How to Survive a Heat Wave

July 21-25, 2005

Two months ago, when I bought tickets to fly to Florida to visit my grandparents, I thought "no wonder these flights are so cheap, no one wants to go to Florida in July!".  My grandparents have been living in Florida for about 20 years now and I am used to paying about a factor of 3 more for tickets when I fly out to see them at Christmas time.  I had the last laugh though, because it ended up being only 92 in Florida but I heard it got up to 104 in Illinois while I was gone!  (and the water was only 80, as you can see in the photo at the left). 

It was a short visit but the switch between work life and family life was total:  it always feels so strange to be running around trying to finish everything I was going to finish at work, and then driving away from it all and switching to worrying about whether I put enough sunscreen on my kids.

The only "in between" moment occurred when as I was literally walking out the door to get in the taxi, and deciding then and there that I would take my mandolin and my laptop with me, not only one of the two.  Of course bringing a mandolin to my grandparents house is like bringing pictures to an exhibition--my grandfather has been playing the mandolin for longer than my mother has been alive, and I would have my choice of mandolins to play while I was there.  But I'm addicted to my own mandolin so it came made the trip with me.  You can see at the left that I even convinced my grandfather to play a few tunes with me, instead of him just listening to me play and giving me pointers. 

The other transformation that happens when I visit my grandparents is that I finally get the chance to read the paper a bit, work on crossword puzzles, and read:  I devoured The Swallows of Kabul while I was there and started Birds Without Feathers on the plane ride back to Chicago. 

Of course Isaac and Sonia were in heaven--if you think grandparents spoil their grandchildren, that's actually only a warm-up for being a great-grandparent.  Isaac learned how to do word scrambles and play Rummy Q (he inherited my grandmother's love of doing puzzles and playing games), and Sonia got to watch TV every day and to eat her weight in ice cream.  (luckily as you can see she did not eat so much that she couldn't still sit on my grandmother's lap...).   

But as they say, no good deed goes unpunished, and when I returned from this mini-vacation I went full swing in the other direction to Project Manager mode for the MINERvA experiment:  trying to understand how much of the experiment should be considered R&D, and getting paperwork for 5 different universities through signatures so that they can start spending real money on the R&D they are doing to figure out how to build this detector.  We have a collaboration meeting this coming weekend, but I confess that after that I'm going on yet another vacation...

Comments

[Balaji Shankar Venkatachari]

Visiting grandparents was always a special thing during my vacations as a child. All the pampering I got from them..mmmm. Even now whenever I call them, it evokes that special feeling. I am sure u'r kids had a lot of fun there.

[debbie]

Thanks for your comment--I am happy to report my grandparents don't seem to pamper me any less now that I am a grownup...