Sylvia's Journal

A thousand chirpy birds in a bright blue sky woke me up this morning. The cove was half full with the surface of a looking glass reflecting the blue of the sky. The row boat beckoned. This required a bit of assembly. Axel had bought new handgrips and new oar ‘buttons,’ the red and green cuffs that hold the oars in the oar locks. By the time I made it onto the water the glassiness had given way to ripples and once out of the cove it was a bit too choppy for relaxed rowing and so I returned. Still it was fun to be able to go for a row like that early in the morning on this beautiful spring day. We do live in paradise!

Sita sent us an article this morning, all the way across the driveway, from Time magazine that features a story about Tony Blair’s new calling with him posing in front of Sita’s rendering of his journey. How proud can you be as parents?

Yesterday I went in early to Cambridge and found the office deserted, which it usually is at that early hour, but staying deserted the rest of the day since most of my colleagues are still in Washington. My elderly computer acted up so much that simply sending some follow up emails to people met in Washington took me nearly two hours. I tried to be patient and resisted the increasingly strong desire to throw a temper tantrum and fling the darn thing into the wall. A scheduled meeting prevented what would have been considered very unprofessional behavior. After the meeting my energy level went downhill so fast that I decided to give up on my plan to have a productive day. I sat in on a one hour information session on MSH’s benefits package which seemed a good use of time and, apparently, it did so to 9 other colleagues. Since there were 10 door prizes for attendance we all got a price. I won a leather CIGNA portfolio which I donated to my colleague Thomas who is going to be a business man after he graduates from business school in California, two years from now. At the benefits session I discovered that one of my new colleagues rows and became a member of the boatclub across the street. This is great news; we can now row together, in one or two boats.

This new discovery propelled me to the boat house for my first row of the season, months after my clubmates put their boats in the water. But then I could not remember the combination of the lock on the women’s dressing room and that was the end of that plan. It was time to go home and stop expecting great deeds; how much wiser it would be to simply enjoy the beautiful day; there was still plenty left of it.

We had a lovely dinner consisting of asparagus, salmon burgers and tabbouleh made from a Lebanese cookbook that witnessed our courtship in Beirut some 30 years ago. We dined sitting by the cove drinking Axel’s home made beer out of a blue bottle with a home made label that was part of his graphic design school assignment some years ago. Life is good!