We made it back to the DMV in time for Sunday night dinner. I saw these cookies on the stove and I was excited, but we didn’t get to eat them for dessert. Maybe they were earmarked for other sweethearts besides us.
********
Oof, I should have done better on today’s test on diabetes, respiratory and cardiac. That’s what I get for playing all weekend instead of studying. Moving right along now to infectious diseases – stay away from birds, bats and cats if you are immunocompromised, OK?
Quick trip to the Hudson Valley to take advantage of the 1.5 days off for the Jewish New Year. Jeremy, the kids and Nat went up first. I stayed behind to do some school stuff and then took the bus/train up myself later in the week.
Jeremy worked for part of the time he was there, giving a talk at Williams and taking in conference calls. He also cooked a lot.
Saturday, we went to West Point for a philosophy talk. Bob was the only one who went to the talk, the rest of us had fun on the fields and went to the visitor center. This hoodie game went on a little too long.
Hung out near Ike.
West Pointers on the right. Bard students on the left. But maybe you could have figured out that one on your own.
The highlight of our West Point trip was eating in the mess hall. It’s huge. All 5000 cadets are in formation at noon outside the mess hall. Everyone is seated by 12:10pm and lunch is over at 12:30pm. It’s here we learned that the penalty for missing class is to walk back and forth across a courtyard with a rifle and dress uniform for five hours. If you are caught on a horizontal surface with a member of the opposite sex, the penalty is up to 120 hours of marching.
Emy and her boyfriend Seth cooked us a wonderful pasta dinner in their totally cute place in Tivoli. Vince declared all of Tivoli “Instagram-able”.
We said goodbye to Pip and Andres. Thank you Nat for coming with us and working and giving up your weekend. You were so much help, especially when I was in DC and Jeremy was working – we couldn’t have done it without you.
New year road trip. Synching the phone to the minivan.
Ruby gets a footwell.
Maxi gets her crate. She was so excited when Jeremy put it in the van because she knows she’s going someplace special.
Loading Edda into her spot. Van full.
Someone brought a bushel of apples to class today. Do you know the thing that they do in TV shows where when the patient flatlines and then the doctor yells “Clear!” and then they take the paddles and shock them back to life? TOTALLY WRONG. You can only shock a person into regular sinus rythmn if their heart still has some electrical signalling going on. If they are flatlining (aka asystole), you are reduced to giving adrenaline with some CPR (and some O2 for good measure). I guess I can’t learn medical stuff from TV. I do miss watching ER (1995!).
********
Vince and Edda hanging out this afternoon. If you look close enough, you can see Edda’s weird molar growing in her palate.
******
Vince made brownie in a mug. Someone has a good recipe for this, but not Vince. Yucky. Maxi is interested.
Nat and Edda waiting for Carmen to pick her up for school.
I’ve not been good about taking photos everyday, so then the blog content suffers a little. And we are so boring, sometimes it’s hard to figure out what to take pictures of. Jeremy and I worked/studied all weekend. I mowed the lawn. We spent a long time trying to figure out why our garage doors were possessed and sometimes would open and sometimes would not open or the wrong door would open or both would close and then refuse to open again (hint: the LED lights we installed in the garage door motor thing-y which automatically turned on when the doors opened were interfering with the remote. This took a LONG time and some googling to figure out. But it was mostly not very photogenic. Oh and Jeremy had to go out and buy incandescent light bulbs to go all retro on energy savings. The horror!) Vince played a lot of video games. Edda watched a lot of Ponyo. That’s almost as boring as taking pictures of a networking event.
So I snapped some photos of Vince walking to violin lessons. Which resulted in:
So Vince didn’t want to be the subject of any photos, so I took some photos of Inky, the dog who plays violin. How’s it going Inky? Maybe someday I’ll get a nicer shot of you.
********
We hosted Sunday night dinner. Right back at you Sarah.
Last night we had dinner with Kelly (Vince’s violin teacher), Shy-Luen (Kelly’s husband and a conductor), Erika (a bassoonist – which is the instrument I would pick now to learn if I had to learn a musical instrument) and Wei (Erika’s husband and an opera singer). So much music! Lots of talk about cooking and Chinese food. Wei is singing with the Washington National Opera and his speaking voice is incredible. So buttery and smooth and deep – I wanted to keep asking him questions just to hear his voice more.
******
Then today, I went to another Chinese restaurant with Joan, Christine’s mom. I needed to do an interview for a gerontology paper and Joan was up for it. Joan is amazingly independent for an 86-year-old. She travels, keeps in touch with many friends, and hopes to finish writing a children’s book soon…