My prayers have been answered.  I have at last found a baseball blog devoted to the Cardinals that is both intelligent and well-designed (and doesn't try and make itself seem legitimate by selling a bunch of crap with a logo on it -- take that Birdhouse).  So check out Redbird Nation, if that's what interests you.  It's the Cardinals blog I would write if I had no life. (Wait, I have no life.  Or at least not much of one.  Uh, would you believe it's what I would write if I wasn't working on my novel?  How about if I wasn't watching TV?) 

Anyway, in my humble opinion the All-Star Fest was pretty good this year.  Yeah both the Home Run Derby and the game took a while to get rolling, but both had big exciting finishes (and loooooong fly balls that looked until the last second like they were out of the park and instead were the last out).  I was proud of Pujols' magnificent showing against Jason Giambi in the semifinals of the derby and his valiant effort to comeback on Garret Anderson in the finals.  But I guess it was Garret Anderson's All-Star Week, since he won both the Derby and MVP.  Nice to see the nice guys finish first for once. (Hear that Bonds, lousy DH, 0-3, did bare minimum to appease the fans?) 

I suppose I should mention that I wrote my first paid article this week.  It's only a 600-some word profile of a Lamont alum for the Alumni newsletter; an assignment which I stumbled into because the office in charge of producing said newsletter is also overseeing yours truly in the archive project.  But I did have to spend two extra hours Tuesday evening conducting a phone interview, and I had to do research in preparation, and I am getting paid so I think it counts as a true writing credit.  The newsletter won't come out until November, but they usually post it on their website soon after, so I'll be sure to link to it when I can.

Yippee!  This is the weekend Susan moves into her apartment in New Jersey!  I am not expecting to be able to see her this weekend; she is, as usual, way too nice to ask me for help, and I am trying to psych myself up to get up early Saturday or Sunday and head down to Central Park for the World Archery Championships. This is research for the novel (if you don't already know, the two main characters are both Olympic archers) and if I want to see the women compete with the kind of bow they use at the Olympics, I have to be in Central Park by nine a.m. Which means I will have to shell out for the train, because I'm sure not getting up at 6 to sit on the 5 train for an hour and a half. But at least if I do that, I can feel that I have done some worthwhile work on my novel, even if I haven't written much on it lately.