Where can you find him? Tonight, or this morning, rather, and indeed at this very moment, Andrew d'Avis is laying awake in a tiny, hard bed on Christmas Day. You only find Andrew d'Avis on the East Coast and most specifically in Hamilton, Massachusetts. In a cold creaky bedroom, with ceilings so low that he bruises his knuckles while putting on shirts, Andrew d'Avis subsists on his family's love, cooking, and love of wine and cooking. Also: reunions with high school friends.

Drew d'Avis has, a few rare times, visited Hamilton but lives more comfortably in Seattle. Drew may or may not have a queen size bed in Seattle—a bed with a mattress into which he sinks, really actually sinks. Apparently, sinking is a positive factor for actually sleeping.

And Carlos d'Avis? Carlos d'Avis never sleeps. (Kind of like Samara, but with less crawling through televisions and living in wells and more working late at night.)

Where am I? Where am I supposed to be? I am certainly, at this very moment—whether or not I can fall asleep—quite right to be in Massachusetts. Today, as previously mentioned, is Christmas Day. I belong with my family: my mother Melanie, my father Federico, my sister Nicole, and her fiancé Mark. Today is a day of joy and celebration and generosity and I cannot help but share it with these people most important. Especially when this joy and celebration and generosity takes the shape of a llama.

…Pay no attention to the previous statement. Right. Moving on.

Truly, I must admit that my heart resides in Hamilton. I must admit that for as long as I have been me, I have been Andrew. But my life, my life is not here, and I do not particularly yearn for it to be so. However rickety or uncertain matters stand, I live in Seattle—I am attached to a gloriously soft bed with certain Northwest address. I am attached to sub-par Mexican food and rainy days and organic farmers' markets and unparalleled local beer and coffee.

I promised my sister that if or when she has children, I would return to Massachusetts. How could I not be part of their lives? Nicole and Mark will be married in February in Oaxaca and, while I do not suspect B will follow A immediately, the future looms all the same. How can I weigh my choices, and the costs and benefits? I must likewise admit that my life is not perfect in Seattle, and I am not perfectly happy, but still I balk so strongly when I consider leaving the West Coast.

But you just don't understand, I plead, life is just… different out there. Um, better. The sushi. THE SUSHI.

Who can say what is better or best? Who can say whom I will meet—what changes I will see—to inform these decisions more strongly? Regardless, the sky lightens out my window and the wind continues to shake the trees. Seven o'clock nears and any chance of sleep dwindles.

And no matter my grogginess, I will soon be celebrating Christmas with my lovely family. My father will brew coffee and, no matter its inferiority to Victrola Americano, I will nurse mug after mug and smile and laugh and love my life.

Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and/or Joy and Peace and Love in whatever you believe. All my best to you and yours, truly. Unless you actually slept last night: I loathe you. Right.

Of late, I have been busy and exhausted and oscillating between joyous motivation and annoyed malaise.

Also, I cut my hair.

I have a tenuous relationship with brioche, that indulgent, fattening French bread—a bread which Wikipedia describes as "highly enriched". Highly enriched, for the layperson, means "having a 1 to 1 ratio of butter and eggs to flour." My mother, in contrast, is some sort of brioche magician. She seemed to conjure golden and perfectly-risen loaves with little effort whenever I blithely requested their presence for a French food day in high school. She may discount this memory but I hold it dear and true all the same.

I have stood beside her—I have existed in the kitchen—while she made brioche. I am sure I even "helped." But however sticky the dough, I retained not the magic. I inherited her recipe at some point during college, hoping, perhaps, to impress some lady with my French baking skills, but misplaced the journal in which the recipe was transcribed.

Even before the lost journal, my attempts with that recipe were lackluster. Yes, there was obviously a truckload of butter in the bread I produced, but did it rise well? Was it brioche? I'd have to say no. Did I leaven any romance? Please see previous response.

I've stayed away from this, the fabled unicorn of breads, for some time. Sure, I eat brioche, as produced by bakers (those bastards, with their fancy hats and professional skills). But. BUT! This last weekend I decided that I would offer brioche to my Thanksgiving meal. (Hubris is I.) And so last night and this morning I undertook an exploratory attempt.

I considered Bittman's How to Cook Everything brioche but was deterred immediately by the inclusion of only one stick of butter. One stick? Even I knew better! Joy of Cooking was next and offered a bit better: two sticks of butter. Then I tried Epicurious, and I found Golden Brioche, trumping all with three sticks of butter. Yes. Very yes.

I feel, at my advanced age and with the clear head that only comes from total lack of romance to leaven, that I was able to learn more from this attempt than those of the past. I'd like to share some of the wisdom I gained.

1. Warm milk or warm water are way hotter than I expected. Was that confusing? In other words, warm is apparently defined as 105 – 115 degrees Fahrenheit, requiring near infinite trips between ten seconds of microwave and Deirdre's milk thermometer. Warm liquid equals properly reactive yeast.
2. A KitchenAid mixer is a bread dough deathtrap. The mixer will triumph, and save you considerable work, but the dough will attempt to escape by climbing the dough hook and gumming up the mixer mechanics. Repel said attempts with a wooden spoon or spatula, sometimes both.
3. More butter is always the answer. Butter makes it better. Fat is where flavor lives. Should I continue?
4. Every brioche recipe—except perhaps my mother's—includes chilling the dough over night. If you have read a recipe without this step, you read the recipe incorrectly. Go back, check the last sentence of the middle paragraph. See? I told you.
5. Your apartment, I mean, my apartment is too cold. The shaped loaves (or rolls) will not rise before baking without a bit of extra motivation. By extra motivation, I mean a barely warmed oven or the radiator the size of a sow in the corner of my dining room.
6. Baking brioche makes your kitchen and connected rooms smell like heaven.
7. A full loaf will retain more moisture than individual rolls, especially small ones. However, small rolls, and baking many of them, will allow you to eat more brioche within the first hour without feeling guilty… but the math is a little easier for how much butter you're getting in one bite.
8. You cannot have too much butter in one bite.

So, all that being said, I am quite happy with The Best (and Only, shhhh) Brioche I Baked in 2008. Wait, that's right! This is the Best Brioche I Have Ever Baked (Without My Mother). Behold its wonder! Behold its… having risen!

If I have not had a heart attack from rapid butter consumption, and if I am not killed by turkeys tomorrow, brioche and I will dance again. Its magic is back in my life and, for this week at least, I can feel the knead of its dough down in soul. Or maybe that's the butter in my gut. Only my mother knows for sure.

I offer today less in the way of prose and reflection, and more in the way of data.

Since the beginning of November, I have mapped and saved my longer runs:

• November 2nd – 9 miles in 1:07:22
• November 5th – 6.35 miles in 48:00
• November 10th – 12 miles in 1:34:23
• November 16th – 13.5 miles in 1:42:14

I have twelve days until the Seattle Half Marathon and many fewer training runs remaining. I will be running Tuesday through Thursday this week, both days this weekend, and then Tuesday through Thursday again next week.

I still do not have a specific goal for my half marathon finish. I would certainly like to run faster than my 7:34 per mile pace from my last long run.

I use Gmap Pedometer to plan and measure my running routes. The site recently added a fantastic feature: automatic route tracing. Rather than using impossibly straight segments between two user-specified points, the application traces the road between the two points to calculate the true distance. Of course, this feature is no good if one does not follow the actual road but is a huge time-saver otherwise.

For now, I need to plow through a bit more work and then do my training. I will be running between 3 and 4 miles and then doing some sort of strength workout. Zoom!

I asked—rhetorically perhaps?—in my previous post what it is that makes me happy. I asked this question at least somewhat because I have not been particularly happy of late. I attribute these low spirits (this wreath of miasma?) to a confluence of circumstances, circumstances I will not discuss herein.

I don't have any "solution" to my life as it stands or, rather, as it sits—you all can probably guess how much time I spend in front of my laptop. But, regardless, I do know one bit that makes me happy, however rhetorical the original question.

I run.

It's really simple and despite this simplicity I literally forget sometimes that running makes me happy. Two and a half years ago I joked that I should get a tattoo reminder to run. I revisit this "joke" with reasonable frequency and I have to admit the notion has gained some merit. (As for the form or exact message of the tattoo, I will presently stay silent.)

Don't get me wrong—I love my family and my friends, I love Ultimate, I love eating and reading and music, and I do quite enjoy some aspects of my work. Still, I run alone, more alone perhaps than I find myself anywhere else in life. The motion and act are pure, independent of anyone but still irrevocably connected to my world. I run in rain and cold and sun and wind. I run on perfect Seattle days, like today, with weather so good I want to yell and exult and smile and greet every person I pass.

Today. I came down the first leg of Lake Washington Boulevard and was greeted by the aforementioned lake shrouded in fog so thick the other was side was actually invisible. The fog burned and lifted as I wound down the shore, feeling strong and free. I dreaded the turnaround a bit, the acceptance that I would have to stop running. I always take the halfway turn a bit slow and relish the point I've reached—today with a hazy Mount Rainier far off to the south.

But I turn and accelerate all the same. I think about the finish, and I think about why I'm running and my next run and how I'm getting faster. I think about the Seattle Half-Marathon in two weeks and I think about training to break a 5-minute mile this winter. I think about the next day, and on, and on.

Last week I ran an excruciating 12 miles after work on Monday, without enough sleep the night before or hydration during the day, and in the dark and cold besides. I struggled through the last mile, nearly all uphill, and arrived exhausted at my home. And I cried. I cried, out on the sidewalk in front of my apartment, because I was tired and felt sick, not just from the run but from every little bit that grates and weighs. But I also cried in satisfaction and happiness: I finished, and I would do it again. And then I didn't move for four hours.

Today. I ran 13.5 miles on the same route as last Monday but in the sun and breeze. I was fed and watered and rested well. I was happy at the start and finish and all throughout, enjoying the lake and killing the pavement and passing people and, as always, singing Beastie Boys in my head. Let's be clear: that last mile uphill still sucked. But, I stepped back in my apartment after the run and just started screaming in triumph.

Wait, what was the question?

I was reading up on the Nikon D90, drinking ginger tea and lusting for this hot new piece, when I found a beautiful little note pages down in Ken Rockwell's D90 review:

Marketing: 16 page brochure. The photo examples suggest that buying a D90 will earn you a lot of young, colorful, outgoing and active friends. No photos are credited. As usual, most of the example shots are made with lenses like the 85mm f/1.4, 14-24mm f/2.8 and 24-70mm f/2.8 that each cost as least as much as the D90 body alone and weigh several times as much, and would never be carried by someone young and exciting.

Notice that you will never, ever see anyone in a brochure sitting in front of a computer screen dicking with raw images. All you will see is skateboarding and bicycling, and the only time you'll see a person portrayed as cool with any electronic device is if Apple is trying to sell them iPods, or a cell phone company is trying to push wireless devices, which do cause cancer. You also will never see anyone holding a camera, unless it's a camera ad. Cameras and electronics are not cool. Dealing with people in person and participating in, not watching, active sports is where it's at.

Thank you, Ken, for this reminder that spending $1000—money that I don't particularly have—for a new camera body will not make me happy. What is it that makes me happy again?

Sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, you just have to say yes to a box of tomatoes, however imprudent 25 pounds of red and green and striated heirlooms may be. Don't listen to the voices in your head, the doubts—listen to Sarah, who firmly believes we can cook and stew and sauce all of these tomatoes. Embrace that box of discount seconds, tomatoes deemed too bruised or malformed or ugly to sell at full price. And sing to those tomatoes as your carry them home and uphill, sing to them of their ripe, juicy beauty and heady summer smell.

Okay, we didn't actually sing to them. But we should have—and we did give them a photo shoot.

Life is complicated. My life is complicated. For a weekend, for some time approximating 48 hours, life was simple and pure. I drank and laughed and danced with my friends, and I lay about and sat and read and watched Buffy and ate delicious brunches and dinners. Bacon and home fries and roast chicken and focaccia and beets and biscuits and smoked salmon and pasta and scallops and apple crumble and tomatoes. Many a tomato.

A 25-pound box of tomatoes is not particularly complicated. It does not ask you about work tomorrow or what turning 27 means. It does not need query optimization. The box is heavy and red with purpose and potential and hope. Each tomato wants to be eaten—or sauced and frozen for the deep dark winter—and that is a service I know I can provide. Say yes.

Say yes, it's true: I ran again today. I really ran. Not three miles, but seven miles. My body thanked me by opening up and finding its stride and affirming that there is life and vitality and speed in me. In turn, I thanked it with a hot shower and typically-delicious Sarah dinner and, in a moment, with bed: now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my tomatoes to keep from spoiling.