Vince is home! He came home Friday night and Jeremy took one for the team and picked him up at the airport close to midnight. He’s home for only a week and then back to California to do a summer research internship. This is a program funded by the NSF at many universities across the country to encourage students to go to science/engineering grad school. Everyday during the 9 week program, there is a presentation about what grad school is like, or how to prep for the GRE, or how to write a statement of purpose. They are doing a good job so far because Vince wants to go to grad school which, if you had asked me if that was a possibility when he was 16, I would have said no way. He knows his faculty advisor and the grad student he’s going to work with. He just needed a suit.
Jeremy and I spent some time discussing the necessity of a suit because, while the list of “nice things to wear when you give a presentation” did include a suit, I was like – no one, especially no one in SoCal wears a suit to anything. Jeremy rebutted and said – suit is on the list and I wore my own suit just a week ago (though I did wear shorts because it was a zoom suit). Actually, it’s also because for the women, it did not say a pantsuit or a blazer/matching skirt and because the women were not up to the suit level of dressing, I didn’t think Vince needed to either. Anyways, this whole thing was solved when Kappa (Bob aka Kappa and Katherine aka Kiki arrived on Friday night for a quick visit with Vince) was so thrilled to hear that suit buying was on the list of possible activities, that he took over that task and shuttled Vince to go shopping for a suit and two hours later, the suit was purchased and in for slight alterations and it will ship to him in Irvine after the tailor is done with it.
Bob and Katherine were in town for less than 48 hours and the visit was very nice – low key and enjoyable. We had dinner on Saturday night at A & J with Louisa and Leon. We’ve never been to A & Js for dinner and we were surprised to find it not very crowded and could seat the 8 of us without a wait.
On Sunday, we walked to Rockville Town Square with the dogs (Jeremy pushed Edda the whole way there!) and had an outdoor lunch which was lovely. The air quality wasn’t the best, so Jeremy took a scooter home and picked up the van to come bring us home.
Actually, my most triumphant thing of the weekend may have been spending a couple of hours fixing Bob’s email system. Having him ditch apple mail/calendar and switching him to gmail and google calendar. The apple based email system wasn’t syncing correctly and he’d delete certain things on his phone and it wouldn’t delete on the computer. It was a mess. The first hour was spent trying to get his existing system to work, but then giving up and the 2nd hour was spent migrating to the new system. (My life is so boring. I know.) But hopefully it is less of a mess now – so go send him an email! He’ll get it on his phone or his computer at the same time.
We hosted Sunday night dinner with the DC Martins. It has been a long time since Vince has seen them because he didn’t see them for Thanksgiving because we were out of town. And we had the covid Christmas where we saw no one.
Grad school is bad. Terrible. I do not believe any living human who wants to have a semblance of self-esteem should go to grad school. So, maybe don’t tell Vince that? Or maybe do? I don’t know. Grad school is dangerous.