I will be heading to Tacoma by way of Portland for Thanksgiving. It will be a long drive there and back, and I am saddened that Sarah won’t be meeting me there as originally planned, and that I can’t take Donald and Mary Ann with to visit with Jay and Melody in Portland and then Donald and Chandler in Tacoma, but this is how it worked out. As it stands, I will likely drive the coast all the way back.

TechnoDonald and Mary Ann: Would you do me the honor of sharing a make up Thanksgiving after the regular Thanksgiving? My treat?

RegularDonald and Chandler: CAN HAZ BACONS?

I will ask everyone more politely later. I’m just so excited for another road trip.

I got a very special package from Norway the other day. Thank you, h0bbel, thank you. Words cannot express!

I can drive fast when I choose to, and after spending four days tearing ass across the country on the best (read: terrifying and fast) roads I could weasel out of the map, my tolerance for fiendishly difficult routes has reached somewhat ludicrous levels. I wanted to drive through the mountains instead of on the freeway. Sarah agreed, but by the time we were descending from the pass, he stomach was starting to feel a little icky.

Some rain had finally reached the forests and so verdure had grabbed hold of the hills. The occasional grasslands were still brown, but the brush and trees seemed to have come back to life. Clouds had already covered the sky, but as we rose they dipped to kiss the mountain: tenderly, shyly, but then ardently, teen lovers grasping clumsily and tightly. The windows of my car steamed up.

I pulled over on the occasions vistas appeared through breaks in the trees. At one clear point we could just make out the bay ten or fifteen miles away. At one grey point the ground past the shoulder dropped away into nothingness. Three trees stood crispy and were wet. Their branches held strange fruit that bore a resemblance to pears. I picked one for Sarah to examine. She did, and it swiftly disappeared into blankness upon her satisfactory examination: not a pear. The not-pear made a soft thud somewhere on the grassy floor of the ravine. We drove. Mossy branches prompted me to comment that the mountains felt of magic. The trees passing by our windows beckoned. I confessed that I felt at home amidst the greenery, and then let slip a more dangerous confession: the mountains make me want to write.

We stopped for tacos in Santa Cruz. Sarah felt better, and we soldiered on. The fog had lifted as we reached sea level, but a few miles outside of Santa Cruz the clouds gathered again. I began to get nervous — I hadn’t driven north out of Santa Cruz before, and I wasn’t sure when Highway 1 would draw up to the ocean. Fields rowed past the windows. Craggy bluffs rose and fell around us, then as suddenly as the ocean could arrive, it did. Cliffs fell abruptly to our left and there was the Pacific: grey and crashing.

“I… wow,” Sarah stuttered. “This really reminds me of Scotland.”

A mist washed over the car and the road. We are just visitors, but nature lives here. Some buildings appeared across from a pull off, and I asked Sarah if we could stop to see the ocean.

“Of course,” she replied enthusiastically. The drizzle had stepped up to a light rain. We had dressed for chilly San Francisco weather, but hadn’t taken wetness into account. Nonetheless, we pulled on our coats and opened the umbrella that had been nesting on the floor of my back seat. It squawked and shook at the rude awakening. I pulled up my hood and let Sarah wrestle the umbrella into her own shelter. Around us, sightseers were hustling back to their cars to get out of the weather.

I tire, so I leave the rest of this story as an exercise for the reader to construct based upon the following images and a short list of activities.
We:

1. walked down to a hidden beach and made photographs
2. drove up the coast through ever thickening fog, which lead me to miss our exit
3. ate at the Ziryab Mediterranean Grill, which was salty, expensive, and delicious.
4. saw the Heartless Bastards at the Independent

Now, some more pictures:

WIN.

After five years of being a member of the core developers of the Gallery open source software — and reaping many personal, academic, and professional rewards from the same, I quietly left the team on Thursday. A large contingent of the core developers had met at the extended Googleplex here in Mountain View to sit down and hammer out as much of the next version of Gallery as possible. Halfway through day two I realized that my heart simply wasn’t in it. Yes, I still love software development, and still need software to manage my images, but somewhere during my sabbatical for school I drifted away and just never came back. Splitting from your high school girlfriend when you go to college is a bit cliché, but that’s pretty much what happened. I continued to offer logistical support to the team for the rest of the week, but Thursday afternoon I went back to my day job and tried to stay out of the way of Gallery’s progress.

Leaving was an incredibly difficult decision. I am still a bit flattened by it.

The plants on my patio are honestly not making it. I’m pretty sure that this is my fault, and I will have to import my mother to retrain me. :(

When Chris was in town, my boss and a former coworker told him that they wanted to go shooting at a local range. I mentioned this to Don, and he was excited to get out his rifle. I was excited to relive some of my fond childhood memories. Shooting was fun.

Here’s Don:

Afterwords, Don told me that I am a good shot, and I was faced with empirical evidence. My targets boasted tight groupings. I haven’t handled a gun in something like fifteen years, but apparently I can put four out of five shots into the stationary left ventricle of a human being from 100 yards. This is a piece of information that I have been having a little bit of trouble reconciling with my day to day pacifism.

The wild shots in the following picture were not mine:

In lighter news, here is the view over my patio’s privacy fence:

Also, Melody is super crazy rad!

I hope Chandler has nightmares. I know Sarah will.

Also visible in the picture: a Domokun piñata. Target is pretty much sold out of Domokun stuff, which I am really sad about. Domos are super kawaii!!!!!!!!L! LK!L!K LK! LK! LK! J:LK! kj hagkjlsd hg;ljksadfhg

Not shown: how eerily non-trashed my apartment is. It could use more cleaning, but somehow I have a living room that you could walk through without tripping if you were to come visit me in California.

Also, I’m all set up on Skype, so if you buy, for instance, a Logitech QuickCam® Pro 9000 webcam and plug it into your computer, we could say hello. I would even put on pants, even though you generally can’t tell that I’m not wearing any.