I've had quite a few since arriving in New York.

Maple candy.My uncle went to a bar mitzvah one weekend - meaning I was stranded in the house (I tried to walk to the train station, Sumana!) but he brought back, the next day, maple candy. Which is glorious. You put it in your mouth, and hold it - and it stays for a while, and then all of a sudden melts! into this wonderful, creamy, lightly sweet magic. Mmmm. 30 seconds of heaven.

Library! I finally visited the Millburn library today. I walked out with a large stack of books on linguistics, computing, math, and Spanish. I have no reason to read Chinese right now, but I do have some very good reasons to learn Spanish, if only to understand the conversation in #olpc-es - the OLPC Spanish chat channel - without resorting to computer translations all the time. I have forgotten most of the Spanish I picked up from books for a few weeks in high school - and I learned no grammar then, just the stray vocab (I wanted to hear the cadence of the original words, so I read the Spanish and English versions of some poems and short stories in parallel) so we'll see how this one goes.

Pair <verb>ing! Pair programming, pair writing, (and today) pair testing... I love making things alongside another person, because it engages both halves of my brain. I get rapid feedback from my fellow maker, and the intellectual satisfaction of working with something technical and making something physical or quasi-physical (usually digital) come into being.

Has to be the right combination of people, though - you have to be at the right working and communication levels. (I have memories of primary school "pairs" that ended up with "one person does all the work" endeavours... not so fun.) Although David, who I paired with today for testing, is a way better coder than me, he was patient enough that I was able to keep up with him, and I can at least write coherent bug reproduction notes really fast so he could zip through the actual finding of the bugs. (At least that's how it started; we ended up both testing and writing bug reports in a back-and-forth mix by the end, and had enough momentum to work straight through lunch - food eventually got delivered and we ate dumplings in front of our monitors while typing things about weird blog import configurations.)

Snow! And warm rain. And Indian food. And really awesome coworkers, and automatic build scripts... and apt-get/yum/emerge (and easy_install, I suppose) and a dozen parallel conversations in chatrooms at once (and being able to have that much information flowing in at once - I don't think I'll ever get used to being able to have text conversations thrown at me at a running clip by people in real-time - my brain is fully engaged while "talking," and engaged in content and meaning, not in decrypting audio) and a warm sleeping bag and a black cotton t-shirt and some very hot butternut squash soup with cumin.

I love the world.

[Edit: Apparently Macs (my aunt's in this case) insert strange HTML tags into Wordpress instead of standard strong and em tags? Weird.]