Prague Journal

Sunday, November 28, 2004.

Petr Vojtechovsky is spending a week with his family in Brno, so we took them to dinner this evening, just after he arrived at the Prague airport from Denver. Petr has mentioned his family to Rick on several occasions, so it was a pleasure to meet them. Petr’s father is an electrical engineer by training , so I was interested to hear about his experiences at Tesla Electronics plant (which made vacuum tubes and radios before 1945, and military electronics until 1989). Petr’s mother, who teaches software applications, is learning English in honor of the American daughter-in-law she acquired when Petr married Kari in Brno in June, but, despite the fact that her English is better than our Czech, it was hard for her to be included in the conversation without some translation work by Petr. Rick was eager to hear news from the Math Department—it’s always different to talk in person than via e-mail. In addition to news about Denver and DU, Petr brought a mountain of mail that our renters had collected for us, most of which was credit card and mortgage solicitations and other assorted junk. But there were a few important pieces, most of which should have been sent here (or to Matt) but ended up at our old address. Looking through some of the mail is amusing, for example the detailed statement from our bank that shows zero “reward points” and zero bonus points for zero debit-card transactions. My “account activity summary” shows a beginning point balance of 0.00 and an ending point balance of 0.00. I so love computers.

posted by JWinn @ 9:04 PM