Videos

 took a video of "the Ring of Fire" in Montréal and the Basillica of Notre Dame. Also, some video of Joni's performance at Aroma Café before that.

Today I took video of Jack riding his bike for the first time. He has a friend in the neighborhood who was letting him practice on her bike, and now he was all set to try out his. Yay! First swimming, now his bike. He is conquering a lot of things this week. :D

Montréal

I am so tired, I don't think I can make a summary post right now, but I did manage to get pictures put online.

Montréal Pictures

In short, the presentation at the conference went well. The rest of the conference was very enjoyable. I met some great people from U of Texas @ Austin, Concordia, Clemson, etc. Jack had a great time with Gma Rose. He went from mostly scared of the water to swimming on his own. We saw Old Montreal a lot. We took the Metro around to see other sites like the Botanical Gardens and the Olympic Park from 1976.

What else?

Traveling was not that bad. Customs was odd, but not painful. The cats were slightly neurotic when we got home, but they are settling back down. There were some big black ants (carpenter ants?) in the kitchen yesterday, but I think I got them all. Why on earth they had to show up while we were gone, I don't know.

Jack met a French-Canadian girl named Kelly who was on her way to Italy with her family. He gave her his email address, lol. I forgot to try to look up the Cunninghams who had been in Mexico with us for the summer program before. Oh well.

Now I am trying to get back into work and marathon training. That's all for now!

It's June Already

Where has the year gone? Jack's last day of kindergarten was Friday the 4th. He is attending camp through the park district all summer. He knows some of the kids in his camp and has already made new friends. The instructors all seem really nice too, so it's working out well.

I launched a new web site for a local artist last night. Joni Laurence is an independent folk-rock artist. She had her cd release party tonight at Cowboy Monkey, which thanks to it being at 5:30pm and smoke-free, Jack and I both were able to attend. He bopped along to the music, as you've all seen him do I am sure. It was a great night. Huge crowd, tons of people from work (Joni worked at the University too, until she left this year to pursue music fulltime), and KC's boys were there too, so Jack had some buds to sit with. :D

Now it is just storming! The radio was talking about tornados up around the Peoria area earlier, and so it seems it took about 3 hours for it to make it's way down here. I doubt we will have tornado warnings, but it sure is going to rain and thunder. This is good because it's been in the 90s and 100% humidity. I was hoping the dam would break and pour on us to end this spell of breathing liquid air.

I am still training for the marathon. I am on the tail end of week 3 now, I believe. I started out with 21 weeks, so I will have to modify the 18-week program a little. It was pouring at lunchtime, so I couldn't run then. I ran out at 3pm so I could get my run in and still have time to clean up for Joni's show. I got sprinkled on, but nothing major.

Nothing else is new that I can think of. Once I post this, I am sure I will remember something huge and wonder how I could've possibly forgotten. ;)