Marc worked hard on an entry yesterday but then lost it when the blogger server temporarily went down, much to his chagrin. So, he is temporarily boycotting blogger for a while until he recovers from that trauma.

One piece of good news this week is that Marc got a travel grant from the Lancet for his conference trip to Amsterdam, so that together with some funding from the graduate school, most of the cost of the conference will be covered. We managed to find a pretty cheap hotel for Marc as well near the conference location in the middle of Amsterdam (far more reasonable than the 200 Euros/night at the hotel hosting the event). Amsterdam will prove to be an interesting place with the night life and more liberal access to hash -- it even has a Cannabis College! Looks like it is a really walkable city, so hopefully Marc will have a chance to check out a few things instead of being stuck indoors in the conference all 3 days!

Last Friday we attended a celebratory dinner for the graduate school for having hit it's target of raising 18 million dollars for scholarships and development. When Marc & I first got the invitations we felt that it was somewhat ironic that the school was going to splurge money to celebrate having raised pledges they haven't even yet collected. However, we are somewhat obligated to attend given our fellowships, and so we did. It turned out to be less pretentious that I had thought, much to my relief. Once we were all seated, two of the final year students did a wonderful job presenting their research to a group of people with very diverse backgrounds. Marc & I were put at a table with 4 older couples who were either donors or people who helped raise the pledges. As the only students of the table, we were seated apart from each other and so others at the table had no idea about our marital status. It was only when one of them asked about my post graduation plans than I mentioned Marc. Everyone was amused to hear that we met in Microeconomics and were tickled to learn that I had googled Marc after he asked me out on our first date. Soon, a few of the couples shared about how they met their spouse as well. Marc & I enjoyed the evening getting to know the donors and are somewhat impressed by the bond they must feel for UNC to be so continuously engaged in the growth of the school. I suppose once we graduate, we might very well feel the same way, but for now I think our dissertations may be preventing us from seeing the positive side of things :P

We will be heading to the mountains of North Carolina on Friday for a retreat with other church members. It is a nice time of the year to be headed there, but given this year's drought, there probably will not be the usual pretty autumn hues, and probably much more browns and bare trees instead. We are in a pretty severe water shortage now, and desperately need rain.

Our plants have managed to still stay alive with hand watering once a day, but it is finally starting to turn chilly at night, so we won't have tomatoes, okra & eggplants to harvest for much longer. Strangely our cherry tomatoes have actually produced larger tomatoes these past few weeks -- perhaps it's the compost we have been tossing in there. Other trivial news include Marc's missing left nipple (dropped off during his long run on Saturday). If anyone finds it, please contact us.