Birthday flowers in Berkeley

The desk run is a different discipline. Berkeley's largest employer is the university, and a department delivery goes to a departmental office rather than to a lab bench — name the department as it is actually written, not as you remember it. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on Cyclotron Road sits above campus behind a staffed gate, reached by the hill road out of Strawberry Canyon, and it is a federal site: nobody drives up to a building unescorted, so the realistic delivery is the gate or the lab's receiving point, with the recipient walking down to it. The Dwight Way and West Berkeley biotech and light-manufacturing corridor, the Fourth Street retail blocks, the Gilman Street and Potter Creek workshops, and Berkeley City Hall on Milvia Street with the civic offices around it are all ordinary loading-dock-and-lobby deliveries and easy. So is the Central Library on Kittredge. Outside the city line but inside the ring, the Emeryville office and studio campuses along Park Avenue and the downtown Oakland towers on Broadway and Franklin absorb a steady share of the region's desk drops. Two pieces of advice for all of them: pick Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, because Bay Area offices have been thin on Mondays and Fridays since hybrid schedules settled, and never send to a workplace that closes at noon on a Friday in summer.