Connie, I would totally read that novel! But how sheltered could Antony have been, with a pirate for a dad?!

Considering the man who's probably My Real Dad(tm) was mom's partner in rally racing, there's a decent chance I was conceived on the dusty hood of a race car in the flush of victory. I like to think so.

Every time my faux-niece says she was an accident. her mom corrects her to say she was a miracle. And she was, my BFF had only a fourth of an ovary left and the doctors had told her she couldn't get pregnant again. She promptly proved them wrong, as she likes to do.

Aw, my department got a Neapolitan cake for the February birthdays (there are two of us, me today and E tomorrow and he will be at the other site tomorrow, so cake today) - layers of vanilla cake, chocolate cake, and strawberry mousse with chocolate frosting and whipped cream roses. It's hella good. Highly recommend would eat again.

My sister was conceived around New Years Eve. I checked to see if my older brother was conceived during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but no, it would have been a month before that. So no relation to the impending end of the world, unless my parents knew about the Soviet missiles in Cuba before the CIA did.

Oops, the Cuban Missile Crisis was in '62, not '61.

Connie, I would totally read that novel! But how sheltered could Antony have been, with a pirate for a dad?!

True enough, this is where timing comes in. Some people argue that Antony was on Jan's ship when the ship was captured by the Moors, which makes Antony Jan's Dutch son and old enough to be out on the seas with him and so not very sheltered. Some arguments say Antony is the son of Jan's Berber wife, acquired in Salee, and therefore he'd have been raised in a wealthy noble household, and possibly a bit more sheltered from the wiles of Dutch barmaids. A lot of the debate is centered on whether you want to count Antony as an early "black" (ie, African, non-European, what have you) settler in America or not. There are undertones to Antony's mother's identity that are problematic.

The primary records on Jan and his life in Salee are in the archives of Salee, which are described in a hard-to-find French book about a hundred and fifty years old.

Congrats, Jessica!

And congrats to Drew as well!

I was born about 9 months after my parents' wedding anniversary in June. But I've never had the guts to ask how I was conceived.

My parents got married in March. Then they had a baby in January. And then they had a baby in January. And then they skipped the next January but had one in May. When those three were all in school, they had a baby in January (me). Considering that the January birthdays in my family are the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd, I figure there was this one day each year that really just worked for my parents, but which got postponed a bit when there were two babies.

All sorts of felicitations to Jessica and Drew and Amy, who deserve every bit of goodness that comes to them. And fingers crossed for the French bakery, which sounds glorious.

I just found out that bike parking permits on campus (a) are free, and (b) entitle users to "towel service" and 30 minutes' access to the showers at the gym. Next project, get reflectors and a headlight and have one of the neighborhood bike shops make sure my cruiser is in decent shape. SO RELIEVED.

JZ, that's good! That should work out well.

I have the same birthday as Zenkitty, so prob. conceived around the same time of year. My parents love embarrassing my siblings and myself, so we all know our conception stories, and each other's, in obnoxious detail. Not explicit detail, thank goodness, just enough to be annoying.

He raided the small Irish town of Baltimore

I have been to the Irish town of Baltimore! It's not that small as it has a fairly busy port. Beautiful though, right on the southernmost tip.

I was the opposite of a surprise baby because my Dad had been exposed to an Ultraviolet machine he worked with and it killed his sperm count. So he took shots for years to build up his sperm count so they could conceive me.

Well, that's not entirely true that I wasn't a surprise. My parents had actually started adoption proceedings on a young boy up in Canada (they were stationed in St. John) when my mom got pregnant with me.

Oh, that's great, JZ! What a good policy.