Who has time for blogging?

It's been a great visit with our friend Dave (whose bag, incidentally, made it the day after he arrived). Dave's one of my closest friends. We knew each other way back in college together, then later became roommates when I moved to L.A., where he endured (among other things) my being stalked by one psycho ex-girlfriend and where we experienced the fun of both the riots in 1992 and the Northridge earthquake in 1994. (Basically the worst years in my adult life, bar none.) From there we actually both ended up at the same grad school (not intentionally), which was funny because in retrospect we wondered if we were accepted because of some sort of affirmative action program when they received applications from two men living at the same address. (Which I suppose is even funnier in retrospect because several years later Dave came out of the closet.) Since he also lives in the DC area, he and Gretchen have become close friends as well. We've all had a blast hanging out this week (Germany, France, the Alps...much more later) and getting caught up, although I suppose we're ready to kick him out and get our lives back to normal and he's ready to ditch us and embark on his awesome trip around the world. So tomorrow morning he's off to Venice (by flying first to Helsinki, which is sort of like flying from Washington to Toronto via Miami) and we're back to our usual boring routine.