My high school friends are awesome, and will be living in awesome, and awesomely visitable, locales over the next year: Guyana, Kenya. I've been enticed enough to want to milk all I can out of vacation days, so I'm back in Palo Alto for three days' work between Christmas and New Year's.

Home was a meandering long weekend of family and late nights catching up. Phones just don't cut it, and I'm really excited to be moving back within a weeknight's reach of my family and Wan and Farah and the rest.

But for now: northern California. If ever a winter day could be sultry, yesterday afternoon was it. At sixty-one degrees, I suited up in only a single full layer of clothes and rolled out the end of the street. I always love crossing over from civilization into pasture, and Page Mill Road, half a mile from my house, is one of the more dramatic breaks. After negotiating a scoot across two lanes of freeway-bound traffic, the cars peel off to my right and there I am, spinning up a winding two-lane road into the smoky foothills. It's not a long shot from sultry to sinister seduction, and true to form I ran into a mist that turned to drizzle that turned to fat old raindrops. It was a warmish rain, though, so uncommon here that you had to — if not enjoy, then — observe it.