Palo Alto and a Few more friends

Our next stop was to see our friend Nick Baxter. After a wonderful nights sleep we awoke around 8, packed the car and headed over to pick up son Joe.  We made the short 1/2 hour drive down to Nick's house and had a wonderful chat about people and other things.  It's been a while since we've seen our friends (think 2 years and COVID) so there was a lot of catching up to do.  I was glad to hear that Nick is now taking new blood into IPP.  All the original members are getting a bit long in the tooth and the organization needs some younger people to survive.  Around 1 Stan Issacs came over and we all had a nice lunch cooked up by Anne.  

After lunch, Nick showed us his puzzle room and I got to see quite a few I hadn't seen before.  

The illusive Marcel Gillen Bishop does exist!

Nick very kindly donated two boxes of puzzles to our cause and they went into the back of the car.

After lunch, George and Stan went back to his house while I took Joe to the train station and checked into our hotel.  This one is a bit better than the Meth den, but only slightly.  With the price we paid, one would think they could afford to put up a non-ripped shower curtain.  The webpage said all newly renovated rooms. When, in 1960? Another dump.  Do not stay at Hotel Real in Santa Clara.  They lied. To add insult to injury, I requested a ground floor room.  They put me on the second floor.  Normally this wouldn't be so bad, but George called and said Stan was giving us some old books and puzzle patents so he asked me to empty the car.  UGH!  I had to carry our 2 suitcases and all of the boxes we had currently collected up that flight of stairs and into the room.  I managed, but just barely.  

I returned to Stans just as Nick was pulling up to join us for dinner.  We boxed up about 4 boxes and put them in the car.  While doing this, a few young people from the Mechanical Puzzles Discord came over.  It is always nice to meet new people. And it's especially nice when they are tall and can get puzzles down from top shelves. Thank you Lance! We also did a lot of just playing.  

At 6:45 everyone headed over to a dim sum restaurant for dinner. George and Stan and I spent a bit more time packing up some more puzzles, but in the end I said we would return at 8 am to go through the puzzle shed.  I knew we wouldn't be able to finish that night.  Between the darkness and the cold, it just wasn't going to happen. 

Dinner was great. Joe Becker joined us and we had a great dinner.  The conversation was all around puzzles of course.  I was surprised to hear Joe speaking Mandarin and he explained how he learned the language when he was in university.  George later told me he was the man who wrote Unicode. I was surrounded by brilliance yet again.  What a lucky lady I am.

I don't remember what time we left, but we did shut down the place. It was probably 9 pm.  I never realized that eateries closed so early until we came out to California.  But then we don't eat out that often at home either.  

We returned to a cold hotel room as the heater didn't work.  We didn't have a lot of noise tonight, but the bed was hard, the pillows were lumpy and there was the faint smell of cigarette smoke in the room even though it was listed as non-smoking.  I woke in the middle of the night and the TV table with the missing drawer had opened itself up.  The 3 remaining drawers had fallen open.  I got up to close them and they just slid open again.  I think the room had a life of its own.  Good location though.  1/2 way between Stan's and Wei-Hwa's.  But more on that tomorrow.