Back to Delaware

My talk went well this morning. In fact, the whole session I was in was pretty interesting. I had a good discussion with some folks from Centre College about re-working the intro calc sequence to include a more computational approach. I'm hoping to follow up with them later to get some details.

Scott and I ate lunch at Chipotle and I drove him to BWI for his flight. I was good hanging with him even though our time together was abbreviated by my trip to Delaware. After dropping him off, I drove back to Delaware to continue with the funeral preparations.

Katie Jo arrived last night. Ric arrived today. John and Luke arrived this evening. Laura got here a bit after that. She's going on 24 hours of wake/travel time as I write this.

Our home base has been my mom's house. This is here little dog Donnie (one of her 4 orphaned dogs):

I'm not sure what story Kathy was trying to tell here, but there's a lot of body language:

I'm in bed now. Tomorrow's another busy day before the funeral on Monday.

Back to Baltimore

Jo-Anne, Kathy, and I spent the day getting details worked out for the funeral. We finalized the obituary and gathered photos. Here's one for the obit and prayer cards:

These are for a collage at the viewing. This is as many of us as I've ever seen in one place. An old beach photo:

This is mom in 1960:

And her in her Kindergarten graduation in 1944:

Later, we went to the church to arrange the details of the funeral mass:

Later we did a bit of house cleaning. We also spent a fair amount of time looking for mom's wedding ring. No dice yet.

Keith cooked hamburgers for dinner. After dinner, I headed back to Baltimore so I can give my talk tomorrow. I need to go over my talk, but mostly I'm ready.

Mom Died

I missed a phone call from my sister over night. When I checked in with her this morning, I learned that my mom died in the night. My mom's been seriously ill for a few months, but her death surprised us. Indeed, I had plans to visit her for a couple of days after the math conference, but it was not meant to be. People plan, the universe laughs.

Laura changed my rental car reservation and I drove to Rehoboth Beach to be with my sister and brother who were already there. My other sister arrived shortly after I did.

We spent the better part of the afternoon making funeral arrangements and informing people.

The funeral is Monday. People are making arrangements to come. Emily, Rachel and Laura are all planning to come. There's still a lot to do tomorrow.

JMM Day 1

I spent day 1 of the Joint Mathematics Meeting going to talks (what else?). In addition to talks on technology in the classroom, placement testing, and virtual reality, I saw Sarah Koch give an interesting talk on complex dynamics. At one point she showed a figure and labeled three important components as "airplane", "rabbit" and "co-rabbit". Here's a crappy photo of the slide:

It's cold here! There's snow on the ground outside the convention center. My Sevilla-trained blood is not ready for this:

The convention center is lovely. Everything is easy to find. There's a pretty fountain at one end:

Scott went out to dinner with a friend. I just grabbed some Greek food and then walked to a Whole Foods to grab some fruit to get me through the week. There is a real dearth of grocery stores in the area. The Whole Foods was a little over a mile away and nothing closer according to Google.

To Baltimore

I slept pretty well considering the 6 hour time difference. I woke up at around 6am (noon Spain time). I went out for a walk/run. Came back, did a little Spanish practice. Then, I went to Einstein Bagels to get breakfast. I had a pumpernickel bagel with cream cheese. It was excellent. When I got back to Rachel's house, she was up and heading to her 9:30am econometrics class. It was the first day of her new semester.

I showered and went out to Walmart to get a list of things we can't find in Spain: advil, mucinex, Pilot G-2 pens, dental floss, deodorant etc. Just to be clear, most of these things can be found in Spain, but not the brands or amounts we're interested in. I drove the Honda. The little lizard that took up residence in the side view mirror:

was gone.

After my Walmart trip, I worked until Rachel came home from work around 2pm. We took in a quick lunch at Taco Bell and dessert at ChillN Nitrogen Ice Cream shop:


The ice cream was excellent, as always. We went back to Rachel's and I helped her install GitHub for her new class.

***

My flight to Baltimore for the math conference left Ft Lauderdale at 7:20pm. With the gov't shutdown still going, I was concerned about back ups at TSA security, so I decided to try to get there 2 hours in advance. To save Rachel the long, congested drive up there to FLL, I took the Miami metro, transferred to the TriRail, transferred to a shuttle bus and got to FLL in 2 hrs--about 90 mins before my flight. No worries about TSA, the lines were empty and I got through right away. I killed an hour at the gate, endured another 2 hours of flying, got to BWI at around 9:45pm, walked to the light rail station at the far end of the airport and caught the train downtown to my hotel. Here's one of the many forms of transportation I encountered on my trip:

The TriRail at the transfer point just north of the Miami airport:

I got to the hotel around 10:30pm. My roommate, Scott, was already there. We chatted a bit and I dropped into bed.