Update from Mom

Monday I went to Tufts with the Lobels to hear Tony Blair give a talk about the Middle East. The event was in a huge gymnasium, packed full with people who had to go through a metal detector and handbag search to get in. Tony blair is now the European Union's representative in the Quartet which tries to forward the Israel/Palestine peace process. The Quartet consists of the EU, the UN, the US, and Russia. Obama has appointed George Mitchell to be our representative, which is interesting, since he and Blair worked together on the successful Northern Ireland accords. Anyway, Tony was guardedly optimistic about forwarding the peoace process if we are even-handed and politically committed. Afterwards Elliott got us in for a photo op with the former prime minister-- even Sabrina, who had been sitting in back with the plebes.

Yesterday Leo and I saw Sabrina again. We took her and Ardy to an Afghan restaurant in Cambridge (Helmand; they have one in SF too) and then to a talk at the Museum of Science called "Why Him? Why Her?" about why we fall in love with the person we do. The speaker, Ellen Fisher, is an anthropologist who has studied romantic love and the evolution of female sexuality for a long time. Now she's a consultant with Matchmaker.com, and she developed a questionnaire that millions of people have taken worldwide. She's studied a subset of those and subdivided people into four different types, then looked at whom they choose as partners. It was interesting and reasonably light for a lecture.

Saturday is Damian's birthday, don't forget. Sabrina is coming over for dinner. Damian has been doing a lot better. He doesn't have the frustration of the trombone, and though he thinks they don't sing enough or interesting enough songs in chorus, he does love to sing and wishes he could have voice lessons. He's also spending a lot of time strumming, drumming, and singing on Rock Band. His basketball practice has paid off, too, and in the game last week he got the ball many times and made at least one basket in only about a quarter of play. He's also told me math at school is boring and he wants to go back to our algebra lessons, so now we are edging our way into algebra II, and I am reading up furiously during the day to be ready for our twenty minutes of study lying on our stomachs on Rhianon's bed at night. (We're skipping geometry for now; maybe that will leave him something to enjoy in middle school.) Right now we're working on how to make an equation from an input-output table, zipping past linear equations with are "boring" to quadratic and cubic equations. It's fun.

Dad seems to be doing well. The gas company turned off the gas to his work for no reason for a day and a half, so they were pretty cold, but no permanent harm was done. The mouse experiments are going pretty well-- a repurposed drug they tested made the ALS mice live 17% longer and seemed to retard some of the neurological changes seen in the disease, so they're going to repeat that experiment in another lab as well as proceed with testing some new drugs that seem to work better in vitro.