This and That

Earlier this week Paul received a card and $75 from his graduate chemistry classmates. That was a pleasant surprise! Some of them are coming to his graduation party so they'll get to meet Nadia then. :-) Paul is still putting in very long hours working on his thesis. His defense is on the 29th, and he needs to submit his thesis to the four committee members a few days before that. His goal is to submit it to them by the evening of the 23rd. He has 55 pages written so far.

A week ago our mortgage broker did a credit check on me as a part of the mortgage application. He received 3 credit scores and is supposed to use the middle score. My middle score was above 800 which he said is very rare (the highest possible credit score is 850). He said anything over 720 is considered excellent. It's funny how happy it made me when he told me how uncommon my score was. I think it's because I haven't been a student since December 2002 when I earned my doctorate and so I haven't been "graded" lately and this credit score felt like earning an "A" on a test, LOL.

One story I keep forgetting to tell happened during our 8 night stay at the hospital. One day Paul and I went to the vending machines that were closest to the NICU to get a Snickers bar. It cost $1.25, but instead of using a dollar bill, Paul used all coins from my wallet to pay for it. It sounded like the coins were going back to where you could retrieve them, but the machine kept registering the correct value. So he retrieved the candy bar and then checked and sure enough the 5 quarters had been returned to us. So we had a free candy bar. Well we never went back to the vending machine again as to use it knowing it was broken would be stealing. Well others didn't feel the same way. Another day my mom watched as people were feeding one coin in the machine and retrieving it over and over again and taking lots and lots of chips, candy bars, etc. from the vending machine. My mom said something to some of the people doing this, and no one agreed that it was wrong. They felt justified since sometimes vending machines take your money and don't give you what you paid for. My mom even went and told a couple of hospital employees, but they also didn't see anything wrong with people getting "free" food from the vending machine. I think it's sad that so many adults and children didn't view this as wrong even when my mom pointed out to them that they were stealing.