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It’s been 15 years since I’ve seen her, after all.

Submitted entry: I suppose it must be. But really, I have an excuse. It’s been extremely busy. You’ll see below. Oh, and on top of that for some reason I haven’t been terribly inspired about writing lately. Who knows why. Oh, and on top of that is the same phenomenon that got me in trouble in college. I would go a long time without going to a class and then would be embarrassed to be seen by the professor walking in after skipping three weeks of class. Okay, I wasn’t embarrassed about the journal - more self conscious but you get the idea.

So what did you miss? All of August, except, for the August 3rd entry I never uploaded.

The busy-ness started about a week after the August 3rd entry when Sage and I went to a breakfast buffet. I hate breakfast buffets but I figured I was so hungry at the time I wouldn’t care. And true to form, I didn’t. I ate like a pig - biscuits and gravy, lots of bacon (the dry crumbly kind that always is in the breakfast buffets), french toast sticks, piles of potatoes and 2 eggs over easy (they weren’t in the buffet but they’d make them for you to order. After that we spent a day with friends.

About 7:00 I started getting awful intestinal cramps that I blamed on overdoing it at the buffet. However three hours after going to bed I woke up - for the night - at about midnight with horrible cramps. The next day I hardly ate anything and felt a bit better and made mistake number two. Starving and thinking I was feeling better I ate a big meal of ramen and hot sauce with some canned veggies. This was a horrible mistake as the hot sauce burned horribly and I was up all night with more cramps.

This went on for about a week and a half. I kept thinking I was getting better but a few hours later I’d be feeling horrible again. Finally, just a couple days before we were to leave for Florida I’d had enough and went to town to visit a doctor. The answer? Campylobacter infection probably from the over (way too) easy eggs. Three days of antibiotics and I was good as new. Two hours after the first pill I felt noticeably better. So I’ve resolved to never have eggs out again. That could have as easily been salmonella and I’d have been in terrible shape. As it was it was a horrible week.

The day before we were to leave for Florida I woke up excited. We’d already loaded the car up and were itching to go. Then I listened to the weather on the radio - a high of over 100 was predicted with heat indices from 105-110. After a short talk with Sage we decided to leave a day early.

So we got in the car about noon and drove until we got to one of the most dismal towns we’d ever been to - Blythesville, Arkansas and stayed the night. Paul loved the hotel and danced around the room for a while while we figured out dinner.

The next day we drove through Arkansas, a sliver of Tennessee and the entire length of Mississippi. Highlights of Mississippi included finding out just how scarily the people driving the trucks carrying house-trailers drive. It felt very much like we were invisible. Not only that they swerved all over the road! We also passed by a town (which I regret not visiting) called “Hot Coffee”. After an entire day of driving we were exhausted and arrived in Gulfport not a moment too soon. We took our coupon books out and tried to use them at a couple places. No luck - convention in town. Then we went to a cheap dive and looked at a room - too creepy and smelly. Finally we relented and paid $65/night for a room. As soon as we checked in we changed into swimsuits and crossed the road to the beach. What a great beach to visit with a 2 year old. No matter how far we walked out it was never over our waists (and that was way out). Paul was in heaven from the moment we got there. Then to make him even happier the beach was in the flight path of a nearby airport so every few minutes a jet would fly over really low and send him into dances of joy.

The next day we resolved to get to Florida and after a moderate drive we got to Panama City Beach. This was the first night our hotel coupons (the ones you get in the books in rest areas) paid off. It was just the end of the season - school had started - and so we spent five days and four nights in a motel right on the beach for $129.99. Paul swam every day in the ocean and the pool and loved chasing seagulls down the beach. It was a great way to rest up after our big drive the days before and give Paul a break from driving before the family reunion. The water was a bit rough the first couple of days so we could only let our feet get wet but the rest of the time was heaven. The water was clear, emerald green, and warm as bath water. We spent a ton of time in there. The first day we really went in, though, I met my first, and hopefully last jellyfish. This one, called a sea nettle I later found out, brushed up against my arm and chest and left enormous blistery welts. The pain was pretty incredible - like a second degree burn. Fortunately we had the laptop and in about 15 minutes I looked up on the net how to treat them. The best is supposed to be a paste of meat tenderizer. Second to that was benadryl. And it just so happened that the day we packed I grabbed a tube of benadryl thinking I might need it but not having any idea why. After a half hour of having that on it was pretty near painless.

The reunion was a ball. We saw just about all of Sage’s family - over thirty of them. Paul did exceptionally and loved hanging out with everyone. However, to preserve everyone’s privacy I’ll spare the gory details.

About this time last week Paul started having trouble sleeping and decided not to eat much of anything, preferring to nurse instead. We took it as a sort of signal that he was ready to go home and sure enough started eating better the moment we drove away. I think it was stressful for all of us, who have such a child-friendly yurt, for him to be in a house where expectations were different - not touching certain things, eating at a table with everyone - many of them strangers - at an appointed time. It was a lot to expect of a 2 year old.

One thing that happened while we were there, though, was that my technical writing job that paid for the whole trip was put on hold for a while. My client’s client was having budget problems. I could be upset and worried about money now but I refuse to be. Instead we’re really excited about paying way more attention to our web design business.

So the first day we drove all the way to Atlanta and stayed the night there and after seeing the labor day traffic (we passed five accidents that day) and looking on the map we decided to take a short detour and visit a friend of mine from high school and her family.

It was such a trip! When we were both in school, despite both being in a class of about 30 or so and even sharing a mutual friend, I hardly knew her. About a year ago she heard a tape I made for that mutual friend with a song that I mixed (Sage’s writing along with some music samples that I will put up here someday) she wrote an email to me. Turns out she is raising her child in much the same way we are and has really similar values to us in a lot of ways. So Sage and I had a really great time with her and her family while we were there. It did, however, make me feel old. After all, it’s been 15 years since I’ve seen her - last time I saw her she was a sophomore in high school and now she’s a mom which, of course, means I’m getting old. I’m seven years away from my 20th high school reunion and I remember how old I thought my father was when he had his 20th! Anyway - we had a great time - it’s always great to meet parents who share similar values and approach. Given the small number of families such as ours we know and probably the small number of families like ours we don’t know it’s always great to get together and be able to support one another. We also got to sit and chat about the website we’re going to be doing for her business which is teaching art to children but with a really unique and in our opinion inspired approach. She also plans to offer online workshops through the site. There’s a page up already that we put together but are hard at work to get the full site up. I encourage any of you in Eastern Tennessee with children to get in touch with her - your children will thank you.

It was interesting, though. I have to admit I felt a bit envious. She’s really got her life together it seems and has something she really has a passion for to spend her life doing. And she’s great at it. Sometimes I think I lost my passion sometime around college when I realized that I wasn’t really into becoming a doctor but instead was doing what was expected of me. It wasn’t so bad when I was working as I was at least doing something I was good at though I wasn’t particularly passionate about it. And I’m not even sure what I want to do. I just feel rather uninspired in general. Not that I’m miserable - I enjoy doing web design but I feel like there’s something I would really love to be doing out there if I could just find out what it is. Of course, the lack of something like that may be a good thing after all. Right now I really feel I need to be paying attention to being a dad. I certainly haven’t learned everything there is to know to be the best possible dad I can be.

Anyway - two days later we got home and not a moment too soon. It turns out that there was a heat wave the whole time we were gone with highs up to 110! The day we got back we brought fall home with us and the high was around 70. There’s still a little summer left according to the weather but it looks and smells like fall.

When we got home we realized, too, how glad we all were to be here. We didn’t miss anything of “civilization” and were glad to hear the silence, smell the earth and see the trees. The cats gave us dirty looks but before long they were forgiving us and cuddly as ever.

One big thing we noticed was how stressed we all were about having to keep track of Paul in someone else’s house, or hotel room. Seems like we were always thinking to ourselves “Where is he?” and watching out for knickknacks, electrical appliances, outlets and anything else dangerous to him or our hosts stuff. When we got home we realized that we’ve got this place so child-friendly that we didn’t have to watch him every second. Just hearing his voice somewhere was enough to reassure us that he was okay and nearby and not getting into anything he shouldn’t because there isn’t anything to get into at his level. It was lovely. And he appreciated it. He ate dinner with us as he used to. He fell asleep in minutes instead of taking an hour or more of fidgeting, asking to nurse, getting up and down and fussing and instead of waking up several times to nurse in the night (his worst night was seven according to Sage who that day was exhausted and drained from being awake and nursing most of the night) he woke up only once - his usual. Yes, it’s good to be home. The only bad thing is that I think I’ve picked up a cold and so I’m kind of low on energy and have a sore throat. I’ve been putting the echinacea to myself today as well as vitamin C and zinc lozenges to see if I can avert the worst of it. I certainly don’t need a flu like we had before.