Wonder What the Grandkids Are Doing

4/20/2022

THIS JUST IN: Isabel witnessed this mug lifting a pack of chips. She won't be able to testify at the trial, since she is leaving for Barcelona in the morning.

After four days on El Camino de Santiago de Compostela and part of Holy Week in Sevilla, Isabel found herself facing a barbary ape near Gibraltar.

Anjaii was at her family house in the Adirondack woods, watching a wild turkey fly near the top of a tree. The original video shows the turkey taking off, but the flight does not reproduce in this format.

On Easter Weekend, Greta peeked out of her dormitory at the University of Vermont and saw spring in all its glory,

Whatcha been doing lately? Always gets interesting replies from Lulu (right). She and Swarthmore soccer teammate Kim ran the half marathon and finished, well, of course that's where it would finish,

George and two buddies from Pennsylvania are visiting an exchange student pal and his family in Turkey, and getting a great tour. This is the rock formation in Cappadocia, with its ancient catacombs and eerie wind-blasted towers, which George pronounced as "Martian -- beautiful and slightly spooky." We told him we had stayed in the hilltop hotel in our epic visit in 2012, On Wednesday he was at Topkapi and Blue Mosque and Hagia Sofia. We expect a full update when he gets back.

Michael

4/20/2022 02:26:21 pm

Beautiful!!! Love the pics - especially the Philly Love Half Marathon one. Thx.

George

4/21/2022 09:09:27 am

Michael: You remember the future co-captain from way back in Phila.
Thanks for the notice. GV

Lulu Wilson

4/20/2022 02:30:17 pm

Love it Pop! Xo

Altenir Silva

4/20/2022 05:28:24 pm

Dear George: Amazing pics.
Best to you and family.

Andy Tansey

4/20/2022 05:56:59 pm

Cool! Perfect in variety and number in these days of so frequently too many pictures for any to have meaning. In this case, each one is huge! Woo-hoo!

Alan Rubin link

4/20/2022 06:23:21 pm

It is great when the grandchildren are grown and starting out on their life’s path. I wish that I had traveled during my college summers rather than working in industry. Although a learned much more about people than metallurgy those summers, travel would have been more broadening.

Other than a ten-day trip through Canada, which included Montreal, Quebec and a side-trip to the Laurentian Mountains, with my best friend right after graduate school, I did not begin to travel abroad until I was married.

Harry and I traveled in my new 1958 Triumph TR-3. I would still have it today except Sandi and I need a down payment for our first house.

It would be worth a lot today, but it would have been too small to sleep in.

We had many great family vacations, which included our three grandchildren and their parents. It was enjoyable sharing their enthusiasm of experiencing new things.

Cappadocia was an amazing place, as well as other parts of Turkey that we visited. A Turkish bath at Sultan Suleyman’s Hammam was quite an experience. You could really sense the history while lying on a slippery heated marble slab, looking up at the vast domed ceiling and having the condensation drip on you.

We were also in Spain during Holy Week, half in Seville and half in Granada. You need not be Christian to have felt the emotion. My two favorite images are the tears in the eye of a hooded woman marcher and the rear of the men carrying one of the religious floats.

These were heavy steel substructures that needed to be put down every few steps. The padded cross beams were placed on their necks behind the head. Even in a still image, you could sense the tension and strain.

As for the Swarthmore College student, one of my best games as a Lehigh soccer goalkeeper was a 6-0 loss there.

It is great to be young in such exciting times, but it is also rewarding to be old enough to see it.

George

4/21/2022 09:19:48 am

Alan, these are different times. My summers in college were spent as a copy boy at the NY Daily News and Associated Press -- sometimes double shifts. $1.20 an hour -- and then at Newsday. Trips? Jones Beach or Wildwood Sate Park (LI) were great. It's a blessing for that small part of the population that can do stuff like this -- considering the poverty and downright disasters in so much of the world. I should have made that point right away -- the good fortune. Now the trick is to use the insights and experiences for something positive. Be well, GV

4/20/2022 10:33:32 pm

Wonderful, thanks for sharing. There is a special joy in grand children.

Randolph

4/21/2022 06:58:09 am

George,
Great photos. Thanks for sharing and making us part of the family.
R

Laura Vecsey

4/21/2022 08:16:17 am

The love of life, learning, travel and adventure passed down from you & Mom. Great post!!

4/21/2022 10:10:24 am

Thanks to Ed, Andy, Randy, Altenir for your comments.

And to Laura, who proved herself to be a great traveler, age 8, when we roamed around Italy, and she learned three phrases:
-- (taking her little sister down the Veneto and asking) "due gelati, per piacere."
-- (out in public) "Scusi, dov'e il gabinetto?"
-- (and in a street soccer game with kids her age in Firenze): "Brutta cattiva" -- and when not to say it. Oh, yes.
You guys were great travelers, and continue to be.
Pop!!!

4/21/2022 01:02:03 pm

Forgive a bit of grandfatherly pride. At 15 she went to China, on an exchange program, to learn Chinese language and culture. The program was not designed well, she was in a class of Chinese students wanting to learn En*lish, and the family were business people, never at home for comversation. She returned home after one semester. She had learned some Italian, from a fellow student and some Chinese.

A year or so later she spent a summer in FIJI, hoping to help a physician, wound up with veterinarian.

After graduating from Johns Hopkins, pre-med and civil engineering, she volunteered in Peace Corps, teaching in a tiny math and science in a tiny Liberian village, no running water or electricity. Began a malaria education program for neighbooring villagers.

Graduates May 15 from George Washington Med School, off to Pediatric Opthamology residency.

Must have gotten it from her parents.

bruce

4/21/2022 02:27:44 pm

george,

nice photos.

except for bouts of craziness that break out around the planet, kids have many more opportunities to see the world than those of us a certain age did.

25 weeks today before france...but i haven't started to count yet.

bruce

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Wonder What the Grandkids Are Doing

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