We also visited the mansion at Maymont last week. I'd forgotten how sumptuous it is.

I took the GREs today. I sat at a computer in an anonymous office park building in the Far West End and clicked on little ovals instead of filling them in on an answer sheet with a number two pencil. I typed the two essays. I felt pretty good about them. The verbal section peeved me: it seemed like I didn’t know at least four of the words for which I had to identify an antonym; a couple of the sentence completion seemed to have no plausible answers listed; and one reading comprehension passage made me glaze over. I didn’t take the math (aka “quantitative”) very seriously: I just relaxed and took my best guess.

In the brave new world in which we live, one no longer waits for an envelope from -- what? -- Princeton, New Jersey, containing those magic numbers. After indicating the school to which I wanted the scores sent, I had a chance to erase, to discount the test, or save it. I saved . . . and scores came right back at me. Nice ones, too. I had improved my math score by 40 over my best practice test. It was 90 points higher than the score I got when I took the test in 1990. What a laugh.

Beautiful sky over Franklin Street tonight, as I left the Y. Streaks of pink and fluffy shreds of clouds, and a hunk of moon.