Horses, Puppies, and Tonys

Your Sis worked hard this weekend to finish all the grading. She was at work until about 10 p.m. Friday. I used the time to run at the college. Starting Saturday, she hunkered down on the couch and hit the research papers. We bought some produce at a local tailgate market before noticing a book sale at the library. I picked up a "West Wing" script book and a hardcover copy of Stephen King's Cell. I've wanted both for a long time. We watched about five hours of horse racing, and that's plenty to last me until next year. An outdoor dinner preceded some yard work. She weeded while I cleared away the ignored half of the garden. Then we assembled the tree pruner Your Dad gave us and took down some thick branches that kept me from mowing parts of the lawn. The back yard is in full glory at this time of year. The lush trees hide the surrounding trees, and it's become a private cylindrical garden.

I got up early and ran at the college Sunday. Unfortunately, I literally ran over a puppy. I was watching an oncoming car, and he ran up from behind me and under my feet. Suddenly, I was trampling. His owners were in the yard and saw the incident. They assured me he was just scared, not hurt, and would be OK. I felt awful. Another runner unwisely brought along her giant dog that hated strangers. She had to stop running to keep it from charging me. In better news, I did mange to cut two minutes from my pace time. Not because I was being chased by a giant stranger-hating dog.

Sunday night, we attended a graduation party for one of the transplanted Spanish students at her dad's restaurant. We couldn't follow the many Spanish conversations, but we did strike up a chat with an older couple. And they're retired illustrators for NASA. Is there any cooler job possible? (Answer: Uh, no.) The husband also collected his favorite comic strips from newspapers, and we got to talk comic artists. It was a startling series of conversations that lasted three hours. This just can't happen in Mayberry, not at a high-school graduation party.

Picture of the Day
We got home in time for me to watch the TiFauxed Tony Awards. It was a weak affair with too many "gosh, Broadway is great" numbers from high-profile productions like Mary Poppins. A new show called Spring Awakening took the majority of awards. It seems similar to Rent and seems to have just as rabid a following. That's them performing last night. The Coast of Utopia, a nine-hour trilogy play about European revolution, took the awards for that category.