When I stepped out of the shuttle from the airport, amusement.

In 2002, I was living in Seattle and had the opportunity to choose between a number of graduate schools, including one in Seattle and one near Palo Alto. We decided to spend a weekend checking out the PA option. My partner in crime and I used priceline to find ourselves what we thought might be a semi-swank place in the bay area. Instead, it was an eclectic Holiday Inn at the intersection of two highways. We were somewhat euphoric though, a direct result of a brightly shining sun, not often seen in the winter months of the Pacific Northwest.

We spent the weekend dazzled by sunlight and the final rationale for selecting my graduate school discarded all pro and con lists. A bright orb in the sky demanded our presence, and we acquiesced.

Yesterday morning, five years later, I arrived again at this most unusual of hotels. It is still sunny here, but the pro and con list has finally emerged victorious. I’m just visiting this time and will not stay.

Instead, I’m attending a conference about the social graph of Facebook and it is a microcosm of many of the things I love about the Valley and a somewhat painful reminder of why I don’t call it home. I’ve met many brilliant and lovely and courageous and enterprising people at the conference, with exciting ideas and a taste for going big or going home.

And that’s the deal breaker….big OR home. I don’t know if this is part of “big OR home”, but there were far fewer women at this conference than I expected, proportionally less than at E3 and GDC. I do wonder where they are.

As for me, I’ve moved to somewhere I hope I can find both big and home. I still need to be part of challenging work that invents and forms the future. But I also need the ability to move at the speed of  my toddler…noticing every stone along a path, building block towers so tall that they collapse and must be built yet again, embracing a particular present that cares little for email, phone calls, and abstract opportunities but knows a whole lot about NOW! NOW! NOW! please, NOW!

It’s bitter-sweet, this stay at the holiday inn, for it really is such a lovely place.