Prophetic subject line!

I missed on Friday! It was a big day...I gave a research talk in the afternoon to a (potentially) UCSF-wide audience (actually about 40-50 people, mostly Tetrad graduate students, I believe) and then went and played D&D with the D&D peeps. The talk went well and a good time was had by all.

Today I saw the Utes get devoured by a band of ravening Horned Frogs. It was very sad. Fair play to TCU, they were the better team on the night by quite a bit. However, Real Salt Lake won the Eastern Conference Finals on penalty kicks, so the evening was saved in terms of sports cheering. (Why Eastern? Because the last two spots in the Major League Soccer playoffs go to wild-card teams, and if they are both from the same conference the 8th and last seed must go into the "other conference" for its games. That would be RSL, who squeaked into the playoffs on the last day of the season, then proceeded to beat Columbus (last year's champions and the #1 seed this year) 4-2 on aggregate, then beat the Chicago Fire tonight on penalty kicks after a 0-0 draw, Nick Rimando the hero of the hour as he saved 3 of 7 penalty kicks to put RSL through.)

This has been the sports update. On to

Memory #6 My Uncle J is only about five years older than I am, so he was the universal favorite (both of my siblings and pretty much all our cousins) to play with when we were young. He put up with it pretty well, all things considered, but he did like his tricks. On one occasion he got an egg out of the fridge, closed one eye, and then came in to tell us that he had extracted his eye bone (showing us the egg).

I was pretty dubious, since, well, it looked like an egg to me! And I was pretty sure eyes did not have bones (I was probably 5 when this happened.) But he was awfully convincing. He had a pretty formidable deadpan even then. He also had a pin-swallowing trick which was impressive.

Memory #7 My grandmother has Seasonal Treats. Over and above Thanksgiving (I understand this is to be her last year as hostess, which makes me sad, since Thanksgiving at her house was one of the touchstones of the year for me until I left home), which was, of course, a cornucopia of delicious things, my favorites are the individualized sugar cookies at Christmas and the chocolate cupcakes with American flags on toothpicks for the Fourth of July.