I've just had the strangest, randomest, and wonderfulest 12 or so hours. Last night, for once, I did not get sucked into the bookstore or the library after work, and instead came straight home. The Thursday night plan, for which I had gotten myself immensely psyched up, had been to bust out Visual C++ and spend an hour or so writing a short program, the guts of and reasons for which shall be explained below. While I was turning on my computer and checking my email, a guy walked in looking for Lauren, whom I knew 'cause she'd stayed over with my housemate Jessie several times; it turned out that he was Colin, who had lived in what is now my room but will be his again in September, and was supposed to meet up with Lauren and go visit her where she lived with her boyfriend Nate. After some phone calls, it was determined that she wouldn't be back 'til 9, at which point I invited his hungry-looking self to cook and eat dinner with me. (Weird that I "invited" somebody to eat here when they'd lived here longer than I.) At some point during dinner, he suggested that I should go up with them and I jumped at the random outing without too much thought.

I'm not sure how effective these details are in capturing just how absurd it was. For a while, I've been amazingly unfazed by strangers walking in our front door— it usually turns out, anyway, that I know them through less than three degrees, and with multiple nodes, at that. But even I have to admit that agreeing to spend a night with a bunch of near strangers, 30 miles away from my temporary home and the job that awaited me at 9am the next morning, was impulsive and maybe even risky—though I swear that I'm always pretty careful about physical safety; the risk was of not getting to work on time, and not any fear of being drawn and quartered.

I didn't know that they lived in such an amazing location. I didn't know, either, that Colin's plan had expanded from being there for a couple of hours to spending the night—though he had said he could get me back to Dire Wolf before 8am, which was really all that mattered. It turned out that he had been waking up around sunrise for the past few weeks, and had to go back to Santa Cruz early the next morning, anyway.

Nate and Lauren were renting the lower level of an older couple's house that they'd furnished so that it was completely independent of the upper half. The front entrance was at ground level, but the opposite side of the room was big glass sliding doors opening on to the lower of two levels of a wraparound wooden deck. To make it even more perfect, there was a wooden chin-up bar of sorts, as well as a sling seat, hanging from the bottom of the upper level so that you were dangling right over the top of the brush surrounding the house, which was raised five or so feet above the vegetation in the back. The others went to bed around midnight. But I felt mildly and probably unreasonably weird that Lauren had made up one big futon bed for the two of us, as well as apprehensive about being awake early enough, so I just sat in that lulling, swinging seat and stared at the scenery, which was indeed enough to occupy me for the entire night.

Woodside is a townlet—really just a loose scattering of very rich people seeking solitude—smack on the ridge of the Santa Cruz mountains, where the Pacific's furthest reach meets its Waterloo. The west side of the mountains are buffeted by chilly Pacific winds and fog, whereas the east (which includes Palo Alto) is completely protected from any interesting weather that might happen. This house was on the west side, but atop a secondary ridge which was protected from direct blasts of ocean air. Had there not been redwoods in the way, the lights of San Francisco would probably have been visible from across the Bay. As it was, there was a red glow silhouetting the treetops of the ridge in front of us and providing enough light for a reflection in the glass doors when I looked back.

Because of the lack of direct wind, there was an envelope of absolute silence around the house. Oh sure, crickets and other bugs abounded, but there was none of the howling wind that we could make out far in the distance. I swear I heard a single leaf break off from its parent and tumble slowly to the ground, with short, fragile crackles marking its contact with every branch along the way. A few times an hour, something would quickly flutter by. It took me a dozen or so to settle that they were bats.

Around 5, as the sky became blue rather than reddish, the bats came back, flying right toward me overhead. Colin woke up just around sunrise, as promised; we got our things together silently to avoid waking Lauren and Nate, and climbed into the car. I was back in my room shortly after six. All this on a Thursday night, with eight hours of work ahead of me. Randomness rocks—though I think there might be hell to pay during work today.