Sunday, May 24, 2009

Two Months

Wow, it's been crazy around here this week. Nay, scratch that--this month. It's always busy around this time of year as the school term comes to a close, projects come up, wedding season sets in, and all sorts of other activities (and, to be honest, distractions) start to fill the calendar. This weekend some friends of ours are visiting from Omaha, and yesterday we went up to Taylors Falls (the town, not the falls themselves which, I was told, have been displaced by a dam) and canoed down the Saint Croix river. I like myself some canoeing, even though I'm not exactly good at it, and only do it a few times a year--mostly at Cass Lake. But we had the current of the river with us, so even if we just sat there and did nothing we still made progress. I got my first sunburn of the year, and will probably be wearing sunscreen more in the future. Oops.

Last weekend we flew to Georgia for my wife's brother's college graduation, and had a great time seeing everyone down there. I often tell my wife that one of the cool things about being married to her is how much my traveling has increased. I have now been to Georgia and Montana infinitely more than I would have ever been had we not been married. I still have yet to leave the country (yeah yeah, I know...) but this summer we are taking a short trip to Canadia and hopefully we'll get to Europe before have kids someday. But yeah, it's always nice to get out of Dodge for a few days, especially when it involves seeing family. We even got to spend the night with some of the Atlanta-based Ringsmuths, which is always fun and often involves delicious food too. But that's kind of a general rule for the South. :)

Today after church we'll probably go see Star Trek again, since our company hasn't seen it yet, and take a walk down to the local free zoo too. It's actually pretty decent for what it is, and a great way to spend some time when the weather is nice.

iDVD just bleeped at me, so it's time to go to work on another DVD project and burn some disks too. Take it easy, all y'all.

Sunday, May 03, 2009

The Summit

It's weird that we'll be moving away from the Cities in under three months.

Dude, three months. Seriously.

We have had three moving companies come look at our place to give us quotes, and tonight we sold a load of books to Half Price Books for a whopping $5 (it would have cost twice that much just to load them on the moving van, so we kind of made $15, I guess). Not bad, really, since they were just sitting on the shelf not doing anyone any good, much as they have done for the past five or ten years.

So anyway, here we are, coming down to the final weeks of living here, and it's weird how much we haven't really done. I mean, there's a ton of stuff that people do up here, but we haven't really done much of it. Like restaurants. People have told me that the Twin Cities has great restaurants. Well, we don't really eat out much, and when we do, there's a few local haunts that we patronize, but there's hundreds of places around here we just haven't been to. We aren't really into skiing (I went once, and it was awesome, but I never got around to going again). We don't rollerblade or hunt deer or go ice fishing...you get my point.

It's not that we don't do anything--far from it. But time is running out to experience the cities we have called home for the past five years. We have a small list of things that we'd like to do, but you know, I'm not really losing sleep over any of it. The thing is, each day I get up, say my prayers, and go about my life, and if I can't find joy and accomplishment in my teaching or the things my wife and I do on a regular basis, well, what would be the point? And so it's in these things that I take joy--often the simple things, like today's walk down Summit Avenue. The houses there are old and gigantic, and the weather was a crisp 58 degrees, and the sun was shining...a far cry from jet-skiing on Lake Minnetonka or snowboarding down Spirit Mountain, but it was a great way to spend the afternoon nonetheless.