Sunday, January 18, 2009

The Promised Land

I'm not the wordsmith that I wish I was. I often have trouble finding the right words as I sit down to write. The words are all perfectly formed as the idea comes to me. While I'm drifting off to sleep, driving, or wherever there isn't a pen.

When I was in high school, I carried around, in my huge 80's purse, hand written snippits of that speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. I memorized that speech. You know the one... the one that says:

"And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream...
...I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Needless to say, my words won't do my emotions justice here.

I get choked up every time I try to talk about it, so I'm just going to write about it. I was listening to NPR's coverage of Obama's Whistle Stop Train Ride and they were documenting people's inaugural journeys. One woman was bringing photographs of her mother who didn't live to see Obama elected and photos of her grandfather and great-grandmother, both of whom were born into slavery. She is bringing the pictures to Washington to honor her family.

OK. Here's the part where I'm supposed to say something profound but I've nothing to say. I am just simply proud of my country and my people right now.

I have seen the promised land!

Click here for MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

We're Packing





Just so we don't forget them...they packed themselves.

Friday, January 9, 2009

Contract on our House

We have a contract on our house and the option period will be over tonight at midnight. I'm confident the buyer won't walk away tonight. We got the offer on December 30th. This is very bitter sweet for us.

Now, if we can get things to finalize on the house we're buying we'll close on the 22nd of January. We're Busy, Busy, Busy! If anyone is dying to come over and help us pack or move, no help will be refused.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

A few days after Christmas, I promised Annabelle and Emerson that we would go geocaching together, but I realized that my GPS was in my car, which is in the shop. So we went back to a geocache that we had tried to find when Grammy and Bompa were here last time. It is called Tanglewood Trio.

This geocache is located in the cluster of trees in the center of this map:

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=30.178973,-97.841249&spn=0.000812,0.001195&t=h&z=20


Grammy and Bompa will recognize this right away...probably the hardest cache we have tried to find so far!

Anyway, with no GPS and I figured the kids would just have fun digging around.

I was trying to round up the kids to leave, and told them the cache probably wasn't here anymore, when Emerson said "Daddy, what's this?". Sure enough, he was holding the geocache container! It was about the size of a lighter, and inside of it were the coordi
nates for the next cache that we have to find! This is called a multi-cache, for all of you non-geocachers.



Way to go, Emerson! A future treasure finder, perhaps?

The adventure will continue! I'll let you know what we find at the next coordinates!

-Daddy