Sylvia's Journal

All day yesterday the Charles River looked very enticing, with many people practicing for the Head of the Charles but I could not join them. Holding a grip with my right hand is for now out of the question. This means that this season I will only have rowed about 6 times. With a 500 dollars membership fee for the year, the cost of each rowing outing comes to about 85. I am glad I enjoyed each as much as I did.

Everyone was back in the office and we had a full house; even Nuha showed up as an intern. I had not seen her since the end of the BU course on August 1. We have both traveled a bit since then. Nuha will work with us a few hours each week before she heads back to Saudi Arabia in January. I told her about the mishap with the deer and the plane but she is not fazed and we will fly before she leaves.

I have brought my sister into the Facebook community and I can tell she is having as much fun with it as I do; she is retired and so she has more time, and she already discovered another Vriesendorp on Facebook I don’t have in my collection. We posted dueling ‘self with giant snake’ pictures; mine was taken at the Python temple in Ouidja in Benin. I don’t know where hers was taken. Her snake looked so much bigger and better fed.

I picked up Steve and Tessa at North Station on my commute home. Steve actually got to handle animals (they are all mice) in his lab. Since mice belong to my least favorite category of animals (rodents) I could only stand so much of the details about handling mice. He described them as ‘popcorn’ mice meaning that when you open the cage they come popping out. The thought alone made me shiver. He is not allowed to use his hands and has to pick them up with forceps. This is tricky because you have to pinch them exactly at the base of the tail. “Otherwise you de-glove them,” he added with a grin. De-glove was the word used to describe the condition of Axel’s head after the crash, and the word gives me the willies each time I hear it; visualizing a de-gloved rodent is just as scary. I decided I can stand to hear only so much about Steve’s work, not my kind of job. Tessa’s job is more my line, even though we will not talk about it to preserve the honest competition between our two organizations.

To make sure that Axel would be ready for the arrival of three hungry people, I announced the start of our commute by phone as soon as I got into the car. He said “dinner is ready.” When we came home we had a brief exchange about the meaning of the word “is” (just like Bill C. did some years ago) with Axel’s interpretation a little looser than us hungry people had in mind. To his credit he had spent hours in the kitchen cooking us a delicious meal of chard from the garden, rice and spicy chicken wings and it was nearly ready when we walked into the kitchen. For desert we ate the remains of a Dr. Oetker tiramisu (out of a package). Although the tiramisu was something I had never heard of as a child, Dr. Oetker was a familiar brand in my childhood kitchen, much like Betty Crocker is in the US. This is the power of brand recognition; it’s like eating your own memories. We decided that the tiramisu in a box is not bad compared to the one made from scratch, and much cheaper.

We watched the second presidential debate last night. Axel could not help himself making lots of editorials comments throughout. He really got worked up, a bonus feature of this debate (the last one I watched on my own). We were pleased with Obama’s performance and, as usual stunned by how the other side rated its performance. Clearly, there are still way too many people in this country who fall for a doddery elder statesman who say ‘my friends’ all the time. We are not his friends.