COMICS
I've read up to Ultimate Spider-Man volume 8 (that is I read 5,6,7,8). They have been great, the way they introduced Venom was great and I really like any arcs that have the Kingpin, the writer deals with those stories very well. This comic is great and I am glad I gave it a shot. On the fifth volume, there is a wonderful panel between Peter and Mary Jane, it was just a beautiful drawing and it explained everything with words not being necessary.
Thor by JMS. I had heard great reviews about this, so I was expecing more than I got, but it was still a great read. I'll definitely buy the second trade when it comes out (about 4 months from now).
Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan. This is a wonderful graphic novel. Vaughan is my favorite author in comics and once again he delivers a wonderful book. It is a story about four lions walking in Baghdad after the American bombing in 2003 released the animals form the zoo (not on purpose), it is based on a true story, but of course any dialog between animals is made up. It is a very heart warming book with beautiful art.

MOVIES
Twelve Monkeys I saw this movie with Yuliia and Roma. This movie is one of my favorites, I've seen it about ten times and I enjoy it every single time. We watched it on the math department to take advantage of the big screen projectors. I keep enjoying the connections to other movies (i.e Vertigo). One different thing this time was that after watching Ledger's Joker, Pitt's acting doesn't impress me as much as before.
Pineapple Express I went to watch this movie with Sid, it was very funny, I think he laughed almost every second of the movie. I don't know if I would recommend it as I think a big part of the laughing experience was watching it with Sid who also laughs a lot, it is hard to judge how good some comedies are as I believe they greatly rely on how one feels at the moment.

SALSA
I went salsa dancing on Thursday and on Saturday and I had a lot of fun. Thursday was the usual Thursday Night Salsa fun experience, while Saturday was a bit different as it is only every second Saturday of the month when Gusanoz (mexican restaurant) has salsa. Sid filmed Yuliia and me dancing a couple of songs and it was very fun to see me dance with her on a video, it is nice to see how happy we are when dancing and to see how good I look dancing, I definitely have a lot of style.

BOSTON
On Friday, Yuliia, Roma and I went to Boston. Yuliia and I went to get her the visa for her trip to Mexico and then we walked around Boston together. We saw the public library, the Trinity church, the Christian Science Church (which I think is a beautiful building and has a really beautiful pool outside), walked the Harvard bridge and walked around Cambridge. I had a wonderful day with Yuliia, my best time in Boston.
Met with Sid at night and he joined us on the trip back to the Upper Valley. Sid stayed in my house for a couple of nights (Friday, Saturday).

HIKING & SWIMMING
Sid and I went to Stowe to meet up with Greg and Kristin and we went to hike Pinnacle in Stowe. the hike was fun 1.6 miles, it has some pretty steep parts. The view from the top is wonderful and it also had a very pleasant breeze. On the way down, we all ran and at some point Greg and I were going extremely fast, it was dangerous but it was so fun. Another cool thing about the hike was that there were no mosquitoes.
We went to Huntington gorge one of the stops planned on the Swimming hole tour but we couldn't do it. Here there was a nice little jump. I jumped a couple of times and dived once (it wasn't that big a jump and it was super deep, so no risk). The water was very refreshing. The problem with the place was that it was very slippery and walking around I fell four times (or five). There was some mini rapids that Sid accidentally rode for a bit and since it looked fun, Greg and I did them in their entirety and it was super fun, albeit a bit scary. There was another set of rapids, much more powerful and scary and we inflated a raft to ride them. Once we were there nobody wanted to do it as it looked super dangerous, but I rode it and almost fell. There's a wonderful picture which I plan to post someday which illustrates just how close from falling out of the raft in the middle of intense rapids I was. After seeing me survive, Greg did it himself and he rode it in a much more intelligent manner (putting his weight in front instead of on the back) and it looked easy and safe. It was extremely fun to raft on those rapids.

DINNER
Yesterday I had dinner with Yuliia and her hosts Tim and Janet. It was Janet's birthday recently and Yullia and I had bought an ice cream cake to celebrate so we had dinner. The dinner was delicious, corn, pasta and a lot of tasty vegetables that they grow on the farm (zucchini, tomatoes, onions, mescaline, spinach, lettuce). It was really really tasty. It was also interesting to get to know more of Tim and Janet, how they started the farm and stuff. I had a wonderful time.

IN LOVE
I usually don't like to write about personal relationships on my livejournal, but in this case, I just feel too happy and too much in love to not put in the livejournal. I have been having the best time of my life with Yuliia, traveling with her, dancing with her and just spending time together. I am really excited about our upcoming trip to Mexico that starts Wednesday morning.

On Tuesday of last week, Greg and I went to Quechee to a place where you can jump into the water from some high rocks. There's also a rope you can swing into the water, it was really fun. There's also a bridge from where people jump (a 48 feet leap), but Greg and I didn't do it that day.

Being excited about this, Greg and I decided to do a swimming hole tour across the state. Giulio joined in (and provided his convertible to make the tour even cooler). We started at Dartmouth at 9am and headed North. After about an hour of driving where we crossed some interesting things, like a town that has a huge missile in front of a church (there were hundreds of missiles in that town in the cold war days) and reached what is called Indian Leap. The leap is 40 feet tall. When I jumped I closed my eyes. While in the air I opened my eyes and there was still a good 10 feet before hitting the ground, I let out a scream amazed that I wasn't in the water yet. It was awesome. Giulio just took pictures, 40 feet was too much for him.

After Indian Leap, we reached the real mecca of craziness, the Crazy Leap. The crazy leap is only about 20 -25 feet high, but you have to jump and clear some rocks. When you're up there you are very scared that you won't be able to clear them, it looks impossible, but one knows is doable since other people have done it and there's some space to run to it before jumping. Greg had done this once before but said he wouldn't do it today. I couldn't leave the place without doing the leap, so I leaped. It was really cool. There is a video documenting the leap and a series of 4 pictures. Greg went up and I was prepared to take the picture but Greg decided not to do it. We walked to get our towels and Greg said "okay, I'll do it" and I went back to set up for the picture and we got a series of five pictures of he doing the leap, it was awesome because Giulio was taking video and in the pictures it looks like Greg jumps over Giulio (a nice perspective illusion). There is also a very safe, fun leap at this place besides the Crazy Leap and we did a competition of who could jump farthest, I think the order was Greg, me, Giulio.

After Crazy Leap we went to a nice jump near Mt. Washington. The jump looked a little scary because it wasn't a perfect cliff like Indian leap, but it had a little bit going forward. There was also 30 people there. Greg jumped first and then me. To get out of the water, we had to cross to another water part and it was incredibly cold, I couldn't breath while on that water, Greg said I looked like I was dying (he thought I hit myself in the jump, instead of just not being able to breath from the extreme cold). The water was cold in the first two leaps of the day, but this one was specially cold, I think it is due to the fact that the water comes from Mt. Washington (which still had snow in mid July). We stayed a bit looking at other people jump doing crazy things like backflips, a gaynor, front flips and one where they run on the wall and then jump from the wall, this one was special as when the dude tried it for the second time, someone was about to leap at the same time and they didn't notice they were going to hit each other until a girl screamed. The guy jumping from above tried to break mid jump and that made him slid down the hill and barely miss the runner and both hit the bottom safely, although the guy that tried to stop midjump was quite bruised (his right leg was all bloodied). It was incredible to witness such a thing.

The fourth stop on the tour was in the Vermont side, it was a place called Warren. The place had some tame jumps compared to what we had done, but the place was beautiful and it had a lot of variety in what one could do. For example, there was a place where I slid down a waterfall. Giulio and Greg didn't want to do it as it looked dangerous given that where a waterfall falls you have no visibility because of the foam. I liked it so much I went again. At first it was cold because it was raining, but the water made me stop being cold.

The fifth stop was in Gaysville. There were a couple of nice jumps there. It is incredible that after all the crazy jumps I still felt a little scared by the fifth stop.

The sixth stop was a place where there's a really cool rope swing. You really swing far on that and it is very exciting. There were a couple of kids doing cool stuff like backflipping from the rope, or climbing on their truck to swing from there (to get an extra 1.5m of height) and one of them was crazy enough to swing back (instead of letting go into the water, he would swing back). He did one thing where he jumped from the truck, swung back, tapped the truck with his feet and then swung back into the water doing a backflip. Nuts.

The seventh and final stop (by now it was 7:30pm) we went to Quechee. I did the rop thing and jumped from the normal rocks, but I didn't jump from the bridge. Greg didn't want to do it and I agreed. After a jump from a normal rock I thought of doing the bridge jump and climbed on top of the bridge to jump, but 50 feet is too much and I will leave it for another day. Greg also says one has to be very careful not to jump far.

The tour ended officially at 8:30pm. Seven stops and a lot of fun. My favorite thing was the crazy leap, but everything had something special to offer, a very memorable day.