News Flash!

A mixed bag of news and observations for you:

1. My thesis advisor said I have “a lovely project.” Since I’m taking two semesters to do it, my due date is now September 17. Which is also my mom’s birthday---this makes it easy to figure out a present—her greatest wish is to see me finally out of school, and completing my thesis is a big step towards graduation in December.

2. I had a week of vacation earlier this month, and spent three days in Kansas City. The time spent there was wonderful, and Abby and Izzy are a delight, but the traveling itself wasn’t great. First, why does the handsoap in airports in Texas always suck? I’ve flown through Dallas multiple times, Houston once or twice, and since I’m a borderline compulsive hand-washer, this is what I always notice.

3. While in Kansas City, I got to visit this museum, which was really cool. The above-ground buildings act as lenses to focus light into the below ground galleries. And the grounds have really cool sculptures—such as giant badminton birdies on the lawn.

4. I had class last night, and there’s a woman in there who, I think, has the perfect Southern gothic novel name. Her first name is Ruby, but I won’t mention her last name to protect her privacy. If I ever write a novel I may have to name a character after her.

5. I’ve been ordering supplies at work for the last several weeks, and yesterday a big shipment arrived. Problem is, we’d already received a shipment exactly like that one two weeks ago. Come to find out that the state duplicated the purchase order by mistake--$2700 mistake. I was just happy to discover, after many phone calls, that the mistake wasn’t mine.

6. Some very dear friends of mine were supposed to get married on September 29, but I found out last night that they moved it to Sept. 1, and now I can’t go! I’m already registered and have a plane ticket for the Society of American Archivists conference in Chicago that week. I can’t believe I’m going to miss it. I’m very sad about it.

That’s all I got for now. Next time I’ll tell you about my boyfriend’s (I originally misplaced that apostrophe and got boyfriends’ –wow, those pesky apostrophes can cause all sorts of relationship problems!) odd attachment to graphing.