I'm including belt loops along with pockets.

My phone
See above

Leatherman
I carry it with me everywhere (except through TSA). I can't count the number of times it's been invaluable; suffice to say I reach for it at least a few times every day.

Wallet
Kind of obvious.

Napa Rose Lounge is in the Napa Rose restaurant, inside the Grand Californian Hotel at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California. Napa Rose is the Resort's high-end dining establishment. It's lately become a sort of tradition to end the day here, or at least begin the end of the day–the Lounge does close around 10 pm, so we'll often move to the nearby Hearthstone.

Supremely relaxing and comfortable, excellent service, great drinks and appetizers.

Yesterday we drove home from Lake Tahoe, and, with inspiration I can describe as well-intentioned but mistaken in retrospect, decided to take US-50 instead of I-80 (on which we’d driven to Tahoe). Here’s the route:

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The whole point of the last-minute Tahoe trip was to get some snow, which we missed completely on the New Year’s road trip. So, says I, checking the Caltrans road conditions site, US-50 seems to be clear with no restrictions and it’s the scenic route. Let’s try that.

We got as far as South Lake Tahoe and then, wow, sudden stop. I rechecked Caltrans and saw that chains were now required for a portion of highway 50 through Eldorado National Forest. Since we were in Jennifer‘s Subaru Forester, with full-time all-wheel drive, we didn’t actually need to install the chains but had purchased some just in case some well-meaning CHP officer insisted we have them.

I really didn’t know what was holding up traffic, but later I determined that we covered the next 25 miles in a little under five hours. It wasn’t accidents, though there were a few. It wasn’t severe weather, as that didn’t start until we were well up in the mountains. It wasn’t chain-on areas—those were pretty well organized off to the side and not really blocking the road. I think it was mostly just volume of traffic combined with less than competent drivers. Think of how badly the average person drives in the rain, and then double or triple that for snow and ice conditions.

Anyway, Jennifer was driving so I was fiddling with my phone—Tweeting, checking road conditions, getting news, the usual. For some very odd reason, although I had good coverage through most of the drive, my Tweets didn’t arrive until many hours later and, of course, were all out of order. I’ve reassembled the correct timeline here:

• Checked out & heading home via I-50.
• Correction: US-50, not I-50. I’m so embarrassed.
• No rain here (outside S. Lake Tahoe on US-50) just snow. Lots and lots of snow.
• It’s snowing sideways.
• Making average 4mph. Whee.
• Live video: http://qik.com/smartwatermelon (archived video clips here)
• There is something ever so slightly surreal about a Mexican cantina in an alpine-style building in a snowstorm. (it was El Papagayo Grill & Cafe, and we stopped for a quick snack and restroom break)
• Close to white-out.
• Cars & trucks skidding out as we descend.
• We’ve gone from snow to rain.
• Annnnd now back to snow.
• Torrential rain in Placerville.
• I think my Tweets are not going through.
• I suspect a whole load on on-the-road blathering will show up sooner or later.
• HOME.

The trip home took around eight hours, and for comparison it was fewer than four to get there on I-80. But hey, snow!

I remember reading something about it taking 21 days for an activity to become a habit. I'm working on that.

I do 30 minutes of Wii Fit yoga almost every day, as a warm-up for a treadmill session. Weeknights, I'll do 90 minutes on the treadmill while watching Countdown and Rachel Maddow (without commercials, each show is around 45 minutes). I'll usually do a shorter session on weekends. The treadmill is usually set at 5% incline and 3.5 to 4 MPH, though I vary the speed now and then.

“2600, The Hacker Quarterly”
2600 is a magazine by, for and about hackers and hacking. If you immediately think that means the jerks who put spyware on your computer and stole your credit card number, you've confused "hackers" with "criminals". Think Matthew Broderick's character in WarGames.

“MAKE”
MAKE is about building things and being creative with technology. So far I haven't actually built any of the projects but I enjoy reading it.

“Scientific American”
I read SciAm to stay on top of news in the science and technology fields that's sometimes ignored or not covered by major media outlets. I tend to skip over the soft science (biology, genetics) but enjoy the physics, environmental, astronomy and the regular columns and reviews.