Labor Day Weekend

September 4, 1994

Road warrior's advice: avoid travel on Labor Day weekend. Airport crowded, airplanes full, pilots grumpy, flight attendants frazzled, tourists shrieking hysterically about missed flights, air-turbulence over Arkansas extremely nerve-rattling. All in all, I'd rather be in Philadelphia ... but I'm aboard Delta 279, enroute to Mexico City, for a another week of lectures ...

The kids are home from camp, the weather has turned cool, the tennis stars have all shown up at Forest Hills -- so it must be the end of summer and the beginning of fall. I think Jamie and David feel, in retrospect, that it was a terrific summer, but Toni, Jenny, and I all wonder how it managed to fly by so quickly. Ah, well, life moves on.

The big event in the Yourdon household this past week has been the arrival of Max, a Yorkshire Terrier who weighs in at a hefty 2 pounds and 3 ounces; he's about the size of a large rat, but we're told that he'll grow to a whopping 4 pounds, or maybe even 5, by the time he grows up. Toni and David picked him out at a kennel and brought him home last Wednesday; he was only ten days old, and there was some concern that he would whimper all night, or run around the house and poop all over everything. But we've been extremely lucky: he sleeps through the night, knows exactly what the newspaper on the floor is intended for, and is delightfully frisky. As of tonight, Jenny hasn't made his acquaintance, but everyone else is quite smitten with him. The theory is that he will provide a diversion for David and Toni when Jamie leaves for college next year. ...

... which Jamie is beginning to plan for. He's been up to see Bowdoin and Colby, and seemed to enjoy both places. He and I will be visiting Cornell in mid-September, and then probably a couple of trips to see some schools in the mid-west and California, plus whatever additional ones he feels inclined to see. Visiting colleges is, of course, a reasonable tradition, though Toni and I remember that we never bothered to even ask to see more than one college (what a disaster it would have been if we had been forced to attend our "safety" school without seeing it). These days, though, things have gotten a lot more efficient: you can get video-tapes from all the schools which provide a video tour of the campus. And then, as a reality check, you can get another video-tape made by students, which presumably provides a balance against whatever rosy homilies are being offered by the school administration. It's a great idea: if the place looks miserable on video, why bother wasting a day to see it?