mike's web log

Happy (Belated) Birthday, Zack!

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:06:26 GMT

A day late, dang! This was 22 years ago yesterday:

The dad-in-law ... again

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:11:28 GMT

Earlier this year, the Seattle P-I ran a piece about doctors who do housecalls. The featured patient was John Devine, my father-in-law. We found this amusing because John has a knack for attention.

Case in point. KING 5, one of our local TV stations, picked up the story and they sent a reporter to go tag along with Sarah Babineau as she made her rounds. The story aired today. And which patient was featured? Correct:

And this is exactly what you'd expect him to say:

If it weren't for Babineau, Devine wouldn't see a doctor as much as he should because he likes to stay right where he is.

"I specialize in inactivity," said Devine.

Once a ham, always a ham, I guess. :-)

College daze

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 07:45:09 GMT

Last week, Sarah was accepted into a graduate program to become a nurse practitioner. She took two classes (one after the other) this summer to fulfill a couple of requirements, which gave her -- actually, all of us -- an idea of what Sarah's schoolwork will be like for the next three years. A good sign was that she loved being back in school, and that the workload, while certainly intense, was not overwhelming, yay.

Of course, we already have a couple of college kids around here. I was talking to a colleague at work whose daughter was about to enter college, and whose son is a couple of years behind her. "Two at once!" he noted, which got me thinking. We have three at once at the moment, plus two more in the wings. Out of curiosity I charted out what us-and-college looked like for the foreseeable future. Here's a picture:

Interesting, eh? We get one year off between now (actually, between three years ago, when Zack started) and the year 2020. With, as you can see, some overlap. And this assumes that Zack does only one year of grad school, and Sabrina none, and that Sarah's girls go straight through four years of undergrad. And that I don't decide at some point in the next 12 years to enter a program.

Dang. Good thing that we're all in favor of higher-educatin' around here, coz obviously we're going to be involved in it for some time to come.

Who you gonna call?

Sat, 31 May 2008 14:41:59 GMT

Local and family interest. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran an article on Thursday about the new-old practice of house calls by physicians. The reporter followed Dr. Sarah Babineau around as she visited patients, many of them in facilities.

The story appeared below the fold on the front page of the Thursday edition. It focused on a particular patient, which turns out was my father-in-law, whom the article called "a small, spry man with a Scottish brogue and a mischievous smile." That would be him.

The print version was illustrated with a photo of the doctor visiting a patient. Here's a not-so-great scan of the photo:

This is not so surprising. Somehow John always manages to be the center of attention no matter where he ends up. :-)

Merry Christmas

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 14:41:01 GMT

Christmas is kind of complicated around here (four kids, three families), but dang, it's fun. There are up to four Christmases. The evening of the 23rd, there's the pajama exchange. On the morning of the 24th, gift exchange number one with Sarah's kids. In the evening of the 24th, gift exchange number two with my kids and Sarah's kids. Then the various kids go to their respective other families and have yet another gift exchange! All accompanied by staggering quantities of food, heavy on the sweets, omg.

Today, the 25th, is comparatively quiet around here. But to make up for that, we're having a white Christmas, at least up here in the Renton Highlands:

We were planning on heading out for a mini movie marathon, but the weather might turn that into a mini DVD marathon instead. That is, if we can take out noses out of many new books we seem to have acquired, including for me two new noun books:

[1]

... among others.

Or in my case, if I can stop playing with my newest toy, courtesy of Sarah:

Oh what fun.

Hope your holiday celebration(s) are enjoyable this year as well!

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Pomes

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 13:16:09 GMT

We have a little whiteboard on one of our cupboards that was originally intended to be a place to write notes ("Dogs are fed") or stuff for the grocery list. However, it's turned primarily into a place where we scribble doggerel on familial themes. (Altho people are inclined to name anything with meter and rhyme a "poem," it seems a little grand to grace our efforts with that name.)

Limericks are the most popular, being a form that sometimes seems to write itself. Haiku has made an appearance. In one case, a "dogs are fed" message went up to the tune of "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean":

The doggies, they do like their feedings
The doggies, they do like their chow
But should you encounter their pleadings
Ignore them, I fed them just now.

No food, no food
They've snarfed up their breakfast and all the crumbs
No food, no food
At least until dinnertime comes.

We sometimes use unnamed forms, as in this excuse for not doing the dishes:

Against my best wishes
I left all the dishes
(Though I did have to empty the sink)

It's the girls' night for chores
Which of course each abhors
(Though it's good for the soul, parents think.)

Below which appeared in childish hand the comment "Nope."

At times the muse stays away, and at one point after a period of blankness on the board, someone posted the forlorn message "Poem goes here."

Not long ago, Sarah spotted in Poetry magazine a triolet by A. E. Stallings that delighted her, so she clipped it and taped it on the whiteboard:

Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,
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Visual Studio users

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:47:54 GMT

Perhaps a deceptive title. I spoke with my son the other day, who's off at college studying that physics stuff. This quarter he's taking his required programming class, which is C++. (Is that really the best choice for a beginning programming class? Never mind, it's a rhetorical question.) For tools, they're using ... Visual Studio 2005! An unexpected familial connection. Zack being, you know, a 20-year-old guy, he immediately took an interest in pimping his IDE.

I had predicted that he'd find programming to be a lot of fun. He told me that after they got their first assignment, he went home and did it immediately. (Possibly a first.) So far, it seems, my prediction is proving true.

In other VS news, I'm going to be attending DevConnections in Las Vegas November 5-8. As always with these things, there are all sorts of conflicting sessions that it will be painful to choose among. But it all looks great, so I can't wait. Maybe I'll see you there!

Hitched

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 21:11:17 GMT

Sarah and I got married last Saturday. I'm a bit behind in reporting this. My excuse: I'm writing this from Maui, sitting in an 11th-story condo that overlooks the water.

Our plan was to have a low-key affair for the wedding. Sarah had proposed, for example, that there be six of us -- the two of us, her two kids, my two kids. I could understand the appeal of this plan, but I favored something attended by a few more folks. And soon enough various near and dear made it clear that they expected to be attending the wedding.

This is a second wedding for both of us, so we were comfortable in planning something that was particularly meaningful to us. As many people know, this is not how the wedding industry works; as someone observed, it's an industry where the customer is never right. Virtually anyone associated with the industry essentially tells you what you should do. So we stayed away from that as much as we could.

For example, gifts. We've got plenty of stuff. Indeed, after combining households, we have more than plenty. So Sarah's idea was this: rather than bringing gifts, people would bring a toast or a memory to share. At our age, it's not the stuff you have; it's the relationships you've wrought that mean the most, and those are the gifts we really care about.

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Sabrina's birthday

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 18:16:54 GMT

Sabrina turned 19 today. We talked this morning; the three-hour time difference still throws me, whatever. I asked her what she was doing tonight. "Master class," she said ... every Thursday night. Well, that's ok, I guess.

This is the picture I usually post on this day:

For a change, I'll also post this one, which was taken on July 4:

Happy Birthday, Sabrina!

WA to IN

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 17:17:28 GMT

Sabrina's first summer after college has come to an end, and she's wending her way back to Bloomington for her sophomore year. She left very early -- the earliest they can be in the dorms is the 22nd -- because she's driving cross-country with her fellow music student Dave, who lives nearby in Belleuve.

Her employment situation -- that is, the summer job thing -- worked out surprisingly well. She worked Sundays and occasionally other days at a small but upscale stationery shop in West Seattle, where one of her duties was the artistic gift-wrapping that the shop specializes in.[1] Sabrina's idiosyncratic style seemed to suit the place well, or vice versa, and she departed with the prospect of a holiday-season job.

On her alternate days, so to speak, she worked at a local outlet of Jamba Juice, a company that is on the way to doing for juice what Starbucks has done for coffee, including the institutionalization of perky service. Sabrina managed to somehow both accede to the vaguely silly, corporate-imposed playfulness of the place and maintain a healthily (tho not lethally) ironic distance from it.

Somehow she managed to negotiate not one but two jobs and still keep her Saturdays free, a feat that impressed me.

But now that's done and she's on the road. Neither of the kids has experience with long road trips. We parents got together last week to do some planning, to some extent because the mom was concerned that the two kids were perhaps not fully cognizant of what lay ahead. So we looked at some maps and guesstimated a budget. But really, college kids on the road are probably more flexible than most of us oldsters would be. Then again, it's the old folks who were pressing the AAA cards on the travelers.

The mom was there for the sendoff this morning. Not surprisingly, the van was packed full:
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Family update

Thu, 17 May 2007 10:35:41 GMT

We're at the point in the new house where things are settling into a configuration that it will take energy to change. The daily stuff -- dishes, linens, like that -- has found a home. We've mostly sorted out the "office" space, which is dominated by my all my junk, of course. Books are on shelves (yay, Sarah!), if not necessarily in an uberorganized way (that's actually the secret for getting them onto the shelves, like, this year). Ditto CDs. Sarah's been steadily hanging pictures on the wall, which has been nice. One, it makes the house look more lived in. And two, it's been interesting to look again at things like family pictures through someone else's eyes -- I've had the same pictures for a long time, to the point where I don't really look at them much, but unpacking them after the move, hanging them, and going through some of the family history has made them lively again.

Less critical stuff is just where it is. For example, after some work to make it possible to at least walk through the garage, the effort to organize it has stalled. It would be easy to wake up a year from now and realize that the chaotic state of the garage is not, in fact, how we want it, just what we've gotten used to. The major obstacle has been all along how to get rid of stuff, especially stuff that we can't or don't want to just give to the Goodwill. (I have had some success with craigslisting a few things ... as long as the price is right, stuff will move. Free is a good price.)

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Keeping busy

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 00:39:38 GMT

Probably right now I should be dismantling the computer and the desk, because ...

I'm moving! Because ...

I sold my house, because ...

Sarah and I bought a house in Renton, because ...

We're getting married later this year.

So, things have been pretty busy, as they are when you're buying one house, selling two, and moving two. Many stories in all that.

One story is that the Web site is likely to be down intermittently while I am packing and moving and perhaps for several days straight while we sort out Comcast on the new-house end of things. I'm simply assuming that I can hook everything back up at the new place and it will work. Hahahahaha.

Anyway, that's one of the reasons I've been slow to follow up on comments that ask tech questions, and generally not been as active as normal. I will post a few of the more interesting (to me) stories about the moves. Real Soon Now.

Bodies

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 21:37:41 GMT

The offsprung have returned to their respective institutions of "higher" "learning" and presumably resumed their scholarly ways. It was interesting to have them around over the break. It was like having visitors, only different. Better, if you were wondering.

We had some outings en famille, for the most part involving eating. Conversation was lively, because it combined the now adult sensibilities of the kids along with the usual gossip and remember-when of any family get-together.

I digress. Sabrina suggested that we go see Bodies: The Exhibition, which is in the middle of a six-month run here in Seattle. I had registered that there was some controversy when the exhibit first arrived, but hadn't otherwise given it much thought. Zack, of course, knew that it had had a role in the latest Bond film.[1] It sounded like a good idea, anyway, so the kids and the mom and I betook ourselves to the exhibition hall and parted with the breathtaking sum demanded for entry.

The big selling point of the exhibition, for those who don't know, is that the bodies are real. Sort of. They've been "plasticized" through a complicated process that basically replaces the, um, corporal elements with silicone. As someone standing in front of me explained, it's like fossils -- the original material is replaced with something else, but leaving a good replica.

The controversy around the exhibition, as I understand it (#), is two-and-a-half fold. Issue #1 is whether the people represented gave their permission to have their cadavers used in this way. Issue #1-1/2 is that the bodies are from China, and there is some skepticism that the process of obtaining the bodies was all entirely aboveboard.
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Family update

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 20:33:22 GMT

Sabrina turns 18 today. That means it's time to run this particular annual picture, which was 18 years ago today:

Sarah was joshing me: "Congratulations, you did it!" Two kids raised to adulthood, haha.

I did catch Sabrina on the phone in Bloomington; she was out for Indian food, which sounded like a fine way to spend a birthday evening. I don't know to what extent Sabrina feels the positive effects of this milestone. She achieved a certain kind of practical adulthood long before turning 18 -- she's been pretty independent since getting a car, and of course now lives far, far away from any semblance of parental supervision, heh.

We don't hear much from our newest scholar, which is to say, moving away has not had much effect on her laconic style of correspondence. We've been able to glean certain facts, tho. College is hard, or perhaps more specifically, German is hard. Other clarinetists at IU are really good. Sabrina has not merged seamlessly into the dormitory social scene (among what the mom called "those corn-fed girls"). None of these are particular surprises, except possibly to Sabrina herself. I would venture to guess that her experience is typical, if a new and different thing to her.

Zack is about to start his second year at WWU. He will return to the dorm (Fairhaven), but this year has a room to himself. All the more room to put stuff in, haha.

His summer job at Jiffy Lube seems to have worked out pretty well. He earned more than enough to cover the car insurance payments to his mom. And since his sister is gone, he inherited the car, so to speak. So we have a 19-year-old boy + car + spare cash. Do the math, what do you get? Correct: a car pimped out with a new stereo and an amp and a subwoofer the size of a laundry basket.

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More Bloomington

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 11:32:09 GMT

We were able to move Sabrina into her dorm room a day early, no problem. Then it was Target Trip #2 for a groaning load of ... stuff. But the shelves had been picked over in the preceding 24 hours (like, no 60W bulbs?), so our provisioning expedition required a detour to the K-Mart next door.

The mom had shipped boxes of stuff to the dorm to complement our overstuffed suitcases, but most of the boxes hadn't arrived yet. Shoot. No bedding, for example, so Sabrina wasn't able to actually move in. Oh, well. She unpacked what she had and we made a list for Target Trip #3.

Have I mentioned that Indiana is hot in the summer? omg.

With our free evening, we decided to head into Indianapolis. I wanted to look. Sabrina wanted to shop. Indianapolis looked pretty cool, allowing for the fact that we spent only an evening there. For some reason I hadn't expected the monumental architecture, including a tall column with an archer dude on the top, which I particularly liked. That would be Memorial Circle, I guess. There was a baseball game on as well, which might have been fun. And I noted that the good people of Indianapolis have, like the rest of us, been screwed by the professional sports industry -- an arena is going up next to a baseball field and a football stadium.

Most of our time was spent at Circle Center, which is the Indianapolis version of Seattle's Pacific Place, only spread across three buildings with skyways. A hundred shops, and not a one that I was interested in. So while Sabrina went to shops, I got my book and read.

Next day, my last, more errands. we bought the last of our supplies (for now). We stopped into a bank, where we discovered once again that banks don't trust people under 18, an age Sabrina will not reach for about another month. Grrr.

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Another day in Bloomington

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 21:57:12 GMT

We headed to campus today to at least visit the bookstore. Sabrina had not had the experience before of shopping for college textbooks and finding your class and the book list in the bookstore. As it happens, she'd forgotten her class list in the hotel room, but we knew she needed books for two classes -- music theory and German -- and we thought we'd be able to guess the class numbers from what was on offer. She's starting German, for example, so German 100 and whaddya know, all sections use the same text. Similar with theory, although it was slightly more difficult to triangulate on the right class; dang, there are a lot of theory classes at this school. But by process of elimination we found the right books. I lightened my wallet considerably at the cash register (or more like, burdened the credit-card statement). Always a shock. Though the bag with the books in it was satisfyingly heavy.

The main bookstore had no apparel specfic to the music school -- excuse me, the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University -- but Sabrina knew of a secret apparel shop just for music stuff that was tucked into the practice-rooms building. So we set off on foot.

One of my functions on this trip is to be the designated lost person. We couldn't figure out how to drive to the bookstore; dad stopped and asked a parking attendant. We didn't know exactly where the practice-room building was; dad stopped and asked at the music library. Etc. People are, of course, unfailingly friendly and helpful, but I suspect that it's just easier for a dad kind of person to tell a perfect stranger that he's a tourist, lost, and generally befuddled -- ie, not cool.

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On the road again

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 09:04:24 GMT

Sabrina and I are in Bloomington, IN. She's starting school next week, and they can move into their dorms starting Wednesday, so that's our plan. In the meantime we're having a look around and working our way through the lo-o-o-ong shopping lists of Things To Buy For College.

We took a red-eye Saturday night, so got hardly any sleep that night, and were stumbling around Bloomington Sunday until our hotel was ready at 3:00. There was a, mmm, slight screwup in the hotel, actually. I made hotel reservations along with the plane reservations a couple of months ago, printed everything off, and threw it into a folder. Once we were in Bloomington, Sabrina got the stuff out of the folder and we started looking for the hotel. After studying it for a minute, she said "It says Bloomington IL." Huh? Indeed, the hotel seemed to be in a place called Bloomington, Illinois. Whereas here we are in Bloomington, Indiana.

Well, dang. I called them up -- cell phones are so amazing -- and explained that we were, you know, in the wrong state, so they canceled our reservation, how nice of them. Then came the challenge of finding a place here where we actually are. Back on the cell phone to the mom, who did Expedia magic to find us a place to stay. Not so easy -- it seemed that pretty much everyplace was booked for a long ways around. But she did find us one place for a couple of nights and another for the last night. Crisis averted.

The town of Bloomington isn't particularly big ... the chamber-of-commerce stuff talks about an "11-block downtown area." And it was Sunday, so not real hoppin'. But it's clear that there's an influx of people right about now. All the nice-looking restaurants close to the town center had long waiting times, and there was all sorts of annoyingly slow traffic around the hotels.

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Sabrina's class schedule

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 09:30:59 GMT

Just got a call from the daughter, who's off in Bloomington, IN getting all orientated and stuff. First thing she told me: "Guess what, I'm taking German!" The taking of German is something of keen interest to me, seeing as how I picked up a couple of degrees in same at an earlier point in my life. I wouldn't have in fact recommended it, but Sabrina has an eminently practical reason, at least: she wants to spend a year abroad studying in (for now) Vienna.

Anyway, she's taking:

Music Theory (8:00am, hahahahaha)
Piano 4
German
Ensemble
Private lessons

The last two aren't set up yet, because she needs to audition the first week of school (ensemble) and because the professor is off playing in Europe (lessons).

Her SAT scores and/or her AP English class were sufficient to test her out of English comp, yay. And apparently there's no math requirement: "I never have to take math again!" she said, a little more emphatically than I would have anticipated.

She sounded quite excited, and I can see why -- this is going to be an all-music, all-the-time environment for our girl, 'ceptin' that German thing. Ah, freshman year registration -- is there anything that has quite the same sense of possibility and anticipation?

Class of 2006

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 21:10:34 GMT

This was our last night of high school ... Sabrina graduated this afternoon, and that was the final, final, final school activity for this year. There's been a flurry of activity in the last few weeks -- last concerts, year-end recitals, meeting this, meeting that, you name it. And now it's done. We -- all of us, kids and parents -- now graduate to new and different things.

The graduation ceremonies are held at, of all places, Qwest Field, home of the Seattle Seahawks. Since the venue isn't exactly intimate, they use that big ol' screen to show the kids as they pass by. Here's Sabrina on the big screen:

And here's the dad, kids, and mom. Don't we look happy to be done? :-)

Choosy doggies choose ...

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 22:38:44 GMT

In a kind of self-delusional stab at "healthy" eating, I buy the kind of peanut butter where the oil floats on top and you have to mix it all up before you smear it on your organic, 27-grain bread. It comes in a plastic jar.

Two minutes ago, Henry the Dog came into my office belching audibly and ... uh ... aromatically. There was the distinct perfume of peanuts in the air.

Ack. I just returned from the back yard. It seems that he managed to reach up onto the counter and snatch the plastic jar, take it outside, chew it open, and lick out what he could get to. This being the aforementioned separate-layers type of peanut butter, it seems that he just ate about 1/2 cup of pure peanut oil, along with whatever actual peanut butter he could get at with his tongue. Ew.

No dinner for that dog tonight, methinks.

Hey there, Slick

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 23:03:31 GMT

Last Wednesday I ran up to Bellingham to fetch the lad back from his higher educatin' -- it was his last day of finals, and it was time to clear out the dorm room and call it a year. Somewhat to our surprise, we managed to pack what remained of his room into the back of my car (a station-wagon like vehicle), and heck, we could probably have stuck a few more ballpoint pens in there, too, had that been necessary.

So now our future sophomore faces a summer at home. Since his sister shall be moving off to far Indiana -- by aeroplane -- Zack is casting a covetous eye on the 1995 Toyota Corolla that she currently pilots about the city to her various gigs and social occasions, and oh yeah school. I have no problem with him taking the car (it's in my name), but I won't pay for the insurance. So he's motivated to labor this summer and save up some wages against this future expense.

He put in applications around the area and the first and/or most alacritous response came from the local Jiffy Lube. Zack did a semester of Auto Tech aka auto shop, but what seemed to interest his potential employer most was that Zack was available to work full time. This somewhat confirmed my somewhat low opinion of the emporium; I have long thought that they were staffed by, let us say, technicians who might not be fully certified for all manner of car repair. Then again, I've never paid anyone to change the oil in my car, so what the heck do I know?

His employment was settled last week after he took a "UA test", which proved not to be something mechanical, as Zack very briefly thought, but rather the old pee-in-the-cup test. Flying colors. He was told to show up on Monday morning at the corporate facility in Woodinville for an orientation, and to bring all his paperwork, which included his social security card.

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Bellingham, Glass, Stories

Mon, 22 May 2006 00:20:42 GMT

Zack's got two more weeks of school, and we thought it might be a good idea to haul some of his junk back home early, else we might not have enough room in the car when he comes back for the summer. As it happens, it was also some sort of parent weekend at WWU, beats me why, although this turned out to be to my benefit. I also have a pile of books I was done with, and I'd been advised by my friend John that it was worth a trip to Bellingham if you wanted to sell books. So yesterday I went up to Bellingham.

This is how excellent a son I have: on Thursday while we were embroiled in a company meeting, Zack left me a message saying "Ira Glass will be here Saturday, so I'm on my way to buy tickets. Call if you don't want to go." Ha. As If. The parent weekend thing, it worked out ok.

John's advice proved to be excellent. I took three boxes of books up and sold only about one box's worth, but got an extremely satisfactory price.[1] Much of which of course I immediately turned around and spent on -- what else? -- more books. For the record, then, you can't do a whole lot better than Henderson's and Michael's in Bellingham both for selling and buying books.

After this delightful multi-hour experience, Zack and I got some dinner and then headed to Ira Glass. I must say that I marveled. Glass had been in Seattle a couple months ago (with Sarah Vowell, I think), and from the price, you'd have thought the tickets were gold plated. At WWU Zack used his student ID to buy tickets: $11 each.

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Ellington again

Sun, 21 May 2006 13:00:20 GMT

The Garfield jazz band was at the Essentially Ellington competition in NYC the last couple of days, and came home with a 3rd-place finish. (2nd place was scored by a band from near Vancouver WA, which was attending the competition for the first time -- how cool is that?)

This was a sentimental trip for our girl Sabrina, since she's a senior and this will be her last visit to this particular competition. She was quite pleased that the band placed this year, giving them another notch in their already substantially notched belt.

That, and the Seattle Times article about the competition happens to include a picture that we were quite happy about:

State competition

Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:35:03 GMT

We had an outing today to Ellensburg for the annual Washington Music Educators competition (aka "State"). Sabrina had to play at 9:20, so we went over last night and stayed in nearby Cle Elum. (Although some kids did make the trip over from Seattle this morning -- a 125-mile drive -- including some who played at 8:30. Yikes.)

Anyway, she performed her Debussy piece, which seemed to go well. We hung about and went to lunch while awaiting results. A little after noon there were no results yet (the last kid didn't play till 12:00), but comment sheets were available, so she picked those up. A bit disappointing -- two I's and one II. The judges all commented on her tone (Mr. II put a note saying something like "I if the tone were better.") Overall, though, they closed with complimentary comments.

We headed home, and while we were driving, one of the other Garfield kids called her to say that she had "placed," meaning she'd been selected for the top three. Sabrina was delighted. The actual places aren't handed out till evening time at what we hear is a long awards ceremony.

Tonight around 7:00 Sabrina got another call from the same girl: Sabrina had won! Wow. Sabrina was elated, naturally. As are we all. So congratulations to our girl and her success today. We're very proud of her!

Update The sponsoring organization has posted the official results.

Update Clarified the story: Sabrina won on clarinet. (So did the girl who called, on oboe.) By at least one definition, this makes Sabrina the best high school clarinetist in the state of Washington, heh.

Family catchup

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 12:11:17 GMT

Busy times around here, so here's a little catch-up. First, Sabrina has decided that she wants to attend the music school at Indiana. Although we still haven't heard formally from all of the schools she applied to/auditioned for, it looked like she had options for most of her choices. It's a complicated game, though; in music (perhaps in other fields) the professors need to fill their "studios" independently from the admittance process for the schools themselves. So she was being asked early on about her choice by individual professors. They need to know if you're joining them, so that if you're not, they can offer a spot to the next student in line. And this happened way before she had heard from the schools themselves or from such useful parties as the financial aid offices. The professors of course could not say anything about admittance or financial aid, so in essence Sabrina was being asked to choose the studio to join with no other knowledge. Tough call.

In the end she opted for Indiana and James Campbell, although it took some agonizing to finally decide. All the more reason we were pleased, then, to hear yesterday that the school has offered Sabrina a nice scholarship that will cover a decent hunk of her costs for four years. And who knows, with two in college at the same time, maybe the Feds will take pity on us and offer us additional assistance.

In other news, I'm off to China on Friday. Sarah's brother has lived in Beijing for many years, and she had decided that this year she would take her daughters to visit their uncle, and I'm going, too. We're looking forward to it, and everyone I've talked to who's been there has many wonderful things to say about it. We'll be there for 10 days total -- enough to experience some miniscule percentage of what Beijing has to offer, apparently.

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