I went on my last kayaking lesson yesterday. The air was still bad, but I went with my other intrepid students. This time, we kayaked along the part of the Potomac that hugged the part I’m most familiar on foot because we started where I often start my long runs on Sunday morning at the Old Angler’s Inn parking lot. Because I knew the parking would get bad close to the meeting time at 9 am, I got to the parking lot at 7:30 and read a book (I’m a paranoid nut about parking. I don’t like to go to things where the parking is hard and complicated and even in easy parking situations I’ll park way in the back of the lot. If you are a friend and don’t mind driving, I’ll ask you to drive every time, unless I’m also constrained by my other paranoia which is being stuck at something without an easy exit. Then I will balance the parking phobia with the quick exit phobia and see which one wins out.). Parking was not super easy to find even at 7:30 am.
I had a great day and I love it so much, I overcame my other phobia of social awkwardness and I asked for everyone’s phone number and I’m going to start a chat so we can all go kayaking together. (So that’s 3 phobias so far: parking, leaving a party when I want to and asking other people to be my friend – shall we keep going? Haha. No. There are many more.)
Vince had a great first week in lab, doing PCR, growing E. Coli, etc. His grad student (who seems great and super involved) gave him homework to learn to uncap and recap a test tube with his non dominant hand because you need to pipette hundreds of samples – so you hold the pipette in your dominant hand and uncap and cap the test tube with your non dominant hand so you can go faster. That’s what grad students are essentially – robots. Dani, his partner, came down to Irvine to see their family and Vince and the lot of them are traipsing around town showing Vince the good stuff – like hot Cheeto infused hot dogs?
