The sun was warm, finally, after weeks of chill, and the tangy orange evening sun was skimming through the bay. It was my first time out running again since I hurt my back a few weeks ago, and, as happens so often, even after eight years in San Francisco, I reflected on what a beautiful place it is. And it felt so good to be outside again, expending energy, feeling the warmth on my back. No wonder I've been feeling down the last few weeks, not being able to run like this.

Mind, my chiropractor would spank me if she knew what I was doing. Although I now finally feel one hundred percent fine, she maintains that there's a magical six weeks after an injury during which you need to let your body heal. She may be right, so I accomodated to her demands by not running as fast as normal. I kept my strides short and close to the ground, feeling a little like one of the old men you occasionally see stumbling along in a track suit.

In my last journal, I wrote that I was going to the Symphony to see a very difficult piece by Ives. That was Friday, and the performance was even more satisfying than I'd hoped. I had a seat right in the center of the front-row, just under Michael Tilson's Thomas expansive nose. Well, it would have been under his nose had he been facing the audience, not the orchestra. But had he been facing the audience he wouldn't have been able to conduct this fiersomely difficult piece. Reading the program notes beforehand, it said that initial performances of this piece, Ive's Fourth Symphony, required three separate conductors.

I know that, to many people, much of the symphony was probably just noise. The first time I heard the second movement, I felt the same way. But seeing it live illuminated so clearly what was going on, and there was a thrill at picking up tantalizing shards of mythic American tunes rising from the chaos. But really, you've never heard such a titanic maelstrom of noise on a stage, and when the movement died with a rapid collapse across all the orchestra, people laughed out loud because the sudden quiet was so unexpected.

You see so many standing ovations at the San Francisco symphony, but really, this was a performance that deserved it. However, the audience was predictably stingy and wounded by all that noise, and mostly stayed in their seats. I did feel like a bit of a wally standing all by myself at the front of the audience, at the end, but I couldn't let such a performance pass without acknowledging it. Otherwise they might think nobody likes this stuff and revert to only playing Mozart and Brahms.

I'm leaving for Orange County early tomorrow morning for two nights. The project I'm trying to oversee is going well, but all of the developers are in Irvine, which kind of makes it hard for me. So I'm going down there to boss them around for a few days. Okay, I'm kidding, I don't, actually, get to boss them around. It's more so that I can figure out what they're actually doing, and then, retroactively, tell them to do it. Okay, that's a lie too. They'll tell me what they've done, and I'll write it down in our design document so that we at least know what we did. Of course, one of these days, we might actually do the design before the building...