It's a quiet Monday night here at home. Shuwen's off having dinner at the Latane Center, and I am listening to Puccini's La Boheme blasting through the stereo...I decided I should blog, since it's been a while.

Truth is, there's not all that much to report here. The North Carolina summer has arrived, with all of its glorious heat and humidity. I like to run over to my yoga class on Monday morning, which is a short 5 and a half minute jog over from our front door, and this morning it was quite enough to warm me up thoroughly. I probably could have skipped right into the heat-generating poses of the sequence! Tomorrow's supposed to be rough, but we do not necessarily feel it much in our little air-conditioned world. There is some irony to the notion of cooling our buildings and warming the earth at the same time; it sort of makes me think of the law of entropy thwarting us at every bend in the road.

Tomorrow night we are having some friends over to share a green curry dish with us. Other plans for the week include working on research and papers, enjoying each other's company and a wedding on Saturday. This past weekend, we experimented in the kitchen with Moroccan-style swordfish, which was glorious, and I cooked up a batch of potato leek soup, one of Shuwen's favorites.

My plans for the rest of the summer are still a bit up in the air. I hope to be able to get back to Chicago for my ten-year high school reunion, and I also hope to be able to travel to Ethiopia to do some work on the Nile research that is supposed to be the heart of my dissertation. Unfortunately, the funding for that's a bit slow, and so I wait. I may have to make choices about how best to proceed if things continue to drag...I may get involved in some work on wastewater reuse in North Africa (mainly).

We will be running a four mile race July 4, called 4 on the 4th, that I am looking forward to. I have not raced since Grand Rapids in May, as I have focused on getting back into a steady running rhythm. The summer makes it hard, but I finally got up to a 2-hour run this weekend and will try to maintain something like that next week. I get up at 6 am on Sundays to run, which means that I really never sleep in now!

I hope you all are staying cool these days!