visitors, jobs, and school...catch up

Amazingly, among the (literally) hundreds of pictures taken last week, there is not a single one in which we all appear...thus Danie's noticeable absence from a cover picture persists. To see her and a handful of pictures from the family's visit last week, click here. As you will likely be able to infer, we had a blast last week. Together we braved a heat wave, worked on the apartment, walked the city, toured the Met and MOMA, played scrabble (of course), and made a concerted, yet inevitably unsuccessful attempt to work our way through the NYC Zagat restaurant guide. Between Dad, home depot drill in hand, adeptly maneuvering the subway system, Mom and Rach moving onto a first name basis with the the local thrift store staff, and the sheer frequency with which we visited the grocery & liquor stores, by the end of the week, Mom, Dad and Rach may easily have been mistaken for locals. And after that much fun, maybe some day they will be...

Now that they have departed, Danie and I are back to more quotidian activites. Danie's job search has proven successful, as she has just been hired as a server at an upscale French restaurant a couple blocks from our apartment. She starts training Monday. She also just got word that her application for Teach for America made the first cut, and will therefore be having a phone interview in September. I couldn't be more excited or proud of her. Should the phone interview go well, she can look forward to a day-long panel interview later in the Fall. Wow.

As for me, this week has been a bit hectic but very exciting. Tuesday night I had orientation and Wednesday I met for the first time with my advisor. Since then, I've been working on my class schedule quite a bit, which is both exciting and exhausting. The course offerings are remarkably extensive, and the faculty's CVs humbling, to say the absolute least. This makes choosing classes difficult, as I want to take far more classes than I will be allowed. Oh well, there's always next semester.