Let me just say how much I love not having to drive to work each day. No really – if you’re never experienced this, you’re missing out – I think my blood pressure has gone down a good twenty points based on this alone. It’s to the point where I actually kind of enjoy getting into a car again, which I never thought would happen. Apparently, the mind has a way of forgetting the bad things in life, and this weekend as we piled into a small European automobil
e to enjoy the fine skiing of Avoriez, France, the gods of traffic jams tried to catch up for all the time I’ve missed in the past six months.
To make a long story short, we got caught in absurd mountain traffic. Three hours into the trip, we realized the cost/benefit of skiing versus continuing on was not in our favor, so we called it a day and turned around. However, being as we were in France, we had the bright idea to stop at a bakery on the side of a road, where I single-handedly demolished a framboise tart, apple strudel, donut, loaf of bread, and something else that was ridiculously good. Greatest bakery ever! We also stopped at a grocery store to load up on red meat and wine which we could then smuggle into Switzerland (prices are less than ½ of what we usually pay for things like meat), so Soph was in heaven. Yeah – if there’s anything that Europe can’t do as well as the US, it’s grocery stores – especially Switzerland. Just not one of their strengths. Anyway – since the weather was a warm 60+ degrees, we then invited some friends over for an impromptu deck party, and sat in the sun sipping on French wine until the sun went down. Good times.
Winter in Geneva has been pretty much perfect so far, weather-wise. We’ve had to wear coats and 
everything, but we haven’t had the bitter cold or freezing winds I expected, considering our latitude is the same as Vermont’s and we’re only a handful of miles from the Alps. I probably shouldn’t jinx it until we’re at least through mid-March, but I also feel I should pay homage to it, so that it understands it’s appreciated and will come back next year. Something like that, anyway…
Couple of things on the blog I want to point out to the four of you who are actually reading it…first, it has come to my attention that pictures have not been uploaded for about, oh, five months or so. I hadn’t realized this until the other day, and I apologize – I’ll hopefully have them up by the end of the next week or two. Second, is the formatting. Blogspot unfortunately has a terrible preview function, in the sense that when I preview how it will look, it doesn’t actually end up looking like that when I post. The result is that it’s almost impossible to get the spacing, pictures, etc. to look how I want them to, which really bugs me, but probably goes unnoticed by everyone else. Anyway – I made the decision about eight posts ago not to let this bother me, and while it clearly still does, I’ve at least gotten over messing with it for more than a few minutes each post.
Next weekend: First visitors!
