We fly out of Green Bay at 7:10 a.m., then to Detroit, then Detroit to Hong Kong direct, landing about an hour before 2009 begins in China.

Did I mention I feel a little like I'm about to give birth for the first time, or maybe a little more like I'm about to die? Either way, I know everything must change....

as they say on our family's new favorite tv show (Heroes)

to be continued...

We live by faith, not by sight. -- 2 Corinthians 5:7

This was the landscape of yesterday's run up here in Door County, Wisconsin. This is what our last few weeks have been like... running here and there, packing up our stuff, moving our eldest college kid into his first apartment, cleaning the home we leave behind for the anticipated sale (soon, please?) throwing out stuff, stuff, and more stuff (some from our house, some from my mother's, which we're making our official State-side residence). Trying to negotiate shipping arrangements, making the initial payment on the enormous costs of youngest son's International School, putting cars up for sale, carting yet another load of stuff to the recycling center, or to Goodwill, renegotiating housing contracts and sales contracts, getting the same car out of the body shop not once but twice in the past 6 weeks...

And I get up, and I get to go running, and it's icy and cold and it's all so hard, and it's beautiful.

Good-bye Maggie Mae

Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. -- proverbs 3:3

The Sunday before Christmas we said good bye to our 9 year old dog and brought her to her new home. It's a great new home, with a kind & lively family. They already have one golden retriever and they live on a lake. Do you think she'll miss us? It's hard to say goodbye.

MMM going to try with a little help from my friends

Seven good men and Omi (my almost 84 year old mother) up in the new "U.S. home base" (formerly known as "Omi's house") the afternoon after moving more mountains of stuff. This is why Jesus says, it's harder for a rich guy to enter the kingdom than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. It's so damn hard to rearrange, shake down, get rid of, box up all the stuff we rich folks accumulate. But sooner or later all that STUFF paralyzes. So. With lots of help, we've managed to lighten up, and begin the move.

The adventure begins

Advent 2008. We prepare to leave the United States for Hong Kong, a place we have never visited. Here's me in gorgeous Wisconsin, a day after completing the Chicago Marathon in October. I turn 50 in January so I feel like Sarah, accompanying a certain gray haired Abraham. Is there hope? For new life to yet stir within these aging bods & souls?