Ah, yes! Saturday morning after a hard week. My shoulders and back hurt, but I am happy to have made it through, without a full-blown nervous breakdown. My boss seems appreciative. There is still much to be done, but the books balance. Perhaps sometime this week, we will be able to tell the auditor we are ready. Aside from working straight through lunch until 4:00, there is not much to tell about that.

We spent less than an hour at home before heading  to the beginning of the year party at the home of the Geology Dept. chair, Mike. Mike is sort of a rough soul, who has been a friend of ours for 25 years. He lives in the wilds of Walton County, 30 minutes or more from our house. We were pretty early, but eventually many other faculty and graduate students found their way there. We arrived about the same time as a young couple, whose names I will spell wrong, Baris and Sanam, and their three-year-old daughter. They are Turkish, and in fact, there are three visiting Turkish geologists this fall. The other two are women. One has brought her 14-year-old daughter, Akanai, for a few weeks, since school has not started yet in Turkey. I enjoyed trying to communicate with them in slow English (the daughter's English is very good), since I don't speak any Turkish, which is not related to any other languages, if I remember right. Although they are here to study geology and collaborate with the scientists, it seems to me that they should be out in the community talking about Turkey and meeting people. We'll see what I can make happen... It made me wish I worked for the UGA office of international students, which is one of the places I applied during my long stretch of unemployment, and did not even get contacted, if I remember right.

Potluck was good. Also met some new office staff Ray has mentioned and one of their 9-year-old daughters, Charlotte. Charlotte is all skin and bones and a very picky eater. I am worried about her. She likes to read and watch scary movies. The Ring is just lame, in her opinion, not very scary. I wouldn't know; I never watch any of them. She recently discovered a book she really enjoyed and read all of: Wait Till Helen Comes. I recommended the Redwall series to her mother; don't know if it will take. In my usual obnoxious style, I made Ray leave at 8:30, practically the first people to go. It was incredibly humid outside, sweat was dripping off my nose. The Turkish women gathered around, asking me why I was leaving. I invited them to church on Sunday.

Ray was watching Harry Potter as I drifted off to sleep.