PMP and the Balloon

I'll give you a hint. The bear who stumbled into the piece of the forest that was left out by mistake also has been known to have some fun with a balloon.... floating around in trees and flirting with bees and such.

Today was a pretty good day. I went running, went to work, taught my class, wrote some final eval letters, yelled at students (kindly, of course) about the appropriate format for a research paper (they seem to finally be getting it), had an intriguing meeting with a semi bigwig at the university, met TMH for an exciting errand, had dinner out (overpriced, but a nice treat for us), and found a red balloon.

We were walking through the park on the way to the train. As we were crossing a very busy road (4 lanes, at least) I noticed a balloon bobbing in the distance. It was blocking one lane of traffic, and seemed to have some kind of weight tied to the bottom of it. So of course TMH laughed at me, but of course I had to go check it out. We actually saw one car swerve to get out of the way of the balloon. So once the traffic passed I went and got it. And me and my big red Elmo balloon (with a big red plastic safety pin tied to the bottom) and TMH (who swears he was not embarassed) continued walking, got on the subway, and came home. I told TMH that I would give it to a kid if one on the way seemed worthy, but I didn't really see any who I thought would appreciate it. Now it's helping decorate the apartment. It joins the Chinese Olympic mascots (as new, sort of odd things in TMH's living room), given to me yesterday by one of my very nationalistic Chinese students. He scares me a bit, but the mascots are cool!

As of tomorrow I will officially have just one week left of summer school. Good friends are visiting this weekend (yay for friends!) and then I work, and then TMH and I will have a short beach retreat, and then it will be on to the next chapter for me. For now I won't ponder much on that. I plan to take as much advantage of the next week and a half as I can. It's the end of summer, after all.