I'm making a list of places to go:

• Venice. It's going to be underwater someday and I really want to get there before then.
• Vancouver. It just seems like a neat place.
• Seattle (again). I suspect its infection of California transplants will continue, but it's still a neat place that I had just started to find the soul of in my four days there.
• Portland. I know nothing about it, but I've never been there.
• Spain/France. Barcelona, Cadiz, Paris, Marseilles, Nice, Arles, Basque country--I think I could spend months just in these two countries. Spain in particular I could get deep into, speaking the language. And I've been meaning to learn French. It's not hard.
• Isle of Man. I don't really know why. It got my attention when I saw the Wikipedia entry for Tynwald Day. I'm not incredibly convinced that it wouldn't be boring, though going during Manx National Week seems to guarantee some goings-on; but I'm curious anyway.

After weeks of doing other stuff, I've been catching up on the housing crash news. It looks like I've been right all along in agreeing with the bubble predictors: it's happening in slow motion, but it's happening. Thankfully, I can do math, and didn't buy a house. Because of the bizarro economics of the Bay Area--low supply, high demand, and lots of people making lots of money--a really thorough crash here is less likely than a serious softening. Still, other parts of the country are currently or will start crashing, like San Diego or Florida, and

I think Apple has just received my Bug of the Year award--belatedly, since that bug is from 2003. It gets serious extra points for the "solution" being "Don't do that".

Maps!

I had a nice Thanksgiving, making sushi with friends, hanging out with them and their marvelous little primate. Today was a little bit of shopping (new shoes, finally--just the updated same model of Merrells I had before, since they worked well enough and I hate trying stuff on) and hanging out with the cat I'm helping take care of. She felt cuddly today, and eventually migrated into my lap where she kneaded the air happily while being petted.

I don't know where we get this sense of permanence that poisons our existence. It definitely reduces anxiety in the short term to figure that things will just stay the way they are, but long-term we suffer for that initial convenience. Everything changes. We and others get sick or old or dead, relationships change and shift and come and go, stuff wears out (or we ruin it, as I dyed several of my training uniforms bright pink earlier this week). For me, the hardest part is that to navigate all the change well, I can't really trust anything except for the little voice inside. There's all kinds of information coming in from outside, but it all passes through that inner vision and I have to listen carefully and have a lot of faith in what I see there, no matter how contradictory to the objective evidence it seems.