A Mid-Summer Update
by Tom Shafer
Apologies for the lack of updates recently. I haven’t really felt like I was doing anything worth writing about, and I don’t particularly like reading blogs whose owners write simply for the sake of writing.
Having said that, there has been a bit of news that I’ll share.
- Martha and I celebrated our first anniversary this past weekend, which is crazy and exciting. We celebrated by leaving the apartment at 5 in the morning to go on a pair of trips (her to Atlanta, me to Wilmington).
- My love for football (soccer) managed to scale up to full-on obsession with the passing of the 2010 World Cup. Spain defeated the reckless flying Dutchmen (with spikes up) to win their first Cup, which was pretty exhilarating. Now I wait for the start of the Premiership while catching the occasional MLS game on ESPN2.
- On a related note, Martha & I became obsessed with the wonderful Off the Ball Podcast produced for ESPN over the last month. Truly a class podcast and we were terribly sad to see it go — only to hear that it may indeed resume for the English Premier League season!
Additionally, I am still working with a professor in Chapel Hill on some nuclear physics projects. All in all I still don’t know that I want to do this kind of thing (research) for the rest of my life — it has the distinct feel of settling. It is a good opportunity, though, and I’m getting paid to learn new programming languages (Fortran, Python) so that’s fun.
Finally, I’m still playing music a bit which is bittersweet. I play a couple of times a month at The Summit Church, and my homies at Port City Community Church are nice enough to let me jump back into the rotation every now and again. This is sweet because I like playing music, particularly at Overflow. This is only bittersweet because I underestimated how much I crave a sort of total immersion into playing; trips to Wilmington these days are a much-needed shot of class and a diversion, not the norm.
Still, it is indeed summer time and the weather and general mood have been quite good (as I write this, of course, my weather widget reports storms the next six days). Looking ahead, Martha & I have her birthday coming up (!) a sweet Paramore show, a music date at the Summit Church, and a week-long vacation getaway extravaganza with the Paschals! Oh, and then I get to kick off the new semester with the Overflow crew. Gonna be a great month. Except for the weather, which really is unbearably humid up here.
