Of course, halfway through my first full day back in Cali (during a Labor Day brunch with Bob and Veronica at the ever-delectable Lighthouse Café in Sausalito), i felt the first twinges of a cold coming on. And by that evening my health had gone decidedly south. Luckily my illness waited out my vacation, as well as my morning spent helping Jenz and Joselyn load up their possessions, stored in our garage, into a U-Haul for transport to their new apartment in the city. However, my return to work was delayed for three days as i languished in sinus hell while Tara tried in vain to cheer me up.

Didn't get much done in the meantime, except for reacquainting myself with the PSP and Lumines and finishing the career mode of the surprisingly addictive RealArcade soccer game i downloaded for my cell phone. Like i said, not much.

I did make it back to Stanford on Friday, and put out the most pressing fires. I had neglected my new postdoc Hu for the better part of two weeks, and was thrilled to see his great progress on the development of our microCT collimator. I made it until 4pm, when i decided to give my health a rest and pick up my dry cleaning and new parking permit on the way home. I was still mighty congested, and whiled away the night with Veronica watching tivoed episodes of the Soup as well as the 2006 MTV VMAs ... i found it grating, and yes i am older than the target demographic.

Saturday was more productive as V and i got a number of errands done. I ran over to Sherwin Williams in Mountain View to get more paint for the kitchen. On the way there i got a call from sister Emily, and was thrilled to learn she is 10.5 weeks pregnant with her first child. "Tadpole", as Jared and her have taken to calling him/her. Let the naming debates commence! I then fetched V and we drove up to the city for a futile search for an Adidas store, followed by some fantastic creampuffs from Beard Papa and a subsequent real lunch at Firewood in the Metreon. We then picked up a few games at the Playstation Store, the highly-rated cutesy PSP action/puzzler Locoroco for Veronica, and the equally-touted "PS2 Greatest Hit" God of War for me. I got in some time with GoW that evening while Veronica headed to San Francisco and the 14th anniversary of New Wave City, and was amazed by its brilliant and ultra-graphic gameplay. I climbed into bed around 1am and watched a truly disturbing British documentary on the Sundance Channel describing the U.S. and U.K.'s habit of denouncing torture, then sending their captured Al Qaeda suspects to allies like Egypt and Uzbekistan who are big proponents of such activities. I found the exposé genuinely shocking.

Today we took Tara on her third visit to the dog park in Foster City, and for the first time let her roam around without the leash. She was good, but seems a bit clueless regarding how this "playing" thing works. When other dogs came up to her and gestured to start running around or wrestling, Tara looked spooked. One dog came up and started barking in her face and Tara stared off into space, quivering slightly with each of the other dog's yelps. I felt like the father of the 98 pound weakling in the playground. However, i must say i was glad that she wasn't the schoolyard bully, and refrained from attacking any of the other dogs, despite growling and barking on occasion.

After i completed a whirlwind house-cleaning session while taking in an afternoon of mostly boring NFL games, we had dinner with my parents in Burlingame at the wonderful Indian bistro Roti. After a vanilla latte from Starbucks, we came home and i set about updating my neglected journal. I would've posted three days ago if my ISP Dreamhost hadn't crapped out. Turns out a network card in their web server died and caused their hosted webpages to fail in various ways over a period of several days as they solved the problem. My CGI-heavy pages were shackled because of an inability to find include files needed for the Perl scripts. All seems well now. I did manage to put up photos of our Hawaiian holiday before the site died, which you can now view here.

I'm still mostly pessimistic regarding the nascent Chelsea season. The signing of Ashley Cole? Good move. The ultra-messy departure of William Gallas? Troubling from a football perspective, and inexplicably disastrous from a public relations viewpoint. Allowing Middlesbrough to snatch a 2-1 victory with two late goals? Ominous, but not independently problematic over the course of the long Premiership campaign. Multiple lackluster performances against lesser opposition? Isn't that our modus operandi over the last two seasons? Nothing's won or lost yet, but i still see storm clouds brewing over Stamford Bridge.

I'm eager to return to expanding my music collection after my vacation-mandated hiatus, and have just picked up the Verve-sampled Rolling Stones Songbook by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra, as well as new albums by Kasabian (after one listen, i contend that it's horrible) and the Rapture (after one listen, i have a feeling this is going to grow on me something fierce ... "The Sound" is hypnotic).