Hello everyone!
Hope you are all doing well. Contrary to expectations, I am not in fact bored, and have quite enjoyed my time off. On Sunday I will head back to Wellesley, in order to start research on Tuesday the 29th! I also have two new swim lessons set up that I am excited to start. Life is about to get busy once again :).
Anyway, for being a non-school week, this week was surprisingly eventful! On most occasions, I took pictures, so I will walk through this blog based on the pictures posted at the end (it’s maddeningly difficult to post groups of pictures on WordPress, so to the end they go!). About the only thing I didn’t take pictures of was my exercising—happily, our family bought a membership at the local YMCA, and I was happy to return to my childhood pool. The Southdale Y has been much updated (it looks wonderful), though I am still idiotically pleased to see my name up on the record board ;P.
I always forget my family has so much going on when I’m not there :). This week, Leslie had her synchronized swimming meet, Nicole had three concerts, my mother made great progress on her garden, and my father is working at both his company job and at selling his invented and patented “box.” The Box does not have a name yet, but it’s a project that my father started many years ago and has invested much time in—and which will hopefully be on the market by the end of this year! It’s great hearing about the details of the project, as I was never interested when I was younger.
So, here goes! The first group of pictures are general pictures of my family—like I said, it’s great to see them again :). Speaking of which, this past week has been filled with extended family events, the like of which I’ve almost never experienced! Since my immediate family lives in Minnesota, but my father’s relatives live in IL, WA, and other far-flung places in the US (like Hawaii), while my mother’s are in CA, it’s rare that I spend much time with extended family. However, this week I spent time with many of my relatives on my father’s side, as one of my cousins who lives in Minneapolis had a daughter (Abigail is adorable), and much family has been dropping by. I saw my grandparents, my cousin Mark from Hawaii, my cousin Kate who lives here and her husband Claude, and my uncle Craig from WA. It was unusual and yet nice to spend time with them; I experienced for the first time spending an afternoon just listening to my older relatives talking amongst themselves. My mother and father both tell me that they did much more of this as children than I did, and that they had wished more family lived in the area so I would be able to experience it more.
Last weekend was thus spent doing extended family activities, elaborated on in the photographs. Then came immediate-family activities: Nicole’s MMTA concert (talked about in the last post), Leslie’s synchro sections performance (see here for two (Trek and Spanish) of Leslie’s performances that made it to State!), and Nicole’s normal band and jazz/stage band concerts as well. During this time, my mother took me shopping (I have trendy clothes now, which will vie for supremacy with all of my jock clothes ;P), I have been preparing for my having-to-make-my-own-meals-at-Wellesley crisis (meaning, that I am properly panicked but lack a plan), and my family took me out to dimsum, my absolute favorite type of cooking. Dimsum is a traditional Cantonese style of cooking which I highly recommend—check out the Wikipedia link for details :). In my experience, it leads to many excellent egg custard dishes and shrimp filled-noodle packets—and don’t dismiss it until you try it :).
I also was able to meet up with some friends: Nora, Athena, Olivia, and Cindy obliged to meet me, and I was happy to see them! I spent a few hours today chatting with them; Olivia and Cindy are pictured :). I have also spent quite a bit of time watching BBC’s new Sherlock series on PBS—it is fantastic, especially since it’s mind-bending without being frightening (a very difficult-to-achieve combination, and which I particularly appreciate since I’m scared easily by movies.) All in all, it’s been a wonderful vacation before I head back to Wellesley, and I hope I’ve left nothing out!
Please please please contact me; I do appreciate it! One of the incoming Class of 2016 (you guys excited?!) recently sent me her schedule and asked about classes—I’d love to help out if any of you want to get started early! (On the other hand, please don’t panic now. Orientation Week provides lots of guidance for classes next year, so it’s a great idea to wait until then too!)
And that’s all for now. Check out the photos if you’re interested—they took forever to upload, so might as well enjoy ;)!
Cheers,
Monica
