Category Archives: Home & Family

Last weekend was very full of seasonal events:

• Friday:
  
  I took a vacation day to go shopping in Chinatown. Two friends and I have gone on
  this day trip during each of the last 25 years. We take CalTrain up the San Francisco peninsula then take Muni bus to Chinatown. We walk through the Lion Gate that
  separates Chinatown
  from Downtown and proceed down Grant. There are shops we always visit plus new
  shops each year. We eat lunch at Sam Wo on Washington Street, go to the fortune cookie factory
  in Ross Alley, then come back down the other side of Grant before taking the bus and
  train home in time for dinner.

  Friday night, we joined our extended family for Hanukkah dinner, complete with
  dreidel games, potato latkes, and lighting menorah candles to prayers in Hebrew. Some of the
  toys from Chinatown were much appreciated by the smallest members of the family.
  They particularly liked the Froggy Squeeze toys and the Slinky walking coil.

• Saturday:
  
  My daughter had a wrestling tournament so we had to get up unreasonably early
  to get her there in time for weighing in.
  We put up Christmas lights on the house and did household chores most of the day.
  Jessica and Paul picked a tree at a local lot and carried it home to soak in a
  bucket before we bring it inside.

  We dropped off 5 bags of used clothes at
  Santa Maria Urban Ministry in San Jose. SMUM is an outreach ministry of
  the Episcopal Diocese of El Camino Real. They distribute food and clothes and
  provide educational programs to serve those in need within 8 Central San Jose zip codes.

  That night, we took Jessica and her boyfriend to dinner and the “Frolic” show (San
  Francisco’s first CircusDragBurlesque Festival) at the
  CounterPULSE performance space south of Market. We have been to several of their
  shows this year and always have a wonderful time. We particularly looked for our friend
  Susan Voyticky who was in two trapeze dance
  pieces by Eat Cake Productions.

• Sunday:
  
  Jessica had a college interview with Univ. of Rochester. As usual, she met
  the alumni interviewer at Starbucks. I think each of the 5 interviews so far has
  been held at one or another Starbucks coffee shop.

  At 12:30 p.m. we went to service at
  Santa Maria Virgen Episcopal church in Milpitas. Santa Maria’s Vicar, Padre Efren
  Garza, offers a completely bilingual service in Spanish and English. Yesterday was
  the annual visitation by the Rt. Reverend Sylvestre Romero so we got to see our
  Bishop confirm about ten young men and women. Two of the girls were dressed like
  lovely little brides but everyone looked handsome and well dressed, mostly in white.
  There were about 175 people at the service so it was standing room only in the back.

  After church, we went to a Christmas party at some friends’ house and then came home
  to work some more on Jessica’s college applications.

10 days ago, my daughter Jessica submitted her college applications
to Carnegie Mellon (CMU), Oberlin, and Lawrence Univ. CMU and Oberlin had to be
in by 1 December so that they could set up vocal audition schedules in January.
Tonight, she finished and submitted her application to Smith College.
Smith is the only all-women’s school to which she is applying.

Tomorrow, Jessica plans to submit her applications to Rice Univ. and Univ. of
Rochester. That leaves only MIT, Princeton, and Brown to finish. Other than
CMU and Oberlin, the order of completion has mostly to do with how
many supplements a school requires to the Common Application, or if they
don’t use the Common Application at all. Jessica is trying not to form
opinions of a school just based on the ease of use of their web pages or
application but sometimes this is hard.

Observing to Jessica work through the applications, Lawrence Univ. seems to
have the friendliest and most supportive admissions office. MIT seems to
have the most responsive and best web pages. Oberlin required the most work
of those finished so far: she had to complete both the Common App.
and the Unified App. to apply to Oberlin and their music conservatory.

Jessica has had in-person interviews so far with MIT, Oberlin, CMU,
and Rice. She is playing email-tag with the Smith interviewer.
Several of the schools have sent her letters asking for an interview
after she had one. I can imagine that college admissions offices at this
time of year are insanely busy. Jessica wants to get everything in before
15 December because in past years a number of colleges’ admissions computers
have gone down under the end-of-year deadline load.

Jessica has gently pointed out to me that “we” are not applying to
college, she is. But it is hard not to feel that it is a family effort
what with reviewing essays for spelling and grammar, checking forms to
be sure the boxes are checked right, and paying fees for
reports, transcripts, and applications.

My daughter Jessica has settled on 9 colleges to which she will apply. In the last six months, the college list has included
as few as 6 and as many as 16 but we are done now. Really.

Two schools have music programs for which the applications were due
on 1 December. Their submission dates are early because they need time to set up the January audition schedules. So, Jessica submitted both the Common Application and the Unified Application, SAT scores, UCSC Summer transcript, photo, Advance Placement scores, recommendation letters, High School transcript, fees, plus several essay and additional question supplements for those schools first.
We had great difficulties with actual online submission mechanism because of the web sites having an real-but-unacknowledged aversion to Macs. Jessica ended up talking with tech support in the early hours before school. All of the other school applications are due at the end of this month.

Jessica spent quite a bit of Thanksgiving week preparing for and
then producing her audition CD. She met separately with both
her choir teacher and her voice teacher several times each to
develop her presentation of four songs. Her Audition 2006 songs are:

• La lontananza (Gaetano Donizetti,1797-1848) in Italian
• American Lullaby (Gladys Rich) in English
• La mi sola, Laureola (Fernando Obradors, 1897-1945) in Spanish
• Silver Dagger (American folk song) in English

Some schools want only three pieces, others specify the languages
and styles so we now have four songs ready to pick from. Of course, we
had to develop a CD label and case design. For the case, John picked a
memorable photo of Jessica from 1999 with flour blown all over her face:

In addition to being college application season, it is wrestling
season. Jessica has been on the
Harker wrestling team for four years and at varsity level for
two years. She was beyond pleased last week when Coach K asked her
to be Team Captain! She has been working with the Freshmen
team members for months. It is good to see her hard work rewarded (and
the announcement timing was excellent). Jessica was able to add
“Wrestling Team Captain” to her applications just before they went out.

Image by Katy Dickinson (Copyright 1999)

Recently, my husband John pointed out that we have not had a family photo since
we got married. We have lots of pictures of the kids and me but not of
all four of us, since John is the family photographer. We also needed
some “glamor shots” of our daughter to submit with her vocal conservatory
college applications. So, I called our wedding photogragher
Ben Janken. Here is a photo
Ben took of us in 2000:

Ben drove down from Oakland and took our family pictures last Saturday in a local
park. Jessica’s formal
head shot photos needed to be in black and white against against a plain background
so we took those in our living room. It will be fun to see our family through
another lens when the review prints come.

Image by Ben Janken. Copyright by Katy Dickinson and John Plocher (Copyright 2000)