Anniversary Road Trip!!

We're planning a road trip for our anniversary today.  But only one of us will be on it.

I've spent the last two years helping to plan the national conference of my main professional organization.  I was on the planning committees for the 2008 and 2010 conferences.  At the end of the 2010 meeting, standing at a lunch barbecue at Weber State University in Utah, the then-president of the organization asked me if I would co-chair the 2012 planning committee.

So I signed up to help run this conference, and THEN proposed to Nora, and THEN we set the date for the wedding.  And you know, when you're having a nice romantic conversation about the day you'll be wed, and about all your friends who'll be there, thoughts of your national conference are not in the forefront of your considerations.

But here it is, June 25th, and rather than be with Nora in Middletown Springs, I'm in a college dorm room in Ewing Township, New Jersey at 6:06 AM.  I'm giving one of the main conference talks this afternoon, and then getting into the car and driving north 278 miles to home so that we can have a little bit of our anniversary late tonight.

I think there's still some wedding cake in the freezer.

The metaphor is obvious, though.  During this past year, we've both been pulled in every direction — living in multiple states, working on behalf of multiple organizations, dealing with family health and friends' health and our own whooping cough, dealing with lawyers and mortgage brokers and surveyors and building inspectors.  And although the stress and anxiousness has swirled around us, we both know that we have a strong center.

It's been a wild year, and a terrific year.  And you've been part of it, too.  Whether you live in Middletown, Milwaukee, Manhattan or Medford; whether you live in Malaysia, Malta, Macedonia, Mexico,  Moldova, or Morocco; you have helped to carry us throughout this first year and into the second.  Stick with us; there's a lot more to come.