Danny!

Danny Marquess, an old buddy from my Stanford days, had us to dinner at his house in Half Moon Bay, just a half-hour up the coast from Costanoa. Originally from Ireland, Danny did his graduate work in England and then came to Wender's group for his postdoctoral studies. The last time we had seen him was at his wedding in Whales in 1997! He worked in the UK for a few years and then moved back to the Bay Area as one of the first employees at a startup pharma company. Now,  that startup has become a publicly traded company called Theravance and Danny is the Vice President of Medicinal Chemistry! As a strange coincidence, the spouse of our newly hired bioorganic chemist at Williams had been working at Theravance for the last 7 or 8 years before moving to Williamstown just as we were beginning our RV adventure. I think that Danny would be pretty cool to have as a boss.

I frequently invited Danny to join me for lunch at La Casa Italiana at Stanford—where Neb lived and I paid for a dining membership. That place was awesome and we had a lot of good times (mostly outside of the lab). We all still remember the spaghetti carbonara that the Italian chef would make for lunch once a week. I have never tasted better.  There lots of stories involving Danny, but few that I can tell here. My favorite semi-acceptable story about Danny was from one time when Neb and I were talking to him about college days. I asked him what were the european equivalents of drinking games like "quarters" or "whales tales" or "thumper" or any of the silly games I played with friends back in the day. Not skipping a beat, Danny retorted, "Tom, I'm from Ireland. In Ireland we DRINK. We don't f#@& around!"

Not As Evil As We Look

I guess some things never change. Danny must have pulled out 5 or 6 bottles of (amazing) wine for us to sample over the course of the afternoon and evening. I don't our gracious hosts originally intended for us to spend 7 hours at his house, but his three kids (Ryan, Harry, and Katie) seemed to have a pretty good time playing with Keiko and Amaya (thank God for the Wii) and we were busy eating and drinking like kings. It was really nice to catch up. They have built a nice life there. I hope they'll come visit us in Williamstown sometime and let us return the favor.

Fortunately, Rachelle was able to drive us back to the campground...