Stories from Summer Vacation: Dr. Julia Mickenberg says "Au revoir" to Paris

This summer update comes to us from UT American Studies professor Dr. Julia Mickenberg, who has just returned from a research stint in Paris:Having only just returned to Austin after six months in Paris (au revoir!), I'm looking forward to being home: getting settled back in, catching up with friends and colleagues, writing with all my books and files close by, going to my favorite yoga classes, doing work in my favorite coffee shops, and cooling off at Ramsey, Deep Eddy, and Northwest Pools with my husband and daughters. Before we left for Paris we started a project of visiting Austin places that in 10+ years here we'd never managed to go to (went to the Zilker Botanical Garden and kayaked on Town Lake, for instance), and I'd like to continue that project: I still haven't been to the French Legation, to Emma Long State Park, or to Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve, and there are also lots of restaurants, cafés, galleries, and shops I need to check out. If it's too damn hot to step outside, I hope to take up sewing. Or something else crafty. Work-wise, I'm trying to finish a chapter that's been making me crazy (the book is on Russia in the American feminist imagination, 1905-1945, and the chapter deals with dance and performance, about which I've had to learn a lot), and to revise an article for a journal. Now that I've publicly announced these goals maybe I will achieve them. We're going to Maine for a week in August with my extended family (including a year-old cousin I still haven't met), and the thought of cool sea air will hopefully sustain my family and me until then. We're planning to get a dog shortly after we get back from Maine. Not sure yet what kind of dog, but it will be a puppy, and we're going to name him or her Sunny. Or Soleil.