"Healthy" August

Perhaps it was good, in hindsight, to pick August as the month that we don't drink and smoke, because the Fringe Festival is driving up all the prices!! Anyway, Day 9, and we are doing great. Not sure if any weight is coming off -- but we are enjoying the change of scenery and different activities filling our days and nights! I'm not gonna lie to you though, we are both looking forward to a cocktail and a smoke come August 31!!!

I am almost done with another book for my summer reading list. It is on the institutions of the European Union - the EU is an amazing, complex system of cooperation and consensus building in a vast and diverse network of nationalities. I am impressed more with each page that I read. I am excited to discuss the significance of such an organization in my classes! I am intellectually charged ;)

Aside from that, I am continuously revising and trying to perfect the Scottish Colloquium that I'll be facilitating again this fall. I have beefed up the dialogue and discussion pieces, and made the 3 smaller, hopefully for engaging, projects, versus the massive research paper of last spring. It's been feeding my internal need to plan-create-make that I enjoy so much about teaching.

On top of that, I have taken on the task of identifying, counting and organizing (both physically and in a database) the books in the library--well, the Scottish/British history, literature and reference portion anyway. I only just started today, but it is fascinating to see how old some of the texts are and to discover the literary treasures that exist.

Time to walk---that beer gut isn't going to walk it self off Ryan.