34 stories for my 34th birthday, final installment

33. My oldest friend with whom I am still regularly in contact is Laurel. I'm fairly certain I met Laurel via the Thomas family (they of the quadruplets). There are lots of stories about Laurel. She was part of a group of us who all learned square dancing together, back in ... golly--mid-90s-ish? That group also included David, Ian, Janan, Christa, Kat, Brandie, and me. Wow, that list of names brings back a *lot* of memories. Laurel and I joined MV LOGOS II together, quite unwittingly. We bumped into each other at some meeting for people who were planning to join the ship, and were quite surprised. Laurel and Megan and I were part of a smallish group (a group which also included Matt Triplat) who held the top 4 spots on the "broke curfew the most times" list on LOGOS II. Wow. That opens the door to a lot more stories as well. Laurel is a dancer and actress and singer and artist, and she ... rocks. She works for a really kewl little organic produce company in Seattle. Laurel attended Seattle Central Community college slightly before I did. Then she transferred to Seattle Pacific University, which despite valiant attempts and a relatively few kewl people is still far too whitebread and conservative and "Christian" in the worst sense of the term. Fortunately (IMO), Laurel didn't last too long at SPU, and she's now at the far superior UW (that's University of Washington the uninitiated). Laurel is married to the totally awesome Chris, one of whose attributes is that being around him makes me feel relaxed and sort of ... makes me like myself more, somehow.

34. I'm an owl. I've been this way as far back as I can remember. I'm sort of the opposite of my dad in this sense. Given my druthers (that is such a delightful old word, "druthers"), I stay up half the night (or most of the night) working, or writing, or reading, or doing homework, or talking, or ... anything, really, and then sleep until noon. Or two PM. It's not that I can't operate on a more ... "normal" schedule. I can, and have, and do. It's just that if things can be arranged to have an owl schedule, without too much trouble, then I'll thus arrange them. I naturally *tend* (or to use a nautical term, *list*) that direction. Hence it's 1:32 AM, and here I am writing. My wife and our older daughter also have owl tendencies, although theirs are not as pronounced as mine. Our younger daughter, on the other hand, is a lark, and lists toward "early to bed, early to rise". Which reminds me of the old Proverb:

Early to bed, early to rise
Makes a man stupid, and blind in the eyes.

Here's Ben Franklin's original version of the proverb.

If you came to this string of posts somewhere in the middle, here's a link to the beginning.