7.11.09

Serendipitous Meetings

In our sundry wandering these past months, we have had a number of wonderful and sometimes amazingly spontaneous meetings, and two days ago, when we arrived in Phoenix for a brief break from work and Gallup, we had another.


A week or two ago, we heard from our cousin Alex (of Tuba Museum fame), that he had gotten a new job sequencing the DNA of Clumber Spaniel dogs, who are apparently incredibly inbred, but that's another story. His new company was flying him out to Phoenix for a few days for training, and wasn't it too bad that we weren't still there?

Well, as it turned out, we were coming back into town at approximately the same time. So we got into Phoenix and picked him up from his hotel, with enough time to grab some lunch and drop him off at the airport.

The restaurant selection process was highly scientific, befitting the behavior of our spaniel geneticist cousin, namely wandering aimlessly around the vicinity of the airport, until we found Carolina's mexican food, which turned out to be an amazing hole-in-the-wall place were latinos, white business men, and homeless guys hang out together to eat award-winning tortillas and tamales in a room of concrete floors and broken ceiling fans. At least, Alex can't find that in Grand Rapids. We were and are super thankful for the chance to meet up another time with Alex, whose company we always enjoy so much.

3 comments:

Teresa said...

I definitely don't think of dogs as inbred. I'm working on a presentation for my physical anthropology class that talks about all the genetic diseases in Amish communities that are the result of an isolated population that has become very inbred. So Amish, yes. Dogs? Well, that's news to me.

The Drs. McLaughlin said...

Alex tells us that at sometime 100 years ago, there were only 50 of these dogs, and now all the purebreeds are descendants of those.

Alex Blanski said...

Those tortillas were the best in town.