I'm at the clean-up point in one of my projects at work, where the dreamy fun is all used up and you're tidying up a seemingly endless roster of little details. By 4:30 my contacts started yelping in protest of too much consecutive screen time. I stuffed laptop and notebook in my bag, resigning myself to some work time later this weekend, and bolted home.

One of Meenal's good friends from college has just started the ME master's program here, and we'd arranged to go for a ride. By the time I met Katy at Escondido and Stanford at quarter to six, the sun was already a brilliant orange lighting our long-shadowed way through a windy, windy Alpine-Portola-Sand Hill loop. It wasn't until I'd gotten home and into a hot shower (Sarah markets this as Best Water Pressure in Palo Alto™) that I realized I was thawing: that, from the low sun and the gusty, fog-driven wind, my fingers and arms were freezing to the touch.

So I had two heaping bowls of Betsy's meatball minestrone and am now huddled in bed far too early on a Friday night. A laptop actually on your lap is an amazing source of heat.