Newsy stuff

Kara and I are both up in NY now which is just amazing. Having Kara here is so very, very good. I think the apartment is going to be a good fit for us. Our downstairs neighbors are fantastic and really friendly w/ all sorts of tips about where to get stuff. I think it will a good living situation with them. Moving went really well w/ many thanks to Dad Morse and Drew w/ whom I packed the truck until 11:15 pm on Friday night which enabled us to be on the road by 10 am on Sat. This was the scariest drive I've ever done. The truck was only 16 foot but there were a handful of times where the back started swaying like some giant hand was rocking the load back and forth. I'm not going to lie-these were times that very short, direct, vocal prayers were uttered. I was not going especially fast 55-60 but the bumps in the road apparently were not congruent with the truck's load. Serious kudos also go to Jeremy Finn, Hanan and Brent from 1st Presbyterian for helping us unload after spending the morning doing hard labor elsewhere. (Hanan is about 6'2'', 225 lbs. plays defensive tackle for SUNY Brockport and has quads that are bigger than my chest. He was running up and down the sidewalk w/ boxes, basically treating the whole thing like some sort of football drill-it was awesome!!) It was also excellent to have my mom lay out some serious food for us afterwards.
Kara and I went with Jeremy and Alisha and Alisha's parents to walk through a building in downtown Endicott that Jeremy and Alisha are contemplating buying in order to turn it into a community center/outreach place/youth center/apartments/music lessons which we are planning/hoping on being invovled with. The building is huge. It's two storefronts but zoned as one building w/ both buildings measuring 29'x90' and three stories. At the very least the heating pipes and system would need revamped, the electrical needs revamped and some very serious cleaning/painting would need to be done. There's all kinds of volunteer labor lined up but this would be a lifelong investment for Jeremy and Alisha (Endicott real estate sells even slower than hot coffe in the Sahara and has approx. the same value) so please pray for them as they contemplate this decision. This building has some tremendous potential but it would require an porportionally great amount of energy and work.
Kara is working two nights a week at the barn where our two (2) horses are being kept in order to help pay for their board. It's a pretty sweet barn and the owner is quite nice and cool even though I almost let Johnny (our horse) out bc I didn't close the stall door all the way and after taking off his halter he pushed past me and the door and went galumphing around the barn. Bah.
Work has been seriously awesome. Davis College is working towards establishing a elementary educaiton program next fall and they gave me a serious chunk of change to buy books w/ so my office is currently invaded by stacks of ya/juvenile ficiton. The difficult part is not to read them all-there are some seriously good things being written. We're also weeding our cassette and VHS collection to make more space on the main floor for students to study and hang out. There were 6,000 tapes of which there are about 300-400 left to delete. I finished up removing the unwanted VHS tapes today, of which there were about 500 so those will move upstairs. All this to say I'm really pleased with the schedule. However I wanted to upgrade the library catalog system to Koha 3.0 and I haven't even come close to touching that and I'm also teaching two sections of a freshman computer course next semester and so far I have a rough outlined schedule and the syllabus mostly done. Got some work to do on that.

Things approaching
We are headed up to Maine next Friday for a glorious 9 days in Maine.
I, finally and for real this time, finish my masters at the end of July.
Kara and I are headed out to the Newport Folk Festival on August 1st w/ Lori and Geoff.
Please note that FLEET FOXES, Iron & Wine, The Avett Brothers, The Low Anthem, The Decemberists and Pete Seeger are going to be there on Saturday.
There is a DFW conference in November for which I'm working on a paper that needs to be submitted by Aug. 8th; got notes but need to do a bit more research and writing for that to be ready.