Two Days Off...

We leave early, early tomorrow morning to drive Andrew Bananas to San Francisco State. Because he is not a merit scholar, schools he could attend were limited to the CSU system. His brother, Roby Bananas, attends Long Beach State.

You know what's really cool about the transition from high school to college now? You can take the HS friends along for the ride.

I threw away my HS yearbooks about 12 years after graduating HS. All those people had become totally irrelevant. All we had in common were some increasingly vague and somewhat embarrassing youthful interactions. We'd created memories together, and then stopped. They were people caught in amber.

But now Andrew and his tight-knit group of friends, male & female, will continue to share memories as each member of the group goes on and make additional unique-to-himself memories. They IM, they text-message, they upload video and photos, they call each other...

My freshman year in college, in a vain and very ill-fated attempt to stay close to Paula Bunker (she was at UofW in Seattle and I was at UofU in Salt Lake City) I ran up a phone bill of $125 over a two month period. That was big money back then. HUGE money! My boys stay in touch with all their friends, all over of the state, and soon the country, for probably about that much a year. And if Google rolls out the gPhone, even that cost will plummet.

So their HS friends have a legitimate chance to remain life-long friends.

We'll be back Friday. I'm taking my laptop, so if the hotel has free Wi-fi, I'll log on and be obnoxious in a NorCal sort of way. It's a whole different world up there...

If they don't have free Wi-fi, I can always bug Even Handed Hope for the use of her T-mobile Wi-fi account.

Here's a photo taken last Saturday night as we were waiting to be seated at Viva Marias: Roby Bananas is the pensive lad sucking on his lower lip. Andrew Bananas is closest to the camera, trying to seduce it with a look.