Well. It's been awhile. I don't have much news to report... except that I'm moving back to the Bay Area. With A. Oh, yeah, we'll be shacking up, too. This collection of news has been more surprising to most folks I've told than it is to me. I suppose that's because the process getting to this point is intimately familiar to me, and out of the blue for most others. The most surprise has been expressed at my willingness to leave New York City.
There's a famous court case called Palsgraf v. Long Island. A railroad guard helps push a passenger onto a moving train car, which causes the passenger to drop a package. Unbeknownst to guard, the package contains fireworks, which explode, causing some scales at the other end of the platform to fall on poor Mrs. Palsgraf. She, of course, sues the railroad. The court finds that even though the guard's actions factually caused her injury (after all, if the guard hadn't pushed, she wouldn't have been hurt), the railroad isn't liable because the guard's actions aren't the "proximate cause" of her injury. That is, there's a difference between what causes something, and what's actually responsible for it.
All of which is a long and legally dorky way of explaining that the reasons for leaving New York are many, and run the gamut from the philosophical to the mundane. Love. Mountains. Jadedness. Burritos. Friday nights at home. Work. Vegas. Friendship. Old age. Tennis. Family. Canyons. Even without accidental explosions, the scales shift from time to time, and at this point they lean West. As for the future, I've pretty much given up predicting that.