Standard Time

I wanted to remind everyone that Europe is no longer on daylight savings time (DST). For the next week we are only eight hours ahead of the west coast.

Florence Photos

I have received a number of complaints regarding the lack of Florence photos on the web site. That problem has now been resolved.

Important Football News:

From the US Soccer web site:

Quote Sheet: USA 1, Switzerland 0
BOB BRADLEY U.S. MNT Head Coach

On the game:“It was a typical game in Europe. Both teams made it hard for the other team. For us, it is important to understand the mentality of being in these games and still finding ways to win. It is still an important step for us. It's a game where credit goes to the team for sticking together, being organized and not giving too much away. And finding a way to win at the end.”“This year
the work has been good and we feel like it is improving. This was our second
game in Europe. We need these kinds of games. Against Sweden we saw that the
first half was solid, but the second half was disappointing, and so the goal
tonight was to pick up on the first half to understand that the tempo of these
games is sometimes different. The commitment of the other team in terms of every
physical challenge. The head balls. Every tackle. These are things that now we
must understand and that we must be able to sustain the commitment on our end
for 90 minutes. So this was important.”On whether he thought about bringing Adu
and Szetela on earlier:"These are both young players…first time in a national
team camp with this coaching staff… I think its important to bring young players
along at the right speed. Having a camp where they could get a feel for the way
things have been done for these last 9 months and to understand what is expected
of them on the field and off the field I think it’s a good step now that they
get on the field and are both part of a winning effort."

Immigrants in Switzerland

Articles like this are very common in Switerland these days. I'm not positive, but I think it is more common in the German speaking portion of the country.

Tete de Moine

We got to experience a new cheese, Tete de Moine, today. Emily thought it was great, but I'll only score it slightly above average. Here is a quote from The Cheese Primer:

No other mountain cheese in the world possesses such intensity of
flavor-stunning and memorable.

I checked and it should be available at a Whole Foods near you!

Fall Break

Rowan is on fall break until October 22nd. His preschool follows the same schedule as the Vaud school system, so he is preschool free for two weeks.

In other Morges news, they have started planting the bulbs for the tulip festival. Come in mid April if you want to see lots of tulips. Along those same lines, I just heard that tickets from Oregon to Geneva for the Feb and March time frame were$640 round trip including taxes.

The local grapes are being picked this week. I just discovered that we live a block away from the Morges commune wine processing center. The tractors are hauling the grapes down our street. Right now it is mostly green grapes, but I have seen a couple trailers full of red grapes.

The weekend of the 12th is the local train show. I think I'll head down on Saturday morning and then take Rowan in the afternoon. I'll have to practice my French so I know what I'm buying.