I grew up in Marin County, just north of the City, where I was active in Boy Scouts (I became an Eagle Scout in 1976) and graduated from Marin Catholic High School in 1977. I studied at the University of California at Berkeley for three years (1977-1980), where I planned to major in Computer Science, but wound up taking courses also in Classics, Dutch (I won a Princess Beatrix Scholarship from the Dutch government—now she’s a queen and so am I!), and Astronomy. During this time I lived in the Rockridge district in Oakland. I left the university in 1980 to take “a year off” and never went back, much to my parents’ disappointment.