MIA in blogland

OK, well, now it's really been too long since I've written. What happened? After the Memorial Day Weekend Lockout, I had some catching up to do. In fact, I'd planned on writing a bit for this very blog that weekend, but haven't scraped the time together since. I had gone to Philly the week prior for a meeting, and this past weekend I went back to Philly for my pal Molly's Training for Change workshop, "White People Confronting Racism 1". That was something of a whirlwind tour, and the training was 9am to 9pm Saturday type of affair. After a leisurely Sunday where I caught up on sleep, this week has been all about three intensive days of training my work's 16 international interns, who all leave Friday for their respective countries. Whew! Tomorrow's the last day of training, and boy, am I wiped. There are two more interns coming later, so we do it again for them in a condensed version over this weekend. If you haven't heard from me in a while, that's why. Not an excuse! But I am a little busy. June is pretty packed, and there's a seven-day trianing at the end of it that will take me away to Baltimore for a bit. Other than that, the travel has abated somewhat, and I've been mostly in DC.

On the not-work-related side of things, WHEW, is it HOT here! I'm having a hard time adjusting - I sweat pretty constantly. Not that all y'all need to know this, but hey, if you know me, you know I'm all about too much information.But as my dear mother often says, "It's not the heat, it's the stupidity." I don't think she's referring to herself, but I am — I think my brains melted out of me sometime mid-Monday.

There was a pretty serious thunderstorm here Tuesday, which was amazing. Safely ensconced in a Thai food restaurant on a date with Elly (where we had decided it was too hot for a picnic, and I'm glad we did) I watched, gape-mouthed, as hundreds of lightening bolts and sky-shattering thunderclaps raged outside. Which was all very lovely until it dawned on me that we had to bike home. Yipes! As much as I was convinced that I would be a human lightening rod, and that my nervousness about this fact would somehow encourage the lightening to find me, we were fine. The rain was refreshing. I'm worried about when actual summer hits, but I think this may be it. Elly and I need to invest in a fan that's talled that a foot & a half, which is what we've got now. This is your mundane weather report for the evening.

The life of my brain, when not melted out my ear, is doing better. I've gotten to plough through a book about the Weather Underground that I'd wanted to read for a while, the Ron Jacobs one. I'm also trying to embark on reading Das Capital, but it's tough without a study group-slash-cheerleading effort. I also just got Paul Kivel's new book about class, You Call This a Democracy? and I'm very excited to get started on it.

In other news, I've been drawing cartoons lately. Jeff G on my friendster testimonial mentioned that I might put them up on the blog some day (I had thought about it a while ago) but I think I'll actually do it. Huzzah!

That's all the news from maxland to report...