All the news that worth mentioning

goddam laptop..just lost 10 minutes of typing due to mysteries of this keyboard and the hypersensitive touch panel lurking right under my right thumb. Kathy now working at Boyd & Webster, an offshoot of Hackett Beecher. she stills work at HB one day a week because she misses being downtown, walking to the Market, etc. Lauren is finishing a thesis that will cap off her quest for a Masters Degree in European Studies. We will be in D.C in May for her birthday and the graduation. In June she will be off to Turkey for an 8 week language intensive. She'll live with a Turkish family. All paid for by the State Department. Lauren has passed the Foreign Service exam and Turkish is a "critical" language so our girl is being recruited by the CIA, I think. She justs laughs me off. After that, she will take a leave from her Phd program to spend a year as a Bosch Fellow in Germany. All expenses, plus stipend, from a fund to enhance German/American relations. Twenty selected out of 600 applicants! The big Perkins renovation project continues to own my life, but we are over half done and should finish by November this year. At which point I will be eligible for a deferred sabbatical and most likely desperately in need of some extended time off. Watch out friends and relatives around the world, we may be couch surfing in your neighborhood! That is, when we are not in Europe to visit Lauren and do some "could we retire here" kind of research and thinking. Yes, we are reaching that age. I've got the finance books lying around with highlighted passages about when to sign up for Medicare, diversifying the investments, balancing the portfolio and all that kind of grown up serious stuff that part of me simply has not yet accepted. I was just driving a cab in San Francisco while going to San Francisco State and living in little apartment near Golden Gate Park. What happened?