Our big news is we bit the bullet and made reservations for China! End of June. Now all we have to do is get our visas, rob a bank to pay for the tickets and then learn Chinese before June. Not impossible. This time we will approach travel a little differently and do a modicum of research about what to do there before we go. Luckily, Annie is doing a little for us, and John and Marilyn are also heading to China at the end of the month, to advance and scout out for us.
This month, I have been attending a retirement course, which means getting up every day and commuting down to Northern Virginia for the day. I miss retirement. But, apparently I wasn't doing the whole retirement thing right, so I had to go back to school to learn how to retire. Not exactly, but the previous times they offered the course, I backed out and this was my last chance. It has mostly been helpful and both opened up prospects and narrowed my focus a little. Speaking of focus, I learned that the University of Massachusetts has made a big mistake and accepted me as a graduate student in their Public History Program.
And, we learned that Sean was accepted into Rutgers Law School, the first of the schools he heard from. Congratulations!
Margaret called last night from New Orleans where she is taking care of a group of Iraqi university English teachers, who are here attending the TESOL convention (teaching English to speakers of other languages.) She loves New Orleans, but worries that it is too risque for this group of Muslims. She comes home next Friday.
Earlier in the week, we met up with Joe and his friend Tamara for a book signing by David Brooks, the NYT columnist who has written a book about emotional intelligence called the Social Animal. It was at a famous lefty bookstore called Politics and Prose, and Brooks, a moderate conservative, admitted he was in the wrong crowd, saying he knew people came not so much "to hear him speak, but to listen to themselves." He was funnier and more insightful than he usually is in his columns and on the News Hour, and was well-receSpring ived.
Spring also means the end of hibernating, meaning we have even been a little social. We hosted a couple of Canadian Embassy colleagues who were on their way back after spending a month in Florida. And we've had dinners with friends from Peru and Arlington, Charlie came up from NC, and this week a colleague from Mexico is staying with us.
We haven't seen the Pittsfield house since early March, but understand they have put up the sheetrock inside. I'll drive up this weekend to check it out (and write checks) and maybe even paint a little, if I don't break my leg on my second day of skiing!
Well, that's all for now. Hope you all are well. Love from down here.
No comments:
Post a Comment