It's almost August. August!

I was reminded recently that I am a horrible blogger. I do not object.

Lately I have been very busy with Spanish/battling dragons, but this is a relaxing Friday night and I'm about to go outside again. I recently added lights to the backyard and it's well-equipped for grilling, so I may take some salmon out of the freezer tonight. Our small yard is home to a pretty comfy-though-dangerous hammock, a gas grill that burned some hair off my left arm last week, a plastic table with an umbrella, a sprinkler with timer set for 6 a.m., lawnmower, weed-eater, satellite dish, several styles of lawn chairs, and my bicycle. It's a steel-frame Schwinn that is too heavy to ride up a mountain and too slow to really make good time with around town. But, tonight I took it out for the first time in quite a while, and I've just attached my new headlight and taillight. I'd like to use it more regularly. I've managed to spend a few hours at the gym each week in July.

I miss playing softball, and I haven't put much time toward my thesis this summer. Spanish is going fine; I'm not retaining a lot at this point, but I'm doing well in the class. We're about to finish 112, and 113 starts on Wednesday for 3 weeks. After that I hope to work on my thesis every day until I begin preparing to teach WR 121 in mid-September.

A note about "The Dark Knight": very good, but it falls short of excellent, in my opinion. The cheesy dialogue may hold true to the genre (I'm not an expert), but some of Batman's lines could have been much stronger. Heath Ledger is fantastic, even better than I expected as the Joker. The film is about 30 minutes too long, and my sense of it is that the directors and editors were a little too caught up in the magnificence of their product. Cutting maybe 20 minutes of the 2.5-hour film could have made it stronger. Ledger makes such a wicked Joker that I wanted to see the film bumped to an R rating so that the truly sinister nature of this character could play out on screen. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed the movie and it met my expectations. Ledger deserves a big nomination...

Tomorrow I am helping a friend shoot a short film for a class project. I'm hoping I don't look nervous on screen. Drama was never my thing, but I think I can ignore the camera and take on this character in the way my friend envisions. It'll be a good time. Maybe I'll post the final product here. Maybe not!