Happy birthday to my father!! :-)

He is 66 years old today. :-) I hope he's having a good day so far today – I know it'll be a good day later, because I'm meeting him and my mother to go out for a birthday surprise (which I obviously can't reveal yet, in case he sees this ;-) which I'm pretty sure he'll be happy about. I didn't get him a present yet, I'll have to do that on my way home from work … should be easy, it'll just be a bottle of something. :-) Really, that doesn't give away too much, it's the obvious gift idea since he can't have the one thing he claims to want. :-)

True story: A couple of weeks ago I went to my parents' house for dinner and we got to talking about Christmas presents. My mother now lives in dread of more stuff since she feels they have far too many things already and now there's my grandmother's house full of things to be cleaned out as well. So she doesn't want any more stuff, things, whatever. So she said flat out she doesn't want anything like that. She wanted to know if there was anything I needed, which I'll have to think about … and I wanted to know if there was anything my father wanted. Any Christmas wishes, or birthday wishes for that matter. He answered, as he always answers this question, 'shirts'. My mother, hearing this, immediately snapped, 'No, you can't have any!' LOL!! So I'm not buying him a shirt, that's for sure.

Back story: he always wishes for shirts, even though he has SO MANY of them already. When we point this out, he says that Oh, those are so old and worn out, he can't wear them anymore. OK, we say, then you'll have to throw some of those out, then, so you'll have room for some new ones. But oh no, he can't throw out the old shirts! They'll come in handy, he can wear them up at the cabin, or when he's painting or working in the garden or something. So … it's a kind of Catch 22. And new shirts, no, he can't have any! :-D

Anyway!! Happy birthday to my dad. :-) Here he is, check out his T-shirt:

I gave him that, years ago; I bought it at Past Times, an indescribable British gift store. It says 'Optimus Pater', which is Latin for, basically, 'great dad'. :-) This is an interesting illustration of personality: he's worn that shirt so often, and a lot of the time when I'm not even around (like when this picture was taken, which was in Croatia this summer, I think, or was it last year in Italy?). But I also got a matching shirt for my mother, which says (unsurprisingly) 'Optima Mater'. They got them at the same time. But my mother has almost never worn hers. I think she's worn it like maybe twice. She says she thinks it'd be like she was bragging if she wore it. (Because of course everyone she meets can understand Latin, naturally.) My father cannot at all in any way comprehend her meaning, and he wears his 'bragging tee' often. :-D

Anyway. :-) He really is a great dad, and I love him to bits. :-) Gratulerer med dagen, pappa!!!