One Thing I Have Learned About This Summer

So, it would seem that now that it's summer and I do not tote my laptop around with me whenever I leave the apartment, I have become a rather poor blogger. Never fear, my loyal readers! I'm going to make a point of updating. For real. And I was going to type up an awesome update on Saturday but while Robert and I were downtown at Copacabana with our computers the tornado sirens went off and rather interrupted any work we were trying to get done.

(Actually, it was this very dramatic moment. I had gone two doors down to the public library to turn in R's book and pick a new one for myself when the sirens went off. Red lights began flashing in the library and a voice came over the loudspeaker saying that they were about to lock down the whole library. I made my way to the exit and then ran, cowboy boots and all, back to find R at Copacabana. The sirens here are a lot more dramatic than the Conway tornado sirens, and running with those blaring in the audible foreground felt very movie-esque).

But you may wonder what I have been up to for the past nearly three weeks!

I finished my paper on Mrs. Dalloway and The Mezzanine and gave a very mediocre presentation on it.





(shirt: Urban Outfitters; belt: via my mum; cardigan: JCrew outlet; jeans: Gap; necklace: gift; boots: gift)

I managed to scrape two A-minuses in my courses for the semester. (Remember, I also have one Incomplete as I have been given the summer to write the seminar paper).

Since then, I've mostly been enjoying the absolute abundance of dandelions in Iowa City!




The weather has teetered between ideal (65ish degrees and sunny, 70ish degrees with a breeze) and just a tad too hot (80 degrees and sunny with little to no breeze). I've taken to sitting out on the pedestrian mall on a bench with iced tea and a book. If R is working he usually joins me when he gets off and we sit in the sun until we get hungry for dinner. This past weekend we managed to find a nice shady bench to enjoy the live music out on the ped mall as well.

I zipped through Sarah Hall's most recent novel, How to Paint a Dead Man, which I thought was beautiful and at times poignant, and reread Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys) to remind myself of my love for Mr. Rochester. At present I have about 30 pages left of the second volume of Anais Nin's diary.

I also baked my first apple pie!



The crust was mediocre, but the filling was quite good.

In perhaps most important news, I finally found an apartment for next year! It is a wee bit pricey (particularly considering the fact that no utilities are included and I'll have to pay for a parking spot), but the location is perfect and the interior gigantic and beautiful. Yay! Obviously there is more to say on this matter, but I'll save that for another post, perhaps when I can post a picture of the outside.