This was a week everyone has been looking forward to for months. Patti's daughter, Corinne, was about to deliver her second child, Olive, this week. On Sunday, Patti and I spent time shopping for the things every modern baby must have: Too Much.
We shopped a lot of places and found someplace called Backstage, which is a discount corner inside Macy's. It was new to us and seemed to have a lot of things that suddenly seemed of great value to us with a new granddaughter on the way. We also visited Kohls where we found even more things that we must have for Olive. As for me, the lunch at Bertucci's was worth all the wandering around shopping. Among things purchased were sheets designed to fit the combo Playpen/Changing Station that Patti had ordered online. That was due to arrive any day now, so I'm looking forward to finding out how hard it will be to assemble it and not have too many leftover parts.
-- Lucky August 13th! Welcome, Olive!
The plan was for Corrine to arrive at the hospital Monday morning, get induced and have the baby
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| Nana and Baby Olive |
Corinne has decided to take two or three months off from work to stay home and care for Olive. Nana and I plan to continue taking care of Lucy on Tuesday's and helping out whenever we can with Olive. My first challenge is the Playpen assembly. The box has arrived and now I have to assemble it. We'll see.
-- Home Delivery on Wednesday
Papa was recruited to pick up Baby Olive and mother at the hospital on Wednesday, including
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| Lucy welcomes Olive |
-- Thursday at O'Connors
My friend Ray met me for lunch at O'Connors, which has been a traditional pastime of ours for years. It's a time to step away from the routines of our daily lives and catch up. Ray spends most of the summer on the Cape, so when he breezes through town, we get together. It's been years since I could rely on the Quiche at O'Connors. For some reason, they dropped it off the menu. So, now I get the crab cakes. Ray continues to eat things that have a lot of leaves and assorted greens. It's an homage to good health I think, but maybe not.
-- Golf at Holden Hills on Friday
Patti and I got an early tee time at Holden Hills Country Club, to stay ahead of the recent heat wave. We were paired up with two senior fellows, who it turned out we didn't know but had a lot of connections with. Mike's wife was a nurse at UMass and it turns out they knew each other. Dan, it turns out, used to work at WTAG, where my Dad worked for 33 years before he retired. So the local connections were pretty thick that morning. My golfing was not as thick, as I couldn't break 90.
Reading Update: I enjoyed the biography of Carl Sagan, a Life in the Cosmos, by William Poundstone as I view Sagan as one of the gurus of our time pointing to the real reality of where life came from and not the fake reality of false prophets and other jabberwocky that serves as intellectual gibberish for the ill-informed. He wasn't afraid to be out there challenging the conventional thinking about extraterrestrials and the notion of how the universe was formed outside of religious constraints. His early life was very traditional in the sense of seeking a research approach to scientific exploration but it was his move into popular science through television and the force of his personality that intrigues me more. The book confirms my every instinct that I would have enjoyed knowing and learning from Carl Sagan. We could all benefit still.