I spent Thursday and Friday nights with Kylae, collaborating on a delicious batch of chilaca bowls, decimating the Santa Monica stairs, and reflecting together on life, love, and how to make it through those rougher spells.

Saturday afternoon, I drove to Belvedere Junior High School, where my grandfather, Walter Zabriskie, had been principal in the 1960s. His former students had asked if he could attend their reunion. And by virtue of the fact that he has lived to the age of ninety-eight, his answer could be “yes”!

Even though Belvedere is a junior high, its students from the 1960s hold periodic reunions because they feel about their junior-high years the way many people come to feel about high school.

The way they tell it, this was largely due to their excellent principal and staff. So they presented my grandfather with this fantastic plaque:

This morning I uploaded my best photos from the reunion into my Flickr account.

After the reunion, I headed to the Ogdorm for a quick nap in Rebecca’s delightfully-appointed room and then a building-wide party with what must’ve been more than 100 of the most interesting people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting in such a short period of time: Phil, Bob, Troy, Reichart, and so many more.

I am not usually much of a party person, but this one had too many interesting people for me to pull myself away. I fell sleep at 5:00 a.m.

On Sunday morning I recovered to the best of my ability and rode with Andrew to a jazz piano lesson he was teaching in Hermosa Beach. We returned in time for lunch with wookie-philosopher Luka, but regrettably missed Shapiro, who unlike the rest of us has a real schedule to keep thankyouverymuch.

Sunday evening, Andrew, Rebecca, Paul, and I joined Reichart and company on a Hike the Geek trek up the aptly-nicknamed “ass buster” trail. I probably needed to buy new running shoes already, but now they’re covered in dust.

Paul took the above photo during the hike. Monday morning, he and I spontaneously took a quick road trip to see Zibby (my grandfather) again before I had to catch my plane Monday afternoon.

I am reminded just how inspiring and rejuvenating it is to spend time with quality friends.

To all of you whom I was able to meet and spend time with during my trip — thank you! I hope to be back soon. With so many good people in one place, it will be hard to stay away.

Today I’ll be re-adjusting to being back home, including plenty of meditation, and getting back into the swing of things with work and the various web development projects on my plate.

I also added a Flickr badge to my right sidebar.

I particularly like my photo of the plane wing from our flight to Tampa this Thanksgiving. I’d show it here, but at the moment I can’t figure out how to embed a Flickr photo into this blog post.

I know how to do many of these tricks, but I always find it ridiculously time-consuming. I’m sure the real experts get much quicker at it, but I still got a chuckle out of their admonition: “Do not compare yourself to someone who has gone through twenty hours of retouching.”

Sometimes it’s a fun twenty hours! And part of what’s most fun is striving for the convincing illusion of realness … the very thing that can be harmful when it comes to women’s self-images.

So kudos to whoever put together this little demonstration.

I am particularly fond of this essay.

Kathy e-mailed it to me in July 1999, shortly after we had met in Vermont and struck up an active e-mail correspondence.

Mid-way through reading the essay next morning, multi-tasking on the way to work, I remember getting a chill down my spine and thinking, “Any woman that would send me this essay is worth taking very seriously.”

I promptly broke things off with a woman I’d been dating casually, and told Kathy that I was no longer seeing anyone.

Below is a photo I took of Kathy a few days ago. She’s been letting her bangs grow out and returning to her natural hair color, which I like even better than the blonde highlights.

Love is friendship set on fire.

I’ve been back for a couple of days, and only now am I starting to feel normal and rested.

The four-day trek up the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu was awesome. It was a full service guided trek, with porters, cooks, and all. The company provided the tents, sleeping pads, and all the meals. For an extra $15, they rented sleeping bags. They also provided a personal porter service, which I did not elect. Bad move. Almost everyone paid for the porter, meaning they only had to lug around a small pack – like a college backpack sort of thing. The personal porters took care of the sleeping bags, pads, and I think 5 kilos of whatever gear you wanted to give them.

I, on the other hand, humped it for four days with a 41-pound load in a full-size Kirezzian hand-me-down backpack.

Which instantly reminded me of this photo of Kirez from Kathy’s and my wedding.

Read Joe’s full post for the tale of how he was almost kidnapped.

And if you don’t get the “Chapel Hill Mafia” reference, just keep on reading down the main page of his blog.

My parents’ divorce, when I was two, left me with a near-mystical appreciation for my father, a deep feeling of his indescribable value in my universe.

This photo captures that connection between us pretty well.

Originally, I created the sidebar photo montage to be one large repeating background image, but the file size was prohibitively high (260K) — so now I’ve divided the photos across three separate background images that are randomly chosen each time you visit a new page.

Since it’s a background, your web browser will cache the image for any given page; so if you’re trying to cycle through the images you’ll need to hold down your shift key each time you reload/refresh the page.

I should break the habit of staying up so late when Kathy goes out of town…. But it’s nice to catch up on blogging.

Enjoy the new cat photos!