Leaving campus

I left campus today. Goodbye office! I will miss my office. Not aesthetically (it's a pretty horrible little space), but there's a lot of history in there. And in my new place I only have a cubicle. (But I'm lucky to have that, so never mind!)

My former parking garage, the door nearest my office, and the grander door in the front.

The palatial gym, where I have spent many excellent hours.

The student-run vegetarian food co-op, our favorite place to have lunch. "Food for People, Not for Profit" -- Their logo is a clenched fist punching through a sandwich.

Eventually I turned in my parking pass, handed over my keys to the person who gets my office next... and that's it! I had to take the bus home, because my car is gone. It took forever. The University runs this shuttle system, which is increasingly underfunded.

I can hardly be said to be ending my relationship with the University of Maryland - I am still employed there, advise two UM students, and am principal investigator of two grants through there - but this is the most concrete goodbye I'm likely to have.

Jordan, taking it in

Yesterday Jordan called me in to his bedroom as he was waking up, invited me to curl up with him, and said, "Mama, tell me some more cool things about Seattle that I don't know."  I wondered if this was part of him coping with all of the goodbyes we said this weekend.  I told him some cool things about our apartment:  that it has a balcony, and a fireplace, and that it is just a few blocks from Theo's house.  (Ten, actually.)  I had to explain what a fireplace was - I'm not sure he has actually experienced one.  "Like the campfire at Uncle Michael's house, only in a special safe place indoors," I said.  He thought that sounded great.

Then at breakfast he said, "Mama, I think that after we live in Seattle for a while we will want to move back here."  I carefully did not say, "Nope!  Ain't gonna happen!"  Instead I said, "You think we will miss it here?"  He said yes.  

I wonder what this is like for him, and how it will unfold once we arrive.

Goodbye, people (II)

Okay, I said Saturday was sad, but Sunday was even more emotional on the goodbye front. Our neighbors have been among the best things about our life here... the companionship, the babysitting, the housesitting, the parenting talks... they have been our community, and become some of our best friends here, and certainly some of Jordan's best friends too. We are truly sorry to have to say goodbye to them. If we find a neighborhood half as warm and welcoming in Seattle as we have had here, we will be blessed.

The offers are good!

The two offers on the Glenway house both look good!  They're both effectively for the asking price, and if we only had either one of these offers we'd probably take it.  But we have two, and one of the possible buyers appears a little more financially solid and low-hassle than the other, so it's nice to have a choice.  And now we're under contract!  The proposed settlement is Nov. 10.  Before that, there is the parade of inspections, loan approvals, and all that.  A positive side of the mortgage crisis is that the very few buyers who are actually out there right now tend to be financially solid - no one else can get out of the gate.  So we are optimistic that the offer will go to settlement.  

The news at Haddon is not so great.  There was only one visitor all week, and the open house today had a low turnout - only two groups with possibly serious interest (and three other groups).  We'll have to think about what we might want to do differently, if anything, in light of the Glenway activity.

Two offers coming up

Our realtor informs us that we will have not one but two offers on the table for the Glenway house tomorrow evening!  We don't know what the offers are yet, but wow, what fantastic news!

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.

Doctor Dale

He did it! Dale successfully defended his dissertation on Wednesday. The room was packed - lots of his coworkers came. He spoke eloquently for about an hour. (I learned a lot! And quite a bit of it was over my biologically uneducated head, but I think that's as it should be.) Then there were a few minutes of questions, and a break, and then the private "grilling" by his committee. In my department, that part lasts maybe twenty minutes and then there is a party where all your friends and coworkers toast your success. So I made an extremely decadent cake (no pictures, argh! but it was this one) and brought champagne and set it all up in the room next door to his defense, expecting that he and his coworkers and committee could all have a little par-tay. Then we found out that the Q&A was expected to last ninety minutes. Uh. His coworkers all left, and eventually I had to leave too, to pick up the kids! How unfair is that! But eventually Dale was released (he said the questioning was not at all unpleasant, just a long scientific conversation) and he and his committee had the cake and champagne together. Phew. And later Dale and I went on a lovely date at Zaytinya, a place I had always meant to take him, so I got a little party too.

For your information, his dissertation research is about autophagosomes, the "housekeeping" structures inside our cells that clean up and recycle damaged parts. If the housekeeping isn't done properly, certain cancers and neurodegenerative diseases can result. His main claim is about how autophagosomes form: They come from the mitochondria. It's important to know the details, since people are trying to treat diseases by increasing the quantity of housekeeping. Dale's claim is apparently quite remarkable: one of the faculty members who attended Dale's defense said before that he'd be astonished if it was actually true. But at the end, that guy said he thought Dale had the data. The picture at left is part of that data.

The committee wants a few miniscule revisions before they sign off; it'll be done before we leave. This is fantastic news... they could have asked for additional experiments, additional chapters, anything they wanted. Whew!

The next day Dale's coworkers drank the other bottle of champagne and made him wear this crazy hat that they made for him. It is adorned with the Washington Monument, the Space Needle, silly pictures of Dale as Super BioMan, Pop-Tarts (a treat Dale is known for at work), and varieties of zebrafish, among other things. Apparently hats like this are a German tradition. Dale would like it known that he can't actually look up with this ginormous thing on his head, hence his funny expression in the photos.