Quinn woke me up from my much-needed sleep this morning. "Dad, I missed you! How was your meetings?"

"The meetings were good, and I got to see a lot of my friends. There was Pete, of course, and Josh and Heather from Chicago, and there was Yaakov from —"

"Dad, are you fooling? Is that his name?"

"Yes, that's his name. Yaakov. Different people have different sounding names. He's very nice. And I saw Schwern..."

"That kind of sounds funny too!"

"That's his name, Michael Schwern, and he is pretty funny. We watched bad movies. And Jim came from New York and another Jim came from New York. He just had triplets."

"I remember that!"

"And there were people from all over the world. I had pizza last night with Adam from Australia, and José was from Portugal and I saw Karen from Ireland, and I saw Abigail and he came from the Netherlands in Europe."

"He's a man named Abigail? Why is he named Abigail?"

"Because that's his name. And I also saw my friend Barbie who is a man from England."

(This proves too much) "A man named BARBIE!?!?" (laughing, thinking of her own Barbie dolls.)

"Yup. And I saw my friend Allison and I found out she just moved to Africa. And there were a lot of people from all over the world that came to be in those three days of computer meetings. They seemed to like it. And I am very very glad to see all these people every year, but I did miss you, too, Shmoo, and I'm glad to be home."