We haven't really made a whole lot of progress on the house. In fact, I'm just going to copy and paste that last sentence right now and keep it somewhere handy because I fear it's exactly how I'm going to be starting most of my blog posts between now and, I don't know, Christmas?

I'm heading to Phoenix tomorrow for a brief work trip, and when I say it's a brief work trip, I do literally mean that I will be there less than 24 hours. In fact, I have just done the Plane Math (not to be confused with the Plain Math, although truthfully it was only adding and subtracting, so it was actually pretty plain) and it turns out that I will be in Phoenix for a grand total of seventeen and a half hours, eight of which (I hope) I will be asleep for.

It's been a while since we got back from Barbados and I haven't even told you anything about it. It was---as you would imagine a vacation in Barbados to be, particularly one taken after two weeks of packing and moving and painting---rather fantastic.

For a start, this was our balcony:

And this was the sunset view from that balcony:

And this was the pool where we spent our days:

My new commute, until now, has been pretty innocuous. We get on the train, we sit there and read for thirty minutes---I have rediscovered reading! I now have a time and a place to read!---and then we get off at the other end. We do this twice a day and it's fine. Sometimes I get my phone out and Yelp all the restaurants and bars we're passing because we move through entirely different neighborhoods now and it's always nice to know where you can get a decent falafel. Sometimes Sean and I chat, sometimes we don't.

Picture yourself at the beach in July. What are you wearing? A bathing suit, right? Maybe a t-shirt and shorts if you're there in the evening. What you're not wearing at the beach in July, I'd expect, is a long-sleeved t-shirt under a hoodie under a jacket with a fur-lined hood, wrapped in a pashmina, and topped off with a hat.

Welcome to summer in San Francisco.

1) A while ago, I wrote this brief guide to Charleston for theCitizen, a cutting-edge youth culture travel site for which I fear I may not be hip enough, and which carries the following disclaimer: "If your idea of fun is eating a 12-course meal on a cruise ship, theCitizen is not for you. If you lost your wallet last summer in a complicated scam run by some junkie from Berlin, theCitizen might be for you.

I wake up every morning like a deep sea diver coming up for air, shooting to the surface of wakefulness. Sleep has been deep and pitch-black and all-consuming---the grateful sleep of a person who finds, with a sudden relief, that there are more of her loved ones in close proximity than not in close proximity---but the room is always flooded with sunlight when I wake, the blind deliberately left open the night before to guarantee it.  

When I got home from work this evening, Sean said "did you hear about this thing with Al Gore's son?" And because I had spent all day writing feverishly about Vail---rather than half designing websites and half checking CNN for baseball scores every five minutes---I said that no, I hadn't.

Yesterday afternoon, my brother Tom walked to Malaysia. I'm not using "walked to Malaysia" as a euphemism for anything, and it's not some hip new street lingo that the kids are all using. I mean he actually walked to Malaysia. From Singapore. For the evening.

I have come to a crossroads regarding my hair. Yes, I know that sort of scintillating opener is what makes my blog my blog and not, say, a cracking page turner on the New York Times bestseller list, but if you can't indulge in a little navel-gazing on your own website, where can you indulge in it, you know?