Knee high by the fourth of July

Well, we're a little past that! We've had great success so far with our first garden. We have lots of lettuce, radishes, green onions, cilantro, and basil. We also are just starting to get our first zucchinis. This was the smaller one of the two I found...

Tonight I made stuffed zucchini, zucchini bread, and pesto (which I froze for future use). Here are our basil plants (don't mind the weeds).

We definitely made the first-timers mistake of planting all of the seeds at once, so we have all of these veggies ready at the same time. Next year there will be multiple waves of planting.

In other news...Brian has been keeping busy at work, though he got three days off over the weekend. Alan came over and they did a bunch of fishing in Lake Emily...and even caught some fish right in our little bay. I'll let him tell the story.

During Alan's visit, the three of us took a field trip to the Schell's brewery in New Ulm. It was a pretty interesting tour and they had a great little museum at the brewery that we all enjoyed. At the end of the tour, they let you do a little tasting and then send you out to wander around the beautiful gardens.

I've been keeping busy with work this summer. I'm working on a few projects. I come up for tenure this fall. That means that the College does a major review of me and everything I've done during my time at Gustavus to decide if they want to keep me around or not. It's a big deal because if you are granted tenure, you pretty much have a job for life (if you want it). If you are denied tenure, it means they are firing you. So, in preparation for this review, I have to put together a big binder (plus another copy of it) of all my work and write up a bunch of documents that explain who I am and what I've accomplished. It sure is an awful lot of paper! I was pretty worried about whether I would get tenure, but now I've calmed down a lot. For one thing, everyone I talk to at the College says it's basically a slam dunk. I have great student evaluations, six publications since I started here, lots of service to the college, and a series of great performance reviews. The process still puts a little knot in my stomach, but I feel pretty confident about it.

My other big project is a research project. I've been working with a student to research an advocacy organization called the Joint Religious Legislative Coalition. The JRLC is made up of representatives from the Minnesota Council of Churches, the Minnesota Catholic Conference, the Jewish Community Relations Council, and the Islamic Center of Minnesota. They only advocate for issues which all four groups can agree too...and surprisingly, there are a lot of areas of agreement. It's a very interesting organization and we've been learning a lot. We've spent a lot of time in the Minnesota Historical Society archives thumbing through records and have conducted a number of interviews with people who are active with the group. I'm hoping that the end product will be a book, but that's a long ways off.

Well, Brian's back from his run and the zucchini bread is out of the oven. Time to sign off and see how it turned out (the bread, not the run :) ).