookstore, Chaucer's Books, one of THE best-stocked I've ever seen.

4.  Finally, is this English?  "To come into budget is like yeah."