Why am I here?

It's a fair question: why would someone travel across the US just to sit on top of a hill with a very large dog when there are plenty of things to do in places that actually have convenience stores and street lights?

OK, here's the short version. I have friends that work in Silicon Valley, who have a wonderful house in a very remote place in California, near Monterey. They have a large, pleasant, if somewhat taciturn dog, named Mozart, and they like to take long trips to exotic locales. Rather than board Mozart, they ask me periodically to come out to said wonderful house in the very remote place, to keep the dog company. Mozart seems to like me, which is good because I wouldn't want to be around such a huge animal who didn't like me. I guess I'm one of the few people whose lifestyle allows for dropping everything for a month and getting on a plane in order to throw a ball for a dog. It is one of the benefits of being a part-time artiste émergent and full-time mystic. My micro-enterprises in Chicago can take care of themselves, and daughter Miko knows how to deposit the checks.

Long periods (say, three days or more) of isolation from other humans, while enjoyable, tends to cause me to become somewhat loony, so normally wife and helpmate Sanja would come with me on a trip like this. But Mathematics waits for no woman, and since untold thousands of students manque d'intérêt will be descending upon UIC expecting to learn Mathematics, Sanja has to stay at home this time. So, she pinned a note to my chest (not to my shirt, but to my chest) and an envelope with some mad money to my underwear, and put me on a plane (or really, the Orange Line to the airport). She looked a little wistful as she bade me farewell, as if contemplating the odds that I might not be seen again.

Now, the place. Oh, the place. Why would someone build a Spanish villa on a remote mountain, twenty miles from the nearest convenience store? I'm not sure, but surely they had nobody like me in mind when they did. Survival can be tough up here with the redwoods and bigfoot ("bigfeet"?), but a grand piano does make the time go better after dark, when the chupacabra run and the tiny reptiles scamper up the adobe.

I'm sorry, I have to go see if I can manage to coax an espresso machine that's more complicated to run than the hadron superconducting supercollider to bring forth an Americano before I take Godzilla for a walk in the hills. Such is life in the wilderness. If you don't hear from me again, please tell Sanja the extra key for my bike is in the little drawer to the left of the computer at home.