Category: Bay area, Calif.

“What happened to your phone?” said the saleswoman sympathetically. She was holding my cell phone between her thumb and forefinger, because it was dripping wet.

“It went into the laundry,” I said.

“Oh, your poor phone,” she said. “I’m going to turn it off so it will stop vibrating.” It wouldn’t turn off, so she took the battery out.

She got me a new phone, but had difficulties with the computer. The other salesman came over to hep her out. He looked at the phone. “What happened to your phone?” he said sympathetically.

“I was doing laundry,” I said. “Then I was like, Where’s my phone? It was in my pants. I opened the washing machine, it was full of water and going goosh, goosh, goosh; I reached in to my pants pocket, and there was my phone — bzzzt — vibrating continuously and totally dead.” I had them both laughing.

I asked the man if they were on commission, and he said they were. I apologized that they weren’t going to make much of a commission off my new phone. He said it was OK. I admitted that I used to be in sales. We got to talking about commissions, building relationships, meeting targets, all the things that salespeople talk about. Both these salespeople obviously followed the soft-sell school of sales. I like soft-sell salespeople: they’re easy-going, they have good people skills, they’re relentlessly positive, and they like to talk.

While we were talking, the man walked the woman through the process of updating my account. When we were done, I asked her if she was new. She said she was. “You’ll do great,” I said, “you have a good sales personality.” And I wasn’t just being an upbeat optimistic positive salesperson: she will be a good salesperson. We all said goodbye, and I walked out into the sunshine with my new phone.

When I first started looking at classical Chinese landscape painting seriously, I never thought of it as realism: those steep fantastical hills, the mists that so conveniently provide a sense of distance and perspective, none of that looked real to me. But when you live on the Pacific Rim, you see that much of classical Chinese landscape painting is realism.

For the past couple of days, I have been staying at a retreat center on a steep hillside in a redwood grove in the Coastal Range of northern California. This morning the mist drifted in the valley below us, and this is what I saw when I looked out my window at about eight o’clock:

Camp Meeker, California

As I drove up here to where the ministers meeting would take place, it started to rain. By the time I arrived, it was raining steadily. I got out of the car, and it smelled like rain and wet ground. It was the first rain I had seen and felt and smelled since last spring. I took a deep breath.

This evening, Carol texted me: “Where do we have tarp for rowing machine?” This summer, Carol bought a rowing machine for ten dollars, and we had set it out on our little second floor deck so we could sit outdoors while we were using it. But now it was getting wet. I texted back: “Crap. Look in basement.” I hope she managed to find the tarp and protect the rowing machine from the rain.

A Silicon Valleyite has gotten another distinguished award. Yesterday, John Perry of Stanford University was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which states: “To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.”

Perry’s original research was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in February, 1996. Perry did not go in person to receive his award, which is no surprise since the awards were given out at Harvard University.