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The Night Before

Posted on November 26, 2014

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. We won’t break bread around a large table or watch the parade, instead we’ll be spending another day simply going where the day and fancy take us. It is an extraordinary luxury to have this time and space. The last three days we’ve walked over 10 miles each day, ringing, as Sean said, “Every last bit of opportunity from each day.” We have laughed, screamed, and gasped for breath (the last two were mostly me, I am defying my “I’m not a rides person” tendencies). We have compromised and cooperated. When we haven’t been hoofing it near and far, we’ve had little slivers of downtime. Briar sitting legs akimbo, headphones on, bobbing, weaving, and singing very loudly to Pentatonix; Ave counting the birds…

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Categories: Random

Disparate Realities

Posted on November 25, 2014

This week was intended to be a break. Getting away from work, home, school, everything but each other. We are not amusement park people, we are not, “We’ll take the works package.” I’m not sure why I pressed for it, what happened to make me say, “Let’s do the Orlando thing,” but I did. And we are. We promised one another that we’d roll with whatever happened—lines, crankiness, anything. We hadn’t expected bomb scares/suspicious luggage delays or tornado warnings and biblical deluges, but lo, they passed. I let a few snarky comments fly, but other than that, it just didn’t matter. Until last night. I’d been in my happy, little bubble when I opened my laptop and Sean asked, “Have they announced a verdict?” My mind…

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Categories: Me

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Not One Child—Ferguson & Michael Brown Are the US

Posted on November 24, 2014

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Martin Luther King, Jr. I don’t feel incredibly comfortable writing about the verdict in the Michael Brown case, but I feel equally awkward not writing about it. A child died, ultimately, no one will be held accountable in the eyes of the law. Let that sink in, a life gone and no one serving time, but his parents in a lifetime of “Why our son?”   I am in Orlando reminding my daughters not to touch every single surface because we are in one big, pulsing, germ dome. Other parents are teaching their sons not to look suspicious or be in an environment where they might be…

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Categories: Random

Travel Travails Triumph

Posted on November 23, 2014

If it weren’t for suspicious luggage and whispers of a bomb scare and a subsequent lockdown in the baggage claim at Orlando’s airport, I’d have written a proper post. Instead, there is this: a post with two images that capture the most important things about today—the anticipation of an adventure as seen from the window seat and then, after so many hiccups…             And a trip to the beach to do cartwheels and scream as they leapt in the surf hours after bedtime had passed.     Sometimes dwelling on the goo in between isn’t worth the time.

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Categories: Random

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