Well, today was just about perfect. I spent the morning reading and staring at the garden (it is untrue that a watched garden never grows). In the afternoon, I had a meeting on campus.

And then in the evening, I attended two downtown Lansing events: Pickin' in the Park (scroll down to see Lansing), which is a gathering of folk musicians in Old Town. While I was there they played several standards: Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms, the Tennessee Waltz, and Liberty. (Emil plays Liberty - well, the A part of the tune - on the banjo and mandolin - I teased him when I got home, telling him I heard the B part for the first time tonight.) It is hard to imagine a better way to spend a perfect summer's evening than listening to a hammer dulcimer . . .

I couldn't stay for the whole concert, though, because I was on my way to LCC's Summer Theatre performance of The Miss Firecracker Contest. (Short review: The actors were better than the script, which gave them little to hang onto.)

The big deal about the whole evening, though, was that I rode my bike, first to Old Town, then to LCC, and then home down Michigan Avenue (to Sparrow, where I ducked into a neighborhood). I was nervous coming home; it was later than I've ever been out in downtown Lansing, and I wasn't sure I'd feel at all safe. But usually things like that are scarier before I do them, and this was no exception. The ride home was positively lovely; the nearly-full moon shone through a scrim of clouds, and there was just enough traffic to make me feel like the place wasn't deserted, but not enough to make me feel endangered by crazy motorists.

So now I feel like another world has opened to me. Before we moved, I was hoping that I'd have that experience; but by the time we got here last summer, the summer events were over so I didn't really know. I've also discovered that the route from East Lansing to our house feels unambiguously safe to me - so I look forward to many nighttime adventures there, too (starting with the carillon concert next Wednesday). I love it when things work out!

And in other good news: my friend Louise's latest book, At Ellis Island, got a nice review in Publishers' Weekly this week. Go take a look. (You have to scroll down to read it.) I guess I'm pretty darned impressed. This book is published by Simon and Schuster, which is not exactly a vanity press . . . The more I learn about publishing, the harder I know it to be to get books published; and I am just over-the-top proud of her. You go, Louise!