Invites!

Our wedding invitations arrived today! How exciting! It makes the wedding seem like it's really happening... as if buying a dress, booking a photographer/cake person/florist/hall etc didn't really get me in the wedding mode. But we both like them- they're nice for a simple late spring/early summer wedding that takes place in the afternoon (so they aren't super-formal). We also made an appointment to pick a menu :-) Yay progress!

We have a preliminary list of our wedding guests, but it's pretty patchy on who will actually come and who I should actually invite. Like take Monty and my lab mates for example- exactly how involved do they want to be in my personal life? I could see Heidi maybe coming, seeing as how she's the only girl in the lab and I share an office with her so we can talk more about things not related to school. The other people in the lab are all boys and I'm pretty sure they won't want to come; that's okay though, I like small gatherings, so Keegan and I will be able to spend more time with everyone instead of just the general small talk. But back to Heidi, she's finishing this year and her boyfriend already took a job in New Zealand, so she might already be gone. Of course I want to invite all my new grad student friends, but I'm not even that sure they'd want to come; we go to gym classes and eat dinner together and do parties/girls' nights, but I'm not really sure about the level of friendship there. I really like all of them and I'd like to develop more lasting friendships with all of them, but I'm not sure that I'm really even capable of that. I sort of feel like I'm not really someone that people like to be friends with out of a school setting; that sounds stupid, but it makes sense in here *points to head* I feel like my best friends are people I've already known for a really long time- even the good friends I met in undergrad I don't really talk to anymore. Which is unfortunate, but that happens when we go to industry, grad school, and med school all over the globe; it's difficult to keep up-to-date on everything. It's nice to still have two good friends I've known for a really long time though :-) I'm pretty fortunate.

I had a nice long (almost 2 hour!) chat with Monty today about the direction of the paper and what exactly is meant by doing a review paper. I know I've read an alarming number of them, but when trying to write about an unfamiliar field it's difficult to sort of narrow in on what it is about that field that intrigues me without having to teach myself everything about all the complex portions of the field. We ended up talking about what I'll be working on over the summer and I mentioned that I know I'll be gone a week for the honeymoon, but other than that I'll be around. So that launched an entirely different conversation about our families, his previous grad students, movies we've seen recently, and the economy was even discussed in there somewhere. What I found most interesting was his complete honesty about grad students who are also parents; he talked about how much more accepted it is now to have kids while you're in school than it was when he was a student. He even had one student who had two kids while in grad school and was pregnant with her third when she graduated (in a normal time frame!). I don't think I'll be in the running for the "Most Kids Born While Attending Grad School" award, but it's nice to know he would be supportive. He also mentioned how he finds it more important for the folks in grad school to have kids because the types of parents who should be having lots of kids are those that will teach them to value education and will steer them on the right path. So his advice for me on that front was to "get to work!" Heh :-)