I have been too busy or distracted to keep a log for a few days. After my long talk with Kate last Sunday night, I had a similarly long phone conversation with Kevin, until we both wore out our phone batteries, while I squirmed with envy to hear him describing the view as he was talking to me from the hot tub on his in-laws' deck overlooking a clear, warm sunset behind the Grand Tetons, and then later oo-ing and ah-ing from seeing a pair of large shooting stars over the mountaintops. That was Wednesday night. Thursday night I went to an art opening at the Harley-Davidson Museum called "The Helmet Project," which was put together by students at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. My former high school student Leslie Sutton is there now, and she invited me to the opening, where we caught up while taking in the exhibition together, and then kept talking over drinks and dessert over at the Hotel Metro. Friday night featured a long evening with the gang, joined by Anthony and Kelly, who drove up from northern Illinois and treated us to Boeuf Bourguignon, along with their company. So Saturday I got back more exclusively to work, although I did have a good long talk with Mom in the evening. More on all that later, I hope.

But Wednesday afternoon, after I had posted my tongue-in-cheek rant about the weather this October, and my feeling that I had been robbed of our usual glorious Peak Week experience, suddenly cleared up, as if in answer to my protest/whine. It still wasn't terribly sunny, but it was a definite improvement. When I got done teaching at 2pm, I walked back over to my apartment, had lunch, and then grabbed my camera and headed back out. Crossing Wisconsin Avenue, I ran into Jessica, and we quickly found out that she was free to join me for an hour taking a look at the colours before she started her shift at Starbucks. This gave her a good laugh in itself, given the several abortive attempts we had made at trying to get together over the last several weeks, only to be able to spontaneously just hang out without trying to make our schedules work.

And so we strolled around the center of campus, swapping off on the camera, and shooting what caught our eye, while we talked of her and Nathan's upcoming plans for the Fall Break, where they were actually going to be constructing the bed she had designed and showed me the other week, in a vaguely Chinese style, as part of their work building up to their wedding in January. We talked about learning to fight fairly with a Significant Other, and the importance of figuring out that skill. Some of my job application stories came up, and we talked about the different kinds of emphases in different positions, and the pros and cons of each of these. And in and out of all the more concrete specifics of life and living as we were currently experiencing it, we talked about angles and colour and composition, and what beauty we were finding in the heart of Marquette's otherwise urban campus. Good times.

I was particularly pleased with the portrait shots I took of her, sitting on a bench by the Chapel of Joan of Arc, of which this is a cropped version of my favourite. This one definitely goes into my "Portraiture" album.