My Days in Texas » education https://www.batterman.org/susan (More days than originally anticipated) Sat, 14 Sep 2013 17:13:41 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.38 Letters of Note https://www.batterman.org/susan/2009/11/19/letters-of-note/ https://www.batterman.org/susan/2009/11/19/letters-of-note/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:49:29 +0000 http://www.batterman.org/susan/?p=274 I have a new blog in my RSS reader (what a modern sentence this is turning out to be!) that every time I read the latest post I think “I need to make sure everyone I know reads this!”. It’s Letters of Note, and it is what it says it is. Interesting letters, scanned and transcribed, with a bit of backstory. It’s been up a couple of months I guess? with a couple of posts a day, and they have all been interesting to me. Really, just keep clicking “Older Posts” and read them all if you have any interest in history or humor or art or people or science or books or writing or happy or sad or life or anything. It’s a new enough blog to catch up.

I started to go through and pick out favorites, but I just started clicking back and re-reading them all so I’m not going bother listing them. Although I liked this recent cover letter quite a bit:

]]> https://www.batterman.org/susan/2009/11/19/letters-of-note/feed/ 0 The Graduate https://www.batterman.org/susan/2009/05/28/the-graduate/ https://www.batterman.org/susan/2009/05/28/the-graduate/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 20:29:25 +0000 http://www.batterman.org/susan/?p=155 It’s official, Erica is a college graduate. Wow, the last four years went fast!

We had a great time with visitors and in Austin. Ed’s brother Jim came a week early and spent time in Dallas visiting historical sites and museums, reading and sailing. He  drove Ed’s car down to Austin last Thursday so he could go floating on the Guadalupe River with Erica and her friends. His sister Colleen was supposed to arrive in Dallas that night, but her plane was delayed so late that she switched her flight to take her directly to Austin Friday morning. Ed and I drove my car down and got there just in time to pick her up and get everybody together to go to the graduation ceremony.

The ceremony was nice, typical processionals, speeches, marches across the stage, pictures after, etc. The speaker was Berkeley Breathed, the Bloom County and Opus cartoonist. He was funny.

We had a wonderful graduation dinner at the Belmont, with Ed, Jim, Colleen, Erica’s mother and stepfather, her maternal grandmother, her sister Rachelle and Rachelle’s two little girls, our friends Mike and Carla who now live in Austin (they are the ones that used to have the house in Galveston), and two of Erica’s friends.

The next day Ed, Jim, Colleen, Erica, Rachelle and I had lunch at Curra’s, our favorite Mexican place in Austin, and then did the shopping for Erica’s graduation party. The party was to be at 6:30pm on a boat on Lake Travis. Unfortunately, as the afternoon wore on, the skies got darker and darker. Eventually it began to pour. We decided to head out to the lake anyway. Traffic slowed and we realized there was standing water on the highway. Cars were pulling off the road. In the middle of the torrential rain, thunder and lightning, Ed announced that he was guaranteeing we would have a sunset. My reaction was “Oh, come on!”. I wasn’t sure they would even let us out on the lake. By the time we got there, it was lightening up a bit. And what do you know, we did see the sunset.

The kids (and adults) had fun, although most people elected not to swim because the rain had cooled things down.

Sunday we had a nice breakfast at Austin Java, then split up to do errands and drive home. Colleen and I drove my car up first to get the house ready for visitors, Erica and Rachelle and the two girls came in her car, and Ed and Jim followed behind after tying up all the loose ends from the party. We had a nice lobster risotto here. Everybody (except Erica) has left now, so we have a quiet house once again. It was nice having a houseful though.

]]> https://www.batterman.org/susan/2009/05/28/the-graduate/feed/ 0 Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams https://www.batterman.org/susan/2007/10/02/really-achieving-your-childhood-dreams/ https://www.batterman.org/susan/2007/10/02/really-achieving-your-childhood-dreams/#comments Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:47:32 +0000 http://www.batterman.org/susan/2007/10/02/really-achieving-your-childhood-dreams/ I’ve noticed all the articles about “The Last Lecture” by CMU professor Randy Pausch over the last week, and finally took the time to watch it today. Pausch is the co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center at CMU, a master’s program which I learned about in person from the other co-founder while I stood in an incredibly long line at security at the Pittsburgh airport about four years ago. Don Marinelli was one of the most fun strangers I’ve ever talked to (the way he is described in the lecture is exactly how I remember him), and was so enthusiastic that when I got back home, I looked into the ETC and considered emailing him about applying. But I was in Houston, and it was in Pittsburgh, so I never did.

After watching Randy Pausch’s lecture, I rather regret that. The topic of the lecture was “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”. If you haven’t seen it, it’s quite touching, especially the ending.

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