Carol's 20-year Reunion

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We spent last weekend in Richland attending various events for Carol's 20-year high school reunion. There was a cocktail party Friday night, a tour of her old school Saturday afternoon, a formal dinner Saturday night and a family picnic Sunday afternoon. We had fun at all the events. Carol has much clearer memories of her classmates than I do! We got to spend time with Carol's best friend (and classmate) Kim, in town from Fort Collins with her husband Dan and kids Rachel, Mark and Natalie.

Carol's old school is nearing the end of a 2-year "renovation" (replacement, really, but without ever closing). The cramped, dark old building she went to school in is the last part to be demolished - a few weeks from now. Good timing! The new building is gorgeous: huge roomy science labs; video projectors in every room; wireless networking throughout; very cool photo, video and stagecraft facilities; and a beautiful 20-foot-wide falcon that a local artist painted on the center of the basketball court in the gym.

Charlotte is saying more words all of a sudden. Now she'll say "mama", "ouch" (in two syllables, like E.T.) and "uh oh". She still has the pterodactyl rendition of "mine".

The girls see me in bike clothes every day when I leave for work and when I return home. Fairly often Carol and the girls meet me for lunch at a park near my office. On Friday, when they got to my office and Audrey saw me in street clothes, she said "Daddy's not wearing his work clothes." At the park on the swings (both girls are recently very fond of swings), Audrey indicated she wanted to go higher. Carol confirmed, "You want to go a little bit faster?" Audrey replied, "I want to go a lotta faster so I can see the whole world." We didn't know she was aware of "the whole world".

Last fall someone asked Audrey what she thought her daddy did all day while he was gone at work. She said, "He builds garages with his friends." Which is a good seque into my latest project: drywalling. I've been having trouble finding a drywaller who can do the garage and studio as soon as I'd like, and the one bid I got was at least double what I'd hoped. So yesterday I started doing it myself. It's going well so far. I'll put up some photos in a separate post.

There's news on the work front. A coworker at my job left a couple of weeks ago so Rosetta (Merck) has offerred me that position (I've been contracting, this would be "permanent"). Unfortunately it doesn't look we'll be able to agree on salary, but we'll see. I love the work and the environment, but I can only sacrifice so much financially for that enjoyment: we've got college and retirement to save for. I have a standing offer for another job with less enjoyment but almost 30% more money than the current Rosetta offer, plus another opportunity I'd like to explore. Stay tuned.

Even if I leave Rosetta, I hope to still finish the Bioinformatics certificate course I started in May. I was pretty unsatisfied with the quality of the course materials (it's all online). But then I got a 4.0 GPA for the first semester so somehow I feel better about it now. There are two more semesters to go.