hello, everyone!

i’ve been sadly remiss in writing. we went to ireland, did i mention? oh, well… that was fun. i bought some fiddle sheet music. it’s really easy, and good warm-up music for practicing my gypsy music, which is really hard. we ate yummy pub grub. mmmm….

then we came back.

the weekend after we came back, we had some friends over for hurricanes. yummy. we got toasted. around 3am, our cat dasha (many of you know her, the rascally cute tortoiseshell one, who scratches and purrs at the same time) escaped from our terrace to our neighbor’s back garden. we were too drunk to take the ladder down to rescue her, and it was too late to ring their doorbell, so we left her there for the night. she’s been there before overnight, to no terrible consequence. i woke up at 9am the next morning, worried about her. she wasn’t there.

she’s been gone over a week now and we are very very sad. we have reported her missing to the organization here, put up posters, and wandered the neighborhood several times daily with treat can. to no avail. we hope she returns before we head to minnesota. we were going to be there either last weekend or this coming one, but we put it off because of her. now we are leaving on the 16th. she’s got a week and a half to come back. we hope she does.

so that’s the next bit of news: we will be in minnesota sometime in the evening on saturday july 16th. matt will be leaving to return here on sunday the 31st, and i will leave for a road trip to washington on the 1st. i’ll be back in mn sometime around august 12th or 13th, since i will be flying home to maastricht on the 14th. i haven’t solidified my road trip plans yet.

our plans in general have not yet been made. please tell us about anything interesting we should try to attend. we will see what we can do!!! we are very sad to find out we are missing jesse’s party on friday, especially since we had originally planned on coming in on friday, not saturday. dammit. argh!!!

any other news? hmmm… dunno. matt held the 3rd KFG, which was very well attended. i, however, had food poisoning, and spent the night in bed. todd called me, though. yay!! so i had some entertainment. also, corey geving, an old friend of matt’s, who is also a colleague, will be in town tomorrow for a couple of weeks. we are looking forward to seeing him.

i have new students crawling out of the woodwork. bad timing, since i’m heading out soon. oh well, many of them have holiday plans too, so this should work just fine.

a student from last summer, who was an au pair here last summer, is back from prague as an au pair again for the same family. we are meeting up in the park tomorrow. then i will head over to molly’s house for coffee and conversation, then my dutch lesson later. somewhere in there i need to bicycle over to lanaken to feed a friend’s kitties for the last time before he returns tomorrow night. and that’s the plan. the rest of the week is pretty empty, since we kept it free in hopes of being on a plane on thursday or friday.

i have a lovely idea for a regular magazine column in a magazine i subscribe to, philosophy now. 🙂 heh heh. when i draft my first one, perhaps i’ll share it.

and that’s that for now. so now i can read up on as many of you as i have time for right now!