Off this afternoon to see my Dad and Jo and to have Erin meet them and vice versa. Haven't been to Santa Ynez in a while, seems like every time I go my dad has some some construction work for me, but I think the house is mostly finished now so it should be safe. Their place is so nice to just hang out at. My dad designed it to be like an Australian ranch, so it has a wide porch all around, and every room is accessible from the outside, making the porch kinda like a big hallway in a sense. This would be a terrible design in, say, downtown Chicago, but it works quite well in its environment. Which is to say, the middle of nowhere.

Here's something you didn't know about my dad: he invented the angled toothbrush. True. I saw the drawings that he made for a design class in college. The assignment was to improve the design of some everyday object. I think somebody beat him to the copyright, though. Since he never tried to get it copyrighted.

My dad is also a brilliant architect, having not only designed the ranch house he lives in today, but also one of the world's few (I imagine) round houses. Not many-sided, mind you, but ROUND. A cylinder built around a ski-lift tower, whose roof is supported by a single helix of stout beams. I lived there for a while growing up. The most amazing thing about the house, aside from the huge ski lift tower in its center, with rungs to climb up and jump off of, were the windows, which grew in height as they followed the spiral of the roof line, so the largest spanned the entire two stories of the structure. Awesome. And they never cracked during an earthquake.

Labels: family, travel