Easter Weekend

Wow--this week sped by fast. Is it already almost a week since Easter? Crazy. Well here are some photos and a great video of all the Easterishness at our house. First, to set the tone, a nice pic of the kids all decked out on Easter morning. I had to hustle everybody into the backyard for the photo shoot against almost everyone's wishes and I made myself late for choir practice in the process, but it was worth it:

Next, the Wyatt video. Hopefully you can hear it okay (turn it way up!), but this is Wyatt giving our FHE lesson using the "12 Eggs of Easter" he got from preschool. There's something to say for those Evangelical Lutherans: they do an excellent job teaching kids about Jesus. Wyatt spoke about each of these 12 eggs all on his own. I hadn't worked with him on it for one minute until we opened the carton. I especially love his little improptu testimony at the end of the video:



I'm so glad Forrest thought to video that, even if it was with his phone camera.

One other fun thing the kids did on Easter weekend was hang out with their friends, dying Easter eggs and making a "Portal cake." The cake is not a lie!  (The line "the cake is a lie" comes from the game itself, which uses a cake as a reward to tempt players along. Apparently making a portal cake is something that kids in the know do now?) I know very very little about Portal, other than Jonas spent his birthday money to buy Portal 2 and the kids have been huddled around the TV playing it for as long as their mother will let them before declaring "enough!" and sending them outside to dribble around on the neighbor's basketball court or upstairs to pick the wet towels up off of the bathroom floor.

Voila, the Portal cake. They made it all themselves, although I did purchase the strawberries:

I also helped host a baby shower for a really great girl from our neighborhood. (Woman? girl? I hate deciding when to use "woman," especially since I know I'm a "woman" but still don't feel like one, and since Alaya, the shower recipient, is most definitely younger than me and preparing to give birth for the first time, shouldn't she be a "girl" then? Or would she be offended and rather be called a "woman"? Why must women/girls have to deal with such linguistic nonsense on top of all the other nonsense we must endure?) Anyway: fun shower. I figured since I had a picture I'd post it, and you can see all the cute Mormon girl/women who live IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD in Minnesota. No, not in my ward. In my neighborhood. If you'd told me back in my White Bear Lake days that such a gathering from such limited geography was even possible in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, I would have chuckled at your naivete. Perhaps "the gathering of really nice Mormon women/girls in Bailey's Arbor" is one of the signs of the times yet to be rooted out of apocryphal Hebrew scripture?

The seven horsewomen (horsegirls?) of the apocalypse

We had a lovely Easter Sunday.  Just enough time to find Easter baskets in the morning before getting gussied up and taking pictures before heading off to church. Here are a few individual shots of each of the kids:

Ah, I love em.

The Harrises invited us over to their place for Easter dinner and we had delicious ham, Chinese chicken salad, pasta salad, puff pillow buns, cheesy potato casserole, and a nice bowl of quinoa (keen-wah, for those of you not as confident in your pronunciation of trendy health foods) prepared by Forrest because somebody had served it at a wellness fair at work and he though it was tasty.  All in all, a very fun day, although we really missed the Easter egg hunt at Grandma and Grandpa Sweat's. Nothing beats an Easter egg hunt at Grandma and Grandpa Sweat's.

And now spring is officially here. Yes! It's been rainy, but I'm hopeful.

Just Because

Although I'll have a more extensive Easter post coming soon, I thought I'd post this to tide us over. I have the heads left over from Christmas (a potentially troubling phrase, that) and dancing bunnies always make my Mondays brighter.

Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!

The Pinewood Derby & Etc.

One thing I enjoy about getting older is when comparisons of my younger self vs. my older self actually illuminate some kind of positive change in my personality. (Speaking of younger self vs. older self and not-so-positive change . . . It's official. I have grey hair. It sprouted suddenly, appearing at my temples two weeks ago. Huh.) Anyway. Positive change.

I remember when Ethan was seven years old and going to our very first pinewood derby. He was in a neighborhood Cub Scout den, not a church one (hence the being 7 years old), and this pinewood derby was tricked OUT. Masses of humanity, multiple race tracks, names being called over the loudspeaker. The works. My friend's husband was an engineer and labored pretty intensively over his son's car. It rocked, winning heats and garnering approving murmurs from onlookers.  Our car, however, was most charitably described as, ahem, "a nice effort!" Needless to say, we were far from winning any of our heats, and although we didn't come in last every time, the overall showing wasn't the greatest.

And I cared. I really did care! I was anxious during the whole event and kind embarrassed at our showing, both for Ethan and for myself. I was also a little bit irritated, truth be told, that Forrest didn't spend night after night working on the car like the neighbor dad did. (Poor Forrest. So glad he still loves me.) I've slowly gotten better -- less neurotic, more realistic, and also less likely to worry about how my kids might feel if/when they "lose" -- as my years as a pinewood derby mother have unfolded since then. So it was with a real sense of personal progress that I drove to this year's stake-wide pinewood derby without nary a flutter of worry or care in my heart; instead, I looked forward to enjoying it as the slightly silly and mildly fun event that it actually is. I was even able to take pleasure in the fact that my hilariously creative 10 year old son decided to create a purple pinewood derby car festooned with a -- yes -- mustachioed unicorn. He named the car "The Deadly Unicorn of Awe," but we didn't have enough room, or enough stickers, to put the entire name on the car, so we resorted to using an acronym. Voila:

I hate to say it, but the mom that I was six or seven years ago might have tried to talk him out of creating a purple mustachioed unicorn car emblazoned with an incomprehensible acronym, instead encouraging him to make a more conventional bright red car with black lightning bolts on the sides. I am also quite certain that, in this one respect at least, the mom I am now is a better mom. So there's that.

Jonas did well, coming in first place in one heat and second place in the other three heats. (Dad has learned a thing or two about making pinewood derby cars over the years.) He still didn't make it to finals, but that was okay. His only disappointment was in not receiving the "Most Creative" award, which came with a giant Hershey's bar. He was in the running, to be sure, but when I saw the giant yellow bird car (that lost most of its races due to its commitment to the giant yellow bird theme at the expense of all aerodynamics), I knew we were done for.  Here's Jonas and the cute boys from our ward's Cub Scout den. You can see the yellow bird car on the right:

In other news, Elise got a part in the school play, a one act production that's a mashup, somehow, of Romeo and Juliet and The Wizard of Oz. She gets to be Glenda the Good Witch. She's very excited about the prospect of wearing a poofy dress and she and I had fun highlighting all her lines in the script. Oh, how I loved highlighting my lines in a script, back in the day.

Ethan got a hair cut and looks very handsome. I love that boy with a hair cut. (Sorry, no picture. He's an elusive species to photograph.) He's also rocking his grades this trimester (so far), did very well at the final sectionals speech tournament, and is writing a funny script about three superheroes that he and his friends are videoing. It's an ironic take on superhero-dom, a caveat I must include lest Ethan worry I've led you to believe that he's writing NON-ironic superhero scripts as a 14-year-old. Because that would be really embarrassing.

Wyatt told me yesterday that he loves me "all the way to South America." He also tells me daily that I have "beautiful hair." This helps make up for the fact that, unless I have scheduled a play date for him, or he's at preschool or McDonald's or a park or the movies, he torments me every nine minutes or so with the following statement:

"I can't have anything to do!"

Followed by the following question:

"What should I do, Mom?"

Sigh.

Forrest is training again, out there running and whatnot. He lost like six pound in a week. I love him despite this.

And me? Hmm. I've come to the kind of tough realization that it IS going to be hard to find an adjunct teaching job out here. Even as a freshman comp instructor. I've applied to the few openings that are posted -- we have a number of colleges in the Twin Cities, but very few of them are hiring -- and so far the response has been akin to crickets chirping in the night. I feel a little bit nonplussed at this development. (See, English department staffing people? I use words like nonplussed. Hire me!)  Although it's been nice to have free time, etc. etc., yadda yadda, I miss teaching. I really do. And it's kind of hard in a mid-life-crisisey kind of way to realize that I am an almost 40 year old with a spotty resume full of lots of Mormon lit credentials, credentials that probably do me more harm than good in some circles. (For example: if you were an English Department head and you received a CV for someone who had edited a magazine dedicated to "Jehovah's Witness Fiction," what would you assume about this person? Exactly.) Imagine me in a corner with a paintbrush, surrounded by sticky wet floor, wondering how in the world I ended up in this particular spot. It's such a cliche, I know.

But! It is spring. The sun is out, as is the grass, and I'm remembering how lovely it is to go outside and hear all the different styles of Midwestern birdsong.  And I don't have to grade any papers. No matter how much I like teaching, I will never (no NEVER) miss grading all those papers.  And I'm healthy and my children seem to like me, and at least one of them thinks I have beautiful hair even as it is graying. And Forrest will take me to Pei Wei so I can get pad Thai with chicken whenever I ask him.

And I've evolved into a human being who can approach pinewood derbies with the amused remove such an occasion actually warrants.  That is cause for at least a small amount of triumph, even if the lady at Century College refuses to email me back.

p.s. I've added a widget that links to previous blog posts with related topics from the past. It was fun to see the post I wrote about the pinewood derby Ethan did at Jonas's age. Technology! 

The Birthday Boys

We had a couple of big birthdays at our house this last week. Forrest turned the big 4-0 and then, the very next day (as he is wont to do), Jonas turned the big 1-0. They're both getting handsomer and handsomer with age.

Blowing out those candles

I didn't organize a giant surprise party or whisk Forrest away on a celebratory cruise for his 40th, but luckily he was more than happy with what he did receive as we commemorated his slide down the backside of the mortal hill we all must climb. (I included that sentence just for Dave, since I know he really appreciates my verbosity.) He got some German chocolate cupcakes (see above), a pair of tickets to go see Garrison Keillor and A Prairie Home Companion live (a must-do that we've not yet done, especially urgent now that Keillor's retiring), a new book (Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahmed, about which Forrest exclaimed as he opened it, "Ah! Right in my wheelhouse.") We also went out to dinner at our favorite fun Minneapolis restaurant, Chino Latino, with some of our new friends in the ward.

Us, t' the Chino Latino, looking younger than we actually are. Right? RIIIGHT???

New Friend Couple #1, Otherwise Known As They Who Live Just Down The Street From Us and Are Lots of Fun and Have Been Literal Godsends of the Neighborly Goodness and Carpooling Variety and  Whose Very Nice Children Have Been the Answer to My Motherly Prayers

New Friend Couple #2, Otherwise Known As Forrest's Deacon's Quorum Partner / Cross Country Ski Buddy and His Extraordinarily Nice Wife and Parents of a Cute Little 4 Year Old Who Is Fast Becoming Wyatt's Favorite Friend (and also, not capitalized, mainly because I'm tired of capitalizing, our friends who are enough younger than we are to simultaneously make Forrest and I feel younger and older than we actually are).

New Friend Couple #3, Otherwise Known As the Great People Who Moved Into the Ward The Week Before We Did and Also Have a 14 Year Old Son Named Ethan and Also  Have Been Great Examples of How To Get Proactively Involved In A Brand New Ward.

New Friend Couple #4, Otherwise Known As The First Established Family to Invite Us Over to Dinner as Well as Parents of Some Really Awesome Teenagers I Would Love My Kids to Emulate as Well As Tons of Fun and Always Ready to Have a Great Time.

Chino Latino is a great place for foodies and/or adventurous eaters. They specialize in food from the equatorial regions around the globe, so you have Asian and Latin and Mediterranean food . . . all sorts of goodies. It's served family style, so everybody gets to try something new. Like this delicioso platter of sushi:

It's also fun to go there and people watch: it was a Friday night, and seeing all the clubby ladies teetering around in their high heels and tiny spangly dresses made for some interesting sight seeing. Even our waitress livened things up a bit, as she had a giant tatoo of Medusa emblazoned across her chest. Forrest, of course, asked her about it. (Turns out she chose the tattoo, she was pleased to inform us, because Medusa is her "favorite fallen goddess."  Ah! Of course.)

So even though Forrest didn't get a surprise party, he did get A Prairie Home Companion, sushi, a book about macro economics, and the rare pleasure of enjoying--and discussing!--another woman's fallen goddess chest tattoo.  I say it was a success all around.

Jonas's birthday was celebrated with a family fun day at our local bowling alley / arcade, Pinz. He was perfectly content to not have a friend party this year and hang out with us instead (yay!). In fact, he wasn't even sure what he wanted for his birthday. Luckily he ended up very happy with his new book (Brandon Mull's latest, Beyonders) and a new racing game for the PS3, ModNation Racers. Here's the fam, having a good time at the bowling alley:

Both Elise and Jonas improved on their bowling skillz (one must type it with a z when one is at Pinz), Wyatt had a great time rolling his ball down the big bowling ball slide-y thing, I didn't make a total fool of myself (I know!), and Ethan came within a breath of beating his dad. (See the tiny smile I captured on Ethan's face as he scored a spare in the background? A motherly photographic victory!) We had fun. It's really nice to have the kids all old enough to go do things like this together.  And it's even nicer to have a great kid like Jonas who wants to celebrate with his family and who, in all his 10 year old goofiness, remains one of the coolest kids I know.

Happy Birthday, my boys.

A New Cover for Bound on Earth!

. . . thanks to the Lovely and Talented Julia Higgins Warren

And here's the entire cover, so you can see the back (which I love):

I think it looks fabulous. I never loved the layout and font of my original cover and this looks so much better. Not only that, but we were able to include the Whitney award seal and some of the more recent reviews. Although BoE has never sold a ton of copies, it's still selling some every month, is read in some Mormon Lit courses, and continues to get reviewed in places. It got a kind of hilarious mention in the Boston Globe. (I say hilarious because the reviewer called BoE a "national breakout," which it most certainly wasn't, but hey, I'll take a mention in the Boston Globe! And if they're going to get something wrong, I'll take exaggeration. She also somehow lumped the yellow journalism that is John Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven in with the Mormon authors, so obviously she didn't do her homework). A review of BoE is coming out in the most recent issue of BYU Studies as well, written by someone who actually read the novel, which makes me happy. So I'm glad that anybody who buys it now gets the new cover, even if that number is small. Thank you so much Julia!

Also, it's now available as an ebook for the low, low price of $3.99.  You don't have to have a Kindle in order to read Amazon's ebooks; you can download their Kindle app for free on your computer or on your phone. Although I don't really like reading books on my computer or on my phone . . . but still. It's an option.

Dispensation is also available as an ebook, for the even lower low price of $2.99, a real steal considering how many stories are in the volume. Bang for your buck!  I was excited to hear that Dispensation received an award at the most recent AML conference, as well. (The first AML conference I've missed in like six years? It was strange not to be a part of it. Sigh.)

Anyway, that's the latest from the writerly side of my life. I'm almost done with the first draft of a new short story and I'm enjoying the new writing group I've joined with some LDS women in my area. They're great, and it'll give me deadlines, which I always, always need. As soon as my short story is finished, I'm getting back on track with my novel, no matter how much it scares me. I am!

And there will be a nice, big post detailing the birthdays of two of the wonderful men in my life, Jonas and his father, coming very very soon.

Adding A Teenager And Losing our Lunch Over Spring Break

Here in Minnesota people take their spring breaks very seriously, and I can see why: by the second week of March most of us are so stir crazy that we risk going all Charlotte Perkins Gilman on the interior decor.  This year we didn't have the funds to go somewhere warm, but at least we got to go somewhere. (Duluth, to be exact, housed in a super duper crowded hotel/water park, to be more exact.) And we got to celebrate Elise's 13th birthday to boot!

So first, Elise's birthday. Hard to believe that this girl:

Is now this girl:

I find this expression particularly teenagerish, don't you?

She's really growing into a great kid, though. A responsible babysitter, conscientious student, talented performer, enthusiastic cook, burgeoning guitarist, and excellent daughter, sister, and friend.  (Not to mention an expert sleeper-inner, light keeper-onner, and laundry-on-the-floor thrower. ) Where would we be without our Lou?

As to our Duluth adventure, it started off with a bang as Jonas found himself doubled over and vomiting into the vomit bowl the morning before we left. He rallied and did okay the rest of the day (hurrah!), but then relapsed some at night. Never fun to throw up in a hotel. Nope. Joe is a really good sick person though; discreet, uncomplaining, relatively fast on the rebound. So he was able to enjoy a good amount of the fun.

 Here the kids are at the Duluth Aquarium, Lake Superior in the background.

And here they are again, in the only other group shot I was able to snap because Ethan (if you haven't heard) is also a teenager. A more expert teenager than his 13-year-old sister. And he doesn't like getting rounded up with his younger siblings, made to stand in front of a moose, and smile obligingly for his camera-wielding mother. Especially when a busload full of what appeared to be at-risk teenagers had just at that moment poured through the doors of the Duluth Aquarium, a gaggle of bored/suspicious adolescents replete with piercings and slightly offensive t-shirts. These kids probably haven't been made to stand in front of a moose with their younger siblings since they were like, nine, so I can see why Ethan was a little embarrassed. I therefore let the poor kid off the hook. 

(It's weird, though, being embarrassing all of a sudden, I must say. Especially because I'm actually wicked cool, so it's particularly confusing for me . . .)

 I was able to get one candid shot that included Ethan (he didn't even notice!). This is all the men-folk at the big boat/dam thingie (I considered saying big dam boat thingie, then decided it would be misconstrued.) It's a cool replica of all the great lakes. Wyatt loved it. Do you remember this, Mom and Dad, from when we visited this aquarium ten years ago?

And speaking of visiting ten years ago, I have this picture (um, somewhere, and it's not digital) of Ethan and Elise, ages two and three and a half, at this very steering wheel. I really should go find it and scan it, but I don't have it in me. Sigh. You'll have to take me at my word. But here's the modern version:

And just for fun, a few more aquarium pics:

Later that day we returned to the hotel for a little more water park fun. It's a smallish water park (not as big as some of the mega-parks at Wisconsin Dells, for example), and it was super crowded during peak times. But the second day we decided do go between 12-4, after yesterday's guests had gone home and before the new guests could check in. It was MUCH more doable, and the kids had fun.

I could tell that Ethan wasn't feeling so swift at the water park. To be honest, I was chalking it up to teen angst until I felt his forehead. Fever! Of course. He got sicker and sicker as the afternoon progressed.

Both Jonas and Ethan trying to regain a little strength

It was obvious that Ethan *really* wasn't feeling good when he decided not to go out to dinner with us to celebrate Elise's birthday that night. There was steak on the menu! Ribs! I felt bad that he was too sick to come enjoy it and instead opted to stay back and sleep. 

But the rest of us had fun at Grandma's restaurant:

Don't you think Jonas looks a little like the famous Youtube Dramatic Squirrel in that last photo?

 

And no birthday is complete without putting whipped cream on your nose and posing for a picture:

 

So despite sickness and crowds of pale, tattooed Midwestern flesh (one guy had a tattoo of a bbq grill on his shoulder with hotdogs roasting on the coils), we had a good time, mostly because we were able to head out on the road together and not worry about work, school, laundry, email, and on and on. I always love a trip, even a less-than-perfect one.

Oh, and one final note. A guy I know named Tony (or T, or T-Bone, or Tone, or the Tonester, or Anthony, or Ross, or Roscoe P Coltraine) is now, officially, a Dr. of the PhD variety. He defended his dissertation yesterday and passed without revisions and with lots of positive feedback. I'm so proud of you, my brother!

The Upside of Travel: A Guest Post

Yes, it is true! The guest post has arrived. I figure once every five years I can talk Forrest into it. And now, without further ado, my adoring (yes! he adores me! he pines for me every day he's away!) husband:

So here is the thing about travel for work.  I actually kind of like it.  I don’t like every little thing about it (like missing my family), and I could pretty easily make a long list of hardships that I am forced to endure while traveling, but that would be disingenuous. For me, and maybe for anyone else who has had moments in their past when they felt trapped by their jobs or other circumstances, the act of heading off to new destinations can be a cathartic experience.

I might have spent one too many eight hour shifts chained to a piece of printing equipment as an 18-year-old temp worker.  Or before that, on any number of summer days, stuck somewhere by myself without means or mobility.  Whatever the ultimate source of that weight is it’s still a tangible part of my soul.  Not in a bad way; it’s not pushing me where I don’t want to go. But the memory of what it feels like to be without options is something I can tap when I need to as a balance.  When I look out a plane window at whatever part of the world I’m traveling over, or when I look out a hotel window at whatever part of the world the sun is rising over on a particular day, I can quickly calibrate around the path I’ve taken.  Locked in place or free as the wind.  I'm grateful for the chance to feel free.

Before this gets too poetic I should remind everyone that I don’t always travel to the most glamorous of places.  Last week I was in a meat packing plant in Petersburg, Virginia.  This week I’ll be in Fort Worth, TX trying to make a better box, and next week I’ll be in Watsonville, CA trying to talk some sense into some berry growers.  The thrill of most of these trips for me comes from the minutiae. 

I landed in Baltimore at 8:00 pm last Monday and drove for 3 hours to get to Richmond.  I listened to some great radio stations coming out of DC, I had an entire 5 Guys place to myself when I stopped along the way for dinner at 9:30, and I talked to Angie on the phone 3 or 4 times along the way to get updates on various topics.  It looks a lot like normal life except someone is paying me to do it somewhere else. 

Once in a while the out of the way places I tend to travel to get more "out of the way" than usual, but my traveling rules for fun still stay the same. Rule # 1 is that food is a comfort.  To misquote Homer Simpson, “Mmmmm, donuts. At least my love for you will never die.”  I’m always up for a donut and, like good Mexican food, the more run down the place looks, the better the donut.  On more than one occasion I have pulled up in front of bakery without being too sure that the building was occupied and open for business, only to be pleasantly surprised by the quality of their wares.  On my recent trip to Luneburg, Germany I was able to find multiple bakeries (“back-a-rye” phonetically in German) and enjoy more that one walnut streusel.  The picture below was the oldest of the bakeries in the city as you can tell by the elaborate and leaning brick work.  It was built like 500 years ago and the woman walking her bicycle in front worked there for most of that time.

We might as well talk about Luneburg while we are on the subject.  The food isn’t anything to get too worked up about, although the breakfast at our hotel was an incredible buffet.  Seven different bowls with seven different types of yogurt each morning?  Enough said.  The façade to our hotel is pictured below. The entire building behind it has been replaced after a fire gutted the old building. I think it was a firehouse first and a warehouse at the time of the fire.  Now it’s a very nice hotel behind a very old façade.  

Luneburg is in Northern Germany and is one of the only cities in the entire region that escaped unscathed from the activities surrounding WW II.  And by activities I mean bombings.  There are three “old” churches in Luneburg and two are pictured below.   

The youngest of the three was completed in the 15^th century.  The youngest!! To be honest I really have a hard time comprehending that.  Most of the city, in fact, is hundreds of years old and is still beautiful and functional. What do you have to say for yourself Kearns, Utah?!

I got home from Germany on Friday night and left Sunday morning for Mexico. The flight to Germany was longer but much more comfortable.  Individual video on demand at each seat; I watched 3 movies on the way there (instead of sleeping) and 4 movies on the way home.  The flight to Mexico wasn’t so cushy.  Mostly work and reading, no movies.  I’ve got a reading goal for 2011, and with all the early travel I am way ahead of schedule.

Food in Mexico was also on the unique side.  When was the last time you had octopus, squid, and raw fish for lunch?  When was the last time it was lunch at two different restaurants with two different groups of people on two consecutive days?  The picture below says it all.  Zoom in on it, I dare you. 

The individual suction cups from the squid and octopus positively glisten.  Surprisingly, the food was very good.  This fish was part of a ceviche: seafood, sometimes raw, in a citrus/acid sauce to ensure food safety.  Goes well with Coke Zero. Oddly enough they didn’t have Diet Coke in either Germany or Mexico, only Coke Lite, but they did have Coke Zero in both locations.

Here is a picture of me after eating the squid on the first day.  The picture of health! It’s hard to look unhappy standing in 80 degree sunshine at the tail end of a Minnesota winter.

Now, Mexico isn’t always the safest spot on the globe, but we weren’t in the bad parts of Mexico. We weren’t in the tourist parts of Mexico either; we were in the farmlands of Mexico. I was never worried for my safety, but that was partially because everywhere you turned there were blue trucks full of Federales displaying their Wyatt-like love of big guns.  The picture below was snapped as we drove through a random road block.  I could have taken 20 of these pictures a day.  

You’ll notice that the blue of the uniform matches the blue from the truck.  These guys were committed to fashion.  Much like the woman pictured below reporting out the local weather on the evening news.  I happened to pass the news on my way to the English speaking channels and I couldn’t resist snapping a photo.  I guess when the weather is dry and warm for nine months of the year you have to take other approaches in order to get ratings.

I’m not sure what the word limit is for blog posts but I’m probably getting close so I’ll wrap this up.  Angie bought me a book for Christmas called The Lost City of Z about a legendary lost city in South America and a British explorer named Fawcett who died looking for it. (Grandpa Hiatt might remember reading about this in the papers back in 1930.) By the time you finish the book you come to the conclusion that this Fawcett guy must not have liked being home.  The Amazon wasn’t a fun place back in the day, and this guy just couldn’t stand to be away from it for very long.  Crazy right? 

Well I’m not crazy, at least not in that way.  The best vacations are ones where you are excited to go and just excited to come home, and that is what these short bursts of travel are to me.  I’m very fortunate to live in a digital age where I can take Angie with me wherever I go.  My Blackberry works internationally and our only real challenge is time zones.  I could wake up in Germany at 5 am and call her before she went to bed.  And then right at 2:30 in my afternoon she would sit down in her office as the two older kids got ready for school and email me about her night. I could snap a picture in Mexico and email it to her from my phone while riding in the back seat of the car to my next appointment.  I can even send her emails while I’m in the air through Delta’s wi-fi service. 

It’s fun to be off on an adventure; it’s fun to stay connected and to share it all in real time; and it’s fun to come home.  Now I need to go pack.  That 7 a.m. flight to Dallas in the morning is going to come awfully early, and good donuts don't find themselves.