May 28, 2001
(Ok -- I, Laura, need to preface this newsletter with a little statement. This was begun in March, and then rewritten in May. It's now July. Eric asked me to just post the thing, and we'll get another one ready ASAP. So just be warned -- a lot of this information is already very outdated.)
It's been a couple of months, so we felt it was time to write one of these again. What's new with us?
As most of you know, Laura has been called as the Young Women's president in our ward. What an exciting challenge! We have a small number of girls, and thankfully they are all very patient with her as she's learning the ropes. We suspect that the youth activities are going to keep her running during the next couple months -- Girl's Camp and Called to Serve (a stake week-long missionary experience for the youth) in June and Youth Conference and a Stake temple trip in July.
For those of you who haven't heard, Laura is officially in mourning for the loss of her youth. She has traded in her sports car for a [gulp!] station wagon, a Ford Focus.
In April, Eric went to Denver to use the Center's equipment to get some measurements of the vocal system to fine tune the model. He got the necessary information, but gosh! it was so sad for both of us -- our first time apart! We've decided to NOT do that again.
So the end is in sight for Eric. He will be presenting a paper at a conference in Chicago next week on some aspects of the model, which is not yet done. So the model absolutely MUST be completed by the end of this week. The first draft of Eric's dissertation is due at the end of the month (June 28th). His defense is scheduled for July 9th, and his rewrites are due about a week later.
We'll be heading out to Utah for the wedding of one of Laura's friends on July 20th. We'd like to hang out for a few days before coming back for Eric's graduation on the 27th. All who want to come are welcome.
Probably the most exciting news is that Eric has accepted a position for the fall here at the university. His official title will be "Assistant Research Scientist." Basically he'll be responsible for much of the same research he's doing for his dissertation -- only we'll get slightly more than a stipend. The nice thing is that he'll get the opportunity to beef up the publishing portion of his CV.
After the horrible reviews we read about this movie, Laura was actually a little surprised. Yes, it had some cheesy romance scenes. (Eric disliked them more than Laura -- he got kicked for his snide comments.) And, yes, the use of sappy music and blurred camera angles for the hospital scenes were a bit much. But overall, we enjoyed it (Laura more than Eric). Like "13 Days", we left the theater feeling grateful for the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform.
Yes, this is old (we wrote this review about 2 months ago), so you've all probably seen this one. We enjoyed it. Laura didn't appreciate the man-against-nature, man-against-himself themes of the movie. She left the movie in tears, determined to never let Eric go on any business trip. Probably not the intended message.