[conspire] Valparaiso; spring garden sales

[Rick Moen]

1.  People who've come to CABAL may be aware that one of the two main
streets across Menlo Park is 'Valparaiso' -- locally mispronounced
horribly[1].  My awful gringo mispronunciation got fixed immediately
when I visited the wonderful place the street was named for, the
historical main port of Chile, a city (Valparaíso)  that in its golden
era (the ~70 years ending in opening of the Panama Canal in 1914) was
nicknamed 'little San Francisco' because it's built on many hills and is
extremely cosmopolitan.  Deirdre and I spent about a week there, and we
love the place.

Anyhow, there's an absolutely insane 'extreme urban mountain bike
downhill race' called the Valparaíso Cerro Abajo [hill descent].  And
you can watch a recent competitor run the course via helmet-cam, here:
https://player.vimeo.com/video/9970489 

Hey, I'm a pretty expert bicyclist, and I shudder, just watching that.


2.  Spring is when all the local gardening groups show off with their
annual plant sales, and I've just updated
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/gardening.html with the big ones coming up.
The biggest of all is this Saturday, April 14th, 9am to 2pm, the UC
Master Gardeners' spring garden market.  It's not just a sale; it's an
event.  Don't miss it.



[1] The name decomposes as val + paraíso = valley of paradise, so the
correct Spanish pronunciation is roughly val-par-ai-EE-so.