A Flurry of Activity

We spent the latter part of last week recovering from our trip, doing laundry, getting back into work projects, and remembering how to cook dinner for ourselves again.

Before we left on our trip, the painter had told us, “I don’t know when I can get over to paint your house.”  As soon as we got back, last Wednesday, he said, “We’ll come on Monday if it’s not raining, and paint the outside stuff.  The inside stuff will have to wait until fall.” 

Monday (yesterday) was the first day of band camp for my son, which felt almost like the first day of school for me, except I was the school bus driver.  “Get up early and drive somebody somewhere” is my motto for the next two weeks. 

Right after I got back from bus duty, the painter showed up, with seven guys.  Heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to paint we go!

Finally, that spot on the living room ceiling is fixed.

The Painter Boss said to me, “Okay, where are the colors you picked for your bedroom?”  We have hired this guy before, so I already knew that he operates like a tornado, arriving with little warning, doing his job, and moving on.  I was ready with my colors. 

One of the sous-chef painters started taping to prep the bedroom for painting.  I had to remove all the junk from the top of our bureaus. Who cares that I have a report on Kansas corn due to my boss?  Fortunately I didn’t have to unload the clothes from the closets.  That would have taken me forever. 

The bedroom is about to undergo a transformation!

I had to wonder if I should discard the dead moth I found in a cup on my husband’s bureau.  I decided not to. Maybe he is saving it to put on a microscope slide for Youngest Daughter.  Because that’s what loving scientist fathers do for their budding scientist daughters.

I had to wonder if I should discard everything that was on top of my own bureau (except my earring collection, of course).  No scientific specimens there.  Perhaps I am grateful for that!

I will spare you a picture of the dead moth.
Instead here is our bedroom furniture, looking the neatest ever.

Today it is quieter and the house looks spiffier on the outside.  Soon I will show you photos of our painted bedroom, but I have to wait until the paint is truly dry enough to close the closet doors, because I have not yet cleaned out my closet.

When I asked my husband if I could tell The Public about the dead moth, he said yes, and he confirmed that he is saving it to put under the microscope.  He said, “Didn’t you notice that it is in perfect dead condition?”  Spoken like a true biologist.

College Tour: Student Life

The conclusion of the awards ceremony for our recent college tour:

Best Mascot:  My son says, “Obviously, MIT.  Tim The Beaver.”  Tim is MIT backwards, and the beaver is nature’s best engineer.  I think MIT calls its sports teams The Engineers, though. “The Gnawing Beavers” just wouldn’t be respected on the sports field.  

Rochester has a wasp called Rocky the Yellowjacket. Lehigh has the Mountain Hawks.  Penn’s mascot is the guy you find pictured on your oatmeal box.

Most Forgettable Mascot:  Harvard.  We can’t remember what it is, or if they even have a mascot.  Maybe if you are Harvard, you don’t need a mascot.

Common Household Mom and Son at the gates of the mascot-less Harvard Yard

Best Marching Band:  Not enough info to determine, but perhaps Lehigh, whose “Marching 97” play at every football game, some basketball games, and, if invited by a student, in the lecture hall during the lecture right before exams.  

I am guessing that marching band will be way different at college than at high school.  Does anybody know from their own experience in both high school and college marching bands if the two are very different?

Best Pranks:  MIT.  Except they call them ‘hacks,’ not pranks.  The top prank of all time (so far): displaying a campus police car on top of the MIT dome.  Another: stealing a cannon from Cal Tech.

Largest Carbon Footprint: We couldn’t figure out how to determine this – most students? Largest campus? Lack of LEED-certified buildings?  I do know that the MIT had the largest number of bicyclists riding around.  There were a lot of bikes at U Penn also.

Most Beautiful Library:  Lehigh.  We can’t tell you anything about Harvard, MIT, or Penn libraries because we didn’t go in them.  Maybe nobody at those schools studies in the library.

Most Obscure Engineering Project:  Robotic Bees at Harvard.  We figured they were working on this for the military, because the info session and the tour gave us no idea what the goal of this project was, although it was mentioned several times.  It was also unclear if this project related in any way to undergraduate engineering students.

Most Destructive of Pianos:  MIT.  The students in one of the dorms drop a piano off the roof at the end of the drop/add period (for dropping or adding classes).  Ach! How can they?!

Most Amusing Story about Application Mistakes:  Here are the stories we heard.  You can choose which one you like the best.

Penn:  a student applied to the Wharton School of Bunnies.

MIT:  an applicant wrote about ‘torturing 6^th graders’  (meant ‘tutoring 6^th graders’)

Lehigh:  the essay talked about ‘hunting peasants’ instead of pheasants.

College Olympics: Around Campus

In the spirit of the Olympics, the Common Household wishes to bestow these awards to the colleges we saw on our recent tour.  Only the five colleges we saw on this summer trip are in the running. (My son is considering several others.  We had hoped this tour would narrow it down a bit.) 

In the order we saw them, they are

            University of Rochester (The future college student picked this independently, before remembering that it is also the alma mater for the Common Household Mom and Dad)

            M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

            Harvard University

            Lehigh University

            University of Pennsylvania

These are the awards in the ‘Looking Around Campus’ category:

Friendliest to Parents: Rochester.  They started with good directions on where to park. Their website provided links to many local hotels, unlike the other schools’ websites. And they offered free coffee and tea in the admissions office, which was crucial since I hadn’t slept a wink the night before.  The unfriendliest was MIT.  I guess they figure if your kid can’t get you to the admissions office, then he is not savvy enough to go there.

Most Imposing Edifice:  Harvard.  Memorial Hall, where we had our info session, is a huge building with creepy disembodied heads of ancient scholars sticking out from the outside wall.  Plus it has gargoyles. Inside, the Sanders Theater is a large theater/lecture hall with ancient, uncomfortable wooden seats. 

Memorial Hall at Harvard

Cicero's creepy head, plus somebody's thumb

Demosthenes' creepy head.
It's hard to tell who looks angrier - Cicero or Demosthenes.

Most Like Hogwarts:  Harvard.  I wouldn’t have been surprised if Dolores Umbridge had entered Sanders Theater to preside over her magical courtroom. Memorial Hall also houses Annenberg Hall, the freshman dining hall.  Apparently this dining hall contains state secrets, so we were not allowed to see it, but it is said to resemble Hogwarts’ dining hall, with long wooden tables and hanging chandeliers.  Also, at the end of the first year, all the freshmen put their names into a sorting hat, which assigns them to one of 12 houses where they live for the rest of their years at Harvard.

Best Walking Environment:  Penn and Rochester.  (But for me personally, Penn was way too busy.)  Both Rochester and MIT offer underground walking opportunities.  We were told that we could walk through the entire MIT campus without going outside!  MIT prides itself on its ‘Infinite Corridor’ because it claims this fosters interaction between students, professors, etc.  I have my doubts.

University of Rochester

At U. Penn there seemed to be an awful lot of younger children around.

Most Informative Tour:  Lehigh.  Their engineering tour outshone Harvard’s tour by a mile.  Lehigh provided four engineering students to lead the tour, so we got several perspectives and a good explanation of their program.  We talked to one of the professors, and saw a current project they are working on to build a better, smarter wheelchair.  I was very impressed.

Lehigh University prefers to depict the entire body of the Great Thinkers they are honoring.

Most Secretive Tour: A tie between Harvard and Penn.  Except for the info session, we did not go inside a single building at either school.  Why are they afraid of showing us a dorm room or the student union? 

My next post will give the awards for the Student Life category.  Stay tuned!

Post-travel prayer

We’ve been travelling – that great American rite of passage called The College Tour.  Nine days, seven states, five schools.

While we were away, I was reading a book called Imagine, by Jonah Lehrer, in which the author asserts that travel fosters creativity.  I think he meant a different kind of travel, because creativity wasn’t happening for me on this trip. I had intended to write witty blog posts all along the way, but somehow driving several hours and then cramming the Common Household into one hotel room negated any creativity that the travel should have engendered. 

On every tour we heard a statement like this:  “If you have an idea, just talk to your professor about it, and you can get (choose one) a research project / a research grant / a job / an internship / the Nobel prize.”  Maybe it was all that optimistic talk of ideas emerging from undergraduate brains that killed my middle-aged brain’s ideas.

Travel did not prevent me from praying.  Every night I was grateful to God to have arrived safely at our destination.   When we arrived home two days ago, this was part of my prayer:

Thank you, God, for bringing us home safely.  Thank you that when we were on a one-way street but didn’t know it, and we turned left from the middle lane (thinking that it was the left lane), the car on the left came whizzing past well before my husband made the turn instead of during our turn. 

Thank you that my husband didn’t leave my by the side of the road when I navigated him onto the highway in the wrong direction, putting us squarely in a traffic jam that added an extra 45 minutes to our trip.  Thank you that I did not leave my husband by the side of the road when he encouraged me to follow the GPS when it said “Stay to the left” instead of following the prominent road sign which said, “Go right” to go directly to our destination, a move which took us an extra two hours of driving, and through two states we didn’t intend to see.  Thank you that the kids got mostly got along with each other so that we weren’t tempted to leave them by the side of the road.

I’ve been quite angry at God about Parkinson’s but quite grateful about making it back home without any one of us being left behind.

More soon about our tours, but I just have to ask if anybody is grateful about anything, or if anybody out there prays in paragraphs.  ??

Culinary Efforts: Food made from food

Following up on my last post…

When I finally got around to cooking something from a recipe, I made Chickpea and Cauliflower Curry.  Only two of us liked it: Oldest Daughter and me.  Unfortunately the recipe made a truckload of curry, so it was around for several days. 

To make up for that, I made lasagna next.  Mine is not high-quality lasagna, but I do put it together myself, so it’s a step above frozen lasagna.  I served it while Youngest Daughter was away at Girl Scout camp.  My son offered this prayer that night, with a tone of relief in his voice:

“Thank you, God, for the lasagna.  Thank you for the peace and quiet we have been experiencing the past two days...” 

* * * * *

As much as the Common Household might need relief from processed food, others are really in need of relief.  My prayer lately is for rain and moderate temperatures everywhere they are needed, which is for most of the US.  Unfortunately, that’s not what is in the forecast.  The effect on crops and, by extension, on many people around the world, will be painful and difficult.

Culinary Efforts: food from a box

Lately my culinary efforts have been underwhelming.  This is partly due to the heat wave, but also due to my overload of work trying vainly to estimate drought-inflicted crops.  But hey, that is also due to the heat wave.  We are also in the throes of planning a bat mitzvah, but I prefer to blame my kitchen failures on the weather, even when I am cooking inside.

Instead of “food that is made from food” (as a local restaurant advertises) I’ve served pancakes, mac ‘n’ cheese from a box, and hot dogs.  Well, pancakes aren't too bad, but the rest - blech.

Here is the kind of dinner conversation engendered by these type of meals:

* * * * *

On the night we had pancakes:  

Youngest Daughter took a huge bite, and part of her pancake flopped out of her mouth and back onto her plate. 

I said, ‘Please, take dainty bites.” 

She said, “Why should I?” 

I didn’t have a quick response for this, but my son said, in the form of a question, “For the love of God?” 

I said, “Yes!  For the love of God, would you please take dainty bites!”

* * * * *

On the night we had hot dogs:

Me: There are these various cheeses you could put on your hotdog.

Son:  They are all cheddar.  What’s the difference between these?

Me:  That one is Hoffman cheese.

Son:  Is that like a brand of cheese?  I thought it was cheddar cheese.

Me:  Yes, Hoffman is a brand of cheese.

Son:  Like, the Swiss brand?  The Swiss brand is for cheese, and army knives, and secret bank accounts.

Me:  Um, no.....

Husband:  ALL this cheese was actually made in China.

Me:  No, Hoffman cheese is made in Wisconsin.

Husband:  You mean the corporate office is in Wisconsin.  But it’s actually made in China, out of toxic chemicals.

* * * * *

As you can see, eating pancakes and hotdogs for dinner has gotten us no closer to being ready to dine with the queen.  

Suburban Animal Homes

Several days ago, one of the children discovered that there is a mole living near the air conditioning unit.  We have had a slow leak in our unit, and wonder if we have found the culprit.   We adults are all about protecting our suburban lifestyle, but the girls are smitten.

Last night at dinner, Oldest Daughter said, “I saw the mole today.  It was so cute and fuzzy!” 

Me:  Hmphh.

Husband:  I think that mole has been tapping into our air conditioning.  It’s a good summer to get free air conditioning.

Me:  And probably the chipmunks are stealing AC from the mole. 

Oldest Daughter:  It has a name, you know.

Me:  You mean the mole?  Did you name it Genevieve?

(When she was about 8 years old, O.D. found a toad in the yard, named it Genevieve and constructed a habitat for it, although the habitat was more suitable as a mosquito larva party school.) 

OD: No.  (smiling sweetly) It’s name is ‘Peaches.’

Youngest Daughter:  Oh, how cute!  Little cuddly Peaches!

Me:  The mole in Thumbelina was evil and nasty, you know.

YD:  No, he wasn’t.  He was just lonely and misunderstood.

Son: (rolls eyes)

The chipmunks have set up a gated community in our erstwhile strawberry garden.  In a kind gesture, I cleaned it out for them in May, but I have yet to receive a thank you note.  The chipmunks keep very busy running the vast empire of tunnels they have under our yard.  And now we find out that their summer project has been to upgrade to air-conditioned units.

Chipmunk gated community, before urban renewal

After I cleaned it out, leaving the strawberry plants

Chipmunk dessert!

Chipmunk entrance to to the gated community

So far I haven’t seen this mole, and for that and much else, I am thankful.