The fall semester starts tomorrow. I’ll be taking these classes:

• Hi 612: British Empire and Imperialism
• Hi 502: Renaissance
• Hi 503: Europe in the 19th Century

Last Saturday, Abby and I went hiking with her brother Andrew and his wife, Melanie. We went to Jones Gap, a state park in South Carolina. It looked like rain at the beginning of the day, but it rained only lightly for a short time and then cleared up. The light rains kept down the bugs, the crowds, and the temperature, so we were thankful for it.

We hiked about two miles into the park. At the most adventurous point we had to cross a shallow stream. I walked across some rocks; Andrew noted the shallowest places and ran across; the girls took off their shoes and socks, rolled up their pants, and marched across. We stopped to see the waterfalls and to take pictures. I was surprised at how different the Appalachians in the Southeast are from those in New England. The trail was almost never rocky; usually it was clay and sometimes even sand. The wet clay was slicker than rock, but hiking on softer soil seemed easier than hiking on rock.

After the hike, Andrew and Melanie invited Abby and me to their home for dinner. Then Andrew and Melanie beat us rather severely at Rook, just as Anna Beth and Kellen had beaten us on a different night.

Two weeks ago, a wonderful woman and I began dating. Her name is Abby.

On Saturday, July 29, I went with Abby and her family to Tugaloo State Park in Georgia. When we arrived, we explored the park to see what there was to do. We settled on canoeing for our first activity. I started off as the captain of my vessel, with able-bodied seaman Anthony Garland paddling in the front and midshipwoman Abby in the middle. My steering was judged less than adequate by both Abby and Anthony, so they mutinied. We all turned around in our seats so that I was paddling in the bow, Anthony was captain in the stern, and Abby, oddly enough, was still the midshipwoman. Abby was terrified (her own word) throughout most of the voyage, largely because of her brother’s attempts to give her a more enjoyable ride by rocking the boat, which I may have assisted with a little bit. When it started raining we turned around and headed for the shore.

After a picnic lunch, it had stopped raining, so we played played sand-lot volleyball—Abby and Mr. Garland vs. Anthony, Auria, and I, with Mrs. Garland as photographer. We then played miniature golf. Auria, Abby, and I played together, and Mr. and Mrs. Garland and Anthony played together. At the end of eighteen, Anthony was the victor.

After a few more activities, we returned to the Garland residence. There we ate dinner (the barbeque that I had been told so much about lived up to its reputation) and watched all four thousand of Abby’s photos with running commentary by Abby, Anthony, and Mr. Garland.

Note: Abby wrote the first draft of this post, but I have revised it. Perhaps she will see fit to restore any details I have omitted.

Gentle readers: I had planned to write several more posts within the next couple of days. But alas! during this, my most popular series of posts to date, my hosting service has notified me that they will be changing servers. ΙΣΤΟΡΙΑ should continue to be available without interruption, but for at least the next two days I will not be able to update it. I apologize for interruption to the oft demanded and, thus far, well received series of summer posts, and I hope to continue them soon.

Several times this summer, some friends and I have attended outdoor performances of Shakespeare produced by the Upstate Shakespeare Festival and staged in Greenville’s Falls Park.

In early June, Anna Beth, Kellen, Melissa, Jon, Abby, and I saw Macbeth. The acting wasn’t consistently good, but the lead roles were well-performed. After the play, we got ice cream and wandered around the park together.

This production of Macbeth took a different interpretation than I’ve seen before. I have usually considered the play’s driving force to be Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition.” In other words, Macbeth destroys himself with his ambition and the witches’ prophecies serve only as a “spur to prick the sides of [his] intent.” In the production we saw, the witches were never absent from the stage. If they were not the characters speaking at the time, they were at least watching the action. Sometimes the witches were making incantations or controlling the main actors on stage. For example, the three witches were obviously possessing Lady Macbeth during her soliloquy in which she invokes the “spirits that tend on mortal thoughts” to “fill [her] from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty” in preparation for murdering Duncan. The witches also doubled as minor characters who helped fulfill the prophesies. For example, the three witches were also the three murderers of Banquo. In one way or another, they were always controlling the action. Though I think most of that interpretation was imported into the text and that there is much more textual warrant for attributing Macbeth’s downfall to his own ambition, the production’s emphasis on the demonic was a different perspective.

In late July, Anna Beth, Kellen, Abby, and I returned for another play—this time Love’s Labour’s Lost. The production was not nearly as good as that of Macbeth, and some of the actors were incomprehensible. Since we had all seen Love’s Labour’s Lost produced as the summer play at BJU, we decided to leave the play midway through and produce our own entertainment. We wandered through the park a bit, avoided a rather noisy concert, and found a nice spot by the Reedy River. We played games, talked, took photos of the bridge and of one another, and called it a night.

Going to the park and watching Shakespeare (or not watching Shakespeare) is surely a pleasant way to spend a summer’s evening, provided one is in good company.

Last Tuesday, July 25, Kellen Funk, Eric Brown, and I visited the library at Furman University, not far from BJU. Before we got to the library itself, we went into Furman’s chapel. The chapel is a beautiful, bright, open building with a magnificent pipe organ as a centerpiece. Kellen has been too sheltered within fundamentalism: he thought the footrests were pretty neat until I explained to him that they were for kneeling.

Next we headed to the James B. Duke Library. Kellen is beginning the research for his senior history paper, so he wanted to check Furman’s holdings on his topic and especially to use their access to databases for historical research. I was there to investigate the library in general but particularly to see the Baptist Historical Collection. It’s a collection of records from South Carolina Baptist churches that I hope to use someday for a paper.

You can see photos of the library from Furman’s website or in my gallery.

Several of my gentle readers have complained that this blog is, for the moment, a failure. One even offered to write posts for me. Just this morning, Kellen e-mailed me this stinging rebuke:

Sir, your blog is deplorable. It needs IHOP. It needs Reedy River. It needs Furman . . . Sir, your life is spicier at this moment than at any other time you’ve been maintaining this blog, and your blog right now is so very lacking.

I apologize to you, gentle readers. I promise that within the next few days I shall write about all my adventures, complete with photos.