Playing cath-up

The past month has left me feeling like a gypsy caught in some weird time warp. It feels like it was just last week that I wanted to collapse after finishing my last final of fall semester, but it feels like half a lifetime ago that I bid Virginia and all the things and people there my temporary farewells.

This has been the last 3 1/2 weeks of my life:

Waking up to snow the day Camilla and I were going to leave B.V... It was okay, though. The snow delay lead to other good things that wouldn't have happened without it.

After a short detour to Williamsburg, Camilla and I decided to do even more driving in the wrong direction by taking a trip to D.C. to visit some of her old college friends and then stopped at the temple to see the Christmas lights. It was well worth the hours in the car and having to drive around D.C. (which was apparently designed to be a maze so that if someone attacked, they'd have a hard time finding where to go- apparently they doubted that airplanes would one day exist).

After stopping in Kirtland, OH to visit some old church history sites, we trekked onward to Michigan to see our family before Christmas. Here my Johnson grandparents are with all of their grandchildren and their first great-grand-baby (Miles) on Christmas Eve.

We hit the road again on Christmas Day and spent Christmas dinner at a Subway somewhere in Iowa. Subways have a weird way of marking my life.

The trip that felt like it would never end finally did two days after Christmas, though Camilla did try talking me into not stopping in Elko and just going all the way to the coast in California so that we could say that we'd driven across the whole country.

After a New Year's Eve marathon game of charades, it was back on I-80 to head to Utah for my ILP training. On the drive home by myself, I stopped at the salt flats just east of the Nevada/Utah border to enjoy the view... oh, how I love the desert!

Sometimes on rivers there will be places in-between rapids where the water's not smooth enough to relax; it's swirly and you have to constantly read it and paddle to keep from it flipping over, even though there are no big waves, rocks, drops, or holes to worry about. You can't get lazy in those places; you have to stay active. I'm in one of those places right now. My drums are what keep me paddling before I reach the giant rapid of Russia.