I met this woman called Courtney at a party Jamie and Cam's threw last year. We kept in touch for awhile, always saying that we were going to go dancing at Circle sometime. But we never got around to it and then I had my surgery which basically killed that plan. And we lost touch.

As I was cleaning out my inbox at the beginning of the summer, I noticed an email sitting there from her that was months old, so I decided to write her a hello and apologize for my being a bad correspondant. In doing so, I mentioned that I was in Los Alamos for the summer. It turns out, coincidentally, that Courtney is from Albuquerque and was going to be in town this week. So today I drove down to spend the day hanging out and hiking with her.

After managing to dump and entire container of Burger King fries all over the bronco, I made it to her house and met her mom and brother. Her mom is a painter which implies that their house is really arty and cool. Wait a sec, my mom is also a painter and my house is lame. Maybe there's no corellation there at all. But the point is that her house was really nice.

We drove out around the back of Sandia peak and up the road to the ski hill. Sandia is weird because on the Albuquerque side it's really steep and jagged, but on the ski side it's a gentle wooded slope that doesn't look all that imposing. The road winds up through the mountain and eventually reaches the crest, offering a great view out over the city.

Also present is an impressive collection of radio antennas. There were so many I had to take the picture. Call me nerdy. Anyway, we hiked along the crest towards the tramway until we got to the CCC stone house about half-way inbetween. Sat around and watch the chipmunks. It was really nice out there; much cooler on the crest than down below in the city.

Driving back, I selfishly convinced her to go to REI with me so I could pick up some gear for next week's big camping trip. REI, it turns out, is right across the street from the "Old Town." We took a stroll through; it reminded me of a combination of Santa Fe and New Orleans.

Back at her house, her step-dad cooked steak and corn and potato salad for us. It was great. We ate outside in the yard as the sun set. Very nice. No bugs - it's too dry. The remainder of the evening involved driving around Albuquerque, playing pool very badly, drinking a white russian or two, and breaking into her old highschool ("The Academy" hah) to find hundreds of rabbits. By the time I left it was 1:30am, which put me back in Los Alamos by 3:00am. Long day.

The major theme of conversation of the evening: Boston so pales in comparison to the southwest. We find it humorous that so many people out there can't understand why we can't wait to get back here.