Toot toot!

Brett passed his Preliminary Exam!!! And I was there and so I can honestly state that (in my opinion) he did so with FLYING colors!

I was so glad that I went (even though it meant waking up at 6:00 to get ready!!!) because it was really really really cool to watch him do his engineering/professional thing which I never actually get to see. He did SO good. Seriously. I know, because he gave the presentation to me three times at home to practice, and I had to give him little hints every time, such as 'talk a little slower,' 'don't dance around so much,' etc. --the usual. But today---calm, composed, smooth, cool as a cucumber. By far the best he'd ever done. And I even got it more this time (maybe because a teeny bit of it was starting to sink in by the 4th time I'd heard it??). When it was time to answer questions, he explained very thoroughly what he meant. It was so impressive.

I thought it was perty darn funny that I'd mentioned yesterday in my post that he always believes he can do anything, and at one part in his presentation he referred to a commercially available device that would have cost $250,000, and he said, "We were confident we could build a device even better suited to our needs for significantly less than that." And his professor said, "Brett was confident!" :) (And he did it, by the way, which was the bulk of what his last year was all about-designing and building a device that hooked up to a confocal microscope that would stretch out cells in collagen so they can measure their reactions to the perturbation. --yeah, I got that word from his presentation. :) Different than most student's ventures in that he was doing more mechanical stuff and building, but right up Brett's alley (as his professor stated.))

Anyway, at the very end after questions, a guy teasingly raised his hand and said, "When are you going to design and build a model capable of 3-D testing?" and Brett smiled and was like, "I don't want to go there," and his professor was like, "That's the first time I've ever heard Brett say he didn't want to go somewhere." And Brett was like, "Well, I've thought about it..." and she said, "See." Anyway, it was funny.

He just did soooo great! Oh, and I forgot to mention how great he looked, too. We got him a new outfit and I was ironing it last night while he practiced, and I said, "Don't worry, nobody will be able to listen to what you're saying because they'll be so stunned at how spiffy you look." And the first thing his professor said when she walked into the room was, "Brett, you're wearing a tie. I didn't know you knew how to wear a tie." Hee hee. I took pictures, but none of them turned out very good, so I'll have to take more on Sunday when he wears his new outfit again.

Anyway, he did super and he is wonderful and I am sooooo proud of all his hard work!!

It must have been very tiring, because when Brett came home today at 2:00 I was asleep on the couch and Hazel was asleep like this.