Year of the Tour
I moved to a solar house and weathered el niño (flooding, mudslides, broken panels and waterwheel, no power, many books, many candles). I lived in that house for six months and every day was an adventure! Feeling a quite restless and curious (and overworked), I took a three month sabbatical from HP. How did I manage this? I hadn't taken any
time off for two years, borrowed from future time off, and took unpaid time off. HP was going through a split at the time, so no one really noticed that I was driving solo across the US, visiting universities, playing coffeehouses, attending a wedding, a graduation, and traipsing through Italy with my family. When I got back, everything at work had changed, and I decided to apply to graduate school and reshape my life.
I moved into a small wooden house (again) in Boulder Creek (this time on the grid), and applied to four schools: two on the east coast and two on the west. I didn't think that I would get into any of them. My music really took off this year as I collaborated with Nick Peters, who also introduced me to a truly divine soul named Meredith. I was
inspired. She had just graduated from University of California at Davis with a degree in biology, and would have minored in dance if they'd had that back then. She took a job at the Carnegie Institute on Stanford Campus and moved to Redwood City, a neighboring town. We were both seeing other people then, and had a lot of growing to do before we were meant to be together.