At the moment I am at my parent’s house in Los Angeles, house and grandma-sitting while my mom and dad vacation in Italy. In all honesty, I haven’t been doing much at all aside from working on this website and researching. It’s really hot here, and I find it hard to motivate myself to do a lot here since my life is really in Providence now. (Well, we have moved into Providence already, but we have yet to make many friends and all that good stuff, so we are kinda half-living in both cities for now) In any case, my current plans are to return to Providence on July 16th. On the 17th my good friend Jared Auld (who rode across the US with me) will be coming to visit me. I am really excited because I haven’t seen him in two years and he is one of the people that I most respect. After that, I will move on with my plans to build a worm-composting bin at the apartment. I also hope to train on my bicycle, as I have begun riding with the Brown Cycling Team, and I would like to do a race or two with them.

Besides that, I plan on updating and refining this website, reading as many audiobooks as I can get my ears on (I’m totally addicted to audiobooks now, and I find it hard to make the effort to read a normal book!), and making a few more mini-documentaries.  On August 17th my friend Christopher from Germany will be coming over to visit me for a few days.  I haven’t seen him in 5 years, since when he was a foreign-exchange student at my high school, and a fellow member of the much vaunted Taft High School tennis team! On August 30 and 31 I have orientation for grad school at Brown, and then classes finally begin on the 5th of September.  Words cannot express how anxiously I await the start of classes.  I am so excited about delving deeply into environmental issues, working on my thesis, speaking to professors and experts in the field, touring sites, etc.  After all these years of resisting higher education, I have finally gotten to a point where I am truly excited to be studying.  And I certainly have no qualms about saying “oh yea, I’m studying at BROWN. . .you know, the ivy-league school!” Haha, it’s amazing. When I try to get an interview, say for the Fuel Cell Power Plant video that I did, as soon as I mention that I am a student at Brown they tell me “oh yes, we would be happy to give you a tour of the plant.  Oh?  You would like to make a video about it?  Fantastic!”

Michele would really like to do a bike tour this summer, but unfortunately I don’t we’ll have time to do anything longer than a week sojourn.  A few days ago I was talking to Jared about the good ol’ days of our bike trip, and boy, I got a really strong urge to do another long ride.  There is nothing as soothing, meditative, exciting and adventurous as a bike trip.  Well, I’m sure there is, but the thing about a bike trip is that it combines adventure with a relatively safe activity, and it allows you to explore nature, your country, meet people, get to know yourself, and get really, really, extremely fit, all while eating more food than you could possibly imagine.  So while this has nothing to do with the subject of this post, everyone should go out and do a bike trip!  Just go to adventurecycling.com, get a map, get some people to ride with you, and feel free to have the time of your life!