...I am beautiful...

...and my friends say so too...
  --After Forever (paraphrased)

My summer break in review:
First, I must note that this really has felt like a summer break, completely and utterly squashed into a week.  There have been many good times, among them the many good times spent with friends between last Saturday and today.  I got a fair amount of work done around the house, including mowing the grass, trimming bushes, other generic yard projects, painting a gutter and part of a fence, and swapping the important contents of two computers.  I also did other stuff like celebrating my birthday, throwing a moderately successful dinner party, finally getting around to getting my check book ordered, hopefully getting my insurance stuff nailed down for school, unsucessfully looking for a place to live, relapsing into infatuation with a girl that broke my heart months ago, getting light-headed from too much inhalation of hookah provided, apple-flavoured tobacco smoke, consuming a Bacardi Silver, playing both some of the worst and best pool in my life, playing Super Smash Brothers Melee for the first time in years (and getting soundly defeated), being a general jackass in public, going to a Harry Potter book-release party (that was an anime convention in miniature, complete with cosplay), watched most of a Japanese miniseries, studied Japanese, and accomplished a small amount of reading. 
How's that for a summer break?
Oh, I also almost convinced myself to drop out of graduate school and just start working in Greenville.  But, for better or worse, my more "rational" side won out, claiming that Japan was still a more important goal than the more immediate pleasures of maintaining close friendships in Greenville.  Only time will tell on this one.
Now...gotta start surviving real grad school, and not this picnic that was Intensive Introductory Japanese.

Crazy kids and their crazy micro-breaks!