Greetings from Milpitas, California. As I write this I’m sitting in my cubicle in the middle of the office building in not-quite-downtown Milpitas. Where is Milpitas, you ask? It’s situated between San Jose, Santa Clara, and Fremont. Squeezed between them is probably a better description. It’s not much of a place as size or influence goes. The section of the 880 freeway that goes through Milpitas has long been the major bottleneck. Everywhere else the freeway is 4-5 lanes wide except through Milpitas where it was 2 lanes wide. So, for the past two years (and well into the foreseeable future) they’ve been widening the freeway. It’s now four lanes wide each direction, but only two lanes each way are open. There is no conceivable reason why…. Perhaps there haven’t been enough accidents on this stretch this year?

In the news of the day, a hearse travelling along a motorway near Duesseldorf, Germany, overturned ejecting the coffin, ejecting the corpse from the coffin, and scattering coffin nails along a stretch of the highway, closing the road for more than four hours while police cleaned up the scene. The driver of the hearse fell asleep, woke up startled, and jerked the steering wheel causing the accident. What a wild ride for the corpse and those following behind! Look, mommy, it’s Halloween!

Southern California seems to be burning up. Huge wildfires stretching from the Mexico border to Los Angeles are causing massive damage. More than a thousand homes have been destroyed and many more will be lost until the weather begins to cooperate with the firefighting efforts. One lady interviewed on TV this morning talked about what she had taken from her house. She had gathered up her “computer hard drives and a couple of pictures.” Sounds like someone with the right priorities…!

Today is a day of meetings. One down already and three to go. Life is good — and even though there are billboards everywhere touting California Cheese, I still haven’t seen any. Just lots and lots of crazy drivers.