Category: Family stuff

At this very moment, my wife, along with several dozen other prospective med students are taking the MCAT. This will be her second attempt at the test. She’s nervous about it, but hopefully she’ll do well this time around.

On another note, I’ve been watching Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. It’s been very interesting watching and learning about the different sharks. What I find most entertaining though are the short Shark Week promo clips they play before going on commercial break. They show assorted people standing nervously around various bodies of water (swimming pools, inflatable kiddie pools, etc). I think they’re hilarious.

The wife’s parents are visiting us for part of the weekend. Monday was their 30th wedding anniversary, so tonight we took them out to Peninsula Grill for dinner. Next to Charleston Grill, it’s one of the best restaurants around. Pricey, but the food is well worth it. Definitely a place to put on your list of places to eat at. But save your pennies beforehand. And make reservations early.

Friday we were up at South Carolina State University for the annual SCAMP conference. It’s a conference for undergrads doing research under the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation program. The get the opportunity to gain some experience presenting the results of their summer research projects.

This year, my wife won the first place award for best oral presentation in the Biological Sciences category. She did a good job giving the talk for her project. She was a little disappointed that she didn’t also win a prize for the best poster competition too (she won both last year), but she’s still pleased.

LS-AMP is a neat program designed to encourage minority participation in the sciences. They help fix undergrad students up with research labs, provide a stipend, and give them a forum to present the results of their work. Along with the stipend for the summer work, scholarship awards are given to the best oral and poster presentations in several different categories. There a number of LS-AMP chapters in a bunch of different states that are definitely worth checking out.

Back from my trip to Jackson, AL for my wife’s family reunion. It was an interesting time. Got to meet lots of her relatives, and collected a lot of information for building the family tree. It’s pretty extensive, and some of the information I got led to some surprising connections. I’ve got enough to keep me researching for at least several months now. Added a couple hundred more names to the family tree database.

Jackson, AL was bigger than my wife and in-laws led me to think, although it was still pretty small. It’s a nice area, lots of woods and green things that contrast sharply with the reddish brown soil in the area. I’ll have to ask my geologist brother about that.

One thing that I would have liked to do was get a little bit of oral history recorded on videotape. Didn’t really get the opportunity to do much of that, since I was so busy getting stuff for the family tree database. Might have to wait for another time, although I don’t think I can wait too long before some of the older generations with the more interesting stories pass along.

Had the in-laws over this weekend, so my wife and I interrogated them to extract their knowledge of family history to flesh out the family tree some more. They managed to provide enough useful information to construct a tree 5 generations deep on her father’s side and 4 on her mother’s side. Still lots of details lacking, like birth and death dates, locations, etc. But we have names, which is a start. Our tree now has over 300 people in it (small compared to some others I’ve seen online).

Looking forward to expanding it even more at the family reunion.