Vince showing his various prizes from Boeing.
Behind him is his Eagle Scout plaque, showing the badges and ranks he earned.

While Roni and I were watching whales, Vince was taking his GREs. He called once he'd learned his score, 2190 out of 2400. He had perfect scores on Analytic and Computational, and missed some in English. Not that I'm at all proud of him.
Roni had a hard but satisfactory first week with her new "real" job. Apparently her last boss, at the restaurant, squeezed the last $30 out of her before he'd give her her check. There are some tax fiddles going on there, I believe. The crew gave her flowers and an autographed baseball and some chocolates and a nice sendoff.
Monica is having a vacation in New York and New England. She's been looking forward to this for awhile. Her birthday is tomorrow.
And I talked to Bernadette Friday, just long enough to find out when she wants to go back in January. (We have her Christmas airline ticket now.)

I'm quite involved with the kids, even now, and proud of all of them. So the dream I had last week was especially strange: I was somewhere in the San Jose area at Bernadette's college graduation, and someone reminded me about Josh, my other son. Josh was possibly graduating, too, and I started looking around for him. I thought I could probably recognize him, though he hadn't come home last summer and I'd forgotten his existence. When I did find him, I was able to tell him he could come home with us, I was proud of him, etc. The forgotten son. Weird dream. (He's darkhaired and slight, only about 5'7 or so.)
I had another one that wasn't so odd, about the upcoming election. It was 8:15 and we still hadn't gotten the booths set up (the polls open at 7, but never mind.) This kind of dream is fairly typical, final exam and not prepared.

Friday evening we went to a Mass and party for a 50th anniversary. As Father said, nowadays people hardly even get married, never mind lasting for 50 years! I learned that they had moved to Carson City in the spring: I just figured I wasn't seeing them because of differing schedules. It turns out that the wife is the sister of another special person, who was honored yesterday.
Jackie was one of the founders of our soup kitchen program, Sharing God's Bounty, 16 years ago. She was, at the time, cooking at Loretto and for the priests, and this at the end of a long career of cooking for people. The administrator of SGB nominated her for a JCPenney Community Service Award, and that alone netted the program $100. Then she won it, got a beautiful trophy and $1000 for Sharing God's Bounty! She's been in the parish since 1959. By the time I met her, 17 years later, she was a widow and her youngest child (of 6) was in Roni's class. Some years ago she had a stroke, but she's doing pretty well now.
Yesterday's party had many of the same folks as the Friday night one, of course. These are three very special people.

Today Rich got to be treated as a special person twice, me only once. We went down to his jury duty and he asked to be excused this morning for the election training. (I embarrassed myself by answering with him when the commissioner was asking him questions until she said "I don't know who I'm talking to." Oops. I didn't even do that with my children. I'm very red-faced about it!) He then stayed for the orientation, and then we went to training, where we were given nice little "Election Official" pins and a frantic training. This was Civic Responsibility Day at our house, it would seem.