Another jewel

In the month or so after Ella, our third grandchild, was born, Barry bought me a necklace with little baby shoes on it, each engraved with the name of the child and his or her date of birth. We returned to the same place when Maya was born: a little stall in the jewelry district on 47^th Street in Manhattan where our friend Judy had bought a similar item not long before. For the life of me I could not remember the name or location of the place, and if you have never been to the jewelry district I can tell you that there are literally hundreds of these booths scattered in various buildings so it would not be possible to just roam around and find this.

But happily our friends also recently welcomed a new grandchild, and I had already seen Judy’s new charm, so she was able to (again) share the information with us; now I have it in my Google address book. Yesterday we managed to squeeze in a trip down there to buy the new charm, have it engraved, and have it put on the necklace.

There are two different charms: a boot and a Mary Jane, which are usually used for boys and girls, respectively. I previously had the shoes in the birth order, so boy-girl-girl-girl (boot and then three Mary Janes). But now, with four girls and one boy, I had the opportunity to achieve symmetry. I like symmetry so much that my doctoral dissertation in statistics was on tests of symmetry: there were three publications that came out of that work^1,2,3. I found these listed on my last resume, which I was somewhat stunned to see was dated 09 March 2012, just weeks before I was diagnosed. This was probably part of an annual update process that Pfizer required.

But getting back to the baby shoes....although the shoes are no longer in birth order, there is something nice about the way it looks. We also bought two extra little gold balls to keep the shoes on the ends from falling off, which has sometimes happened with my less-than-agile post-tumor fingers (a side effect of the vincristine which is much more prominent and constant in my feet) when I am putting the necklace on or taking it off. I also just realized that now there are 6 balls, corresponding to the six adults in our family. How perfect!

  

The picture is about the best I could do with the limited lighting and photography equipment. The pictures I took on my old Canon were not so good, so I decided to try using my Samsung Galaxy Note II. The Samsung did the better job (independent of the fact that our son-in-law Aaron is now working for Samsung)! While I still find the phone awkward to use for photographs, maybe it is time to abandon my trusty old little camera. Heaven knows I could use having a little less stuff in my purse.

The Midwest is really suffering through tornadoes and storms. That front is moving up this way but here it will just be a lot of heavy rain. Other than a routine appointment with my pulmonologist tomorrow, I will not be going too far.

Stay dry!

Love,

Rebecca

¹Eubank RL, LaRiccia VN, Rosenstein RB.  Test statistics derived as components of Pearson's phi-squared distance measure.  J Am Stat Assoc- 1987; 82:816-25.

²Rosenstein RB.  Tests of symmetry derived as components of Pearson's phi-squared distance measure.  Commun Stat A. 1989; 18:1617-26.

³Eubank RL, LaRiccia VN, Rosenstein RB.  Testing symmetry about an unknown median via linear rank procedures.  J Nonparam Stat. 1992; 1:301-11.