Journal of a Sabbatical

July 22, 1999

refenestration part 2

Today's Starting Pitcher: Jin Ho Cho

Today's Reading: none

Sabrina

Waiting for the refenestrator is getting to be a major hobby of mine. The refenestrator came. Window is fixed now. The bedroom windows are now also preemptively fixed. The pet sitter had to reschedule her introduction to Wilbur 'til tomorrow.

Nancy called to tell me she got tickets for the Konishiki sumo demo for Saturday. She heard that tickets were going fast and we might not be able to get them at the door so she acted quickly and we are now all set. The local newspaper likens Konishiki to Michael Jordan, but I think in context Konishiki is a bigger star than His Airness.

It's cooling off tonight and getting less humid again. Being able to open the window and leave it open is positively thrilling.

I have been working at cleaning up the archival journal entries and putting them up on bluetarp now that I have more disk space. I've already brought back January, February, and March of 1997 for your reading pleasure. And apparently it was three years ago today that I became a sumo fan. I should read my own journal more often.

I spent a long time on the phone with Joan-west last night, who can properly be called "-west" because she's visiting her mother in the Midwest, hence not in Italy. We haven't been as good at keeping in touch while she's studying in Italy as I thought we would. Even e-mail is a big production since she doesn't have her own phone at the institute. So we had a lot of catching up to do, as well as a lot of planning for my trip to Italy in the fall.

When the Hungarian herbarium (say that three times fast) trip was going to be in May, I had planned to combine it with a visit to Joan-west in Italy. August is the summer vacation for her, so she'll be on this continent while I'm in Europe. Hence the decoupling of the visits. I kind of don't want ot spend a lot of time planning the details of Italy before I leave for Hungary, but I'd really better get to it if I want to use frequent flier miles - the person I talked to when I booked my ticket to Hungary said I'd better book the October Italy trip now in order to make sure there are seats available.