Left to right, Carol North, Deborah Tussey, Heather Daniell, Bill Conger, Dawn Grooms, Debbie Boles, Gayla DiGiusti, Laurie Jones, Nathan Gunter, Gina Rowsam and Damon Gardenhire.

OCU LAW staff and faculty met for the second Summer Salad Lunch today, planned and sponsored by Assistant Dean for Professional and Career Development Gina Rowsam and the staff of the Professional and Career Development Center. The lunches, happening periodically throughout the summer, give OCU LAW faculty, staff and students a chance to connect in a way that they do not always get during the school year. Today’s crowd enjoyed delicious chicken salad, spinach salad, bread, fresh watermelon and brownies, and had a discussion about how they have adjusted to the new OCU summer hours. In addition, everyone shared a little more about their summer plans:

Assistant Dean for Professional and Career Development Gina Rowsam is learning how to be a Dragon Boat racer. She just had her first lesson on the Oklahoma River and will be joining a dragon boat racing team made up of breast cancer survivors. 

Gayla DiGiusti, Administrative Assistant to University General Counsel Bill Conger, will be spending time at her home at Grand Lake, Okla., and "having grandma time" with her two grandkids, who are 5 and 3 years old.

PCDC Administrative Assistant Heather Daniell will move into her new apartment on Saturday. Her mom is coming from Texas to help.

Debbie Boles, PCDC Law Career Counselor, is taking a cruise to Alaska, as well as planning time with her grandchildren, Rebecca, who is 3, and Cory, who is 2. She especially enjoys watching Cory mimic everything his big sister Rebecca does.

OCU General Counsel and Distinguished Lecturer in Law Bill Conger will be traveling to Munich, Germany on June 29, and then continuing on to Freiburg, where he will teach in the OCU LAW study abroad program in Freiburg and the Netherlands. He will return to the U.S. in time to see his youngest daughter, Erin, get married on August 1, and then is traveling to Clarksdale, Miss., with some friends to attend a blues festival.

Professor of Law Deborah Tussey is traveling to Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, and then driving to Williamsburg, Va., to visit her mother. She will end her time on the East Coast by meeting some friends at Lake Lure, near Asheville, NC. 

Senior Communications and New Media Content Specialist Nathan Gunter kicked off the summer by attending the Kerrville Folk Music Festival in Kerrville, Texas. He is hosting a folk music house concert in his backyard next week, and then will spend the Fourth of July holiday in Washington, D.C. before flying to Ireland, where he lived for two months during college, for a week. In the meantime he is working keeping his backyard vegetable garden alive and thriving, and writing freelance pieces for the Oklahoma Gazette.

Legal Research and Writing Professor and Public Interest and Pro Bono Coordinator Laurie Jones is learning how to weld. She and her boyfriend own a vineyard in Harper County, Okla., and he built new trellises for the grapes, teaching her how to weld in the meantime. 

Legal Research and Writing Professor Maribob Lee is redecorating her "state of the art 1973 harvest gold" bathroom. She just had a new bathtub installed and is currently looking for a white five-gallon tank toilet and also sorting through 66 years of her parents’ accumulated belongings.

Assistant Dean for Communications and Marketing Damon Gardenhire has enjoyed this summer’s four-day schedule as it has allowed him to spend more time with his 7-year-old daughter. So far the pair have visited Science Museum Oklahoma, the Oklahoma City Zoo and the Oklahoma City Botanical Gardens, as well as spending a lot of time cooking, drawing, and crafting together. Damon also is getting his house ready for the newest addition to his family, a baby boy, and taking his family on vacation in the Ozarks. He also has started a project called "Auxano" with some men from his church. The group assist working poor families in starting and maintaining backyard gardens as well as tending to home repair issues that the working poor in Norman cannot always afford to have fixed.

Carol North, PCDC Data Analyst, will be performing in this summer’s performance of Fiddler on the Roof at the Poteet Theatre at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, which she says has been a rewarding experience both spiritually and artistically. She hopes to get to visit with her brother when he visits their mother in Arkansas, and will help her daughter, who graduated from OCU in May, move into her first apartment.

Faculty Support Administrative Assistant Dawn Grooms is traveling to Miami, Florida, for a vacation, and has so far enjoyed getting to spend Fridays with her daughter Chloe and grandson Quentin. She is taking a summer philosophy course and hopes to dedicate the second half of the summer to photography, which is her major. She will be traveling Route 66 as part of a collaborative project with Professor Alvin Harrell wherein she will photograph and he will write about America’s historic road. The two hope to publish the project in book form.

PCDC Summer Salad Lunches are scheduled throughout June and July. To register for one of the three remaining lunches, contact Debbie Boles in the Professional Career Development Center at (405) 208.5332 or e-mail dboles@okcu.edu.