7 Days and All's Well

I haven't been posting recently since Leysia left last week early Tuesday morning to travel to the U.S. to study how various research issues related to human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work are playing out in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Of course, having Hurricane Rita arrive in the area shortly thereafter has not helped her data collection efforts! However, she is with a good team of people that Morten Kyng helped to assemble in a very short period of time. The team includes a nurse, a doctor, and the police and fire chiefs of the city of Aarhus. He was able to do this because he had the right connections in place due to a sub-project of his Palcom project that deals with IT Support For Accidents.

Leysia and I have been in contact throughout her trip (mainly using video conferencing enabled by Apple's iChat and iSight products) and she and the team have been making smart decisions about where to go and when. As Leysia put it, "I'm with people who are even more risk-averse than I am!" They have been able to gain access to several shelters, to the headquarters of both FEMA and the American Red Cross, as well as with various state and local officials including the police chief of a town that was hit hard by Katrina.

So, for the past seven days, I've been the sole caretaker of Max and Lilja and things have been going quite well! :-) Somehow in the middle of all her preparations Leysia found time to cook six dinners for the kids and I, wrapping them up and placing them in our freezer down in the basement. I just have to remember to go down and pull one of the meals out of the freezer to let it defrost while I'm at work and the kids are at Bodøgården (their pre-school). This past weekend went fairly well, despite the fact that both Max and Lilja came down with a cold that is still lingering today. However, they are much improved since Friday (which was the worst day for both of them) since I made them rest during Saturday and Sunday, which included naps for the both of them on both days. I also had help in entertaining the kids since Niels Olof came over to have dinner with us on Saturday (and brought along his Nintendo DS for the kids to play with) and Tom Moran and his wife Lydia came to dinner on Sunday. If you go to Tom's website and click on his "students" link, you'll see a familiar name. He was on Leysia's PhD committee and Leysia worked in Tom's group at Xerox PARC when she did her internship there in 1996. We were supposed to see Tom and Lydia last week in Paris, because Leysia was planning to attend ECSCW until it became clear that she needed to head to the states to study the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I had been looking forward to that trip, since I haven't been to Paris since 1993 and I wanted to show Max many of the famous sites of that city including Notre Dame (especially the gargoyles), the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and a picture of a certain enigmatic lady that they have in this small museum located there. Indeed, Lydia was looking forward to touring the city with me, helping me watch the kids while Tom and Leysia attended the conference. Ah well, that was not meant to be, but I had a fun time chatting with Tom and Lydia last night and they got a kick out of the kids. (It was their first time meeting Lilja.) Today, I attended Tom's talk that he gave at the department on his current research at IBM and then met with Lydia in the afternoon to visit the Viking Museum in downtown Aarhus and then dropping her off at Den Gamle By before picking up the kids at school.

So, anyway, its been almost seven days since Leysia left on her trip and we are doing just fine, although we miss her and can't wait for her to return! Our biggest worry that Lilja would be up all night crying because Leysia was gone did not materialize! She wakes up once a night, crawls across the bed to determine that I'm papa and not mama, starts crying, and then I sleepily give her a water bottle, and we both go back to sleep!

She leaves the U.S. on Wednesday arriving in Aarhus on Thursday; I'm contemplating taking the kids out of school early that day so they can be home when she arrives!

Ken