2009-10-19 - 4:54 p.m.

...returning to normal?...

My parents left for their home this morning :-(. I am sure that they will be very happy to be back in their own beds. We are very very happy that they took the time to come out here and visit us and their granddaughter, who loved their company. I miss them already.

But one nice thing is that they have already brought home the wonderful word "DAH-DOH!!!" - which lives on in Susi's lexicon as her word for BYE BYE!! We all use it now, along with her one-handed thumb-sucking good-bye wave.

My stepfather is big on new vocabulary, and was working on getting Susi to say "Transcendentalism" before he left. But when he heard Susi say "frog" and "clock" for the first time - "f**k" and "c**k," respectively - he decided that some remedial work was of higher priority.

In any event, we had a fabulous time with my parents, laughing, and walking, and eating, and drinking, and driving about. They took a classic, 20 minute video of us planting apple trees on the public strip of ground in front of our house, in the pouring rain (and more importantly they went with us to the apple festival to retrieve the apple trees). We watched it and laughed. I am already trying to figure out when I can visit them next.

And then I came back today to a faculty meeting. I was kind of uncomfortable, actually, as I had to argue very strongly against to of the most senior faculty members in the department. I came away from the meeting feeling red-faced and a little embarrassed. I really don't like to be that intense with these colleagues. After the meeting, however, another colleague came to my office and thanked me for taking the stand that I did - he said that (contrary to how I felt), my arguments were succinct and clear and helped to bring some very important points across. I thanked him very much for saying something to me, as it has made me feel a lot better for speaking out.

Anyway, it's become quite late and rather than working on finishing this paper, I should probably be heading home. So off I go at last, to my quiet house where my parents are not.