Weekly post

July 18, 2005

Dear friends,
Only a month remains until the start of the fall semester at the divinity school. Orientation is scheduled for the weekend of Aug. 19, and registration is the following Monday. Classes begin, I think, right after that.
Needless to say, I am very excited. Part of orientation will include meeting my adviser and laying out, I expect, a long-term view of what courses to take when. Mark and I have agreed that in terms of studying, it will be best to do much of it on campus at the university library, so that when I'm home I can really be at home and enjoy family life. It is so important to try to maintain that balance! I will probably go in very early each morning to have some study time on campus so that I can be home at a reasonable hour each evening. I can hardly wait to see what my fall schedule will look like!
In other news, I took my 10-year-old son to the Harry Potter release party at the local Barnes & Noble on Friday. That was great fun. The store was packed with children and adults in costume, games and activities were all over the place, and the atmosphere was contagious. At 11:15 p.m., staff cleared us all out into the parking lot and began lining us up in groups of 50 according to the number on the paper wristband we'd been issued (I was number 248, not bad at all). At 11:55, the first group of 50 was let into the store, and at about 12:02, the manager announced, "The first copy of 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' has been sold!!" There were cheers and applause from the crowd of 800 or so. I was let in at 12:15 and joined a line that, as at Disney World, snaked around bookshelves. We all passed the time by plucking various books off the shelves and skimming. Unfortunately, the line moved too quickly through biography and history but got bogged down in chick lit.
Got my copy, and we drove home. The boy went right to bed, but I stayed up long enough to read the first two chapters. By Sunday night I had finished it, and cleaned the oven to boot! I must say, that oven looks good. The boy is about 120 pages in. It will take him about a week to 10 days to read. It's very, very well written and a terrific read. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
There will be NO posting next week. On Saturday, we leave to spend a week at a beach house lent to us by friends on a quiet, remote tip of land near the Chesapeake Bay. Key words here are "quiet" and "remote." I don't plan to take my laptop, so please don't worry if you don't hear from us. I will have my cell phone with me in the unlikely event of a major emergency, but otherwise, I'm looking forward to some quiet.
Grace and peace,

Beth

P.S. I hope that if so moved you will post the occasional comment! There should be a link for that at the end of each post. :-)