Sunday, April 10, 2011

How I Spent My summer Vacation - Prologue

On a suggestion from one of his aunts, my son got in touch with a woman who works in the development office of the rehab hospital where he spent four weeks in early 2005. As a family, we have kept in touch with the administrators there and have been involved in some of their fund-raisers. My son is frequently invited by the hospital’s Development Office to take advantage of donated sports or theater tickets, or other opportunities (which he almost always gratefully accepts!).


The purpose of his call was to offer his services to the hospital for a summer internship. He has been developing his communications skills this year, working on the University’s student newspaper. He would like to learn more about not-for-profit organizations, perhaps using his writing to promote fund-raising events this summer. But he would be happy to help in any way he can.

After some back and forth by email, he had an interview a week or so ago, and it looks as though he will have his summer hours filled with helping out there – a good cause for him to put his effort behind while gaining some experience in the real work world. I don’t know how the interview actually went; he didn’t share much. I do know that he is excited to get this opportunity and looking forward to the summer.

Three weeks of school before he completes half of his college education. So far, so good.

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Amazing

Not long from now, I expect my son will step up to the plate and manage his life. And he never ceases to amaze me by showing how he can do that when I least expect it.

Near the end of his freshman year, he tried to create a back-up of his computer files and got an error message that the drive could not read the disk. I tried a few months later and got the same error. We used a flash drive and I forgot about it.

Just a couple of weeks ago in one of those Eureka moments, I woke up thinking that the DVD drive (indeed the whole laptop) is covered for service for the four years he is at school, and I thought maybe the DVD drive is the problem.
 Of course, in the morning, the thought went nowhere and I forgot to even mention that to my son. Fast forward to just a week ago, and I happened to be spending a nice Sunday afternoon with him. He mentioned that the DVD drive on his laptop wouldn’t work (he has two movies to watch for his Shakespeare class). He told me he was going to the tech office the next day to drop it off. He brought it to them the following day, explained the problem and, without so much as an argument, they told him they would get a new drive for him. It was fixed by Thursday.

No prompting, no advice, no practicing, no intervening by Mom on his behalf. As I’ve written here before, he has his own schedule