CAR WOES

Friday night/Saturday morning the phone rang at 2:45 a.m. That's every parent's nightmare. Nothing good ever comes from a middle-of-the-night call. Thank goodness in this case it was only mangled metal, not flesh. Mike was on the line, adrenaline obviously pumping, speaking about twice as fast as normal, reporting that his car, parked on the street, had been the victim of a high-speed rear-ending by a truck, whose owner apparently was fleeing a domestic violence incident (according to the officers on scene who were taking statements). From Mike's description at the time, we envisioned a car accordioned to half its size, which would be a short Focus indeed. Actually, although pretty severe, I doubt that AAA will treat it as totaled, but will opt to repair it. Bummer. It's less than a year and a half old, with only 13k miles. They never can restore it to "like new," and the accident will haunt it at resale time. I guess this is the balancing karma for everything that has been going so well for Mike.

MIKE'S MASTER'S GRADUATION

Well, here we go again. As you can see from previous posts, I was trying to get pictures to be placed within the text of my posts, instead of having to publish them as individual posts. After much frustration and inquiry, I found you need to be publishing with FTP (file transfer protocol) in order to do that. FTP, however, was and remains a mystery as to how to use it. While avoiding work and perusing some of my favorite rv traveler websites and blogs, one of them mentioned that Blogger had changed the way you post pictures. Ah HAH! It seems now that you can actually do what I wanted. Let's see. Hit the "photo" icon and see what happens . . . GLORIOSKY!! At last! Here's Mike in his somewhat modified regalia at his Master's Degree ceremony at Stanford on June 12, 2005. The pirate hat is courtesy of his terrifically energetic and whimsical advisor and mentor, Professor Adina Paytan , who supplied her three charges with different hats during the "hooding" ceremony. Here's a shot from the "official" photographer of Mike getting hooded by Adina. Hmmm. Tried twice to get it from the Geo department website url, but it's not appearing. Let's see if I can get a second pic from the computer to post here.. .. well, that seemed to work. Here's John (or JC as he seems to be known these days) and I showing off Mike's hood (which had to be returned along with the gown). I'll play with one more picture in a larger size before going back (get started) to work . . . I think Blogger has some fine tuning to do, as the pictures pop up in odd places, then you have to drag them around. Below is Mike and Adina in her crab hat. By way of (some) explanation for these haberdashery touches, Adina is a professor, among other things, of paleoceanography and chemical oceanography. Mike's master's is in the former.
I guess that's all for now. Obviously I need to work on getting some kinks out of these photos, but this is much better than before. Kudos to Blogger.

BY THE WAY, YOU CAN CLICK ON ANY PHOTO TO OPEN IT UP TO FULL SIZE.