À Detroit

The airport in Detroit is not equiped for the warm weather this week provided. I was fine walking around at night in a t-shirt. In the airport, however, the heat was blaring. The past 24 hours I've been in the great lakes region for something of a whirlwind trip in search of my next challenge. There is an odd balance of vibrance in the Rust Belt amongst the stench of death that is, perhaps, merely a charicature of the region.

I spent a good portion of the time in the company of a Mexican who reminded me vaguely of my friend Jose from grad school. I wasn't on the same level as Jose and I'm not sure I'm on the same level as Guillermo either. More on that later I suppose.

Meanwhile Cara is busy at her finding her next challenge post grad school. Her closed door defence is April 12th and the open door one won't be long after. Then I'll have to address my wife as "doctor" and genuflect whenever in her presence. Not that she'd ever insist on that. She's too down to earth and humble about her brilliance. I just feel a little pang of shame every time someone makes a Mr. and Dr. Wogsland joke. C'est la vive. I'll have to get over it. Next month she'll be headed to Bergen to scope out a possible post-doc. That's Bergen, Norway folks, so things are about to get real.

This was only my second trip to Michigan. The first was in 2010 when Zara & I rerouted our trip to Hilton Head from Nebraska to avoid the flooding in Kentucky and Tennessee. None of my other kids have been to Michigan. Somewhat ironically we moved to the recently flooded city of Nashville a year later. Now it seems we may be leaving Tennessee again to continue our adventures elsewhere. I imagine we'll probably be back though. Our spacefaring (or so she hopes) daughter has applied to my alma mater in Knoxville for grad school in planetary geology.

Regardless of where everybody ends up, the next year is bound to be interesting. Like so many of them have been. One can never say we didn't live life to the fullest. Sometimes it's overwhelming, but it's always interesting...