The end of last week was sort of a disaster at work. We finally had our funding meeting for FY08 (even though it started Oct 1) and foudn out our budget got cut in half. Fun! I'm thinking it might be about time to follow Caryn's advice while I can do so under my own terms. Fortunately, the weekend was a good way to take my mind off the whole thing.
Saturday Tech won in Coral Gables in a scary game where I just kept waiting for us to blow it. Basically every conference game is a must-win for us, but we get VT and UNC at home and have to play Duke on the road, so at least we've got a shot at that. I just don't want to finish below .500 in conference, and certainly not below .500 overall. I swear, if Tech misses a bowl game, Gailey is out. But enough pessimism, we won, so yay!
After the game we met up with my family down at the Occoquan for some late lunch and kayaking and canoeing. Bobby's family joined us and Tommy's family was up visiting, so it was fun to see all my cousins. Everyone seems to be doing well. Lindsay is very excited about Princeton as a possibility for college next year. Daniel is really enjoying William and Mary so far. Emily's job and apartment are great and adult life isn't so bad after all. We had dinner at my parents' house (fresh-caught Alaskan salmon that Tommy brought back from his vacation) and a make-your-own sundae bar. Mmmm. It was also Zoey's birthday, so even though it was late when we got home and we had to get up early, we still let the fuzzies out to play for a while.
Sundaybright dark and early, we had a flag football double-header against Arizona and Pitt. We shut out Arizona while scoring 35 or something ourselves and almost shut out Pitt, so it was a good day for our team. We desperately need to work on defending the reverse though. Option seems to be no real problem for us, but the reverse causes everyone to freeze in place instead of risking pursuing the wrong person.
Then last night I volunteered to be a recruiter for Georgia Tech at the FCPS College Fair which was a lot of fun. It reminded me a lot of my Connect With Tech days. It was funny to see the difference between students who had already done their research and those who hadn't. "So, what do you offer for engineering?" versus "I'm interested in video game design and I hear you have a brand new degree program and state-of-the-art computing center. Can you tell me some more about that?" And then I got the one kid who asked something along the lines of "Do you offer the classics?" I'm sorry, you're going to have to be more specific. We have civil engineering or physics, those are pretty classic... No no, he meant Latin and Greek. Um, hi, we're an institute of technology, not of dead languages. If you're interested in Latin or Greek, more power to you, but if you're planning to major in something like that, I want a detailed explanation of what your career plans are. I guess you could work for the pope... Plus it's fun to see kids get wide-eyed when you tell them last year's incoming freshman class had an average GPA of 3.7 and average SAT scores over 1300. Then I have to give them the whole "you're not just a number" speech. Not sure how true that statement is, but as an alumni, I don't want a bunch of 4.0-1600 bookworms on campus who are going to spend gameday in the library. Let those losers go to MIT.
Saturday Tech won in Coral Gables in a scary game where I just kept waiting for us to blow it. Basically every conference game is a must-win for us, but we get VT and UNC at home and have to play Duke on the road, so at least we've got a shot at that. I just don't want to finish below .500 in conference, and certainly not below .500 overall. I swear, if Tech misses a bowl game, Gailey is out. But enough pessimism, we won, so yay!
After the game we met up with my family down at the Occoquan for some late lunch and kayaking and canoeing. Bobby's family joined us and Tommy's family was up visiting, so it was fun to see all my cousins. Everyone seems to be doing well. Lindsay is very excited about Princeton as a possibility for college next year. Daniel is really enjoying William and Mary so far. Emily's job and apartment are great and adult life isn't so bad after all. We had dinner at my parents' house (fresh-caught Alaskan salmon that Tommy brought back from his vacation) and a make-your-own sundae bar. Mmmm. It was also Zoey's birthday, so even though it was late when we got home and we had to get up early, we still let the fuzzies out to play for a while.
Sunday
Then last night I volunteered to be a recruiter for Georgia Tech at the FCPS College Fair which was a lot of fun. It reminded me a lot of my Connect With Tech days. It was funny to see the difference between students who had already done their research and those who hadn't. "So, what do you offer for engineering?" versus "I'm interested in video game design and I hear you have a brand new degree program and state-of-the-art computing center. Can you tell me some more about that?" And then I got the one kid who asked something along the lines of "Do you offer the classics?" I'm sorry, you're going to have to be more specific. We have civil engineering or physics, those are pretty classic... No no, he meant Latin and Greek. Um, hi, we're an institute of technology, not of dead languages. If you're interested in Latin or Greek, more power to you, but if you're planning to major in something like that, I want a detailed explanation of what your career plans are. I guess you could work for the pope... Plus it's fun to see kids get wide-eyed when you tell them last year's incoming freshman class had an average GPA of 3.7 and average SAT scores over 1300. Then I have to give them the whole "you're not just a number" speech. Not sure how true that statement is, but as an alumni, I don't want a bunch of 4.0-1600 bookworms on campus who are going to spend gameday in the library. Let those losers go to MIT.
