Next guest, please! September 8 - 30,2002 on a growing popularity of our home, censorship, Suchýš, Tux, and my mom.

At this phase of reading our journals, you are most certainly aware that our house is amazing, wonderful, and simply great. Events of last days suggest a popularity trend, which may some day require us to charge entry fee.

About two weeks before my mom's visit, Suchýš's e-mail arrived, opening on a flower-power note "If you're going to San Francisco" and blaming it all on Chris and Bakulin (my virtual girlfriends), who recommended him to turn to us for advice on planning a route of his post-conference, one-week trip. We assured Suchýš that we would love to meet him, pointing out that the song, which urges you to "...be sure to wear some flowers in your hair..." is not to be taken literally, for a usually percent-wise single-digit minority is concentrated in San Francisco into a much larger fraction, hence a handsome man may experience some unexpected adventures there (Suchýš, too, already falls into the age category, which can only claim, "we used to be young and beautiful, and now we're just - beautiful")

	Suchýš looks defiant, while his Tux feels in our pool right at home.

Suchýš passed a test "Looking for Hippos' nest" with flying colors and drank Fernet with us on the same Friday. He also received several hours of lectures on and analyses of, California's tourist attractions, schizophrenically intermixed with detours into more subtle details of competing computer platforms. For some reason or another, there was no bloodshed between windowsy and linuxous branch of species of programmers, it only took me until two a.m. to convince both excited and ferneted gentlemen to go to their respective beds.

Spirits, it seems, had melted all remaining barriers and Suchýš decided to reveal to us that he's been traveling in a company of his stuffed penguin (Tux), and asked to get photographed with him in our pool (he did not know then that we take our little pink stuffed hippo on our trips). Since we swim naked, we had to apply some pictorial censorship in order to maintain an image of morality. Both gentlemen enlightened me that a censoring "bubble" must be well sized to allow enough space for speculations, especially if a pictured gentleman had been disadvantaged by an extended stay in cold water. Sid ended up being the censor, obviously motivated by male solidarity.

We have barely managed to guide Suchýš out onto (freeway) one-oh-one, buy an electric lamp, fix a broken chair, move both plus a bed into our guest room, before Tuesday came and with it my mother. This year, both Sid and I work, so she only received survival instructions and for first two days had been abandoned to fate in the form of Martina. As far as I know, ladies managed to sample several bottles of white wine and shop for numerous small necessities.

	Borel Hill after pulling her out of the plane, I took my mom right outdoors, to our favorite spot

Meanwhile a crisis developed deeper at Sid's work. While the corporation mandated him to take a certain number of vacation days, his management expressed a strong resolve to disallow him taking any, if possible. From an original plan to take four days plus a weekend, only Friday and Monday remained, permitting only a timid journey. As you may know, I am left with only one day of vacation this year, and it made no sense for me to participate is this endeavor. I still think that Sid came up with the idea of a trip to be able to remain in the center of his colleagues' sympathetic attention -- to go on a vacation with one's MOTHER IN LAW is considered an immensely heroic deed.

I was relatively curious how I would work out these four days on my own in our house. In the end, I was not quite alone. I wonder how much we are being watched by our neighbors, but if we are, then I might have became a source of sensational gossip. On Friday morning, Sid drove away with "another woman" (my mother), while after several hours, a "strange man" came (Suchýš who had returned from his independent trip), and stayed until his flight home (overnight!). Suchýš eyes were bulging with excitement, as he encountered a bear family at Sequoia NP at a very close distance. He promised us pictures and a write-up of various funny stories so I hope to get them soon.

The rest of my grass widowhood passed without disturbances and I must say that there is something to a weekend without a husband. Nevertheless I was glad to hear our garage door rumble up on Monday evening, when my pilgrims returned back home.

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