We love you very much! We have indoor hockey and the Super Bowl at Teresa's to look forward to this weekend. I will also go to a childhood friend's mother's funeral on Saturday, Margaret Campchero.
'morning all. Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad. We Love You. I see Patty's on line. Nice blogging with Kara. She'll probably help some of us with our motivation. I like the JCC a lot. It's open almost every day and long hours, and is directly on my route home. It's family oriented and I get lots of "Hi Doctor Woods" when I'm there. Very nice exercise room, a full gym, olympic pool, hot tub, sauna, and steam room. Susan and I are into NYC this weekend to see La Traviata. When there we usually get to the Met Museum as well.
Well, I'm not a Woods or a (full) Davidson, but someone has to represent our distant (Smith) corner of the family ;-).
I've returned to the University of Tennessee after working an engineering internship in Augusta, Georgia last semester. I worked at a nuclear power plant; it was a great experience--I learned a ton about the industry. There wasn't much to do in Augusta, however... I describe it at length at my Xanga weblog.
Most of my classes now are about obscure chemical engineering stuff, but I'm also taking Technical Editing and Organic Chemistry. Joy. It's actually one of the easiest semesters I've had yet... Again, more here.
We get checked in every Wednesday here and have an opportunity to meet with a Dr. At other points in the week we meet with our Behavioral Health and Nutrition specialists individually. The check-in (and weigh-in) have been serious positive motivators. There's always a worry that you're not working hard enough or that for some reason the fat is gonna just refuse to come off. But I've been very satisfied so far. Some of my friends are finding it more difficult since the first week, and the loss of all our water weight, to keep losing, because of physical limitations when working out, or menopause...some things really slow down your metabolism.:) Being young and having a relatively high resting metabolic rate are helpful in this case.
I thought I'd write again today, because the rest of the week will be busy for me. I mentioned my Bio midterm is friday - well im not too worried about it b/c it is by far my most interesting and fun class. It has a real fancy name: Molecular Genetic Analysis of Bacterial Pathogenesis, but it just means we're learning how bacteria cause disease in plants and animals (usually humans). It's a cozy class (just 10 students total) and though there are 3 professors depending on the day's lecture they all really know their stuff since they do research in the field and they're very funny. I find the topic interesting and Microbiology is currently my "specialization" within my major of biology.
A couple of comments. If you want to create a blog entry, you need to click on my blog or create content. As you are creating your blog entry, you will have the option to promote your entry to the front page. This is the default. If you click this option to the off position, the blog post will not appear on the front page. This choice appears in the middle of the top of the page as you create your entry. The same choice can be made when you create any other content -- such as uploading an image or posting to a forum.
So our third week at the DFC started off with a fun activity! We went out to a restaurant as a group tonight. Last Friday we met and went through a lecture on traditional restaurant foods and strategies for not overdoing it (removing the bread, etc.) We then chose a restaurant and looked through the menu, preselecting our dishes. It was fun because we got to plan in dessert and we don't really eat any dessert here. We went out tonight and the food was great. I'm having a really good time with all of my new friends. Hopefully we'll be able to keep in touch after the program. In other news...a true-blue celebrity showed up yesterday. Ask me in person because I feel awkward talking about it online (confidentiality.)
Hi everybody! I think the new setup of the website is fantastic - it's a great way for all of us to keep in touch. I hope to be using it to give you all updates on my life in Chicago and I encourage you to do the same (I want to live vicariously also). I've already read all of Anne and Chuck's and Kara's blogs and I like being able to hear about you all from afar. The adventures ahead for Aunt Anne and Uncle Chuck sound exciting - have fun! Right now I'm in the middle of midterms at the U. of C. since crazy midwesterners like to be on the trimester. It's officially the 5th week of the 2nd 10 week (plus a finals week) term of the year. It's a little misleading to be calling it midterm time because in courses such as Organic Chemistry where there are 2 exams during the quarter, as we call it, they are both called midterms, and I took the first this past Thursday and hope to hear about it soon. Thankfully, there is only one final. Similarly, for one of my courses I have 3 papers and just handed in the first earlier today.
I have removed the view permissions settings because they seemed to be getting in the way of publication of blog entries and the like and very little, if anything, was being set as private. Document attachments to forum posts remain private unless you are logged in. If anyone would like to discuss this, please send me an email or give me a call.
Oh, the challenges of retirement in the 21st Century. We have blotched the blog and are trying to figure out how to make this work. This is a test. We arrived in southwest Florida on Tuesday afternoon. Down to shirt sleeves. Our journey was a success, but carrying all our possessions including one car with our RV was a challenge. At least we did not try to drive out while still connected to anything. We drove through a storm in Carolina, but the cold front followed us here. The temperature fell to 50 this morning. We wore a jacket to Caloosahatchee Bay and watched dozens of species of shore and water birds on the mud flats this morning. Yesterday at lunch we gazed at three eagles circling above.