July is for new adventures.

A quick, picture-heavy update before I go to dinner. We're going for Ethiopian food tonight. Should be fun!

So one adventure I will be embarking upon in July is the San Francisco Marathon!! That's right, I finally took a deep breath and signed up today! I put in a good 20-miler this morning (12 miles with my new running partner and 8 miles with the dogs; it's good to break it up a little like that), and it went off without a hitch and I feel weirdly good right now. Not ravenously hungry, not particularly tired, and only a little stiff. So I think I'm ready! This will be me in one month:



Aaaahh! Races are so exciting! And a 5:30 start time in downtown San Francisco, plus running across the Golden Gate Bridge at dawn will undoubtedly be awesome.


Adventure #2 (which will actually transpire before Adventure #1) is, of course, that we're moving. I walked by the new house and snapped a few quick shots the other day. As I said before, it's nothing particularly lovely to look at from the outside, so part of me wants to not even post these shots, but I realize that curious minds want to know. :)

That last one is from a little down the street so you can see the neighborhood a little bit. We're both so excited to get moved in! Can't wait to be there, get settled, and show y'all what the inside looks like.

The only other thing I would add is that I've been working on a very cool art project that I'm extremely pleased with and proud of. Remember I told you about the Galapagos Islands in black ink on our new kitchen floor? Well, I've been contemplating decorating our little dining room table for some time now, and I was thinking of putting flowers all over it to go with the flora/fauna theme of the floor. But then I thought, y'know, as much as I love biology, I'm a linguist, and I should do something that reflects what I do while still complementing the aesthetics of the floor. So this is what I came up with:


Basically, I covered the table and chairs with the words "one language is never enough" in several dozen different languages. It was particularly fun because I haven't done an art project in a long time, and because I was able to come up with something original that actually turned out how I envisioned it! I'm particularly pleased with the the non-Roman scripts, e.g. the Chinese and Japanese you see in the last picture below. They were challenging because I free-handed it all; I printed off little strips of paper with the words I wanted, carefully copied them onto the table in pencil, then went over them and jazzed them up a bit with black permanent marker.




I actually have 2 or 3 more to finish, but the vast majority of it is finished.

Okay, I think I'm done for now. Love to all!