Thanksgiving Dinner was terrific - especially since it was so unexpected. I'd come to Truckee to get some space to think, and ended up spending the entire evening with five complete strangers, eating turkey with all the trimmings (how come you eat turkey with trimmings, but burgers with fixings?), and playing "Charades" until midnight.

There were a couple of uncomfortable moments over dinner, though, when politics came up. John, the guy who owns the house I was staying in, is, like me, something of a Libertarian, while his girlfriend Amy is a San Francisco liberal. She's a lovely person but if her ideas were put into practice, the San Francisco economy would go down the drain. John's friend, Lewis, sided with Amy against the views of John and myself, while Carol and Lupaka, who live locally and couldn't care less about San Francisco politics, yawned and gave each other "get me out of here!" looks.

I ate way too much, along with several glasses of wine and egg-nog. Perhaps that's why I couldn't sleep. I couldn't make my mind up whether to be too warm, with the heater on, or too cold with just the bed covers to keep me warm. And John's three dogs bounded around the apartment all night long, crashing into each other. They have little snow-bells on their collars. These sound cute when you're not trying to sleep in the middle of the night.

This morning, I left after coffee to go hiking. It was a beautiful blue day, and almost warm enough to just wear a t-shirt, which felt bizarre considering the snow lining the streets. This was my first time in a ski resort and what I saw didn't particularly make me relish the idea of coming back another time to go skiing - even now, at the bare beginning of the Season, the parking lot at one of the slopes was jammed with hundreds and hundreds of cars.

Despite the crowding, I hit the hiking trail, and soon found myself completely alone. The snow was deeper than I'd expected and I found myself soon out of breath due to the altitude.

Back on the main trail, I wasn't the only person enjoying the snow. There were kids flying down the ice on what looked like plastic trash-can lids.

Kids and snow

On the way back to Truckee, I turned off to see Donner Lake.

Down by the lake side

I hit Truckee for lunch - pizza and a Starbucks, and finally got some time to put my mind in order. The whole trip here I'd started the thinking process. Strange as it may seem, I was trying to apply software development methodology to my own life. The way it works, with software development methodology at least, is first of all you gather "requirements" - which is basically just a list of what the customer wants the software to do. Then you refine those same requirements until they're unambiguous, complete and measurable. The next step is to design an application that can demonstrably meet those requirements. I'd decided to take a similar approach to help me out of my own confusion over the multitude of decisions I'm facing in my private life. I just asked myself - what do I want? I tried not to censor myself. Once I'd gotten some things down on paper, I started to list what it would take to get the things I want, and started to pull together something of a plan. Now, the question is will I be able to implement my plan? We'll see.

By three, I felt like I'd decided in my mind that I might as well head back to San Francisco. I'd done the basic thinking I came here for. Moreover, I'd learnt that the house was due to fill up this evening with more guests, which would mean I'd have to share a room, and would probably lead to an even more wretched night of tossing and turning. So I returned to the cabin, packed up, and headed home. It was a beautiful drive for the first 90 minutes. As I came to the vicinity of Sacramento, the fog set in. Looking across the vast, flat fields you could see occasional clumps of trees looking grey and flat through the fog. It looked very English, actually. But the drive went quickly, and by sunset, I was just entering the Bay Area, heading into the deepest red sky.

Almost home