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Just said adios to the Parents, who were in town for nearly three weeks, so I hope I am forgiven for the total lack of updates of late. I will attempt to rectify the situation, post haste. As mentioned earlier, I have had a string of visitors and a series of minor adventures in the last few weeks (even before my parents arrived) and I have thus accumulated a small pile of mildly amusing photos which I thought suitable for publication online. None of these were really worthy of a whole post on their own, but collectively I hope they at least inspire a few smiles. Fig. 1: French Championship of Tarot Card Reading, in beautiful Evian. Presumably, you are given a group of people, one of whom is about to die, one who is about to meet the man of her dreams, etc., and it is your job to figure out who is who. I have to admit that I had no idea that there was even such a thing as a championship of Tarot card reading. I guess that just proves that I would not be qualified to compete. Fig. 2:...

As bad as I've been at posting to the blog lately, at least I have had a legitimate excuse: Casa SanGiorgio has been quite full of late. Lots of visitors. First, longtime family friends (and blog readers), Warren and Nancy Davis, stopped by for a couple of days. Looking through my photos, I don't have a lot of photos from their visit, but I know that Warren took a bunch so maybe one or two will surface later. At any rate, although they did not stay at my place, and were only here for about one full day, they still got the total Lausanne experience: fondue, the Collection de l'Art Brut, narrow-gauge cog trains, and lots of rain. Next up, another blog reader (and occasional commentor), my Aunt Donna, stopped by for a weekend after she finished up giving a tour in Italy. Luckily for her, the weather was significantly nicer -- it only rained about half the time -- so we got to do some really fun outdoorsy stuff. Fig. 1: This is the only photo I have of my Aunt Donna and I t...

Although I received a bike for my fourth birthday, I don't think that I really got the training wheels off of it until I was at least six, or maybe even seven. After school, my best friend, Ralph, and I would often bike down to the baseball fields, or the dirt bike track, or Burger King, but we never really went further than about a mile or so. Most of this was due to San Diego's unique geography: it is virtually impossible to travel more than a mile from my house without hitting a canyon. And, although I enjoyed riding my bike to school in 5th and 6th grade (not more than a mile), I had to be driven to Junior High School, as it was roughly five miles, two freeways, and two or three serious canyons away. Thus, I pretty much gave up on bike riding when I was about 11. I sort of picked it up again at Stanford, as biking in to school saved me from having to buy a parking permit once I lived off-campus, but again, I never really biked more than maybe two or three miles at any ...