Late Night With Guido

For reasons unbeknownst to me, my body has decided that I need to be awake at 4AM. Since that's the case, all I have left is to try and be vaguely productive and hope that it changes its mind soon.

Just flew back into Silicon Valley yesterday evening after visiting my parents for a week. My dad turned 70 not too long ago, but my parents were in Canada on their sailboat at the time, so the celebration was delayed until they were back in town. My sister and I flew out and met them in Sidney, B.C., and then spent a couple days sailing back to Anacortes.

By the way, in this context "sailing" means "travelling on a vessel equipped with sails" rather than "being moved by wind power." Most sailboats in Washington spend more time motoring than sailing. In any case, my parents' boat had cracked its bowsprit earlier in their trip, so sailing was pretty much out of the question.

My dad's belated birthday party was a fun affair. My father has always had fun with language, and creates occational bits of random poetry (think "clever doggerel" rather than Yeats or Frost). So to more properly hoist him by his own petard, my mother sent out with the invites to his birthday party requests for limericks on the subject of my father and his quirks.

Some of these were quite funny. Some of them even named names. Apparently when my father was around my age, he moved into an apartment complex that had around 5 men and over 50 women. "Good odds," as my father put it. One of the women living there was my mother, and another of my dad's friends then-future wife lived in the same complex.

Another of my dad's friends happened to be the father of my best friend from high school, who I've pretty much been out of touch with for the last 10 years or so. We would occasionally shoot an email back and forth in that time, but his access to email has been erratic. Mostly I would get the occasional bulk email and vague updates would get passed back and forth between our respective fathers at the local tavern. So I met up with Janusz' (that's my friend -- pronounced "YAW nuh shh") on sunday and spent an hour or two and a couple beers catching up on old times and recent updates. Neither one of is married, or, I gather, will be any time soon.

I will post my limerick, on the subject of my father's ill-fated motorcycling career, when I get the final version back from my mom.