I lack patience to create a proper gallery album with pictures from the recent celebration of Kimmy’s Bat-Mitzva, so instead I am just posting a small selection here. You may have already seen a couple of them on Facebook, posted by our photographer. These are primarily pictures of us. Those of the guests who were
The quality is the basic home-video variety, but that should not prevent you from giving me your “Ooh”s and “Ah”s. Get the Flash Player to see this content.
Demands of varied kinds did not leave me much room to flex my artistic muscles in advance of the Bat-Mitsva celebration that Kimmy enjoyed this past weekend. I only had time to quickly string together a slideshow of 150 or so pictures that charted her growth from a little baby to the Amazing Tween that
Last Friday was the senior prom night for our eldest. Here are a few pictures taken during the photo session prior to the dance. No commentary is truly necessary.
Once in a while, we decide to go for a beach vacation. It’s a pretty long while. Our last such vacation was a week-long stay on the Costa del Sol in 2008, but that included two day-trips and a couple of other excursions to strip the holiday of its “lazy” designation. The last true lazy
I’ve heard it many times in the past that performing at the Carnegie Hall in New York always features among the major highlights of a musician’s career. Well, one of my children have gotten it out of the way at a pretty early stage. Becky and her high school choir participated in a program at
To all my friends, occasional readers, and their families I wish the happiest and most prosperous New Year! May it bring you joy, success and only the pleasant surprises!
This stay-at-home vacation thing is unexpectedly working out in a way that my top-priority sizable project for the week (in the “home video” category) remains untouched on the to-do list. And there is only one formal vacation day left… I suppose going for a matinee movie showing one day followed by a mid-day theater outing
In the last few years, among all of the celebrations of family birthdays, anniversaries, reunions, and even national holidays, this particular date has descended into relative obscurity. I might have completely forgotten it by now if my Mom did not bring it up during the Thanksgiving dinner the other day. Twenty years ago today our
Twelve universities. Roughly 3,200 miles driven. Plenty of impressions that started to crowd each other towards the end. A few obvious judgments and a number of decisions of greater nuance. Four additional colleges that did not fit into our travel plans were also in the mix. Two of those were from the cheaper/safer category. One
The last stop on our tour. A level of fatigue certainly sets in. It’s not that we are not enjoying campus visits anymore, rather we are challenged to differentiate. Our first few visits each generated a couple of pages of notes. Our last few – less than a dozen lines each. But Georgetown scored in
For a student who wants to aim high and cannot be lured to a no-name school, cheaper college education these days means a single option: Going to a public institution. Even as an out-of-state student, your costs at a state school will be at least 25% and possibly 40% lower than at most upper-tier private
NYU had a chance to become my own alma mater. They blew that opportunity when I was offered way too few transfer credits based on my Russian undergraduate studies. (I went to a cheaper school that offered me full two years of transfer credits plus a generous merit-based scholarship.) I don’t hold grudges. And when
With the exception of just a handful of the States in the Union, for a student aspiring to the Ivy League-level education, the nearby state school gets designated as a “safety” choice: An institution with a much better chance of being accepted to than those super-selective top schools, but something that will only be considered
New Jersey legislature came up with a grand idea some time ago to raise the legal driving age to 18 years old. Leaving aside the discussion on the merits of that decision, we will instead note that the new law went into effect for children born after December 31st, 1994. Which means my eldest child
The second liberal arts college on our itinerary is the one that offers an engineering degree among its majors. Doesn’t that make their “liberal arts” designation invalid? Not that it matters to us, as already mentioned in the past. The college grounds are simply gorgeous, worthy of a royal residence, with a long tree-lined alley
Sometimes people check out stuff they come across in the infomercials. Drexel was nowhere near our list of targets for Becky’s higher education. It is not big on liberal arts and humanities subjects, instead priding itself on offering strong programs in applied sciences and professional lines of study. Not at all what our undecided applicant
Cornell topped the list of matches for Becky’s various interests, when that research was conducted, which is not at all surprising given its founder’s motto of offering any subject of study to its students. It was our second Ivy League school to pay a visit to. Its suburban campus sits high in the hills surrounding
Not all colleges on our touring itinerary were selected because they matched up exceedingly well with Becky’s interests. Several were selected for reasons that could be summarily expressed as “why not”. U of R was one of such selections. We heard a couple of good things about it from acquaintances, and we were making the
The sequence of different-type-of-campus visits continued on our call to Boston U. Unlike our previous stops, BU’s campus sits smack in the middle of a major city, strung along a public transportation-served artery for over a mile and a half, with the riverside as its northern boundary. “Beautiful” does not enter the conversation to describe