Goodbye, people (I)

This is the sad part. We said goodbye to a lot of people today. First we went to the Udupi Palace, where we have had many, many, many weekend lunches in the last four-plus years. It was Jordan's first restaurant food, he has loved it since that first bite, and now Aaron is following in his footsteps. Our kids know paneer from dosa, let me tell you. The staff at the Udupi has been so great with the kids and so nice to us all. Would you believe they never once charged us for the kids' lunches? Even though Jordan eats more paneer than three adults put together. We tipped big.

Next was a picnic hosted by my coworkers at a big park. People came to say goodbye that I haven't seen in years, and then also there were people so new to the crowd that I hadn't actually met them yet. The Maryland PER group has been an incredible place of professional growth for me... I could not have imagined, when I left Seattle, the professional self that I am now so glad to be. I am grateful for everyone's friendship, for their support, and for their challenges to my half-baked arguments.

I made another cake, which Joe kindly photographed. (I am going to have to be more independent if I am ever to be a food blogger.) It was a banana-spice-chocolate chip triple-layer cake, filled with caramel, bananas, and whipped cream. It was a showstopper. We liked this one much better than the chocolate-peanut butter one I made for Dale's defense - that one was so oppressively rich that after the party was over Dale never wanted to see it again.

(By the way, any image on here, you can click on it and see it much larger. The cake is a glorious mess close up... the puddles of caramel, the gobs of whipped cream. Next time I might try to be more restrained with the filling.)

We also arranged for some non-PER friends to crash the picnic: Jordan's best buddy Jason from school, who he will... probably never see again. Except maybe on iChat. This is more than a little bit heartbreaking, because those two are buds. They click in together and are happily in their own boy world for hours. It's so cool to watch. And we like the parents a lot, so it really is a shame to say goodbye to them. We all teared up watching the boys give each other a double-big-extra-super hug.

Then home for a brief crash (no afternoon naps for our kids today) and then on to a party hosted by Dale's coworkers, kids in tow. Aaron was cranky until we figured out that he could eat dinner riding in the backpack; I handed him one bite at a time over my shoulder, and he shoveled it in like that for forty-five continuous minutes. Jordan had a great time playing with Dale's friend's daughter, especially in the host's Star Wars room. Yes, that's right, an entire room of Star Wars action figures... it was quite a thing. Dale's coworkers had hilarious road-trip gifts for him (bags of junk food, stacks of CDs) and his boss gave a great goodbye speech about how much Dale had grown in his time with the lab. She hired him initially as a technician; Dale had no thought of graduate school then, but Jennifer recognized his potential, and said that now he's become an incredible scientist. "We're going to submit a paper on Monday that's going to shock the world," she said, and hey, she might be right.

I got quite sentimental saying goodbye to Dale's coworkers. Through their friendship and professional association with Dale, they've made an enormous difference in the life of our family. And while I'm likely to see my own coworkers at conferences, I can pretty much bet I won't see any of these people again. They're really good people.

Funniest moment: Dale's boss, who is interested in everything, quizzed me about my new research group, and then said "Hey, that sounds a lot like what John's brother does" (John is her husband - he was there). "His name is Dan, Dan Schwartz, any chance you know him?" And what do you know... he's part of my new research center. He's at Stanford, not UW, but a collaborator nonetheless. It never occurred to me to wonder if he and Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz were related.