We miss Wei-Ting and Claire....

We miss Wei-Ting and Claire Yu who have returned to Taiwan after Wei-Ting completed his PhD in our academic program at Penn State. Wei-Ting's thesis title is, Correction of Estimation Bias in Evaluating the Labor Market Outcomes of Youth Participating in School-Based Learning Programs in the United States. Claire is finishing her thesis in Taiwan, where she is studying Chinese literature.

Chris & Amy's wedding. I missed...

While I was in Portland, Oregon, Chris Yoder and Amy Wielinski, my niece, were married in western New York. Here is the bride and dad, Bill:

Here is the new couple:Congratulations, Amy and Chris!

What? This is supposed to be delivery?

OK, so I found these pictures in my electronic inbox. Apparently, these pictures are supposed to document Yuki's delivery of the Heineken beer I was owed by Phil Archer. I am touched, but does delivery while asleep count? I should think not.

Here is the entire sequence of this stealth operation as it appeared in my mailbox:

The beer arrives.

The beer is in position.

The beer insinuates itself.

Now, my friends, can this delivery really be verified? Is a beer delivered to a sleeping man? Very deep philosophical questions of an ethical nature come to mind.

 

I will drink the beer; but, can I really think the debt is paid?

Passmore reads Edna St. Vincent Millay's Recuerdo

"Recuerdo" means "memory" in Spanish. Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem appeared in her 1922 book, A Few Figs From Thistles. Here is a transcript:

WE were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

Here is an MP3 file (2.2Mb) of my reading of the poem:http://emerge.ed.psu.edu:1026/movies/recuerdo.mp3 Podcast consumers among you can get this reading the easy way through my podcast feed: I am partial to river crossings!

Rhiannon does some on-line drawing....

I was in Pittsburgh over the weekend for the U2 concert, as noted in other posts. I visited my son's family. Rhiannon, my granddaughter, was using a Flash animation site called, MyScene. The site allows the user to customize sites. A site for little girls, and Rhiannon sure did enjoy. She is pretty good at moving the mouse precisely to paint fingernails and decorate rooms on the screen.