{"id":856,"date":"2010-07-11T12:42:53","date_gmt":"2010-07-11T16:42:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/?p=856"},"modified":"2010-07-11T12:42:53","modified_gmt":"2010-07-11T16:42:53","slug":"update-first-hows-the-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/?p=856","title":{"rendered":"Update – first, how’s the family?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Disturbing all of about two people, I took several months off from blogging.\u00c2\u00a0 I just needed a break; call it writer’s block, busy mom syndrome, or whatever.\u00c2\u00a0 After a while, it seemed like the quality of my thoughts and inspiration had degraded to the point of not being worth writing.\u00c2\u00a0 I hope I’m past that now.<\/p>\n

In those months, we’ve celebrated Alpha’s graduation from UT (BS in Mathematics).\u00c2\u00a0 She has accepted the Dean’s Distinguished Fellowship at UC-Riverside<\/a> to pursue her PhD in Math.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s a lot of fancy speak for “one child off the payroll.”\u00c2\u00a0 Lest that sound dismissive, make no mistake that I’m incredibly proud of her — for her academic achievements, and for her personal growth.\u00c2\u00a0 She truly is ready to move on to the next step, and I know she’s going to do well.<\/p>\n

Beta just completed her sophomore year as a Physics major at UT, and landed an internship with the Physics department for the Summer.\u00c2\u00a0 At her first meeting with the prof she’s working for, she was told to get a passport.\u00c2\u00a0 They sent her to CERN<\/a> for two weeks.\u00c2\u00a0 Now, this is Oak Ridge, so there are a few people around here who know what CERN is.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve been told repeatedly that undergraduates just don’t get that kind of opportunity<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 But she did, and thoroughly enjoyed it.\u00c2\u00a0 I had a little fun joking that re-creating little black holes might not be a good thing, but she’s safely home and the world is still spinning.<\/p>\n

Gamma spent most of her senior year working with some folks from her physics C class on their “Lemelson Project<\/a>.”\u00c2\u00a0 In that picture, she’s in the back row, 4th from the left.\u00c2\u00a0 Far left in the back row is HWTFM, who took on the role of advising the team, along with a couple of other professionals from the community and the world’s greatest high school physics teacher<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 They presented their invention at Eurekafest at MIT at the end of June.\u00c2\u00a0 She had a wonderful time hanging out for a week with other physics geeks from all over the country.\u00c2\u00a0 Next month, we’ll cart her (and all her stuff) off to UT, to presumably begin her major in Materials Science & Engineering<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That will leave me, for the first time since mid-1990, with only one child at home.\u00c2\u00a0 One child who, come October, won’t even need me to drive her around.\u00c2\u00a0 Delta’s a lot of fun to be around though, so I expect it will be an entertaining three years as she makes her way through the rest of high school.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Disturbing all of about two people, I took several months off from blogging.\u00c2\u00a0 I just needed a break; call it writer’s block, busy mom syndrome, or whatever.\u00c2\u00a0 After a while, it seemed like the quality of my thoughts and inspiration … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=856"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":858,"href":"http:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions\/858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}