three good newses

we'll start with marek. he's the student i helped make an appointment, etc. for next week. he wrote me another email just now with:

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Date: Fri, 01 Jul 2005 01:30:14 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: Re: are you coming?

Hi Lara,
just to announce, I'm alive: have antibiotics and next appointment was planned to Tuesday.
So I hope nobody will tempt me to drink on Monday.
marek
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the czech boys are funny :-)... i didn't see marek today, but i did see josef, jan, and martin... jan gave a little more detail than marek with "yes, it was a strange skin disease, the doctor didn't quite know what it was either, but hopefully the antibiotics will help!" -- that is much better than appendicitis, and goes to show just how off going from direct translation can be :-P

anyhow, marek getting non-serious news from the doctor is good news #1

in other news, i've spent 5 hours today just exercising in some form or another... my usual 45 minute workout in the morning...

that was followed by walking over 5 miles this afternoon so that i could hit that "i walked over 100 miles in the month of june" benchmark... 100 miles -- that's good news #2 :-)

good news #3 was the following email that one of my students sent out yesterday:
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Subject: volleyball on Thursday

Hey guys and girls. This is an invitation to play volleyball on Thursday,
2005-06-30 at about 6:00pm or so, weather permitting. A few of us will be
playing then at the sand courts near the Sonny ... Center. Come join us if
you would like -- no experience or skill required. If you have any
questions, e-mail me or call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx. yep - Andrew
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i played volleyball on a team for 6 years of grade school and junior high... i used to have the most perfect underhand serve that i could pick the square foot of court i wanted to hit and nail it 99% of the time... i remember drills at team practice, where for example, we'd get in a line and serve and if we hit the net or out of bounds we had to run a lap and come back... the coaches would purposely stop the line sometimes and make me serve repeatedly UNTIL i goofed. i was never good at slamming it over the net, but bumping it around, diving (esp. if in sand), and serving have always been my friends, and i was consistently good through the end of HS even if i didn't play on a team anymore.

anyhow, at my REU in san antonio 4 years ago we made teams of 3 and duked it out at the sand courts on campus there pretty regularly... i was the only girl who would play so it was usually 3 on 3 with me and 5 guys and it was a blast... my regular team of 3 was undefeated the whole summer.

imagine my joy last year at seeing that rutgers has sand courts too! only last summer i never found people to play with... they're all about basketball and aerobie... and i'm not...

anyhow, when i got andrew's email, i was excited and showed up today... my aim is not what it used to be, but 85% of the time i can still throw a decent serve, and i definitely am not the least inhibited about diving for the thing. anyhow, just like 4 summers ago, it was 6 of us playing 3 on 3 and i was the only girl. for most of the time, it was me, martin (the czech grad student), and andrew (the student who shares an office with me and martin), against 3 of the REU guys... for part of the time it was two americans with one czech student, and then another czech student showed up and traded out with one of the americans.

we seriously played for over 2.5 hours in the heat. playing 3 on 3 instead of bigger teams means a LOT of running around, and the guys are all in better shape than me, so i'm very happy to sit still for the night now, but it was a FANTASTIC time while it lasted :-) i'll have lost 30 pounds since january in the very near future... and my goal was just to get down to that before prague... with 3 more weeks to go, there's a chance i could be down 35 before i go... this is a party too :-)

yay for fun times.

*now* to be lazy :-P