mengwong

People keep asking me just how big Singapore is.

Buddy of mine just opened a cafe. The focus is on chocolates, but they have the usual coffee, crepes, cakes, etc.

So DSL+wifi went in yesterday. Now the question:

How to make the geeky road warriors happy, while not totally losing money on leeches who buy a $3 cup of coffee and camp out all day occupying valuable table space?

At Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto, they take down the WiFi on weekends.

How do other people do it?

I suggested that he might offer an $18.88 bottomless cup of coffee plus any one food item; laptop people would be encouraged to order that, with the understanding that they're really paying rent.

Or, when every table is filled, and there's a line waiting, waiters could deliver pointed hints.

Suggestions?

The newbies start with the high-school relationship, the immature relationship, the Hollywood fantasy, the dopamine crush.

Grown-ups have the adult romance, the mature relationship, the marriage-with-kids, the vasopressin commitment.

One easy litmus test to tell the difference:

Do the couple insist on sitting together at the dinner party?

Or do they follow Miss Manners's guidance, which is that couples should never be seated together; they should be fully capable of acting as independent social individuals for the duration of the party. And then they go home together.

Dependence, Independence, Interdependence.

Adults go into Phase III knowing their BATNA well: Phase II.

If you never have Phase II, if you've never been happily single, it's harder to be happily attached.

If you set economy above ecology, you get global warming.

If you set economy above biology, you get 1.24 Singapore.

I personally don't see the problem. The saving grace of human population dynamics is that economic success leads to overpopulation, but it also leads to education, women's rights, and K-selection depopulation. I just hope we get through the stages in time.

... iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli
uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim
imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se
continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat,
panem et circenses. ...
(Juvenal, Satire 10.77-81)

A juvenile populace that eats its seed corn is headed for the cliff.

I wonder if any of the candidates have the gumption to say "fellow Americans, we've made some bad mistakes. We've borrowed against our future, and now we have to pay. The sooner we pay, the sooner we recover. The longer we wait, the longer we suffer."

There is flint in the American character that will respond maturely to bad news firmly delivered; but that flint is buried deep. An election year is a terrible time to dig it out.

I wonder how things would be different if more of the country had grown up on Heinlein.

Let's say we've had seven years of fat. Now, choose between two hypothetical futures. Choice A: we collectively tighten our belts, opt for seven years of lean, and together we all make it to the other side. Choice B: one more year of fat, followed by the execution of the poorest tenth of the population, followed by another year of fat, and another round of slaughter of the most costly and least productive ...

I imagine Choice B looks a lot like last days on Easter Island. (At least, the morality-tale version of Rapanui, whether or not it actually happened.)

An economist would say that the question depends on how much you discount the future. If you discount it enough, your Pareto curve will get so steep that you might as well adopt the sand tiger shark as a mascot.

I have a harebrained theory that discount rates arise from the fact that we die. If we were immortal, the rate would be zero. I hypothesize that the discount rate of a population can be indexed to its life expectancy. More precisely, it can be indexed to some weighted average of the objective, the subjective, and the evolutionarily instinctive life expectancy. (i.e., the superego, the ego, and the id.) The life expectancy according to the id is pretty much fixed at about 35, tops. Re-weighting requires education and civilization.

Five years ago Michael Pollan mentioned that this might be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will be shorter than their parents'. I believe it: the high-carbon lifestyle is not just bad for the environment: it's also bad for the people who practice it. Here in Singapore, my maid (physically active, eats mostly vegetables) may well live longer than my mother (sedentary, eats mostly meat). In America, that future is now arriving: it's just not evenly distributed. If you buy my theory, the consequences are staggering. Inverted yield curves are only the tip of the iceberg.

The larger consequence is that America might, for the first time in its history, reverse its progression along the r-K continuum back toward r-selection. Down that path lies poverty and the third world.

The NYTimes flatly agrees that the masses will vote for bread and circuses every time. Democracies don't act in their best interests. I just hope Singapore can keep up the benevolent paternalism.

As for America, I hope the superdelegates remember they're electing a president, not a pastor, for his policies, not his popularity.

NIMBY may have won in Texas, but it's still a distortion.

Like the man from Shell said: "An issue was dealt with, but the problem was not solved. We need more energy."

The coal plants weren't evil. They were just responding to energy demand.

Sure, coal sucks. Maybe wind, solar, or nuclear would have been better ways to supply energy.

But the best and most elegant solution is to cut demand. Amory Lovins says negawatts before megawatts.

Let's face it: We don't need more energy. We want more energy.

And you can't always get what you want.

In the old days, thrift was a virtue. Today thrift has been replaced by conspicuous consumption. Anyone who says "it may be more than I need, but I wouldn't want people to think I was poor" is acting out of insecurity. The Joneses aren't particularly good role models. Pick someone else to keep up with!

Especially when there is a clear chain of causation that connects the convenience of the car to calamity and catastrophe. Drive the car, emit the carbon, melt the iceberg, flood Bangladesh. Turn up the thermostat, warm the oceans, cause a hurricane, flood New Orleans.

Sure, we could blame China, which just bumped the US off the #1 spot. But if China weren't spending a quarter of its energy making stuff that ends up in Wal-Mart ... they wouldn't be building a new coal plant every week. (You know the stuff I'm talking about. It's the stuff you don't need that you buy with money you don't have.)

Humans are really bad at recognizing responsibility when it gets diffused through the economic system. We have achieved such dominion over the planet that two out of three Acts of God are really man-made disasters. For every ten cars white people buy, God kills one brown person. In a sense the first world has declared war on the third already, only we're not killing them with bullets; we're killing them with dysentery.

For the cost of a cup of coffee you could save a child, sure. Or you could literally just not drink the coffee, and you'd probably benefit that child about as much, without sending any money anywhere, simply by refraining from consumption.

Those activists who protested against the coal plants -- I wonder how many of them had switched to CFLs at home. If Gandhi were alive, he would remind them: Be the change you want to see in the world. If the average Texan pledged to use the same amount of energy his grandparents did, all those protested coal plants would vanish on their own.

Those changes don't require quixotic campaigning. Market mechanisms should do the job. Increase the cost of energy, people will use less of it: they'll switch to CFL simply because their pocketbook insists.

But there are two things that get in the way.

One is that it's expensive to be poor. If a CFL has an up-front cost of $10 versus an incandescent's $1, then even if the lifetime running cost of the incandescent is $200 versus the CFL's $50, the poor person living from paycheck to paycheck will never accumulate the capital needed to benefit from the economies of a high-capex, low-opex strategy.

The other thing that gets in the way is sheer force of habit. In the first world, we're used to a certain kind of lifestyle, and in many people's minds the alternative looks like this.



If we're going to rely on price mechanisms, we're looking at some drastic changes. Ideally the US would use one-tenth the energy per capita that we do today. For that to happen, prices would have to rise so that a first-worlder spends as much of their income on energy as a third-worlder. That's a huge, huge rise.

The last politician who told people they can't have their cake and eat it too was Jimmy Carter, and look what happened to him. I just hope that people have changed enough to listen to Obilary.

If they don't, and we decide that a resource-intensive lifestyle of comfort is important enough to go to war over ... then war it will be.

China is building a new coal plant every week. Now Europe is following in its footsteps.

This is not okay.

They say we have enough coal to last 200 years. I say the more coal we use now, the longer it'll last: if we keep up our current rate of consumption, our existing reserves might last 200,000 years. Why? Because enough people will die in the next 20 that all those new coal plants will become entirely unnecessary.

Population experts say we are at, or above, the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet. And if you've read Bill McKibben and Michael Pollan you know what "sustainable" means: we have to stop making human beings out of oil (from crude to corn to cow to Cheney) and go back to old-fashioned sunlight and air.

When you make people out of oil, if a barrel of oil costs ten times what it used to, then you can only make one-tenth the people. The lifeboat isn't as big as it used to be, and if things keep going, somebody's going to have to get off.

There are two paths forward. Both paths lead to depopulation. On one path, we stand up and head for the exits in an orderly Powerdown. On the other, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse await. When Silicon Valley professionals start hoarding food, famine is no longer something that happens in other countries. Famine leads to war. War leads to death. And dead people only emit carbon once. That is Nature's way of getting the last word.

Einstein says: The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

There are four levels of thinking in Daniel Dennett's Tower. Each level has a patron saint: Darwin, Skinner, Popper, Gregory, named for the degree of adaptiveness available to organisms and species at that level.

At the highest level, money and markets are Gregorian tools. They let us shape behaviour using nothing more than memes. The issue of climate change is only just beginning to reach that floor of the tower, with the Kyoto Protocol.

Carbon credits aside, for most people living day-to-day, climate change is camped quietly at the level of Popperian thinking. We know intellectually that it'll be a problem in our own lifetimes; but short-term thinking (exemplified by the quarterly earnings call) beats the kind of long-term thinking we need to solve the problem, dooming us all, unwittingly, to a sort of species-wide Logan's Run. Besides, being an expert on a problem doesn't mean you're an expert on a solution; and being an expert on a solution doesn't mean you actually do it.

That's where Skinnerian thinking comes in. Your neocortex may know that a stove is hot. But your lizard brain will stay unconvinced until you actually get burned.

And huge swaths of human behaviour are Skinnerian. We are irrational in all kinds of ways. We only learn lessons when we get hurt. But that's the great thing about money. Money is a bridge that lets the higher levels reach down and influence the lower. Popper said famously that our ability to imagine futures "lets hypotheses die in our stead". Money lets us lose a fortune instead of a finger. It hurts, and we learn.

We need all the Popper, Gregory, and Skinner we can muster. The alternative is Darwin. If we allow the Earth to warm by 2°C, we're done for. As a point of comparison: if, during the Cold War, we had blown up all 70,000 warheads available to both sides, each equivalent to 500 kilotons of TNT, thus putting a total of 146 exajoules into the troposphere (which masses, say, 4E18 kg) ... an all-out thermonuclear holocaust would raise global temperatures by 0.03°C. In the last 150 years, we've already managed to raise temperatures by 1°. That's equivalent to nuking the world every day for a month. Another 1° will end the world as we know it.

We need to return to preindustrial levels of carbon emission, only with ten times the number of people on the planet. You can see why this is going to be the single biggest challenge of the first half of the 21st century. No matter which way you slice it, it's going to hurt: it'll hurt the American who has to stop driving. It'll hurt the Chinese worker who moved to the city dreaming of buying a car, and who now never will.

We need to change our lightbulbs. We need to power those lightbulbs with nuclear, not with coal. We need to eat meat once a week, not three times a day. We need to ditch our cars and walk to the train. We need to move to the city. We need to party like it's 1899. Smart people see the writing on the wall and get there ahead of the pack.

The mass media is not getting the message out. In the recent primary debate, the moderators spent more time talking about lapel pins than global warming. And Gore's recent TEDtalk says that the man on the street is still basically clueless. Let me paint a picture of Florida 2010: in the aftermath of two back-to-back hurricanes, Joe American packs his family into the SUV (bumper sticker: McCain 2008) and they drive until they run out of gas. This happens sooner than you'd think, because in 2010 Joe American can only afford to use a quarter of his gas tank. Two days later, his four kids are weak from hunger and dysentery. Joe American, trying to find food and water in a boarded-up grocery store, is shot as a looter by a jumpy National Guardsman just back from Iraq. There are many ironies here, but the greatest one is that he dies with "why?" on his lips.

Why? Because when all else fails, blind Gaia invokes Darwin.

Anyone who doesn't actually starve may yet learn the connection between demography, food shortages, biofuels, gas prices, and the Hubbert peak. They've been burned, and they'll want to know what went wrong.

In America, the band plays on. The US has one last chance to elect a president who'll sign Kyoto. The Republicans will say "we can't afford to fix the environment." The Democrats will say "we can't afford not to." Sadly, the human primate is completely unequipped to deal rationally with matters of species extinction. Some days I feel like I'm living in the wrong alternate universe. Some mistakes are educational. Others are permanent. Placing the economy above the environment leads to Collapse.

I'm glad we have the Kyoto Protocol. I worry that it's not enough. Common-pool resource regulation is one approach to the tragedy of the commons. I bet France, which switched from coal to nuclear, is making huge bank on traded carbon credits. And they're doing it with the blessing of major environmentalists. It's enough to make you want to invent a Magic Carbon Dioxide Sucking Machine and go into commercial carbon sequestration.

But regulation doesn't give us a way to deal with actors who opt out. What are we going to do if a country decides not to cut emissions? Invade?

Regulation is the stick. If you use the stick too much, the donkey runs away. We need a carrot.

I say the carrot is a new financial instrument. It takes us from Popper to Gregory. It looks a lot like insurance. Imagine a Carbon Assurance Corporation. The premium is basically a tax on carbon pollution. The coverage: if you get hit by a hurricane, or your crops wither and fail, or you die in a heat wave, Carbon Assurance pays out.

It's hard to add a tax on carbon, because the demand elasticity of energy in the first world is incredibly low: people who are entirely habituated to an hour-long commute will grumble, but they'll give up their children's education before they buy a smaller house near work.

But if we frame it in terms of risk management, we can tap in to the fear side of the equation, and if there's anything the modern media are good at, it's drumming up fear.

This model makes people want to join the system voluntarily. It makes people want to reduce their carbon usage. It should make energy agencies think twice about building all those coal plants. It even penalizes people who aren't in, by leaving them exposed to risk. And you can join at any level: personal, municipal, state, and nation.

In America, where people don't even consider their own health worth insuring, this may not go over. But in the rest of the more socialist first world, enlightened leadership may do the right thing. And developing economies have a lot to lose. They may well look at the case of China and recognize that economic growth that comes entirely at the cost of environmental devastation is not true growth at all: it is merely a loan against the future that will come due with a vengeance.

Carbon Insurance just might provide the right economic incentives to turn the ship around before it's too late.

I hereby coin a term to describe an economic downturn related to the failure to go green -- food shortages, Hubbert peak, climate change.

It is an economic brownturn.

See also:

• NYTimes Mag: Why Bother? by Michael Pollan


• John Doerr at TED


• the End of Oil

in which I rediscover New Age syncretism

In Silicon Valley, we take it for granted that if a technology is to reach the mass market, it must be developed beyond raw potential into something a customer can easily use. We call this process productization, and it typically falls to commercial enterprise.

In religion, it works exactly the same way.

If you go back to the historical core of most major religions, you will find mysticism at the very center, surrounded by a terse code of ethics and morality. That core, I believe, is essentially identical across Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and many other religions: it is the same technology, developed into different products. The products happen to be different only because they arose in different places in different times. The core technology is the same because humans, fundamentally, are the same.

Now, for a business to take a product to market, it has to advertise, promote, and sell: if it didn't, customers might never hear about the product! And to stay in business, a firm must charge money so it can keep the lights on, pay the staff, run the ads. These are inescapable consequences of operating in a free market economy.

For that reason, in a competitive marketplace -- for dollars, for souls, whatever -- churches and businesses both find themselves needing to differentiate. They say "my product is better than your product." Even if the products are based on the same technology, and are much more similar than they are different, the businesses that market the products must emphasize the differences. It is the way of things. Compared to McCain, Barack and Hillary are two peas in a pod. But they're not comparing themselves to McCain; they're comparing to each other. And so they must seize on the slightest differences.

And, once they differentiate, they must compete. Like products that are strong but lack marketing, religions that reject evangelism don't go very far. By Darwin, a religion that organizes and promotes itself will displace a religion that doesn't, just like a strong species invading a weak ecosystem.

The irony here is this: the mystical insight at the core of each religion asserts that we are all the same. We all share the human condition. The path to insight is awareness. It leads to eternity. These things are hard to put into words -- which is why Jesus Christ and the Buddha taught face-to-face, and left it to their followers to fossilize the living tradition into text. (In The Power of Now Eckhart Tolle has great fun pointing out how Jesus was a Zen Buddhist: "Before Abraham was, I am" transitions from past tense to present, in a single sentence from samsara to higan.)

Of course, all of this new age enlightenment is 180° away from the age-old psychology of tribalism that is built into our genes. Darwin bequeathes to us a temperament red in tooth and claw, perfectly adapted for a life nasty, brutish, and short. In Hobbes's world, the biggest question is: us or them?

Us or them is the fundamental theorem of human politics. Chomsky says our minds are built for language; equally, I say our minds are built to define an "us" and pick on "them". The hinge between us and them can be anything at all: skin colour, sex, language, religion, geography, surname, social class, accent, schooling, age, beauty, gun ownership, abortion, ability to pronounce "Shibboleth", preference for red vs white wine, position on the Nicene Creed, wearing of spectacles. The all-time best illustration of this point appears in Babylon 5: The Geometry of Shadows: when the Drazi face overcrowding, they pick sides, arbitrarily, and slaughter each other.

The core of every spiritual tradition says: "there is no us versus them: there is only us."

The necessary elaborations of every organized religion retort: "but of course there is".

And that is why I check the box "spiritual but not religious."

I found Queen Bees and Wannabes lying around the house. I have four nieces currently going through teenager hell. Now I have newfound sympathy for them!



It's easy to emerge from adolescence with a jaundiced view of humanity. Who are young people exposed to? Mostly, other young people. Given the evolutionary predilection for chimpanzee politics at that age, it's natural for a teenager to conclude that everybody in the world is riddled with insecurities, unkind, and oversensitive ... but that describes adolescents, not adults. This is sampling bias, pure and simple. Besides, once you're in a position to choose your company, you can select out the insufferables.

Now I want to watch Mean Girls.

It is so sad, because in a way they have each become the other's Nader.

NYTimes: Maybe Money Does Buy Happiness After All

I wonder how this modifies Bill McKibben's Deep Economy.

Presidential debates are well and good, but the American public would just as avidly watch Clinton, Obama, and McCain compete at a shooting range with handguns and rifles. And many would vote the winner.

NYTimes: Co-Payments Soar for Drugs With High Prices

Dismal philosophy predicts a rise in urophagy to reuse unmetabolized pharmaceuticals.

Since not everybody is on Dopplr (we can haz social network federation already plz?) ...

I'll be in Singapore on business next week from April 14th to the 20th. Please post a comment to plan for prata, kway teow, etc.

Here in the Bay Area, Shiok! gets thumbs up, though their chili crab continues to elude us. We went with dazeoflaur, jtavan, floatingatoll, hachi, selena_kyle, and erica.biz. Jenluk was also there, but don't tell her husband. Later, at the Peninsula Creamery, octal and brad joined us for milkshakes.

eHarmony count:
total: 113
closed me: 41
open communication: 6
serious potential: 2

Wow. After reading this blogsite, I now have tremendous sympathy for twentysomething women.

http://www.baggagereclaim.co.uk/drama-seekers-its-time-to-get-off-the-relationship-crack/

Personally, my feelings about relationships oscillate between the following positions:

A. Alex, Helen, Kabir's Mom, etc say that I'm just what sensible women want: I'm a dad, not a cad. All I have to do is put myself out there.

B. Women claim to want nice guys, but in reality, it's complicated: until they get over their own issues, they'll just keep enacting relationships that validate their insecurities. Solution: she must be thirty to play, or, alternatively, the well-adjusted product of an extraordinary upbringing ... in which case she's already in a serious relationship, not with you!

C. William Gibson was right all along. See The Belonging Kind, a few stories down in Burning Chrome.

I'm going to keep my fingers crossed and go with door A. The others don't go anywhere.

Sometimes I say to myself, "Meng, maybe we have too many fonts installed."



When pencil-and-paper stop working, the troubleshooting consists of four easy steps:
- does the pencil need sharpening? Sharpen.
- is the pencil too short? Get new pencil.
- are you out of paper? Get more paper.
- is your handwriting illegible? Practice calligraphy.

After Software Update marches you through an iTunes and Quicktime upgrade, followed by a mandatory reboot, and then Firefox renders the wrong glyphs for italic and non-ascii characters, the troubleshooting is just one step:
- it's opensource software. Open an editor and figure it out. (And have fun storming the castle!)

See also Joel on Software: the Law of Leaky Abstractions.

Every January, people all over the world get their dates wrong: instead of 2008 people say 2007. It takes a few days, weeks, months to catch up.

Sometimes I feel like I haven't caught up from several years back. I knew the material. It was easier. Could we do it again, please?

Apparently I'm not the only person who feels this way. Somebody just sent me some files and they're all datestamped March 2006.

I say let's go all the way back to 1998. It was a very good year.

What year would you like to go back to? Not relive, necessarily; just live in, as you are now.

Move to California. Become a hippie. Eat less meat. Take your Whole Foods cloth bag to the Farmer's Market. Stop driving. Ride a bike.

And visit wine country!

This Easter weekend, inspired by the New York Times, I explored Napa Valley with ladykalessia, jtavan, and dazeoflaur. The article specified bicycles, and we obeyed. I wanted to try touring on my Brompton, and Jeremy wanted to stretch his beautiful Breezer.

To get there, inspired by TransitCampBayArea, I took public transit.

Caltrain from Palo Alto to San Francisco: $5.75.
BayLink Ferry to Vallejo: $12.50.
VINE Route 10 to Bothe-Napa Valley State Park: $2.75.

I went 100 miles, door to door, for $21, at a cost of 21 cents per mile.

At 25 mpg and $4/gallon, that would've cost $16. The fully loaded cost of driving, however, is closer to 50 cents per mile (according to AAA.) Driving would've gotten me there faster, but with a poorer use of time: three hours in a car is three hours lost: eyes on the road, twitching at other drivers. Instead, I stopped at the farmer's market, browsed hundreds of stands, and bought lunch to go; then I got on the boat and enjoyed the lunch in a civilized manner, using both hands, seated at table. Through the window I watched the Marin headlands and Alcatraz go past. And I read.

Bill McKibben's Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families explores Malthus's question from a Greenpeace perspective. The worst thing you can possibly do for the environment is have a child: at the micro level there is that proverbial mountain of diapers, and on the macro there is overpopulation and untrammeled economic growth at the cost of global warming. And, so, if even two is too many, and zero not enough, then maybe one is just right.

It was amusing to read that only children are not weird in any way; they are just fine, even without siblings. In some ways they tend to do better. Phew.

True, the train, bus, and ferry did all run on diesel, so there was still some shame. A true hippie would've cycled the entire distance. I could have done it, but it would have taken ten hours, and I am not nearly that fit.

Camping at Bothe: $20/night. These campgrounds were a treat, though an air mattress is essential for gravel. Hot showers within walking distance, miner's lettuce growing wild and tasty, and, next door, two families who lost their homes to the subprime crisis and whose kids are now, as a result, having the time of their lives. Unfortunately, they come from that class of society which believes in frequent sugaring of children, hence raucous, hence not such a great experience for the neighbours trying to sleep.

Saturday evening, birthday dinner for ladykalessia. The Kobe burgers at Martini House were every bit as good as jtavan had promised. The mushroom amuse-bouches were delicious, as was the mushroom soup. They love mushrooms. They even have a tasting menu of nothing but. The underground bar is perfect in every way. And, of course, with thousands of little lights that glow on the grounds, they had me at hello. Was it worth dressing for, in black tie? Absolutely. I recommend it to erica.biz and jenrourke too.

Sunday morning. We bicycled to Calistoga for Easter brunch. The Calistoga Inn and Restaurant has lovely grounds. We were afraid it would be mediocre, because everybody goes there, but the food turned out to be quite acceptable and I would be happy to go there again.

We cycled back along the Silverado trail and stopped at a number of wineries along the way, none of note, except for the redonkulous Castello di Amorosa: as Jeremy said, it is so very tacky that the needle goes all the way around, back to "awesome." It is an authentic 2-year-old Tuscan castle, with pennanted battlements and a half-moat, on top of a hill, surrounded by vineyards. Naysayers will be shot.

Just down the road from the State Park is a magnificent old restored water-powered grain mill. The next few loaves of bread from my kitchen will have been milled there, yesterday. As an engineer, the experience of standing inside a machine three storeys tall and powered by water was almost religious. In the software trade we regularly design systems a hundred times as complex, yet this machine, so simple, and so big, was tangible in a way that software cannot be.

Sunday night. Pizzeria Tra Vigne had excellent crust, though the toppings were a little salty. Back at camp, Laurie and I learned to make fire. A fire has distinct modes: the 12V cigarette lighter will ember paper, but you have to concentrate the heat and blow if you want it to burst into flame; then it will light the wood, but if you want the wood to stay lit you have to arrange it to reflect heat upon itself, and also you need ventilation. Smoke in your eyes is very painful, but we got it in the end, and we put a few pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. When it's down to coals it looks like the molten surface of a cracked and cooling planet.

Monday morning. Bouchon Bakery (YATKR) had awesome nutter butter cookies, epi de ble, and brioche. It was a treat to watch the baker shape the epi loaves. Her artistry was consummate, consummate.

Then I put the "nap" into "Napa" as Jeremy drove us all home.

I can't wait to go up again.