on your journey, i will bless you...

According to the Google homepage, today is apparently the first day of summer. Edit: I clicked on the Google doodle, and the first day of summer is actually tomorrow, June 21 (the Summer Solstice). Well, way to massively mislead people there, Google. Anyway, this is a bit about how Rebecca spent it.

I overslept this morning, and as soon as I finally woke up, the electricity in our apartment sputtered and died. No air conditioner, no fans, no refrigerator, etc. -- ugh! I called our electricity company but never got through to an actual person, and the power came back on after about thirty minutes anyway. And that might not seem like a long time, but it's been so hot lately that our apartment warmed up fast.

After that, I left to run some errands on my bike. And even though it's been drought-dry for the past two months, of course it suddenly decided to start raining while Rebecca is on her bike. (And I don't mean a little sprinkle but a heavy rain.) I didn't mind getting wet, but fool that I am, I left The Postmistress (a book my mom lent me, and it's not bad, even though it's taking me forever to read) outside and it got soaked! At least it seems to be drying well. It tooker longer than I had thought to get my errands done - my own fault for oversleeping - and I had to really haul butt to get to work on time.

I didn't have my parapluie française (which I bought on a rainy day in Villers-Cotterets) while I was bike riding, but it didn't matter, because when I got home and tried to open it, the handle broke in two. I guess the Louisiana weather was too much for it.

But the day wasn't all bad. Muse Watson used to leak whenever it rained (which I know he didn't do before the crash), but I think stopped him up. One of my more annoying coworkers quit over the weekend, and to celebrate him being gone, my awesome manager bought the entire closing crew candy and soda. When I verified the deposit amount for him and caught a mistake he made, he said something like, "Wow, you Jews really are good at counting money, aren't you?" Haha. He cracks me up.

So, summer has officially arrived, people. (Although here in southern Louisiana, we've been having summertime temperatures since at least April.) Enjoy yours.

I'm almost halfway done with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. So far I've stuck to my goal of reading one chapter a day, and I'm still keeping a journal of it, which I write in almost every day (which is why I've haven't been writing in this journal so much lately).

I'm back at Mom's house for now. Moving out of Slobpartment went smoothly and certainly much better than moving out of Tarpartment, although Mom was late arriving in Baton Rouge because she'd stayed up late the night before finishing Harry Potter (every Potter fan in the world is probably done with it by now except me). Although I didn't hate living in Slobpartment, I was not sorry to see the last of it. My three roommates there were nice girls but incredibly wasteful -- hence my name for the place. One of them bought milk and let it sit in the refrigerator until it was lumpy. One of them made brownies and let them sit on the counter until they were rock-hard. One of them bought a chicken dinner, took one bite, and threw the rest away. I never said anything to them about it, but it really angered me. Wasting food like that is an insult to everyone in the world who doesn't have enough to eat.

I finally found a temporary job, which is a huge relief. I'm working at the bookstore at the university here for the first few weeks of the fall semester; they hired me right away when I told them that I was a veteran of the LSU bookstore. My first day was today, and although it was difficult to wake up so early and stand up for so long, it feels good to be earning money again. The air conditioner in the bookstore was broken, but it wasn't as bad as you'd expect of Louisiana in August -- several were fans were on, and one them was blowing right on me. But a broken air conditioner is probably the least of that school's problems. From what I saw, there was no landscaping or custodial services, litter was everywhere, outdoor benches were covered in bird shit, and the public restrooms in the student union were filthy. Most of all, it was unbelievably small. The bookstore where I work only has one floor, and its textbook department is less than a fourth of LSU's. When I first started at LSU, I regretted not going to this college instead, but now I'm thankful that I didn't. It doesn't even have a French Department! The French education that I would have received there couldn't compare to what I learned at LSU. (Sara said that when I ring up their totals, I should add to my customers, "Getting an education, priceless," like in the MasterCard commercials.)

Speaking of my French education, my departure for France is drawing frighteningly near. We're making a trip to the Visa Consulate in Houston tomorrow to apply for my visa, and I'll probably be buying my airplane ticket soon. More on that as it develops.