I go to bed late and prefer to sleep in (topical comic). Some study recently reported that night owls are more prone to resist authority.

Visiting family, I always need a day or two to adjust to the new environment. The old folks go to bed early, for one thing. People have different routines, and I don't always have the familiar home comforts within reach (WiFi, my pantry, my getaway car).

I'm in Caffe Fiore in Ballard, reading a Stranger article about Barack Obama and sipping a luscious caffe breve. Feels like home.

Betsy and I are back in the Northwest for Christmas, visiting her family and mine. We're staying with friends tonight and in the meantime I'm relaxing. May go watch some English soccer with Josh today, do some shopping, play Eve. Probably some work, too.

It sure is nice to be back again.

It snowed about six inches this past weekend in Boulder. Betsy and I went on a nighttime walk through our neighborhood, where it was quiet and still except for a few dogs and their people going for walks. The prairie dogs were nowhere to be seen.

Watched Harakiri the other night. A great film; subversive, suspenseful, well-acted. It's an anti-samurai samurai movie, and Betsy liked it, too.

Also of note for Japanese movie fans: several of Akira Kurosawa's movies have passed into the public domain and can be downloaded from the Internet Archive. I've now got a couple DVDs worth of Ikiru, Stray Dog, Sugata Sanshiro, and Rashomon.

Statetris is a game where you drop the states into place on a map, kinda like Tetris. Addictive to the geography geek part of my brain. I played with the Japan map to try and learn the prefectures, but there are also games with Africa, Europe, the US, and the counties of South Carolina.

Now that we've been here almost two months, I've gathered a few impressions of Boulder that I'd like to share.

1. Eating out is expensive and mediocre. It's easy to pay too much for a decent, but not very interesting, meal. We had some good pho the other night, but it was $8.50 and there were no cream puffs. Than Brothers in Seattle has us spoiled. Most of the menu at this particular Vietnamese place was $15 per entree, too.

Work brought me back to Seattle for a few short days. We moved our office upstairs to bigger digs and I helped set up the network. For my next trip to Montana the end of this week, I'm also helping polish up a hardware project.

Ben and Lindsey hosted me at their new house (thanks guys!). While waiting for them to return from climbing on my arrival day, I spent some time at the Farmer's Market in Ballard. I had a great veggie quesadilla and sat and read Alpinist 21 in the new Caffe Fiore.

Tonight we had a bunch of my friends over for some burgers and beer. I miss 'em and I hope everyone will come out and visit us in Boulder soon.

I went on my first long road bike ride in Boulder today with Chris D. and his coworker Luis. I met them at Amante (the road biker's hangout, apparently) and we went out to the town of Lyons, out and back the Apple Valley Rd, and then back to my house via 66 and Hygeine. Total distance is about 39 miles and I am whipped, even after a post-ride nap. You can really fly down the road here, and I now understand why staying with the pack is so important—drafting makes a big difference.

[Map of our route]

For two weeks in a row, I've taken a daytrip to Livingston, Montana for work. Livingston's the "Gateway to Yellowstone" and is a pretty scenic location itself:

We arrived in Boulder July 20-somethingth and set to work fixing up the place. Paint was first, then we ran around picking our furniture and carpet. Then our moving van arrived in Denver, so we drove down, picked it up, and unloaded it, all the the help of Emily, Linda, and our gracious real estate agent, Digger Braymiller (thanks!).

Ever since then, our home has looked pretty much like this, give or take a couple boxes:

We're both busy finishing homework and makin' the software, respectively. Someday we'll paint the other two bedroom walls and find the rest of our underwear.