Spent a 4-day weekend at Zach’s vacation house. Best food and rest I’ve had in a long time.

The house was in the woods, at the foot of the Berkshires, on the border of Western Massachusetts and upstate New York.

Brought In Patagonia and The Rest is Noise to read. Didn’t get far into either. Instead, watched Days of Heaven, Chansons D’Amour, Sleeper, Lawrence of Arabia, and Ken Burns’ Civil War Documentary.

Woke up each morning for a run. Next door was a farm, which is to say, a large house with a huge backyard of fenced off, rolling vistas of white. Cows milled about casually in the bitter cold. On a windy morning you could see a soft, diffuse powder floating over the clean edges of the horizon, like smoke backlit by the blinding winter sun.

Brought my 35mm film camera and took pictures compulsively, including a 2-minute exposure of a frigid, star-saturated night, until I broke the shutter. Then I took more on my digital snapshot, and on John’s Pentax when he arrived later in the weekend.

Ate voraciously. Many meals owed to the innovations of Annie and Andrew. Salmon, bread, cheese, dozens of beers and bottles of wine–red and white–steak, french toast, bagels and lox, tortilla chips, tortilla soup, fresh milk (and organic chocolate syrup) and once–only once–went out for a pastrami sandwich.

Last semester of college starts tomorrow. I think I’m ready.