Jeez, sorry everyone for being blog-negligent for a week or so.  So many things happened that I didn’t have time to write stuff down.  Here’s a wrap-up, numbered in no particular order:

1.  I finished painting my friend’s apartment in Jamaica Plain in record time.  I did the whole thing in three days.  It was a thousand degrees, but sometimes that’s the best temperature to work, in that you’re so hot you don’t have time to get tired.  On day two, Katherine brought home Southern take-out for dinner.  There is something sublime about eating Southern food with a Southern girl while drenched in sweat.

2.  Misia’s parents are visiting.  They got in Friday night, the same night that my cousin Bruce and his pal Brian crashed at our place after a week of camping in Maine.  There was a lovely moment when all of us plus my brother were crowded around the dining room table singing and playing bluegrass tunes.

3.  Misia and I and her folks went to Canada for a short vacation.  We spent a night in Quebec City and one in Montreal.  Quebec is incredible: it looks and feels like Europe, yet there is a breezy confidence about the tourists.  It’s as if Canadians and Americans alike have found a place that has old-world charm where their t-shirts and collective girth do not seem out of place.

4.  While driving from Quebec to Montreal, I hit a cinder-block-sized piece of debris, damaging a rim and flattening a tire.  We were able to make it to a rest area, where a collection of exceedingly kind Quebequoise men were all too eager to help us get on the donut and direct us to a tire shop.  The incident took only an hour out of our travel time.  Misia’s dad wavered for the next 36 hours between touting the kindness of Canadians and then dismissing the primitive collection of factory rims in stock at Canadian tire shops.  Once he got that out of his system, he has now moved onto yelling at Misia for having such an old car (a 2001 Chevy), made virtually undrivable because of this new Canadian rim.  Fathers have a way of showing their love and concern by turning every blue sky grey, and that’s why dads are great.

5.  Our friend Meg was in a moped accident in Greece, breaking her clavicle, wrist, and pelvis.  She was on holiday after delivering a stirring speech at a health conference in Vienna in which she raised awareness of the lack of pain treatment available to people in developing countries who suffer excruciating pain from illness, burns, and amputations.  While hospitalized in Greece, she was given no pain treatment, an irony that was not lost on anyone.  She’s now back in the States where she received proper medical treatment (and pain medicine) and will be on bedrest for several weeks.  I’m flying down there in a couple days to keep her company.  She is at her parents’ house, and I’m sure she has received her dad’s version of the Inadequate Canadian Tire Shop speech, if only so he can convey how worried she made him.

6.  I love cheese.  I really do.  Cheese and beer seem to me perfect examples of the joyous and limitless wonder of the human mind.

7.  My friend Jess is about to have a baby.  She started her pre-labor (is that right?  Is that a thing?) as well as some small contractions.  She’s a woman who maybe never planned on being a mother, you know, never dreamt as a little girl in Australia about playing house and being covered in babies.  But she’s made for this.  She’s so emotionally there, as well as her husband, and their daughter is going to have the life we all wish we had, the life we think everyone should have.  I’m so happy for them.

8.  I still haven’t gone pants shopping for my new job.

9.  I just got a package in the mail from my mom of a bunch of books, most of them galleys.  Hooray mail score!  Thanks, mom!

10.  I ran into a former student outside of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Montreal.  He now lives in Seattle.  The world is small.