I’m taking advantage of my remaining vacation days to road trip across the midwest to visit form friends this weekend. First, a stop in Bloomington, IN last night to visit with fellow MIT grads Ann Ames and her family: husband Dr. Mark Messier and 3.5 year old son, Leo(ok, Leo has not graduated yet…)

I met Ann as part of the Russian House crowd(Cyndi’s dorm at MIT). Ann is now working from home for a software company in Boston, where she was employed before they moved out to Indianna. Leo is a real firecracker of a kid, and played with Arianna this morning before leaving for pre-school. Ann and I played with Arianna for a while before we departed for St. Louis. Well, it is still Friday, part of the normal working week, and Ann had to get some work done.

I met Mark during rush week at MIT many years ago(maybe it was my junior or senior year), when I volunteered to sponsor a jam session at Chi Phi. Mark showed up with his tenor sax and we played with a few other freshmen.Eventually, he played in the top MIT Jazz band, but never knew what his major was until we spoke last night after the kids went to bed. It turns out that Mark is an experimental physicist. Some of you might know that I a dabble in cosmology, and therefore, a little bit of particle physics, so I had lots of questions for Mark, and he had lots of answers. Dr Messier was part of a famous US and Japanese team that discovered that neutrinos have mass! We had a great time, and stayed up until 1:30am.

This morning, we drove to St Louis to visit my friend Jane, from Ford, who took a golden parachute a couple years back. That round of incentives came right after she discovered she was pregnant with her first child, Ahren. She now lives in St Louis with husband Dr Sebastian Rueckhert. Ahren is 16 months old, and adorable. 10 seconds after we showed up, he was following Arianna around the house like a puppy dog, chasing her or holding her hand. I had told Arianna before this trip that she would be able to play big sister to these small children, and so far, she has enjoyed it.

So, on the way here, she spotted a birdie party. For years, when our kids have spotted a flock of birds, on the ground, telephone lines, or in the air, we declare a birdy party. This time, however, the birdy party was in the air, and their formation was more or less a straight line, parallel to I-70, flying away from us. And, despite our speed, we never seemed to find the end of the birdy line. I think I drove a good sixty seconds as the birds flew away from the highway, and I could not see the end of the line before they faded from sight. At my speed, that was at least a mile of birds, wow