Bright lights, big city

So I here I am - San Francisco, city by the bay, Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz Island and Chinatown, 'where the cable cars climb halfway to the stars' (thanks to the estimable Cailleach for the Tony Bennett quote!). Silicon Valley (Apple, Facebook, Google and pretty every other shiny brand name you can think of in the world of IT - apart from Microsoft!) is just down the freeway.
San Francisco is also where I made my entrance on the world stage, way back when the city teemed with hippies rather than today's MacBook-toting hipsters drinking tall skinny soya lattes (easy on the foam!) Said hippies hung around Haight-Ashbury, nodding along to Jefferson Airplane, smoking herbal jazz cigarettes and sticking it to The Man.
I landed half an hour earlier than scheduled last night - there must have been a good tailwind - at the end of a backside-numbing journey via Atlanta that amounted to something like 20 hours in total if you count from the moment I first stepped outside my door. It's nearly five years since I was last here - everything looks different, but also exactly the same!
This is the view from the deck at the front of my little brother's house (a house which once belonged to our Dad). It's a pretty good panorama of downtown - best viewed large. On the far right you can just see the towers of the Bay Bridge . At night that turns into a bejewelled twinkle.