Summertime

We've had a fairly relaxing week here in the DePriest household. The weather has been beautiful, Billy's dad continues to heal well from his surgery, and I am preparing for an 8k race I have coming up on August 2.

On Tuesday Billy got to attend a presentation from the astronauts who fixed Hubble when they spoke at his work. I was hoping to go along, too, but had to go to work for a training session instead. It was a fairly slow week at work for me as my co-worker tries to get as much of her work done as she can before she moves to her new position and leaves her responsibilities to me.

I finished reading Cather's One of Ours and am relieved to find that nothing in the novel conflicts with the thesis for the paper I am working on. I will need to spend some time researching and reading secondary articles about the text before reading OoO again prior to writing the paper. I am hoping to get a solid draft done before classes start at the end of August so that I don't have too much to do during my fall semester. If all goes well, my argument will come together well and the paper will serve as my PhD application writing sample.

Friday night Billy and I went into Baltimore to watch "On the Waterfront" at an outdoor screening in Little Italy. It was a fun (and free!) evening, and right as Marlon Brando gathered his courage to return to work, it started to rain, so the timing worked out perfectly. The traffic was another story-- it took us an hour to get out of the city because we were fighting the crowd from the soccer game between Chelsea and AC Milan. Saturday we relaxed at home, enjoyed our free trial of HBO, and spent some time reading outside before going out to dinner at a local mexican restaurant. This afternoon we took Oscar to the park and he got as muddy in the lake as we would let him. He even behaved himself pretty well when we tied him up in the shade and played catch. He still hates riding in the car, though.

This week we don't have much planned until the Legg Mason Tennis Classic starts on Sunday. We got the weeklong pass, and I am looking forward to spending the week prior to my birthday celebrating with some world class tennis. According to Andy Roddick's twitter account, he is recovering from his hip injury and ready to play, so he will lead a very good field of players including Tommy Haas, Juan Martin del Potro, Lleyton Hewitt, JW Tsonga, Robin Soderling, and all the other top American players. I can't wait!