And here we go

It's weird to think of all that's happened in the past week. It seems like enough to fill at least eight days. I got the fans replaced in my car, all by myself no less, though one of my coworkers was with me to hold a few parts when I needed it (we did the job after work, by the way, so no time was robbed from the clock). I'm not sure the a/c is entirely fixed, but at least we got one of the major problems taken care of for only $60.

Last night I ordered a GPS I've had my eye on for quite some time: a Garmin Venture HC. It's pretty well-reviewed, and I got it so I could start geocaching on a somewhat regular basis. I've always liked going with my brothers and friends, but now I'll be able to go even if no one else is available (not so easy when I don't have a GPS, hence the purchase). It should get to me on Friday or Saturday, so hopefully we can get some caching in this weekend. And speaking of this weekend...

24 hours from now (give or take a few) we will be on the road to Lincoln--our halfway stop on the trip to Stillwater, Oklahoma, which will soon be our new home. The boxes in our apartment have been multiplying lately, and some of our rooms have developed a rather curious echo to them, which is normal but a little strange nonetheless. It has been fantastic living here for five years, despite the very frigid winters, but I'm excited to move on to a new town, with a new job, and meet new people too. Last night we went out to dinner with my cousin, his wife, and some other friends, and tomorrow we'll get to see Jon and Sarah one last time before heading out tomorrow. I was hoping to get one last trip to the Brass Rail, but we're going to hit up Key's Cafe instead. BR is just too far away. Sad, yes, but it will be another reason to get us back up to Minnesota. :)

So this will likely be my last blog post from Minnesota, at least for a while. It's been a great run, and here's to new faces and new frontiers.

Heading up north

Ever since we moved to Minnesota, there have been things we wanted to do that were, more or less, uniquely Minnesotan (or at least Northern). Many of them we did, but here as we approach the final month of our time in the Twin Cities, it seems like there is still so much left to do. I'm not one who likes to live life with regrets, though, so rather than focus on what we didn't get to do, we're thinking of what can yet be accomplished before the end of July. One of those things, a trip to Canadia, will soon be realized. Just tonight we booked a hotel in Thunder Bay for this weekend, and even though it will be kind of a short trip, it's going to be a nice way to spend a few days together doing something very different from our usual routine. I'll try to bring back some maple syrup or get a photo of a Mountie or something. :)

In the past few weeks I've been trying to get into Twitter, and to be honest, I still don't really get it. It's been a bit of a distraction from this blog, actually, and I don't like that at all. Twitter seems like a hollow, impersonal flurry of activity at all times, and I find it hard to follow what's going on unless I check it several times a day. I'm probably going to keep up with my postings tweets, but I feel a little guilty that my exploration of weird new Web 2.0 technologies has caused other things to fall by the wayside if even just a little bit. However, to that end, I have also consciously put an end to my surfing of Digg.com, mostly because I realized just how much time I was wasting on that site. Weird videos, odd tech news, up-to-the-second coverage of anything Apple was doing...it all amounted to little more than a heap of distractions from things that really matter. I was also deeply dissatisfied with the brazenly political bent of the site, and so, in the past month I think I have visited the site twice for a total of about 20 minutes. I've been replacing it with TechCrunch, Drudge, and that tried-and-true standby, Slashdot, and have hardly looked back. So long, Kevin Rose!

Before I close out this post I have to mention that I went rock climbing today, and it was pretty cool. I went to this place called Vertical Endeavors and found out just how little upper body strength I really have. It was a lot of fun, though, and I hope to go back at least once before we make the move to Oklahoma.

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.