Gorgeous day yesterday here in the DMV. Eliana was back from vacation, so she and Edda went out for some St. Patrick’s Day fun, and I headed towards nature with Elka. A 2.5 hour hike and I was on a Pokemon mission – one of my tasks is to catch 200 pokemon in a day (I usually catch about 10 a day), so I spent the working on this made-up goal and finished it about 3/4 through the hike.
I also had time to go thrifting which is just my favorite, really. I got a couple of mugs (to turn into planters) and baskets (for organizing). And a deck of cards – I’m thinking of practicing some magic?
Jeremy’s in berkeley with his high school friends. He accidentally left all his shirts in the Sacramento hotel (whoops). So he needs to buy some shirts today.
Vince is going to go to UC Irvine for grad school. He found out late Thursday afternoon and are all very excited for him and can’t wait to see what this new chapter brings. He’s so incredibly happy and eager to go start in the fall. It was a tough admissions season for him as this was his only congratulatory letter (after it was initially and, we think, erroneously a you are on the waitlist letter), but he needed only one and we are all thrilled. As someone said – it makes it easy to decide. He’s really blossomed into his scientific self starting the tail end of sophomore year, it’s a joy to see. He likes research and labs and classes and teaching and it’s all good.
We like to compare rent and stipends as he’ll be the third generation to go to grad school in engineering on the Lee side.
My mom got a $200 monthly stipend and her rent was $50 a month which included phone, maid service and fresh linens. My fathers was $400 a month with $90 rent. Mine was a monthly stipend of $1900 with a monthly rent of $420 which might have included phone (land line – I did not have a cell phone in grad school. No one did.) and bathroom cleaning, but no linens. Vince’s will be $2800 a month stipend and he expects to pay about $800 a month in rent.
He’s going to be off on his own soon! I’m not going to buy him any more pants or shoes or cell phones. It feels weird to just send him off like that, but it is as it should be.
It was so gorgeous yesterday. I always love fall the most and spring second, but I’m loving this spring bloom. I planted some azaleas yesterday that I got as a gift. There is a little patch in the garden where I plant all of my plant gifts that can be planted – Hyacinth, teeny-tiny daffodils and now this azalea.
Jeremy made it to Sacramento and he’s not traveling light. He had to take an Uber XL to the airport. He can’t even blame Edda for all his luggage weight.
Bob and Katherine got a pair of puppies! These are rescues and they are not related, though they seem well matched. White one with brown patches is Whimsey and brown one with white patches is Bunter. We are having a fun time facetime-ing with the puppies.
Jeremy is off to CA for business and pleasure. He’s gone for almost 2 weeks (kind of inadvertently), but we’ll be fine here at the mother ship. I gave him a hair cut and eye brow trim yesterday before he left.
We don’t really have any landscaping to speak of, but 15 years ago, I planted a scattering of daffodil bulbs and show up happily each spring and they make me smile!
On Saturday, while I was traveling with my parents, my favorite son turned 22. We had asked him what he wanted for his birthday and he asked for some floor lamps and so we bought him 2 – one a general room lamp and one to read in bed with. We also got him smart light bulbs so he can control them by voice and he’s been having fun with them.
My uncle Louis (my father’s older brother) passed away a few weeks ago and the service was last Friday in Los Angeles. My father is one of eight siblings and this was the first death among them, so there was the regular family drama, but nothing out of the ordinary (from what I know about families). My parents wanted to go and I wanted to go to the service too and I knew I’d make it easier for them to travel, so I went. We went for only the day, flying in on Thursday and flying out on Saturday. I booked the hotel within walking distance of many restaurants in Old Pasadena and on Thursday night, we had dinner at a seafood restaurant.
The day of the service was lovely and beautiful. We swept my grandparents’ grave before the viewing.
A very very rare gathering of the family. Look at all of us being nice to each other :). Really, we are all trying. It was fun to see everyone and reminisce over way too much food. Omg, Aunt Liz ordered like 17 times too much food for lunch.
At the burial, Helen ordered a dove release which was actually very very touching and we all got to release a white bird. They flew around and around and headed back home over the hills behind the cemetery. I asked if they named the birds, but the bird handler said they owned more than a thousand birds, so no, they are not named.
My aunt Jane, who at almost 80, is still working and looking snatched! It was a very nice trip, one of the nicest trips I have ever had with my parents. I know! To a funeral! Us Lees are not good at vacations or just chilling, but give us a trip where we aren’t supposed to have fun and we rocked it. I chauffeured everyone around LA in our little Ford Escape and found parking wherever I went and mostly smooth traffic. And I was so happy we were able to go together.
Big News! Lol. I got to level 40 on Pokemon Go! (while on the phone with Vince, so that was nice.) This is a milestone in my Pokemon journey. From the wiki entry: The maximum level a player can achieve was originally level 40, but expanded to 50 as of November 30, 2020. So I would have “finished” the game. But then they expanded to level 50 and now I’m only like 20% of the way to level 50. This is my mobile game of choice, it encourages walking in the real world and you can play it anywhere you are and you don’t have to spend any money to have fun. But if you spend a little bit of money, it can be fun-er, kind of.
I went to see Kristen this morning for a quick visit. She made delicious breakfast tacos and we went for a walk in her neighborhood. I love going to her house because she has such a great eye for decorating. She thrifts a lot of things and buys other things, but everything is very cute and comfortable, but not overdone and not too fussy. She had so many small plants in cute pots all over her living room and I got a few cuttings to propagate.
Jeremy flew back to Minneapolis to lobby in an actual lobby. He’s been discouraged the past few weeks because he’s “losing”. In MN, he’s being fought by both the Koch brothers from the right and the Sierra Club on the left. Unbelievable. Honestly. Anyways, he’s fighting the good fight and saving the world with Garchomp as his wing man.
Jeremy really, really wanted it to be a one day trip – catch the 7 am flight, home by 10 pm (for a three minute speech), but his grad advisor was winning that big prize at the APS meeting, which, this year, just happened to be in Minneapolis and on MONDAY night was the dinner celebration. I had to kind of nudge Jeremy to go. What are the chances, honestly? So he went and he was glad that he did.
The text was like – oh, my office mate has retired and spends his free time thinking about physics. LOL. And it’s pretty funny to chat with a bunch of folks who live Ising models so much. I love Ising models because I was literally failing all my graduate courses one after the other (like not even understanding what the Greek letters stood for, let alone how to manipulate them mathematically) – never ever feeling so dumb in my life – when I handed in my Ising model homework (the first problem set of my grad statistical mechanics class) which I worked on with Olga and we had to painfully step through some crazy unhappy programming for the Ising model and when we got it back, Zhen-Gang, complimented us on a job well done. I couldn’t believe it! So I love the Ising model too. But not too much. But I still love the ideal gas law better.
I did cut Edda’s hair this weekend. She has so much beautiful hair and it was at least 10 inches long, so we are going to donate it to Locks of Love. Four substantial braids. I cut it this weekend because it was really getting to be TOO MUCH and forever long to dry and braid and also because I’m leaving town for two days this week and Jeremy would be in charge of Morning Hair and it would have just been TOO MUCH for him. I cut both Jeremy’s hair and Edda’s hair (I actually was worried a little too much to make the 10 inch requirement for donation that I cut Edda’s a little too short, but it’s OK). Elka does not need her hair cut, but if I needed to, I totally would cut her hair too.
