The first time I had this tiramisu I was being courted. Randy was managing Il Bistro in Seattle, and the dessert arrived at the end of a meal I do not otherwise remember. I asked the chef for the recipe. Twelve birthdays later, the recipe is mine.

After the Iliad post I read Emily Wilson's Odyssey. The reading was harder than I expected, because the classics I love I love through Russian. What Wilson did to Odysseus, and what Zhukovsky and the older English translators kept doing to him for two hundred years, turned out to be the same question.

Yesterday we celebrated a very quiet birthday. Rudy turned twelve — the corgi who arrived the day I met my husband, who has been with us for every chapter since. He moves a little slower now. The days feel a bit more precious. Some of what that means.

Before the queens are crowned, before the parades roll down the Malecón, before the Naval Battle fireworks, there is fire. Every year Mazatlán builds an effigy of whatever weighed on the public mood — a politician, an influencer, a feeling — and burns it. The carnival cannot begin until it does.

If you ever want to see a city fully surrender to joy, come to Mazatlán during Carnival. The Pacific sparkles. Banda music rolls through the streets. Sequins shimmer under stadium lights. One of Mexico's oldest carnivals, with a personality all its own and a 2026 theme that beats like a drum.

I keep returning to the Iliad. The question I answer differently as I grow older is which of the three, Achilles, Hector, or Odysseus, is the real hero. The teenage answer was one of them. The answer now is a different one entirely, and I think I can defend it.

Twenty-three years after Randy lost touch with a friend in a Lovina village, we drove north with a photograph from 1993 and almost no hope of finding him. What happened on the second day is the part I still can't quite believe.

In 1993, after a hard divorce, Randy went as far from California as he could get and ended up in a Balinese fishing village called Lovina. Then he came home and lost it all — his wallet at the airport, and every way of reaching his new friends.

Fifteen years ago I came to Seattle on a Microsoft contract. Now most of our belongings are in Mexico, though I'm still here most weeks for work. Half-moved is the honest word. Here are the nine reasons we made the decision, and the things I still can't bring myself to stop loving.