A good, full week!

Well, Shuwen's defended her dissertation proposal and become a full-fledged doctoral candidate, and Marc is trying to get his research plans organized and sorted out, but we can both step back and say that this was a good week. While spending time in Philly with Christine and Chris, enjoying the company of their cat Gabrielle, Marc had the chance to run the Philadelphia Distance run: check out the team blog http://carrboroac.com/ for Marc's description of the race, written on September 17. Needless to say, it was a great race preparing to run the trials marathon in November.

He was then happy to come home and be back with Shuwen, especially as she made her final preparations for the defense on Wednesday morning. We went through the presentation together two nights before, and discussed how to keep it within the 20 minute limit. The defense was closed, so Shuwen called Marc after her committee kicked her out to deliberate. We kept each other company during those tense...3 minutes, which is literally how short a time it took to decide that she had a good enough plan to proceed.

On Wednesday night, after an interval workout for Marc and a team dinner at Milltown (read yummy good beer and food), we met with some friends at Tyler's and did really well with trivia night, but were disqualified for having too many people on our team (too bad!).

Otherwise, Marc is working on a couple of papers, which are now in their final stages of internal review before their official submission to journals. He also has a presentation next week at a conference of environmental economists working in this area, as well as being involved in producing results that will go into his advisor's talk at the same event. The final research aspect being dealt with is related to planning a trip to a conference in Amsterdam (and subsequent talk in the Hague) in December. His dissertation plans are still on hold, since the World Bank takes things at its own, unique pace.

Shuwen went shopping today for new running shoes, and some gardening supplies. She came home with three nice looking Kale plants. We will try our luck with those now!